I'll Let You Go (14 page)

“He's dead.”

“No one knows that for sure.”

“I said he's dead!”

She let him breathe for a minute—well, maybe five seconds. He'd been through so much. “But did you talk to Grandpa?”

“He said he hired a detective but they couldn't find him.”

“What did your father even
do
? I mean, for a living.”

“I don't know.”

“Did you ask?”

“No.” Tull wondered what else she knew, and was withholding for the sake of rapprochement. “If my father were alive, Grandpa would have found him.”

“I don't think that's necessarily true.”

“What do you mean?”

“Grandpa Lou would
not
be terribly anxious to find someone who hurt your mother the way that man did.” He admitted she had a point. “But
you
should find him, for your own peace of mind.”

“I don't care,” he said, unconvincingly.

“You don't
have
to—but you should probably still make the effort. You need closure.”

“Closure?” he said, with suspicion. “Maybe
you're
the one who needs closure—for your
book
. You know—for
research
. I know how
thorough
you like to be. Because you're such a
great writer
. Maybe
you're
the one who needs closure so you can figure out how to end your book!”

She listened to the tirade, eyes glued to the ground. “I guess I deserved that.”

Tull thought that maybe he'd been a bit rough. He poked at the soggy plantains. “Besides,” he said, “I wouldn't know where to start. I'm no good at ‘Missing Persons.' ”

Lucy tap-tapped psychedelic decal'd nails on the marble cutting
board, squinting her eyes—the girl detective again. “The trail is cold, but the Internet, you know, is … 
hot
.”

N
ot far away, in a modernist villa on Stradella Road, cousin Edward lay in bed attended by his mother. A Gucci scarf pinned to a goose-down pillow shaded his head, its hem stopping short at the brow. Liquid brown eyes watched her sponge his small frame; today he was too tired for the tub.

Joyce Trotter was older than her husband by nearly fifteen years. Approaching sixty (having had Lucy at forty-five and Edward at forty-seven), she carried herself with the presumption of an actress who had retired in her prime and was now only rarely glimpsed, someone of whom the world might say:
Still so gorgeous!
She had mitigated the tragedy of her son's unhappy lot with the compulsive maintenance of her own body. Though she desired to prolong and enhance her femininity, Botox and herbal wraps hadn't really softened her—Ashtanga and kickboxing instead bestowed a Brentwood warrior's mannish, sinewy glow. Sclerotherapy erased spider veins and Autologen was injected into nasolabial folds (a lab in New Jersey was busy farming collagen from three millimeters of skin taken from behind her ears); the men on Roxbury Drive had rolled up AlloDerm, an implant made from the dermis of human cadavers, surgically inserting it in her lip, and applied erbium laser to forehead. Mistakenly diagnosed with Lyme disease, Joyce flew to New York on the BBJ to have her blood pumped with a synthetic amino acid. Horrified that she leaked urine during a particularly torturous Pilates session, she immediately had a “designer” vaginoplasty and anterior colporrhaphy to restore the dropped bladder to normal position.

But dark clouds hung overhead that would not disperse. They had tried so long and so nobly to have children. Joyce saw a hundred specialists, but nothing worked; she combed Russia and China for little ones, but could never commit. Then came the magician of Santa Monica. He was going to use her womb as an incubator for another woman's eggs—Joyce was giving herself preparatory injections when by mistake Lucy happened. Well, why not? She knew plenty of fortysomethings who were knocked up. What was modern technology for? Then she wanted
another, and the magician made it happen. Presto: eyebrows were raised—there were always the doomsayers, including her mother-in-law, who wasn't thrilled from the beginning that her son had chosen
une femme ancienne
. Is it safe? they would ask. Are you sure that you
want
to? You were so lucky with Lucy … so
blessed
. What if the child—and she knew he was damaged, of
course
she knew, because the magician had told her so, but then she met with Father de Kooning and was certain she would have it.
She would have it
. And people were not happy! Years later, the Four Winds Mommies, scourges of the silent auction/Pediatric AIDS/carnival-booth charity circuit, tacitly indicted her for Edward's plastic fantastic skeletophantasmagoric woes … she could
feel
it. She smelled it in their eyes, their hair, their smiles, their very teeth as they pushed thousand-dollar prams stuffed with bawling bundles of gorgeous DNA. (Since Apert's wasn't a “recessive,” the odds of Lucy having a child so afflicted were astronomical … as were those of Joyce and Dodd if it were possible for them to have another, which of course it wasn't. Wasn't that a consolation?)

“Think he'll snap?”

“Who?”

“Tull.”

“Edward, don't be silly.”

She used a little bit of alcohol to swab beneath the brace, then rubbed his pale skin with Camelia Iris from E. Coudray, his favorite. Say what he would to Lucy and Tull, he secretly adored her. These were the only times—her touching him—that Edward felt alive.

“He's been acting pretty weird since he found out.”

“I think that's normal—an attention-getter. The whole thing has been quite a shock, I'm sure.”

“Have you talked to Trinnie?”

“Yesterday.”

“And Grandpa Lou?”

“Today.” She smiled. “What are all these questions?”

“Is Grandpa Lou angry that Tull found out?”

“I think he's relieved.”

“What about Trinnie?”

“Seems better than ever.”

“She isn't mad?”

“Why
would
she be?”

“At you and Dad. For snitching.”

“No one
snitched
, Edward.”

“
Lucy
did.”

“It's better that Tull know. He's of age—he would have found out. He
should
have been told. How can you keep a thing like that quiet?”

“
You
couldn't.”

“Very funny,” she said, smirking. “I always thought it was handled poorly.”

“Mommy”—that's what he called her when they were alone—“what would make someone leave like that?”

“I don't know. Marcus was always kind of a nutjob.”

“He didn't love her? He didn't love Aunt Trinnie?”

“I'm sure that he did.”

“Did you know him?”

“Not very well.”

“What was he like?”

“Edward, I'm late.”

She screwed the lid on the iridescent green lotion, then drew the thin down quilt over his whiteness, gently kissing his cheek.

“Are you going to another funeral?”

“Yes.”

“I never told you this before,” he said, clearing his throat. “But I—I really respect the work you do.”

“Thank you, Edward.”

She kissed his bare cheek again, just under the hem of the scarf.

“I guess,” he said, “you can't explain certain things—what makes someone leave. Tull's dad … or what makes someone throw a baby into a dumpster.”

“No—you can't explain.”

“Guess that's just the world, huh?”

“
Part
of the world. An ugly part, but just a part.”

J
oyce Trotter stood at the Castaic grave near Grasshopper Canyon.

The breast of her son still flitted before her like a haunted, broken bird's.

“Can you hear the freeway?” asked Father de Kooning. “It sounds like a fountain. Jesus was tired, and stopped at a well—Jacob's well. He
asked a woman for water, and she said, ‘You are a Jew and I am a woman. How can you ask me for water?' Jesus said, ‘If you knew who I am, you would ask
me
for water. With the water in this well, you will still have thirst. With the water I give you, you would never know thirst again because it would be like a fountain inside you.' ”

There were about forty gathered there. She had dressed down for the burial, in simple earrings and black Donna Karan sheath; the sun highlighted the chalky outline of water stains from the sponge bath. The small box about to be lowered into the earth held a two-year-old, found in the trash. Joyce had been informed that as in some infernal
Rugrats
episode, the diapered boy had scaled the garbage and draped himself over the metal side of the bin before dying in balanced repose, like a tiny-tot prisoner shot in mid-escape.

“Thomas Aquinas wrote,” said the pastor, “ ‘It is
me
who Jesus was looking for—not water. It is
me
.' ” He crossed his hands over his chest. “It is
you
”—he nodded to the mourners. “It is the seven buried children Jesus was looking for when he sat at the well.”

There
were
seven now—seven anonymous babes she had helped bury in as many months. Today's child, Joyce had named Jakob. It still tore at her to know that in the eyes of the law, the new christenings were only symbolic; the interred must remain Jane and John Does, forever.

They stood listening to the indifferent fountain of the freeway while a young girl walked forward with a basket and released a dove, for Jakob. It hovered there, taking Joyce's breath away. Another basket released six more that soared above as the mourners arched their necks. The lone dove rocketed to the others—as if choreographed by a maudlin god, they moved this way and that in unison, a school of wondrous flying fishes in a topsy-turvy sea before erasing themselves in the smog of infinity.

As Joyce drove back to Bel-Air, it occurred to her with a shudder: she had never named him. Fourteen weeks in the ICU and her son had had no name. Then one day, her husband suggested Edward. Depressed and spent, she acquiesced.

D
odd Trotter was, as his precocious daughter averred, the eighteenth-richest person in the world—or thereabouts, given market fluctuations.
^†
If his total worth, as construed by available SEC filings, were divided by America's GNP (a financial monthly had merrily done the math), his estimated personal wealth would equal a rough 0.19 percent of the U.S. economy. That is how this sort of money multiplies: it rises and converges, thunders, pelts and showers, then, like a perfect storm, leaves rainbows all around.

He became another poorly groomed, badly dressed coverboy of the money rags—
Fortune, Portfolio, Tycoon
—though one especially beloved, for it was Dodd's spectacular feat to have made the greatest amount of dollars in the shortest amount of time in the pecuniary history of man. This centerfold anomaly, comely string of ciphers beneath silky spreadsheets, was responsible for the birth of
Forbes
's infamous MPH graph, where IPO booty is half-whimsically measured in “millions per hour.” Like geeky campfire tales, bizarre analogies and goosebumpy stats abounded: such as how the man's annual take matched the incomes of a hundred thousand blue-collar workers combined—or how it wasn't even worth his time to stoop to pick up a $20,000 bill, if there were such a thing, because he'd make more than that in the seconds wasted by the effort.

When Dodd met his wife (Joyce Gilligan was his father's “second” secretary, a sad sack resigned to spinsterhood) he was still working for Trotter Waste Systems. To get out from under, he invested $13 million in the fledgling start-up of a once high-flying industry, which the reader has by now surely inferred. He renamed the company Quincunx, at the suggestion of his sister—the golden calf could have been called ePiss or iShit for all anyone cared—and within three years he was Dodd Trotter the Eighteenth and we'll leave it at that. Once, details of the acquisition of vast personal fortune were revelatory, offering insight and inspiration; those times are no more.

Now he walks through a building, earbud wire slacking to a phone hidden in his pocket. He does not have the fashion sense of his dad; balding since he was thirty, he shaves his own head, usually missing meadowy patches of hair at the base of the skull. He is in the mood to buy an empty shell of a structure, another in the strange series his daughter Lucy already avouched. Today, his real estate consultant has steered him to a Beaux Arts husk: the Higgins Building at 2nd and Main.

What was it about vacant buildings that captivated him? He shared the idiosyncrasy with his father—both engaged in epic searches, one seeking new edifices for the dead, the other dead edifices once for the living. For Dodd, it had begun with a magazine article about an abandoned nineteenth-century asylum in Connecticut. He'd bought it sight unseen, then moved on to rusted refineries, desecrated churches, ghostly downtown movie palaces—all of which he determinedly refused to develop. Consortiums built private prisons in hopes of landing government contracts; when that didn't happen, the bankrupted jails still stood. Dodd had already snapped up three such institutions and had no other plans but to let them sit.

He obeyed Joyce's command to see a specialist, who immediately prescribed Prozac for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, 100 mg, once a day; BuSpar, also for OCD, 15 mg, twice a day; Seroquel (an anti-psychotic he took for sleep), 100 mg, once at night; Tegretol (mania), 200 mg, three times a day; Neurontin (mania), 300 mg, twice in the morning, once at noon, twice at night; and Lamictal, for “rapid cycling” between poles of mania and depression, one tablet, twice a day. He cheated with Prozac, adding 100 mg in the afternoons. The specialist said Prozac tended to “elate” a manic.