Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

Trinnie had asked the Motts to please come, and the family stood alongside the man they had once known as William Morris. Amaryllis insisted on wearing the birthday dress Lucy had bought her while she was on the lam, and that proved prescient; though its style was inappropriate for the occasion, the haughty expat was moved by the homage and was more easily able to renew her affections for “the other woman.”

Samson cut short a snorkeling trip in Fiji. He brought a “date,” an aging-starlet type, and Trinnie thought that rude but figured he was making some kind of I’m-over-you statement. The thwarted detective was partly redeemed when the gal was later introduced as his ex-wife.

Aside from immediate family members (and Winter, who was not having a good year at all), those hit hardest stood in a group, shivering and bereft: Epitacio, Sling Blade and Dot. The disconsolate chauffeur wept openly, and not since his father had cried over Jane Scull had Toulouse seen such a cruel and alarming thing. His sobs came like great perverted sneezes followed by a train of Ohs! that conspired to sound like a protracted guffaw — one simply could not look away. Sling Blade’s grief took a different tack. His face contorted in a frozen Mardi Gras smile reminiscent of one of the cousin’s workshop masks while he rocked back and forth on his heels and hung on to his elbows for all his life. Now and then a hand leapt to the opposite biceps and scoured it, as if he were a freezing person trying to warm himself.

Perhaps the most poignant of all was Ms. Campbell. So distraught was the parkland guardian that her sister Ethel had been summoned from the East. Though she knew Mr. Trotter to be repulsed by her fashion sense, Dot was too unmoored and dispirited to dress in his honor, and wound up in the most grotesque costume misery could select, on or off the rack. (Ethel did not fare much better.) As many people were touched as they were chagrined by the clownish sight of her.

When the body had been lowered, inevitably calling to mind the whirligig boy across the way — when they had taken turns shoveling dirt over the box — after all had stepped back in respectful contemplation — that is when the final mourner arrived.

Pullman loped to the grave and no one interfered. He circled, tentatively poking his head in the airspace above. Seeing the great hole, he used a paw to push in a clod; if that weren’t enough, roundly and ceremonially chuffed. Some of the mourners swore they heard the old man chuff in return.

An autopsy revealed that Louis Trotter had exsanguinated into his thoracic cavity. Trinnie attended a meeting at the law firm that had represented her father for thirty-five years. It was suggested that Cedars-Sinai be sued for employing what the attorneys characterized as a “fatally non-aggressive” treatment plan, the assertion being that their client had died of medical inaction.

An aneurysm such as his was rare, and the doctors hadn’t caught it; they had attempted to rule out cancer or thyroiditis instead. They admitted being frustrated in their efforts to extract cells during the initial outpatient procedure, and the pathologists now had an understanding of why they had failed. It was speculated that some months ago, a microscopic tear in the decedent’s arterial wall had caused a leakage of blood — the root of Mr. Trotter’s difficulty in closing his collars. The hole had spontaneously repaired and the blood resorbed. Such a “rip” may have had its origin years ago, and been caused by trauma; a car accident or what have you. (There had been a collision with a taxi in Mallorca, but that was in ’85.) The innominate artery had been weakened and filled with “turbulent” blood flow, then burst from its capsule underneath the collarbone that day as the old man leafed through the pages of a recently acquired twelfth-century bestiary.

Trinnie knew that her father never had any use for hospitals; he was a lousy, irascible patient and saw doctors on his terms, not theirs. He had lived a long and wonderful life and would not have wished a drawn-out lawsuit to be part of his legacy. So while Trinnie was amused that a quantity of physicians were shitting their pants, she forbade the lawyers to proceed.

On ten o’clock Wednesday morning, they left Burbank by private jet. When they returned, approximately three and a half hours later, they were married — again. The oldlyweds agreed to tell no one, not even Toulouse.

Why had Trinnie proposed (for Marcus would not have dared)? The reasons were manifold. She was thrilled at the effect he was having on her son. It was as if some magnificent chunk of the boy had been restored — perhaps his heart. He seemed more alive with his daddy in the world, more at ease, more boyish, more manly, more everything. It may have been her pride that colored what she saw, but Trinnie knew he respected Marcus’s native intelligence and eagerly sought him out for all manner of arcana, and was usually more than satisfied with the response. Seeing them together like that — student and mentor — was a coup de foudre .

Yet it wasn’t just the child they shared. She was forced to admit to her therapist that her husband’s psychosis had always made him more perversely attractive; now it pulled her in deeper still, potentiated by the feeling she had in her bones that he would never leave her — them — again. In the time since his return, Trinnie had become convinced the wrenching dislocation that had transpired between them was actually a good thing; they were now in possession of their own “personal myth,” portable and custom-made, to which they’d been fated, and fated to recover from, too. The past would hold no dominion, and they would be infinitely richer for it.

In other words, she had fallen in love for a second time.

The therapist had some concerns. (They always do.)

The most compelling reason for repeating those vows was the death of her father. The digger had always felt guilty for not having protected her from the beginning; he had built La Colonne out of hubris, and it became their tomb. It didn’t matter that his feelings were irrational — to marry Marcus again would close the circle, and give the old man absolution. Hadn’t she told him on his deathbed that they’d spent the night there? Hadn’t the corner of his mouth turned up in a smile?

She had lost a man to the tower just as before — sacrificed so the other might stay.

“Grandma!” shouted Lucy, running to Bluey’s arms.

Though her name was now officially Rose, she had graciously agreed to fall back on the birth moniker so as not to further confuse our dear cottage resident. The old woman looked stricken; Lucy had forgotten (and Toulouse had failed to remind her) that Bluey didn’t take well to noise or abrupt movement. Even the girl’s clothes were loud — a Lacroix jigsaw-print mini with red tights and lime-green ankle boots. Her grandmother smiled and softened, yet didn’t say a word. Lucy had enough for both of them.

“Oh, Grandma, I have so much to tell you!” Her accent was still cheap, but she wore it like the crown jewels. “England is so bloody wonderful! Aunt Trinnie said”—“aunt” being pronounced as in the first syllable of “entourage”—“Aunt Trinnie said you used to go there all the time. That you were a ‘regular’—crossing the Pond on the Queen Mary , I mean. Very posh: Port Outward Starboard Home . Did you know that’s what ‘posh’ stood for, Toulouse? At least you weren’t on the Titanic ! Aunt Trinnie said you were like a heroine out of Henry James — I’m halfway through Portrait of a Lady , and it’s so you .”