Louis Trotter, incensed and betrayed, did not attend; he was the digger after all, and had that in him. He would visit his grandson another time, away from the circus, and let a moment pass before contemplating legal action to move the boy to more hallowed ground. He visited Bluey instead, who was in fine form, and sat with her on a bench along the path of the wandering garden.
The Weiners stood a respectful distance off until Trinnie waved them closer. Ruth helped Harry navigate the gravestones and he kept reaching for his yarmulke, which, ill-clipped, threatened to tumble from his head. Detective Dowling passed Lucy and Toulouse — he smiled at the girl, and her face lit up through her sorrow — and Trinnie greeted him warmly. When she embraced Ralph Mirdling, who had come to pay respects with his friend Ron Bass, Samson stepped back and stared contemplatively at the ground. He was going to say hello to Dodd but would have to wait, for the billionaire was consumed with ministering to his wife.
There were photo flashes as Diane Keaton walked through the gate on the arm of John Burnham (she and Ralph were still seeing each other but had decided to arrive separately), and it was only a coincidence that Boulder Langon and her mother arrived just after. The starlet gave the wannest of smiles to the paparazzi before hurrying along to join the group from Four Winds — Mr. Hookstratten, his lanky friend Reed and the teachers and nurses and flight crew from the world tour. All the globe-trotting kids were there, too, shocked and shivering, deflowered by death.
Trinnie stoically held the hands of son and niece, and, as the casket was lowered, at last began to fall apart. When she saw them watching her, she smiled like a valiant dying superhero: “He loved you,” she said. “He so loved you!”
While his mother gently released the warm water of a sea sponge over his spindly chest, Edward used to speak of the potter’s field his cousin visited that famed stowaway afternoon. Toulouse had told him the plaques were inscribed with years instead of names — that’s what Edward said he wanted. But she couldn’t bear to listen — and could not bear it now, could not bear to have him in the earth without his name as a marker. She had violated her son’s request and begged his forgiveness. Joyce felt a bottomless pang of loneliness for him, but soon there would be others crowding around — the “gang.” She knew how sardonic yet welcoming he would be. He would disperse their fears like doves into the air, and call them by their new names.
The first clump of earth was shoveled in.
After the funeral, a large reception was held on Stradella. Cavernous tents were pitched over heroic amounts of food, and visitors — some, there for the first time, marveling at the cobblestoned village — filed through the Boar’s Head to admire the masks Edward had created and the tidy rows of those he’d been crafting at the time of his death. (Candelaria and her elves had made the place spotless.) Ordinarily, such trespass would be anathema, but Lucy and Toulouse felt expansive as the crowds ogled deferentially; they stood to the side like proud curators, their burden for the moment lightened as it was shared.
Trinnie accepted a number of hugs, then pleaded exhaustion and told her son she was going home. Now her grief arrived, borne aloft by the pallbearers of her relatively young life’s every regretful moment. Our stay on earth was suddenly exposed as tenuous at best, and of exceeding short term — what if it had been Toulouse they were busy burying? She shuddered at the ease with which the image came. She was perverse; she had no regard for the sanctity of this world or any other; she was a wastrel who ruined everything she touched. Marcus had an excuse! He had myth and pathology on his side — and yet, there he was doing the brave thing, battling his demons, bloody and unbowed. For her, it was business as usuaclass="underline" still playing in the garden and flirting with disaster. Edward was stone-dead and now, on top of everything, Toulouse must factor that in, his fragile worldview further rocked. At least he had the role model of his father, a father at war, kind and courtly, fervid, mysterious, brimming with remorse and amends — real amends — back from a hell ten thousand times worse than any of the self-pitying, insipidly pornographic soap operas this brassy golden girl’s rehabs had ever provided. There she was, a twat ingenue who could only be counted on to pick up her toys and vanish, and who dared feel justified because that’s what he, Marcus, husband and eternal old flame, had done … done to her.
The men in suits waved Trinnie through. She saw him right away, stepping from the Town Car; he must have arrived only moments before. Dressed in dark navy, with a great shock of hair and a week’s growth of beard, he wore a recherché vulnerability that drew her in.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m looking for Marcus Weiner.”
Startled by this roan-headed woman (handsome and exotic to him as well) and unable to put the pieces together, he said, with a smile both broad and nervous, “I am Marcus Weiner.”
“It’s Trinnie.”
He still looked perplexed, so she held out her hand.
“Katrina Trotter. We were once married.”
†Once Trinnie had decided to aid her son, Detective Dowling contacted the Motts (who had not let up in asking after Marcus anyway) and laid the whole astonishing thing out: how, independent of aka William, the street-savvy waif had insinuated herself into the bosom of the Trotter clan. That was a mind-blower. Lani subsequently had a lively conversation with Katrina Berenice Trotter, who was funny, easygoing and acerbic. (By the time they spoke, the CASA extraordinaire had supplemented her working knowledge of the famous family with numerous Internet forays.) When Lani discreetly referred to the almost supernatural far-fetchedness of Marcus and Amaryllis’s skid-row alliance — without mentioning anything relating to his incarceration — Trinnie said indeed it was a weird thing, but her voice was flat and distracted and she made a dry cliché about life sometimes being stranger than fiction. Yet before they got off the phone, Trinnie had warmed to the topic. She said she’d debated about putting the kids in touch at all, then decided it would be unfair to be censorious. They were good kids, she said, and without having met her “Tull,” Lani wholeheartedly agreed. Toulouse — his “full” name, the mom explained — had intermittently spoken of Amaryllis for months, but Trinnie said that until rather recently, the adults were of a mind that there had been enough excitement surrounding the girl already. So at first, she wasn’t eager to reward the delinquent clique’s behavior by tying their special friend to Marcus Weiner in nearly cosmic fashion. Things were different now, she said. They had stabilized; months had passed, and the phantasmagoric aspect of it had diminished. Everyone seemed to be getting on with their lives.