Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

This time she didn’t ask about his condition, which gave him leave to inquire after hers. Did she hurt anywhere? Was she feverish? Did she — yet before he could finish his examination, Amaryllis doubled over and ran to the trash, where she threw up what little she’d imbibed. With clucking self-reproach, Edward realized the poor girl was starving; cocoa may not have been the best idea. While she lay on the divan, peering at him from beneath a comforter, he rang the house kitchen for chicken broth and Popsicles.

A few days later, the cousin invited Tull and Boulder to join him and Lucy for a light supper at the Boar’s Head. Edward forsook his customary face covering and, while not commenting directly, the children thought that remarkable. A molten rage of pimples had subsided, leaving a rash of burnt-out villages in its wake, their charred remains artfully covered by hypoallergenic makeup.

After heartfelt remarks on how well he looked and how buoyant seemed his spirits, the children occupied themselves with Four Winds gossip — fallout from the Easter Island faculty debauch, et alia — while young Candelaria shyly set the table. Another helper wheeled in a cart with boeuf bourguignon, yellowfoot mushrooms and Ligurian chickpea cake stowed in heated steel cabinets. A box of Le Marmiton tartes Tatins and thumbprint cookies awaited for dessert, wedged prominently between a Yupik Eskimo puppet and Julie Taymor — made goblin that Aunt Trinnie gave Edward on his last birthday. After the tossing of the mâche salad the couple was dismissed.

But a fifth place had been set.

“Who are we expecting?” asked Boulder, glancing at the empty spot.

“Wouldn’t be Detective Dowling , would it?” added Lucy, an eyebrow archly raised. It was obvious she had in her possession an insider’s “piece of intelligence”—some fresh mischief of her brother’s was afoot.

“I don’t think so,” said Tull. “He’s with my mom at a screening.”

“Poor Rafe,” said Lucy wistfully.

“It’s Ralph,” amended Tull.

“So easily replaced!”

“Don’t worry about him ,” said Tull, blasé. Then he turned to his cousin, tired of the game. Edward smiled like a mosaic mandarin; his much-operated-upon face looked digitized. “I hope it isn’t some Jewish thing — you know, waiting for Elijah-slash-Marcus Weiner? That would be so dumb. And boring.”

“Two things I’ve never been accused of,” he said smugly.

The invalid used a cane while meandering to an open door. He stood inside its frame and looked expectantly offstage. With not a little sense of showmanship, he faced the group again, ridiculously clearing his throat.

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I reintroduce to you … Amaryllis Kornfeld!”

The appearance of his father may have been the only thing to surprise Tull more than the sight of the girl, who had never really left his thoughts. The orphan haltingly entered as she had the Mauck that long-ago day, but the old terror was supplanted by a diffidence, a charming acquiescence that filled Tull’s heart.

Lucy ran to shore up their guest, who in the last seventy-two hours had already regained some weight if not a good part of luster. Aside from making sure that she fed her face around the clock, Edward had steeped her in the finest of emollients, and her hair, though in need of shaping — the MacLaren “stylist” left much to be desired — seemed to grow wilder and more beautiful by the hour. Tull (he still thought of himself as Toulouse around her) now waited nervously in the reception line, directly behind Pullman, who for some intolerably annoying reason chose this very moment to spend more time with the wayward child than he ever allotted to anything, living or dead. Lucy stroked the girl’s rosy gold-brown cheek while Boulder, above it all, busied herself with Edward, praising his gambit and twittering over its daring illegality.

It was Tull’s turn at last. The braided detective watched as the two locked eyes; and Lucy’s face became a flowery field overtaken by dark clouds. She withdrew with a forced smile, joining Boulder and her brother.

He said hello and asked if she remembered his name. When she gave it to him, he was beside himself — he would be Toulouse forevermore.

He stood and blinked, dragging upper teeth against lower lip. Finally: “How did you get here?”

“I–I came to your school.”

“But how did you know—”

“Boulder visited the place I was staying.” It secretly thrilled her to so casually invoke the famous name. “They asked where she went, and she said Four Winds—”

“Visited?” exclaimed Boulder, having overheard. Edward hovered blissfully, like a playwright watching from the wings. “Visited where?”

“MacLaren Children’s Center.”

Boulder was stymied for a second. “Oh my God! You mean that prison for kids? You were there ?”

Amaryllis nodded. Mercilessly, Lucy smelled subplot. “But how did you escape?”

“My friend and I ran away.”

Edward hobbled forth and solemnly waved, forbidding her to finish.

“I am compelled to say,” he began with great flair, “that by harboring this girl sub rosa —this innocent — we have each placed ourselves in jeopardy.” He pulled a card from his embroidered tunic. “I have here the name of Amaryllis’s legal counsel, which, for the record, the young fugitive offered to me unsolicited. In fact, there were two of the barrister’s cards, were there not?” He sounded like a magician setting up a trick. “I will retain one while my lodger retains the other. Upon this card are telephone, fax and e-mail contacts. Will I attempt to get in touch? Absolutely not!”

He tore up the card as if dispensing with a ruined queen of hearts. Everyone laughed but the orphan, who smiled pathetically. Watching Amaryllis — her small joys and terrors — had for Tull quickly become a warm avocation.

They took their seats and Boulder helped lay down plates. When Tull awkwardly attempted to engage the guest of honor in conversation, Lucy ordered him to get up and serve the damn salad. Which he did.

With spirited promptings from her Mauck Daddy, Amaryllis mesmerized them with fabulist tales of woe. The numerous, thimble-size portions of cognac with which they celebrated their reunion (partly medicinal) did nothing to hinder the orphan’s dizzying, colorful amplifications — alcohol or no, she had found her tongue as never before. She spoke of canyons and witches, and deaf-and-dumb supergirls (though there was much she didn’t tell); of her father held prisoner in the forbidden Valley of Carceration and her mother now with the angels (Amaryllis said she died but wouldn’t say how); and lamented over her precious babies, cruelly stolen away. There were Fátima saints and advocating devils, popes and postulators and vast stone courthouses where children were chained with leg irons to bloody stone benches; a journey to another canyon (not Tunga) and how she slept under the stars with a white-fanged hot-breathed coyote watching her every move then stole a motorcycle from a biker on “the parole” and crashed it on a winding canyon road then called 411 to ask for “Santa Monica’s Famed Four Winds School”—that’s what they called it in Boulder’s Twist profile — she took a limousine to the address they gave but it was Saturday and no one was there and she hid for twelve days and twelve nights (actually, just the weekend) before seeing the Mauck—… and by the time she was done, Lucy had long abandoned her Smythson pad and with it any hope of being a teller of stories; Boulder had decided to produce and star in an Oscar-winning film of the orphan’s life; Edward was happier and handsomer and higher than he’d been in who-knows-when; Pullman was fast asleep; and Tull — who, having come of age and into his own name, should henceforth be called Toulouse, for if Rafe Mirdling can warrant a rechristening, then so should the boy — Toulouse, a name of murky origins, which only his grandfather and Amaryllis had ever called him — well … our dear, suffering Toulouse was in love.