Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“Her name is Scull, not Scall,” said Marcus matter-of-factly after examining the log. Their host said nothing and made no move to correct the entry. “Well, I’ll see her now.” He daubed at his nose with a handkerchief and walked outside.

Toulouse watched him thread his way down the hill; keeping a discreet distance, the boy struck out on his own. There were no tombstones, but he noticed markers embedded in the grass, with years instead of names, memorialized: 1978, 1983, 1991. His father squatted down to touch one. Then Sling Blade strenuously motioned for Toulouse to return to the Mauck.

On the way back, he saw beer bottles washed up at the bottom of a chain-link fence, the sediment of small-time paganism.

They left the parking area without discussion and pulled into the street. Toulouse felt at once numb and giddily relieved — for better or for worse, the mysterious man who happened to be his father now seemed more novelty than threat. He was cocky enough to think it might be time for Sling Blade to make an introduction. He was about to nudge the caretaker when Marcus Weiner began an oratory of tears that jolted both boy and driver from their seats.

“Janey! Janey, my Janey! What did they do to you?” He tore at his hair; a worried Sling Blade looked in his rearview and was at least assured that the man had wits enough to have used his seat belt. “Why’d they do it to you, Janey? Why? My darling, my darling!” He wailed and snorted and thrashed about. The book he’d been carrying fell to the floor, and with it the envelope that was tucked inside:

To my Darling Will …

The caretaker, though inured to the trappings of grief, to its keens and waterworks, and bodies lowered into the earth, could not help but grimace at the force of his rider’s pain. There was beauty in it, too — just as in the gnarled olive trees of Westwood Memorial Park. Toulouse was all gooseflesh, like a riptide had sucked off his clothes.

Sling Blade glanced sidewise at the boy, pleased at the demonstration of humility. He saw that Toulouse was sorely moved by this stranger, and such maturity in one so young unexpectedly moved him too. Came the caterwauling and lamentations: now melodious, now atonal, now piano, now forte, monolithic arpeggios of sorrow lit by plaintive trills — grace notes singing the leitmotif: Janey, why!

He took the Sunset off-ramp and left the boy just south of Sunset. When Toulouse began the walk to Saint-Cloud, he thought, Surely this life of ours is a dream — and those who said otherwise could not even aspire to be phantoms of a phantom world .

As the Candlelighters became better-known (just the previous month they had settled into the top floor of a charming little building the Trotter family owned on Brentwood’s tony San Vicente), the group received calls from friendly police departments alerting them to bitsy bodies recovered from all manner of tide and trash. This time, as earlier reported, a well-meaning soul jumped the gun; the overeager dispatcher had received half-baked information from a hospital worker but passed it on to the ladies anyway. Happy, red-faced retractions abounded.

Joyce was determined to meet the infant she had named Isaiah but was now calling Lazarus — the Candlelighters’ own “lucky angel.” She got in touch with the newborn’s foster parents, Rachel Hirschberg and Cammy Donato, a gregarious lesbian couple living in the Palisades, late-thirtysomethings who’d been planning to go the in-vitro route until reading the Times item about the McDonald’s Miracle Baby Doe. They had been touched, just as Joyce was by her first Baby Doe almost two years before.

Rachel and Cammy were eager to soak up the stories-behind-the-story of their baby’s almost novelistic arrival into the world and eagerly invited Mrs. Trotter to tea. †Joyce came in Chanel armor, bearing duffels of baby Pratesi, sweet little frog boots and English-made tattersall shirts DHL’d from the Magic Wardrobe in Virginia. The Candlelighters’ CEO was not disappointed by the mascot’s sweet disposition or his astonished, resurrected eyes. She was absolutely taken with every single Rembrandt-drawn hair of his fuzzy, sweet-smelling head.

When Rachel surprised by saying he was yet to be christened, Joyce underwent a welter of emotions she hadn’t experienced since the perilous birth of her own son; he too went unnamed for a while. The baby, jaundiced and malformed, barely left the ICU with his life (aside from ten thousand other afflictions, he had swallowed amniotic fluid and was vomiting blood) — it seemed there were two teams working full-time: one to keep him afloat and the other (Bluey and Dodd and various shrinks) to keep Joyce from going under.

Staring at Lazarus, tickling his perfect pinkness while he wrapped a Lilliputian hand around her finger, an old sickening riff sang in her head: this was how she had expected Edward to look. This was what she had dreamed. But the miracle was theirs — a spectacularly healthy fast-food discard, born of who knew what godless monster, snatched up by ebullient, shorthaired queers.

Her son had stayed in the hospital for three months, while she remained bedridden at Stradella. It was Winter who visited him, and Winter whom all the nurses knew, and Winter who sat for hours by the incubator after intubations and bloody cut-downs, and Winter who gave Joyce progress reports that she listened to from bed as a grinch would a poorly written fairy tale.

Then one day without warning he was home. He stayed with the Jamaican RN and Oahuan doula in the faraway “servant and sick wing.”

Joyce didn’t touch him for a year. It wasn’t until he was four that she even tried to bathe him, as a dutiful if reluctant penance. He was so damaged that she barely had the stomach. How had anyone expected her to give him a name?

In the noisy steel cask of the MRI, Louis Trotter had much to mull over. A long time coming, Bluey’s grim predicament had nonetheless taken him by surprise; he could not buy her comfort, or even assess her agonies. If she had a cancer, he might help her rally to blast the thing away — or end it all, if that’s what she’d wanted. But this! A once fearless woman now possessed by terrors, trembling with each breath in horror that her mouth had become a broken window to let robbers in … With a violent twitch, he pushed the picture of her away.

He drifted in the diagnostic tube. What was this thing if not a coffin? The digger was, thankfully, not a claustrophobe; no Valium, please. For this particular procedure he was in his element.

He had other concerns — to wit, the grandchildren. Not the girl — he had no worries about the girl to speak of. Lucille Rose possessed an enormous heart and a head for figures, too; a buoyant, practical child certain to have buoyant, practical passions. A dreamer and a nester at once, she was not prodigal, and relished in absorbing the best parts of those around her. She would live to be 102. But the boys … the boys.

Shortly after the existence of Toulouse’s father had been revealed, Edward asked that they convene. When the old man suggested the Withdrawing Room, he demurred, nominating the site of his grandfather’s future memorial instead. Onlookers whispered while the curious pair strolled past the neatly mowed graves of Natalie Wood and Donna Reed.

The boy said he was tired and quite often in pain and had, like his confessor, been preparing a long while for his death. He could share these things, he said, because he knew the rigor and care with which his grandfather had pursued his final home. Edward said he too wished “la última casa” —the last house — to be aesthetically pleasing, and that he’d spent quite a lot of time studying Saint-Cloud’s funerary-commission maquettes. He asked Grandpa Lou into the Mauck (Epitacio had parked adjacent to Irving “Swifty” Lazar) to show him clippings of tombs, stelae and catafalques collected over the last eighteen months, and expressed his desire to be buried in this very park so that his sister and beloved cousin Toulouse might be near him.