Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

When she got to the lengthy piece in the Times —the one she’d been hoarding — there was great commotion in head and heart; all the world was hard-charging calvary and redemption and the girl’s blood began to boil: the pope had declared two children to be Blessed, the first ever beatified by the Church who weren’t martyrs! Amaryllis didn’t care that the article said beatification was only bestowed on the dead — things were moving so quickly anything could happen. There was an actual photograph: two girls and boy, just like Amaryllis and her babies — Portuguese shepherds, from a place called Fátima, to whom the Virgin Mary had appeared in a field. She stared ravenously at the image of them clutching rosaries, sweet hands pushed together in prayer. Their eyes alone, dilated and enthralled, proved they had witnessed something awesome and eternal. It seems the three little cousins, using information the Virgin gave them, had predicted that someone would shoot John Paul long before he was even born. (She was glad Dézhiree had prepared her for the awful news.) Now, John Paul kept the bullet in a shrine. Two of the cousins died of influenza not long after the Virgin’s sighting, and Amaryllis wondered why they wouldn’t at least have lived a normal life span after being so touched — Dézhiree said hers was not to wonder why. But the surviving cousin was ninety-four, and that seemed to make up for it. She and John Paul smiled for the camera.

Amaryllis pasted the holy couple to the cover of her magic box. Then she said a prayer for Cindra, a Pixie attached to a respirator who slept sitting up, and a prayer for Dézhiree, and a prayer for Crystel and Shangg and Dennis the Phantom Menace, and a prayer for Jane Scull too, wherever she was, and one for Topsy — all of whom she decreed Blessed — and still another for her gone yet not forgotten mother, and of course one for her own little shepherds, the precious babies, with whom, God’s help and John Paul’s mercy allowing, she would soon be reunited …

She sits in front of the mural with the painted image of Martin Luther King, Jr., against a backdrop of constellated outer space. She watches a boy paint a perfectly proportioned clapboard house on the Star Trek cope — little house on the cosmic prairie.

Cindra in her wheelchair, facing campus. A child is only supposed to be at Mac short-term; a child must appear at children’s court within fifteen days so it can be learned why he or she has not yet found a suitable placement. But Cindra’s been here three years, practically a record. She’s got MS, and not even one of those famous families that adopt only invalids has yet to take her on.

Amaryllis turns to look in the same direction: wild boys strut this way and that, each one trailed by a burly, unflappable staffer. “One-on-ones”—those deemed unsafe to be alone. The shadowy escorts bark corrective commands, which their charges obey in jerky protesting movements, unruly automatons staying the course.

She sits in the Learning Enhancement Center.

The Learning Enhancement Center helps kids who have neuroperceptual difficulties. All Mac kids have neuroperceptual difficulties. The teacher says such disabilities are “the hidden handicap,” because most people go through life undiagnosed. The purpose of the class, she says, is to “retrain the brain”—the way it organizes information. The teacher says perceptually handicapped people are usually restless and can’t control the impulse to talk or interrupt or get up and wander. They’re emotionally unstable and cry over nothing or laugh uncontrollably or get too boisterous. They get easily frustrated and withdraw into themselves. The teacher says no one should feel bad about being there, because lots of famous people have neuroperceptual problems. Like Thomas Edison, Cher, Tom Cruise and Bruce Jenner. (Amaryllis hadn’t heard of any of them.)

They did some tests, like making her walk on a long rail set in the ground — she pretended she was a tightrope walker at the circus. They gave her a pen and big pad of paper, and while someone read from a book, Amaryllis wrote down what they said, only she was blindfolded. They had her do a lot of bouncing on a small trampoline.

Around seventy kids are gathered because the director of the Scream movies is coming to talk about a movie he’s planning to make about Mac.

After celebrities visited, there was always fresh “swag” at the boutique — videos and sweatshirts and key chains with movie-studio logos — and sometimes tours of Universal Studios were arranged. When celebrities came, the kids always thought there was a chance they’d be put in a major motion picture or brought on a field trip to the celebrity’s house or pitied so much by the celebrity that they would be chosen from among all others for some sort of temporary home visitation sleepover that would fatefully morph into permanent placement at a Hollywood mansion.

The Scream man is introduced by staff. Most of the kids are shocked, because he was standing there the whole time and no one knew it. He looks like an old college professor, courtly and bespectacled and soft-spoken, with a nicely trimmed beard. Willow whispers to Amaryllis how the Scream man also did the movie about the monster who went into children’s dreams and killed them with long finger-razors. Amaryllis missed that one. A kid asks if he really made the “Freddies” (because it was hard to believe there was a scare in him), and the Scream man genteelly acknowledges he was “the culprit.” The staffer interjects that he’s made other films, too — like the one about underprivileged inner-city kids who learn to play the violin so well that they all wind up at Carnegie Hall — and is here today to talk about the power of change and the movie he’s planning on making about children like Mac children and how they can overcome adversity and realize their dreams. She tells them the woman who starred in the violin movie was nominated for an Academy Award and then introduces the dimpled lady who stands blinking and smiling beside the Scream man — a lady, says the staffer, who actually did win an Academy Award for Best Actress. The lady is old, too, and no one believes she ever won. Someone wants to know if she has the award with her, and she says normally she leaves it at home but would be sure to bring it next time. Then the boy who was painting the house on the mural shouts, “Are you the Flying Nun?” and everyone laughs and the woman with apple cheeks smiles and says yes she is, or yes she was. With great authority, someone whispers to Amaryllis that The Flying Nun is on TV Land. Amaryllis is embarrassed to even ask what TV Land is. Then a girl led by Dézhiree rushes up. The Scream man playfully scolds, “ There she is! You’re late, you’re late! You’ll never work in this town again!” The girl looks flustered and out of breath and makes her way to join them. There’s a stir because lots of kids recognize her from television, and when Amaryllis has a good look, she gasps — it’s Boulder Langon! Royal Kumari covergirl, TV superstar and friend of the boy who first called himself Toulouse …

The Scream man talks about the film he’s going to make “about a place like Mac,” starring Boulder and the Flying Nun, but Amaryllis doesn’t hear a word: her heart pounds away as she gathers the nerve to approach her after the talk. She plays out the encounter in her head, wondering if Boulder will remember her. She was just reading about her in a magazine at the cottage — the “What’s in Your Makeup Bag?” column of Twist , where they asked Ms. Langon that very thing. Now she stares at Boulder’s Prada purse to calm herself, trying to recall the starlet’s exact response, forcing herself to do a real-time inventory, neuro-perceptually retraining her brain to organize data: a Power Bar and my StarTAC , she said, and lots of sunscreen … — lots of lipsticks … — yes! that’s right. There were lipsticks and lotions that Boulder called “Mac” (for MacLaren?) …