Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

On other nights, Trinnie’s absence was sorely felt but soon blotted out by food and revelry and the spellbinding tales of a shadowy world — a street world, one that Amaryllis of all people had shared. Toulouse was envious; when his father spoke of carrying her on his back through the night, he may as well have been describing a magic carpet ride. Sometimes the details were so vivid Toulouse felt he might somehow insert himself so that Marcus would remember a time when the three of them had had some such adventure. Just when the boy’s desperation nearly drove him to recount some pathetic anecdote from his own life (shoplifting from 7-Eleven came to mind), Marcus sagely saw fit to weave another web, only this time one whose weave Amaryllis had not been part of. She would listen enrapt, her eyes wide as her suitor’s, even reaching for Toulouse’s hand during the telling — then all would be right with the world again.

The ride back to Franklin Hills would be quiet, with a kiss stolen here and there in the rare moments Epitacio avoided peering into the rearview.

Weekends were devoted to the babies. There was usually a large group — Gilles and Lani, Candelaria and her niños, Cody and Saffron and their foster parents, along with their other three wards — and off they’d go in a minivan to Downtown Disneyland or the San Diego Zoo. Sometimes they made a day of it at Stradella, and Trinnie hired a circus with acrobats and elephants and sword-swallowers too. After barbecue they would trip to the Majestyk for a noisy matinée. Of course Winter brought Ketchum, and everyone was glad to see Joyce looking so well again.

It was good for Toulouse to wander Olde CityWalk. Since Lucy left, there hadn’t been much reason to visit; he’d even built up something of an aversion to the place, as in the time Amaryllis vanished from her hideaway. But now it was like walking inside one of the dreams he still had about Edward — dreams that left him feeling warm and reassured when he awakened, and without melancholy. He would grab Amaryllis and break away from the crowd, stealing into the Boar’s Head to survey the workshop, where masks still hung as if awaiting selection by their master for the new school day … then they would creep upstairs to the “apartments” where so many schemes had been hatched and secrets revealed.

Toulouse poked open the trapdoor, and they climbed to her old safe house.

She looked around with a shiver of nostalgia. He kissed her and she let him.

“Amaryllis,” he said.

There was a catch in his throat, and she noticed how he’d gone a little pale.

“I wanted to ask you — I wanted to know if you would think about the idea — or the possibility … and it doesn’t have to be, well, it couldn’t be something that would happen now or even very soon but — something that would happen maybe in the future … well, I wanted to know if you would think about thinking about the idea of us — of us eventually getting married. I mean, years from now. When we are older or after college or whenever you — whenever you thought that might be something you wanted to think about or maybe say yes to in the future but not necessarily now.”

She took his hands and looked him in the eye.

“I do love you, Toulouse,” she said. “I always have. And I always will.”

She kissed him and ran to the ladder to rejoin the group, now in general tumult over a tightrope walker’s derring-do.

That night he lay in bed more tortured than ever. No amount of careful analysis could yield a definitive result: had she said yes or no? Was it an undying — or a sisterly — proclamation? Luckily, sleep laid siege to the conundrum and put it to rest until the fresh misery of morning.

It was true that Dodd Trotter had fallen in love with his secretary, but one could not hold it against him. He had been loyal to Joyce for as long as humanly possible, and remained so in his fashion; unlike his wife, he had no dumpster babies with which to sublimate his grief. Frances-Leigh was a good woman. She was devoted to his happiness.

Trinnie asked her brother for help. She had decided to sell La Colonne Détruite, or rather sell the property where the broken tower resided, for no buyer could be expected to preserve such a monument. Nor would she wish it preserved — to that end, she had even considered tearing it down before putting the park up for auction. Strangely, Trinnie found she could no longer set foot in the place. Bluey was right; they should have sold and subdivided years ago. All the furniture and items so mathematically arranged were carted off to storage, to be sold on another day. Next on the list was Saint-Cloud — everything must go. She wanted no more shrines or mazes in her life.

Dodd had an agenda of his own. He decided to move the corporate headquarters out of Beverly Hills. His son and father were dead and his daughter was living in England; his mother did not know anymore who he was; and the last of his worries — his rolling-stone sister — was safely anchored by Marcus and Toulouse. It was all right now for him to begin afresh, away from the nexus of his old life. To her credit, Frances-Leigh argued against the move. Conservative by nature, she felt it more symbolic than practical.

The dream of revamping Beverly Vista was dead too. There would be no rooftop gallery, no Puckish cafeteria, no starstruck planetarium or fiber-optic learning center powered by truck-size servers buried underground — no Sage Hill, no Ross Institute, no Cary Academy — no footprint or imprint, only misprint. There would be no thinking outside the box, only thinking inside the box. Probably what his dad was doing right about now, he darkly joked (Frances-Leigh didn’t think it so funny). That’s all the imperial Beverly Hills school district knew how to do anyway, he said: think inside the box.

The Quincunx Holding Company undauntedly continued to acquire rectangles of real estate in the Beverly Vista matrix and was now in possession of nearly one hundred houses and apartment units. Like an embittered dramaturge (but more like a broker calling in margins), the billionaire ordered the division to take possession of the deeded homes that surrounded the school. It would be a three-month process, for that was the amount of time the tenants — former owners who had continued to “squat” on the properties — agreed they would need in order to move, upon notice to vacate. (Many of the homes whose original owners had already taken the money and run were currently inhabited by Quincunx employees.) Within six weeks, Dodd Trotter’s hydra-headed enterprise had transplanted itself to Northern California, and the eighty or so employee-participants of the Middle School Adjunct Residency Program had followed, leaving empty residences behind.

A series of increasingly frantic calls to the Quincunx CEO from honorary PTA president Marcie Millard went unreturned. As one by one the dwellings around the school went dark — and the student body dwindled accordingly — Dodd Trotter’s disappearing act became fuel for the media. Stories of the unfolding suburban debacle invariably contained two sides: that the celebrated nerd had avenged himself Carrie -like on an ungrateful school district for failing to allow him to remake the alma mater in his own image (and name), and the counterspin being that any reports to this effect were patently absurd, the vacancies an unfortunate by-product of a recessionary downsizing. For a few months the Trotters, Dodd in particular, endured more scrutiny than may have been desired. They would endure.

Neither the New York Times Magazine cover (“An Unsentimental Education”) nor the intercession of various moguls, senators and billionaire busybodies — most of them friends and colleagues or at least high-level acquaintances of Dodd’s and his father’s — did anything to sway him. His lawyers said the courts would eventually force Quincunx to sell off the marooned properties, but such a decision might take two years, at least. By then the paint would have faded and the lawns died, and Dodd Trotter’s interest along with them. He never held on to the empty buildings in his portfolio for longer than that anyhow.