I could tell he didn’t want to answer.
“You promised to answer one question,” I said quietly.
“And so I shall, Lio. But first, what about showing an old man to the coffee maker? My husband won’t let me have any, so I have to sneak it when he’s not around.”
I hid my grin as I turned to lead him to a nearby lounge where breakfast would be served in a few hours for any guests of the palace. There was always coffee, water, tea, and simple snacks available.
Once we were settled with coffee at a small table, Mr. Wilde studied me.
“Do you know about his mother? Our daughter, Jackie, wasn’t the best parent to Felix…”
“I know. He told me. You were lucky to raise him,” I said.
His eyes snapped up to mine in surprise, and his mouth widened into a bright smile. “You’re the first person who’s gotten it right in all these years, son. We were the lucky ones. Everyone tells Felix he was lucky to have us, but they have it upside down and backwards.”
I nodded. “So, what happened?”
“When he was eight, his mother dropped him off at the Mountain View Mausoleum and told him to go inside until she returned to get him. She didn’t return.”
I sucked in a breath and felt my heart trip over itself. “A child left in a mausoleum? Why in the hell did she do that?”
He sighed. “She swore later she’d thought it was a church. She’d had an important rehearsal. Mind you, all auditions and rehearsals were important to her back then. According to Jackie, it was ‘a once in a lifetime’ role. She didn’t have childcare for Felix, so she decided to have him sit quietly in the church building until she returned. Well, by the time the cemetery closed for the day, she still hadn’t returned. The authorities were called. They tried reaching Jackie, but she didn’t answer, so they called me. Luckily, I was on the emergency contact form at the school. You can’t even imagine how it felt to be so far away from him when I got that call.”
Even after twenty years, I could see the toll the memory took on him. I reached out to squeeze his hand.
“What did he do all day? He didn’t find an adult and ask for help?”
“She’d told him to be quiet and try not to be seen. I guess she pictured him reading a book quietly in a back pew of a nice church. But when he went inside, it was all marble internment boxes and stained glass. Thank god Felix didn’t know what the place was. He just thought it was a strange kind of church with the most exquisite stained glass windows he’d ever seen. After he finished the library book he’d brought, there was absolutely nothing else for him to do but study the windows all day, so he sat and sketched in his notebook and thought up ideas for his own designs.”
He took a deep breath before continuing. “Unfortunately, in the process of trying to find the boy’s mother, the police discovered she had a record for public indecency. Once they figured that out, they booked her on child neglect and held Felix until we arrived to take him. Of course, someone in central booking recognized her from an adult film and leaked it to the press. The media swarmed the station and screamed questions at us while we tried getting Felix out of there. It was awful, and he always associated the press with fear and anger after that.”
“Rightly so.” I seethed. “I can’t believe they didn’t have the decency to give a child more privacy than that.”
Mr. Wilde blew out a breath. “It was clear they were trying to get a salacious story about a porn star who was in the process of making it onto the big screen. At that point she’d already landed a role in her first feature-length film, so it was bigger news than it would have been if it had happened six months before.”
“What happened with Felix after that?”
“We told her we were taking him. She had to choose Felix or her acting career because it was obvious she couldn’t manage both.”
I let out a heartbroken sigh. “She chose the career.” I wanted to say more, but I remembered we were talking about this man’s daughter.
“Yes. Poor Felix. He was so loving and innocent. The kid hadn’t even realized what a mausoleum was, thank god. He discovered later that the mausoleum’s architect had been interred in there and insisted we go back before leaving Los Angeles for good so he could say thanks to the man for designing such a beautiful, peaceful place.”
I didn’t even know what to think. The idea of Felix, a knock-kneed quiet nerdy boy of only eight, alone and afraid in a cold marble death chamber made me want to run at top speed upstairs to where he slept and gather him up to keep him safe. So he knew he’d always be warm and never be alone again.