I'll Let You Go (13 page)

“The boy should see it.”

“It was a copy of a real place—an eighteenth-century garden outside Paris, where your father and I had once been. Though ‘copy' doesn't sound quite right, does it, Papa?” The old man smiled humbly. “Your dad
and I came upon it during our meanderings and fell absolutely in love with the place—and Grandpa built a … 
re-creation
, right in the middle of Bel-Air. The most beautiful wedding present anyone could ever—” Again, she looked toward her father, eyes swollen with tears. Her pain was lancing, and the old man steadied himself against the vitrine that held a knockoff of Le Corbusier's chapel at Notre-Dame-du-Haut. “But Grandpa kept it a secret. He had artisans from all over the world working around the clock. I used to complain, didn't I, Papa? ‘What is going
on
down there on Carcassone?' That's what I used to say. The whole
neighborhood
was in an uproar, but Grandpa kept smoothing things over. God knows who and how much he had to pay to keep everyone happy!”

“I never spent a dime on that sort of thing,” he said, letting loose a gentle chuff or two.

“I'll bet you didn't,” said Trinnie sardonically, the smile returning to her face, along with some color. “Six hundred people came to the wedding … I bought my wedding gown last minute, do you remember, Papa? At Christie's—”

“Oh yes.”

“—Cristóbal Balenciaga himself had cut the material. Everyone arrived in horse-drawn landaus.
La Colonne Détruite
—that's ‘the broken column'—it was so beautiful, there was no reason to leave for a honeymoon.”

“They threw rice,” said the old man, prompting.

“We stood on the steps and threw rice on the guests as they left.” She gathered herself, nervously smoothing the lap of her gown. “That night, you were conceived. I fell asleep in your father's arms.” Now her face darkened as the life went out of it. “When I woke up, he was gone.”

“Where—where was he?” asked Tull, trembling.

“It was so quiet! I'll never forget that. It was the first time—the only time!—we slept there overnight. So you have that funny sleepover feeling—vulnerable. You don't really … you know that disoriented feeling where your body—where you don't really know where you are? And nothing's familiar? The grounds were so huge, so you really
did
feel like a trespasser in a park … We didn't have staff, because no one had even been hired. I listened for sounds of him—nothing. I don't know
what
I thought at first. I was still floating from the night before! I thought he was in the bathroom or the kitchen. I waited awhile, then went out to find him. I was certain he'd be walking around, but he wasn't … maybe
he'd gone to Nate 'n' Al's for deli, to surprise us—breakfast in bed—he used to love that—but the cars were all there. I went back to our room to wait. His wallet and pants were in the upstairs bath, and a book too, thrown facedown on the floor like he'd been snatched off the toilet! I laughed—oh, I thought he was just being evil, evil. Hours and hours and hours went by. I started to feel trapped, like I was losing my mind … I was afraid to call anyone. Then I got angry and then I got scared and then I got
mad
—at
myself—
for
being
mad—and then I got angry and scared all over again and finally called your grandfather.”

The old man wandered closer now. “I had a feeling.”

“You loved him!”

“Yes, Katrina, I loved him. But I had a feeling when you called.”

“What kind of feeling?” asked the boy.

His grandfather's chest expanded as he took in a long breath. “I knew we would never see this man again.”

Tull nearly swooned with the drama of it.

“Grandpa called an old friend of the family, a detective. I was—I was
worried
, of
course
I was worried, that something terrible had happened to him—but in the back of my head—this
thing
, this
jilting
thing—I was ashamed to even think it possible this man who I
loved
and just
married
had actually
disappeared
—”

“What did the detective do?”

“Looked for your father,” she said.

Before Tull could ask, his grandfather said: “The gentleman was unable to find him.”

The old man sighed, settling into the Louis XVI.

“But where did he go?” Tull could do nothing about the pleading whine in his voice; he was at their mercy.

“That, my dear grandson, we were not able to ascertain.”

He turned to his mother. “Did—did my father give me my name?”

She smiled. “When we came back from France, he began calling himself Toulouse—demanded everyone at work do the same. He was quite serious about it. Said he was going to get a tattoo:
NÉ TOULOUSE
. Do you know what
né
means? ‘Born.' That was your father's little joke:
Born Toulouse
. But you were named after Grandpa too—‘Louis' is in ‘Toulouse'—”

He wished he were someplace else; remembering his ghostly peregrinations on Carcassone Way, he felt the chill of the profane; he wished
Cousin Lucy dead. Yet he no longer felt a fist in his chest, though the weight of the world seemed upon him. His jaw ached from being stuck out, and he dug his fingers into the points beneath each ear for relief.

“Do you know why we were in France?” his mother asked rhetorically. “We were there to visit a film set. One of your father's clients was a famous actor. We were in a beautiful train station there.”

“The Gare de Lyon,” offered the old man.

“They were shooting a scene where two people say good-bye. We hid behind the camera, watching. It was drizzling—
très Parisienne
. The actress stood on the platform while her ‘boyfriend' boarded the train. The cars were already moving. You know: a real movie good-bye. She put her hand on her heart and ran along the track as he waved. He was standing in the door, on a step. No one smiled—the director didn't want them to. She stopped running and the train kept going. They held the shot until the car was out of sight. The director called, ‘Cut!' and everyone waited until the train came back to the station to its original mark. After a while, someone yelled, ‘Last looks'—that's what they say when they're about to shoot again. ‘Last looks! Final touches!' The last chance for wardrobe and hair and makeup. Then the scene began again and the actress ran after the train and he waved and no one smiled and then she stopped just where she did before, and put her hand over her heart. Again, the train came back to its original position. ‘Last looks!' More waving and chasing and chasing and waving, again and again and again. Finally, it was over and your father looked at me and smiled and squeezed my hand. I didn't remember that until years later.”

I
n the days following the meeting in the Withdrawing Room, Tull went to school like a somnambulist—scattered, so to speak, to the Four Winds. He finally understood what Edward meant when summoning the word
postictal
(pronounced post-
ik
-tal, always with great flourish) to refer to the emptied, euphoric state that came over him in the wake of an Apert seizure. That is to say, Tull walked about in a kind of gauze; he felt an overall generic thankfulness; colors and scents seemed more vivid. As he floated indolently from class to class, building to building, ethereally benevolent toward his fellow students, the once cynically regarded campus revealed itself as a quaint and inconsequential place, a warm and fuzzy manufacturer of future nostalgia.

Lucy and Edward were the only ones aware of the facts behind Tull's “seizure.” Though Edward was perversely thrilled by the development, his poor sister grew morbidly beside herself. Deeply ashamed to be the snitching source of Tull's pain and fearful to approach him, the redhead kept her distance. Unable to concentrate on the detective-book project, she sat at desk torturing herself for having delivered the coup de grâce—it was only a matter of time before a distant chorus of screams would announce that Tull had gunned down a dozen students or been found hanging from the top metal slat of the folding bleachers of the multimillion-dollar
DODD AND JOYCE TROTTER GYMNASIUM
. The truth would out and she'd soon be (nationally) marked: Lucille Rose, spoiled scion, had destroyed her adored first cousin because while on the way to visit their hospitalized grandmother (whom she was exploiting in the name of “research”) he had not paid enough attention to the prattling précis of
her pathetically still unwritten
Mystery of the Blue Maze
. The horror of such ruminations came to a head when she startled herself awake with a reflexive gasp in the middle of European History. Boulder turned to scowl at the creepy little outburst—the outburst of a loser.

Tull still thought of the homeless girl, and fantasized that the reassuring voice of the GPS would direct them to her. He would invite Amaryllis and her mom to Saint-Cloud for dinner and make Grandpa Lou give them money so they could move from their motel—to Malibu or the Marina. After his grandson's recent trauma, how could the old man refuse?

By dreamy smile and odd disaffection, Tull not so subtly advertised the intimate, intensely private revelation that had knighted him with its from-left-field melodrama. At such a tender age we're as innocent as we are vain, and while it's true Tull had his share of weepily beleaguered moments, he was not above considering himself the irresistibly charismatic star of a new school play called, say,
The Wounded Boy
.

Having thus left the door open, it was inevitable that his nastier contemporaries would gather, as Grandpa Lou would say, a piece of intelligence, on their own; predictably,
l'affaire Colonne
still lived on in the memory of those peers of Trinnie's who had begotten children way back when—such were the vagaries of coming of age in the town one was born. Hence, like an ungainly, standoffish bodyguard, Lucy found herself shadowing the boy she loved and had so casually betrayed. “Stop it!” she shouted when tormentors made their retarded Bride of Frankenstein/Invisible Man jokes about his father that cut Tull like daggers—“You better shut up!” They laughed until she cuffed the biggest one, hard. The bully almost struck back, but her coldly measured comment—“
Touch me and my father will fuck your family”
—dissuaded him. (The aggressor, like most of the student body, had laid curious eyes on Dodd Trotter, the bullet-headed billionaire, at the formal dedication of the gymnasium; and though his
own
father was a cruel Century City litigator, instincts told him not to call her bluff.) Reveling in the martyrdom of his “second act,” the Wounded Boy allowed Lucy to vent. If not exactly righting a wrong, she could at least salve her guilt.

Things changed at home, too. Ralph stopped pestering him for comments about his script, and that was definitely a plus.

As for his mother, Trinnie seemed at once lighter and heavier, like a ballasted ghost. She dressed elegantly, as always, but without the usual
frivolity. She joked less, more droll than outrageous. Though she spent most of her time in the gardens, she had a warm, missionary smile for anyone who came along—she was effortlessly, agonizingly present. Even Bluey was surprised when her daughter moved from the bedroom that had been hers as a child into a guest cottage, which she kept uncharacteristically clutter free. Trinnie no longer had wine with dinner, and when speaking to Tull made sure to lightly touch his arm or hand, shoulder or cheek, like an otherworldly healer infusing with balm. She looked into his eyes when he answered; her own were clear as bells.

And each day, Tull thought:
my father
must
be dead
. They'd hired a detective … yet how was it a body was never found? Didn't they say a body always had to be found? Grandpa Lou would have scoured the ends of the earth, dug the deepest hole with spindly, spotted hands until he broke to the other side—he would have done that for Katrina, Tull knew. No: he
must
be dead, or good as. What a mediocre denouement for the drama of a gifted child! He raged at the walls while headphones blared Slim Shady, feebly rapping to slang he didn't fully understand, a psycho Gilbert-and-Sullivan blizzard of miniature passion plays about duct-taped women thrashing in car trunks.

“T
here's someone here to see you,” said Winter.

He stood bathed in the light of the Sub-Zero picking at cold Cuban chicken. Lucy appeared in the kitchen door, frail and diffident. The old nurse ducked out.

“Tull …” she stammered. “I'm—I'm so sorry! You have to forgive me! I didn't mean to—”

She cried, and his heart opened up. The smell of her perspiration was animal, as if she'd been chased to Saint-Cloud by predators.

“It's all right, Lucy, really—”

“No, no, it isn't! It isn't, it isn't, it isn't! It was so
sadistic
—all because you wouldn't listen to my stupid book cover!”

“It
isn't
stupid. I
like
your book cover.”

“You are
so sweet
!” Deliriously, she kissed him, and he blushed. “Why do I
do
things like that? Edward says I have a mean streak, like Mom.” She dried an eye with the butt of her palm. “Then you'll forgive me?”

He nodded, then sat forlornly on the stool Ralph favored during culinary rants and raids.

“So: what are you gonna do?”

“About what?”

“You want to
find
him, don't you?”

“There
is
no finding him.”

“That is bullshit, Tull.” He narrowed his eyes menacingly.

Lucy quickly apologized, fearing she'd lost all the ground she had gained. “But you
could
find him, if you—”