Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

“By genetic standards,” she said, “I don’t suppose I’m very old. And the women in my family have always gone on just forever, I mean we continually live almost a century. But even if I disregard your flattery, there was no reason to expect I’d ever be famous, much less rich. The nicest thing anyone ever wrote about me was that I had a ‘modest but congenial talent.’ ” She shook her head, and the orange hair grabbed at the sunlight. “And he meant it as a compliment . But an angel took a hand and made me rich and semi-famous, and you know who she was.”

“I do. And I know that she thinks your talent was something special.”

“Really. How do you know that?”

“This is embarrassing to admit, but I had to read her journals to figure out where she might be. She said you had a light in your center, and that’s what the camera saw. She was just reflective, she said, but you were a lighthouse.”

“That poor child. If I was a lighthouse, I did a rotten job of keeping her from hitting the rocks.”

Lissa guided the car along a narrow road that took us between banks of roses, not so much a formal garden as an almost impromptu arrangement of beds, all different sizes and shapes, with lawn stretching like green aisles between them. Here and there a stone bench sprouted, a double bench, actually, with seats facing in both directions and sharing a single backrest between them. Then a high wall appeared in front of us, nothing fancy, just rough, weathered redwood, grayed by exposure to the elements and absolutely perfect for the site. Lissa pulled around it, and I saw half a dozen parking spaces.

“This is beautiful,” I said.

“Isn’t it.” She undid her seat belt and got out of the car. “Like a lot of the good things in my life, it came from ‘Once a Witch.’ ” We were walking by now, heading back around the wall toward the roses. “Years ago, back in the 1980s, I had a part in another sitcom, ‘In the Family Way.’ You don’t have to pretend to remember me. I played the next-door neighbor, and I had brown hair and nothing but straight lines. We had this darling makeup man, Buddy Mendoza, who’d been forever with his friend Charles. Charles was an agent who’d done very well, and he and Buddy were just rolling in money. I once asked Buddy why he continued to work, and he said, ‘All my life I’ve been playing with makeup, Lissa, so why would I stop now?’ ”

She led me along a strip of meticulously mowed grass between beds of roses that stood four and five feet high, most of them in full bloom. The air was thick with scent, and I could hear the lazy drone of bees. “Anyway, during our second season on ‘Family Way,’ Charles died. When Buddy read his will, it turned out that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes placed in a hole and have a rose bush-he specified a damask rose, one of the very old varieties-planted on top of him, so he could supply nitrogen to the flowers. He’d bought a few acres up here but he and Buddy had never built on it. We go right, here.”

I followed her as she turned. The green path we were now taking led to a circle of roses perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with a smaller circle of grass in the center. “So Buddy brought Charles’s ashes up here and did what Charles had wanted, and that rose just exploded. You could practically see it grow. This was the time, I’m sure you’ll remember, when men like Buddy and Charles were dying by the dozen every day. And Buddy had brought some of his friends up here when he planted Charles’s rose. The idea sort of took hold in their hearts.”

We entered the circle of roses. At the center was a round bench, and Lissa sat down and indicated a rosebush, not very tall but profusely adorned with blooms of a red so dark it was almost black. There was a small pewter plaque in front of it that said Henry Wellman . “There he is,” she said. “My Henry. He chose the rose, which is called ‘Othello,’ because of its color, thank you, not as a comment on our marriage, which was mostly free of jealousy. By the time Henry passed on, there were almost fifty people buried up here, mostly gay men, but not all of them, and Buddy was fighting tooth and nail with the city, which wanted to close the place down. Anything new, anything beautiful, just brings out the worst in bureaucrats. By that time, I was rich from ‘Once a Witch’ and Henry’s real estate, and I bought all the property on both sides and hired lawyers. It took a bunch of lawsuits and newspaper stories and some stuff on television, but the little gray men eventually went away. The funny thing is that two of the men who fought the hardest to stop Buddy have their own roses here now.”

“How many people are up here?”

“Twelve, thirteen hundred, and more every week. Buddy doesn’t charge fees, but everybody has to bring the rose, naturally, and for the first ten years they’re expected to pay twenty or thirty dollars a month for upkeep. Of course, everybody does. Some people have left the place thousands of dollars. And why not? Who wouldn’t want to see their loved ones continue to bloom? Properly cared for, a rose bush can live fifty or sixty years.”

“You’re a very nice woman,” I said.

“It’s easy to be nice when you’ve been blessed. Isn’t Henry blooming, though? He was never what you would have called a handsome man, although he had his angles, so it’s especially nice that he’s so beautiful now. It’s more like how he was inside.” She folded her hands in her lap and sat quietly, looking at the new incarnation of Henry for several minutes. Then she said, “Thistle’s father is here.”

I said, “Oh.”

“ She fought it of course, the mother, I mean. Luella the Cruel. It’s all faggots up there , she said. She wanted to plant him in Forest Lawn, probably under a life-size sculpture of herself, paid for by Thistle, of course, with a stone saying something like, Can you imagine leaving someone like this behind ? I’m sorry, I’m being terrible.”

“I’ve met her,” I said.

“Then you know. The poor child, as if she wasn’t having enough trouble by then. Oh, good heavens, you came to see me to talk about Thistle, and all I’ve done is rattle on about everything under the sun.”

“I could listen to you rattle for weeks.”

“Well, that’s sweet of you, but it’s not going to help you find out what’s happened to our girl.” She got up and blew Henry’s rose a kiss and said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Howard.” With Lissa leading the way, we left the circle and followed a path that led around a large gray boulder. On the far side of the stone was a bed of roses planted directly against the rockface, their colors especially intense on the gray background. “He’s the Sterling Silver,” she said, “the sort of lavender one. A very delicate rose, subject to mildew and other problems. In that way, I’m afraid it was an appropriate choice.” The pewter plaque read Howard Downing . “He was a pleasant man, but no match for Luella.”

“Vlad the Impaler would have been no match for Luella.”

“You know, it never ceased to amaze me that she felt no concern for that child. Later, I mean, when things began to go wrong. All the misbehavior, all the acting out and the drugs. It was just an inconvenience to Luella, an irritation. And, of course, it threatened her lifestyle. That little girl was a miracle at the beginning, but then …” She broke off, looking down at Harold Downing’s plaque. “But then,” she said, “it was just heartbreaking.”

“It really began in season four,” Lissa said. We were sitting in the front seat of her SUV with the doors wide open to admit the fragrance of the roses. “I’m sorry to date everything in terms of the show, but that’s how I remember those years. And, of course, Thistle was the show. In more ways than one.”