Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“She the one there!” he shouts, advancing. “Come here last night — try to grab her foot but she too fast! Scratch me up good!”

Peering at the child from his side of the broken slat is a handsome, world-weary man in white shirt and tie, stylish sport jacket slung over his arm. In comic contrast to his guide’s histrionics, Samson Dowling squints like a bird-watcher at some point above Amaryllis’s head, which must have seemed a goad to the vagrant, who wished the little fugitive’s apprehension to be handled in a more Most Wanted fashion.

“Wull,” he says, turning to the detective. “ Get her!”

Amaryllis sprints on cue, and Someone-Help-Me pimpily gives chase. The investigator, shod in tasseled Church’s English, takes casual, graceful flight. “You! Idiot! Stop!”

He commands the bum, but the little girl, arrested by the powerful voice, can run no longer — and collapses.

Someone-Help-Me does a victory jig and the detective tells him to disappear, his tone menacing enough so the snitch is gone in the briefest time imaginable.

Detective Dowling kneels, bunching his expensive coat under the girl’s fainted head.

When they got on the freeway, she became agitated — certain he was taking her back to Mrs. Woolery’s.

“Were you staying at the motel, Amaryllis?” A nauseating lump grew in her throat — for she hadn’t yet told him her name. “Were you staying at the St. George?”

“The babies!” she cried, broken. “Where are the babies?”

He reached out to pat her head; he was awkward with kids. “The boy and girl? They’re fine, fine. Don’t cry, now.”

“How do you know ?” she snarled. A ray of hope pierced through: “Have you seen them?”

“Not personally.”

“Then how do you know ?” She hated him again. He had hairy, muscular arms and reeked of cologne and she held him in the utmost contempt. “How do you know anything about them—”

He laughed, not unkindly. “Because I know the detective who made sure they were safe. A female officer,” he said, then corrected himself. “A woman. She really took to those kids. They’re your brother and sister, aren’t they?”

Now she was possessed of a new torment: the babies were bonding with one of their captors! They would love the policewoman and not even recognize her when she came to their rescue. “When can I see them?”

“Soon, I’d imagine. First we need to get you well and on your feet. You’ve had a rough go of it, haven’t you? It couldn’t have been wonderful sitting with Mom all that time the way you did. You’re a brave little gal.”

They rode awhile in silence. He cracked a window, because the smell of her was overwhelming — like the worst, infected whores he’d found in crackhouses, or half dead in littered fields. He asked about the man—“a big, tall fellow” whom a “witness” saw carry her off into the night. Went by the name of William, he said, or Topsy … He wanted to know where the man had taken her, and if he was a friend of her mother’s.

There is no man, she said. And where are we going?

“A place called MacLaren.”

“Is it in the Canyon?”

“It’s in El Monte. What canyon?”

“Is it a house?”

“MacLaren? In a way, though it’s a lot bigger. There’s a school and a gymnasium — even a swimming pool. Lotsa kids your age.”

Amaryllis scanned the interior: the dash-mounted beacon on a curved, creepy metal neck … battered computer wedged between them … shotgun rack — prison! He was was taking her to prison!

The detective’s insistence this MacLaren place wasn’t a jail did little to ameliorate her terror. The children who lived there, he explained offhandedly, were not prisoners —why, there weren’t even locks on the doors! He went on to say that in point of fact at MacLaren locks on doors were “against the law”—of course there were some locks, he clumsily amended, to prevent strangers from coming in , not to stop kids from going out , a system so designed to protect the “pop” (“short for ‘population’ ”) from unhappy parents, who in very rare cases may wish to do their children harm—

With each botched blandishment the detective dug a deeper hole for himself and his detainee, multiplying her paranoia tenfold until the looming sight of Mac’s outer wall — the highest, thickest wall Amaryllis had ever seen — delivered the final blow. The only thing stopping a leap from the moving car were the babies. They were there, at the place called MacLaren, like prisoners in a deathstar. She knew it. They had to be.

Then it all blurred. She was taken to the infirmary, where an RN peeled off layers of clothing and gasped, hand to startled mouth. Other nurses and staffworkers gathered to gawk. Doctors were called; wounds were cleansed. She was examined for pelvic inflammatory disease and tested for TB, strep, syphilis, HIV, chlamydia, clap. They poured penicillin in her veins, and Demerol for pain.

Amaryllis slept for three days. In a languid flirtation with consciousness, she heard the stealthy footfalls of children arriving for daily meds. They poked their heads around the curtain to look before being chased away.

When some of her strength returned, a woman from “intake” came bedside to announce she could make two phone calls, adding that both would be “monitored.”

“Who would you like to talk to?” she asked cheerfully.

All this time, Will’m lay low in Angelino Heights, the grateful guest of Fitz and his maimed pet. The peculiar trio put up in the garage of a Queen Anne Victorian on Carroll Avenue. The owner (one of Fitz’s former supervisors at the DCFS) had hit a financial bump in mid-restoration; chain link surrounded the property. Fitz was on-site to ward off vandals.

The architecture was to Will’m’s liking. It reminded him of Red House at Bexleyheath in Kent, the dwelling built for Janey on occasion of their marriage — with its humble demi-courtyard garden, rose-entwined wattle and decorative well house with conical roof, he felt he was truly home again. There were two stories, plain and spacious, and polished, set-back porches. By light of day, he explored the Gothic-arched drawing room of this earthly paradise and made secret plans to paint a mural on a hall cupboard, the one he had begun so long ago but never finished: Morte d’Arthur . This time he would include Fitz and Amaryllis among the likenesses of Lancelot and Tristram, and even work in Half Dead.

At night, while Fitz smoked his chemical pipe in the garage and ranted about the Department of Children and Family Services, Will’m paced the hortus conclusus , square plots of lilies and macerated, streetwise sunflowers, reciting verse from News from Nowhere (which he need soon retrieve from its Olympic Boulevard storage bin)—

I know a little garden-close

Set thick with lily and red rose,

Where I would wander if I might

From dewy morn to dewy night,

And have one with me wandering.

To be frank, he hadn’t slept well since giving up the girl. The small face, with its rough cherub’s mop, tugged, calling him to seek her out; he made resolution to reconnoiter the bakery and look in on her progress. But skid row tom-toms soon brought news of her capture by police — and Someone-Help-Me’s perfidious involvement in the dragnet. Will’m was undone. Discreet by nature, he decided to gather Fitz into his confidence, bringing him up to speed on all that had transpired between him and Amaryllis, culminating with the freedom flight from Higgins to East Edgeware alley.