I'll Let You Go (65 page)

Because of this obliviousness, and because Sling Blade's scowls gradually subsided, Toulouse had the opportunity to scrutinize the burly character now standing at a lectern skimming a ledger of the dead and holding what looked to be a prayerbook in his hand. How handsome his father was, he thought—already much thinner than the day he saw him
at the Bel-Air, and with a powerful magnetism about him, though his eyes were red and his face swollen and ruddy from weeping. His suit was finely cut yet capacious as a tent. He looked wise and kind and fierce, too; he was no one to tangle with, yet that's all the boy wanted to do.

“Her name is Scull, not Scall,” said Marcus matter-of-factly after examining the log. Their host said nothing and made no move to correct the entry. “Well, I'll see her now.” He daubed at his nose with a handkerchief and walked outside.

Toulouse watched him thread his way down the hill; keeping a discreet distance, the boy struck out on his own. There were no tombstones, but he noticed markers embedded in the grass, with years instead of names, memorialized: 1978, 1983, 1991. His father squatted down to touch one. Then Sling Blade strenuously motioned for Toulouse to return to the Mauck.

On the way back, he saw beer bottles washed up at the bottom of a chain-link fence, the sediment of small-time paganism.

They left the parking area without discussion and pulled into the street. Toulouse felt at once numb and giddily relieved—for better or for worse, the mysterious man who happened to be his father now seemed more novelty than threat. He was cocky enough to think it might be time for Sling Blade to make an introduction. He was about to nudge the caretaker when Marcus Weiner began an oratory of tears that jolted both boy and driver from their seats.

“Janey! Janey, my Janey! What did they do to you?” He tore at his hair; a worried Sling Blade looked in his rearview and was at least assured that the man had wits enough to have used his seat belt. “Why'd they do it to you, Janey? Why? My darling, my darling!” He wailed and snorted and thrashed about. The book he'd been carrying fell to the floor, and with it the envelope that was tucked inside:

To my Darling Will …

The caretaker, though inured to the trappings of grief, to its keens and waterworks, and bodies lowered into the earth, could not help but grimace at the force of his rider's pain. There was beauty in it, too—just as in the gnarled olive trees of Westwood Memorial Park. Toulouse was all gooseflesh, like a riptide had sucked off his clothes.

Sling Blade glanced sidewise at the boy, pleased at the demonstration of humility. He saw that Toulouse was sorely moved by this stranger, and such maturity in one so young unexpectedly moved him too. Came
the caterwauling and lamentations: now melodious, now atonal, now piano, now forte, monolithic arpeggios of sorrow lit by plaintive trills—grace notes singing the leitmotif:
Janey, why!

He took the Sunset off-ramp and left the boy just south of Sunset. When Toulouse began the walk to Saint-Cloud, he thought,
Surely this life of ours is a dream—and those who said otherwise could not even aspire to be phantoms of a phantom world
.

A
s the Candlelighters became better-known (just the previous month they had settled into the top floor of a charming little building the Trotter family owned on Brentwood's tony San Vicente), the group received calls from friendly police departments alerting them to bitsy bodies recovered from all manner of tide and trash. This time, as earlier reported, a well-meaning soul jumped the gun; the overeager dispatcher had received half-baked information from a hospital worker but passed it on to the ladies anyway. Happy, red-faced retractions abounded.

Joyce was determined to meet the infant she had named Isaiah but was now calling Lazarus—the Candlelighters' own “lucky angel.” She got in touch with the newborn's foster parents, Rachel Hirschberg and Cammy Donato, a gregarious lesbian couple living in the Palisades, late-thirtysomethings who'd been planning to go the in-vitro route until reading the
Times
item about the McDonald's Miracle Baby Doe. They had been touched, just as Joyce was by her first Baby Doe almost two years before.

Rachel and Cammy were eager to soak up the stories-behind-the-story of their baby's almost novelistic arrival into the world and eagerly invited Mrs. Trotter to tea.
^†
Joyce came in Chanel armor, bearing duffels of baby Pratesi, sweet little frog boots and English-made tattersall shirts
DHL'd from the Magic Wardrobe in Virginia. The Candlelighters' CEO was not disappointed by the mascot's sweet disposition or his astonished, resurrected eyes. She was absolutely taken with every single Rembrandt-drawn hair of his fuzzy, sweet-smelling head.

When Rachel surprised by saying he was yet to be christened, Joyce underwent a welter of emotions she hadn't experienced since the perilous birth of her own son; he too went unnamed for a while. The baby, jaundiced and malformed, barely left the ICU with his life (aside from ten thousand other afflictions, he had swallowed amniotic fluid and was vomiting blood)—it seemed there were two teams working full-time: one to keep him afloat and the other (Bluey and Dodd and various shrinks) to keep Joyce from going under.

Staring at Lazarus, tickling his perfect pinkness while he wrapped a Lilliputian hand around her finger, an old sickening riff sang in her head: this was how she had expected Edward to look. This was what she had dreamed. But the miracle was theirs—a spectacularly healthy fast-food discard, born of who knew what godless monster, snatched up by ebullient, shorthaired queers.

Her son had stayed in the hospital for three months, while she remained bedridden at Stradella. It was Winter who visited him, and Winter whom all the nurses knew, and Winter who sat for hours by the incubator after intubations and bloody cut-downs, and Winter who gave Joyce progress reports that she listened to from bed as a grinch would a poorly written fairy tale.

Then one day without warning he was home. He stayed with the Jamaican RN and Oahuan doula in the faraway “servant and sick wing.”

Joyce didn't touch him for a year. It wasn't until he was four that she even tried to bathe him, as a dutiful if reluctant penance. He was so damaged that she barely had the stomach. How had anyone expected her to give him a name?

I
n the noisy steel cask of the MRI, Louis Trotter had much to mull over. A long time coming, Bluey's grim predicament had nonetheless taken him by surprise; he could not buy her comfort, or even assess her agonies. If she had a cancer, he might help her rally to blast the thing
away—or end it all, if that's what she'd wanted. But this! A once fearless woman now possessed by terrors, trembling with each breath in horror that her mouth had become a broken window to let robbers in … With a violent twitch, he pushed the picture of her away.

He drifted in the diagnostic tube. What was this thing if not a coffin? The digger was, thankfully, not a claustrophobe; no Valium, please. For this particular procedure he was in his element.

He had other concerns—to wit, the grandchildren. Not the girl—he had no worries about the girl to speak of. Lucille Rose possessed an enormous heart and a head for figures, too; a buoyant, practical child certain to have buoyant, practical passions. A dreamer and a nester at once, she was not prodigal, and relished in absorbing the best parts of those around her. She would live to be 102. But the boys … the boys.

Shortly after the existence of Toulouse's father had been revealed, Edward asked that they convene. When the old man suggested the Withdrawing Room, he demurred, nominating the site of his grandfather's future memorial instead. Onlookers whispered while the curious pair strolled past the neatly mowed graves of Natalie Wood and Donna Reed.

The boy said he was tired and quite often in pain and had, like his confessor, been preparing a long while for his death. He could share these things, he said, because he knew the rigor and care with which his grandfather had pursued
his
final home. Edward said he too wished
“la última casa”
—the last house—to be aesthetically pleasing, and that he'd spent quite a lot of time studying Saint-Cloud's funerary-commission maquettes. He asked Grandpa Lou into the Mauck (Epitacio had parked adjacent to Irving “Swifty” Lazar) to show him clippings of tombs, stelae and catafalques collected over the last eighteen months, and expressed his desire to be buried in this very park so that his sister and beloved cousin Toulouse might be near him.

Louis Trotter, for all his end-point obsessions, was for
life
. He was always on the loamy side of life; he had dug the earth for its living riches and would keep on digging to provide for his grandchildren and their children, too—yet in this instance the boy's wizardry had transformed the old man into a ghoulish handmaiden. This was a sudden, unwelcome fillip given his heretofore charming role as “afterlife hobbyist,” and he felt some guilt because of it. Had he really imagined that his years-long
pursuit of a resting place (the mention of which family members assiduously avoided) would go unnoticed by this most brilliant and fragile boy? They were closer than kin that way; Edward, in his superior fashion, had simply made his grandfather do the legwork.

On the day already discussed, the boy left his collection of “memorabilia” with Grandpa Lou, and while he hadn't looked at them since, he often revisited the events of that afternoon. They had been distracted by the infernally meddlesome Dot Campbell, who'd prattled on about talk shows and orphan diseases; Mr. Trotter pretended to be irritated but was secretly relieved, for the gracious child had been unbearably poignant and he needed to step away. He let out a string of chuffs and walked over to Sling Blade to arrange for the caretaker to accompany the kids on their one and only group field trip to La Colonne.

He had never followed up on their discussion, and it nagged him that his grandson might be planning a “dramatic” exit. But he didn't know
how
to follow up on such complicity; he loved that boy and respected him and knew he was doomed, just as he himself was doomed. (As were we all.) Edward had sung his graveside song with such profound elegance and economy that—well, it wasn't the old man's style to hand him a pep talk or send him to therapy, as his mother would have done. Who could ever really know how that child suffered? So he let it go. Whenever he saw Edward, at school events or family dinners, there was a wantonness between them, the shorthand charisma of a very married couple who had made their vows on the Day of the Dead.

He ruminated on it as Epitacio drove him from Cedars to the Westwood Village Memorial Park. On the car phone, the doctor said the MRI results were inconclusive. They would need to shoot dye through an artery and see what they could see. Mr. Trotter was surprised that with all the fancy equipment, there was still no clear resolution—so to speak.

Sling Blade, who was raking leaves near the Candlelighters' parcel, ran over when he saw him stepping from the Rolls.

“What happened?” asked Mr. Trotter as he approached with more than a little speed.

Sling Blade went blank.

“You never told me what happened!”

“You mean—”

“I mean with Mr. Weiner!” he said with great annoyance. “What do you think I mean?”

“Oh! Yessir!” he said bashfully. Then he leaned on his rake and remembered. “Well, we went there, sir.”

“To Boyle Heights,” he prompted.

“Yessir.”

“And there's a large cemetery there …”

“Yessir.”

“Was it the old Jewish one?”
^†

“I don't know, sir. We didn't go
there
, anyway. We went to the other one, next door.”

“I see.” He stroked his chin, already intrigued.

“We went inside—there was a book there. And her name was written in it.”

“A book?”

“Yessir. More like a ledger.”

“A
ledger
,” he said, fascinated. “With ‘Jane Scull' written down …”

“
Scall
. It was a misprint. Your friend—Mr. Weiner mentioned it, but I don't think they'll do anything about it.”

“And then?”

“He went and paid his respects.”

“Went over to the
grave
?” The old man chuffed and strained at the caretaker's appalling dearth of detail.

“Yessir. Kneeled down. Had his book with him.”

“What book?”

“You know—that book he got when I took him to the shelter. The
Nowhere
book.”

“And the grave?”

“The grave, sir?”

“Man, tell me! What was the grave like? Describe the headstone!”

“Headstone? Oh no, sir—there was nothing like that.”

“No headstone?”

“No sir. They don't do it like that there.”

“Then how
do
they do it?” he asked imperiously.

“With little markers on the ground. Little markers with the year written on them.”

“The year? Just the year?”

“Yessir.”

“Just the year? And no names?”

“It's all grass, just like this.” He pointed to the cemetery flats. “No names or headstones—just little markers with the year.”

Mr. Trotter seemed shocked at the simplicity of the concept, and again set to stroking his chin. He then reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a gold money clip whose teeth clamped onto a sheaf of hundreds like a feral dog's. He loosened a few bills and palmed them toward Sling Blade.

“No, sir, not today,” said the caretaker, retreating.

“And why?”

“It's all right, sir.”

“Don't be a fool!”

“I can't, sir, not today.”

“Is it your pride?”

“No, sir—”