He always dressed the same: chinos, black loafers, white polo shirt, his habitual Angels baseball cap. He told his congregation that the cap was persuade the Father to get the Angels a division championship or at least some better hitting down the stretch.
"Oh, Joe. Joe Trona. "
"Good morning, Reverend. I'm sorry to barge in, but I wanted to talk: to you."
"That door is never locked on you. You know that. Please, sit."
We sat. Orange leather sofas, blue cushions, the county spread out below in a blanket of summer haze and smog.
"I love it early on Saturdays here," he said. "No programs. No business. Nobody here, really, except me and the church mice. Joe, how can help you?"
"Can I ask you a direct question?"
He smiled. "My favorite kind."
"Well, when you and Dad were talking in the Grove booth that night, the night he died, you two were talking about Savannah Blazak. One part of the conversation went exactly like this. Will said, I know where she. But I'm not so sure I trust those people with her. And you said back, Will, what could you mean by that? "
Daniel's eyes widened, magnified by his thick glasses.
"Joe, that's called eavesdropping!"
"I know, Reverend. It was always part of my job."
A big smile from Daniel, then, "What a memory you've got, Joe."
"It's a gift."
He watched me with his big eyes.
"Reverend, my father knew the Blazaks socially. Would he have a reason not to trust them?"
"Why, none that I know, Joe. I can tell you that Will and Jack Blazak crossed swords in the world. As you know, they had different views. Jack, was very bullish on growth for the county. Will, believing that not all growth was good. They were not close friends. But I have no idea what Will didn't trust about Jack or Lorna. Or Bo."
Daniel looked pensively out the window.
"Sir, Will wouldn't find a kidnapped girl, then keep her away from her family unless he had a very good reason."
"Agreed."
"Reverend, what did you give him that night?"
"When?"
"In the booth at the Grove. When you said here's this."
Again the widened eyes—it was a trademark expression from his TV performances, indicating amazement at the mercy, wisdom and good humor of God. He laughed quietly.
"Joe, this memory of yours. I never knew it was so, uh . . ."
"They call it eidetic, Reverend."
"It could be a miracle, or a curse, couldn't it?"
"Not forgetting is both."
"So you never forget anything?"
"I don't know yet. I'm only twenty-four."
He smiled then, and sat back. Daniel's smile brought the lines of his face into their happy old alignment. And his eyes lit up like they always seemed to.
"Joe, you could count the cards in a blackjack game! Bet on a rich deck, beat the house."
Whenever Daniel's mind takes a sinful tack, it often comes to gambling. He mentions it in his performances, using it as an example of the kind of sin that's glittery and tempting. I've heard him talk about sports bets with Will. He knows a lot about sports, every kind. He surprises me sometimes, like that last night with Will when he walked past my table and called the shot and spin my ball needed. As if his seminary days were spent in casinos, pool halls and sports parks. Maybe the idea of gambling thrills him, because Daniel is a tightwad. His Chapel of Light ministries take in untold millions of dollars every year—much of it never taxed—but Daniel himself lives in a modest home in Irvine. Drives a Taurus. His wife, Rosemary, is another story. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like her, and he did not keep apartments Newport Beach, Majorca and Cabo San Lucas.
"Well, Joe, all I gave Will that night was payment for a small, friend wager we made on the Freeway Series. The Angel relievers failed."
He shrugged and smiled, looking half ashamed of himself for wagering, half irritated with the Angel bullpen.
"We had a deal that all winning bets went to a charity—winner's choice. You know Will, always trying to help someone."
As a couple, my mother and father had donated $235,000 to charities the first six months of the year, not including the $50,000 memorial to the family of Sammy Nguyen's victim. This was reported in one of the articles that ran last week around the funeral. Over his lifetime the total was $2.75 million.
Most of it had to come from my mother, who had multiplied her share of the family fortune several times over, according to Will. That fortune had begun here in the county in the early nineteenth century, and evolved with the times—ranching to citrus to land to real estate.
"How much was the wager, Reverend?"
"One hundred dollars." Daniel looked down, then turned away from me to look out the window to the county that had made so many people rich.
"Do you pray regularly, Joe?"
"No, sir."
"You should. He listens."
I looked out again at the county spread before us. Almost three million souls. A lot for Him to listen to, but I believed Reverend Daniel anyway. If there's one thing in life I've learned, it's this: there's a lot I don't understand.
"Sir, do you believe that Alex Blazak kidnapped his sister and threatened to kill her?"
He looked confused. "Why, absolutely, Joe. Alex Blazak is certifiably insane, and a criminal. That's all a matter of record. He pulled a knife on me right here in this study one day, and threatened to throw me out the window. He was fourteen. It was just for fun—he laughed afterwards. Told his friends that I urinated through my robe, which I did not. I absolutely believe he would kidnap his sister. I believe he would kill her, too, if he didn't get what he wanted. The stories about him that I've heard from his parents are very frightening. He's a disturbed young man—just twenty-one years old. But very, very disturbed."
It wasn't hard to believe Daniel, even knowing that his business is making you believe him.
"My father wasn't going to take Savannah back to her parents. He was going to deliver her to Hillview."
The Reverend's eyes got large again. "Why?"
"He didn't tell me. I thought maybe he told you."
"Oh, no. No. I don't see any reason why he would do something like that."
"Dad used to say he could smell Blazak's soul rotting from ten feet away."
"That's graphic."
"It sounds like more than a disagreement about toll roads or airports."
"Well, yes, when you put it in those terms." Daniel nodded. "I can't see Will interfering with a good family simply to fuel political fires."
"I can't either. So it must have been something else."
I stood and thanked him. I thought again about the 10:17 Coast Starlight arriving in Santa Ana that night, and felt that chill in my fingers again. Daniel studied me, his expression patient and curious.
"Is there something else bothering you, Joe?"
"Yes. My father—you know, Thor, the real one—is coming into town tonight. He wants to see me. I don't know what to do."
I told Daniel about the letter, about Thor's plan for getting into heaven, about his need for my forgiveness.
"Oh, my," said Daniel. "This is a difficult situation."
"When I think of the Amtrak station at ten-seventeen tonight, my heart speeds up and my face hurts and I feel cold."
"As well you should, Joe." Daniel leaned back and studied me. "Is it fear?"
"Yes."
"But not of what he could do to you?"
"Do? No, he can't do anything to me now."
"Fear of what, then?"
"Of failing to hate him."
"You'll have to explain that, Joe."
"I always have hated him. It's been simple and safe and understandable. When Will died, it left me not as strong. I don't feel love or hate feel like everything's about the same as everything else and none of matters. So, I wonder if I should see Thor. Talk to him. A month ago I wouldn't have considered."
"Did you w
ish to harm him?"
"I used to imagine that a lot, when I was learning a martial art practicing with weapons. With pleasure. Now, there's no pleasure in it.'
"What do you want to tell him, Joe? What does your heart want say?"
I had to think about that. "Nothing, sir. I don't want to tell him one single thing."
"Oh?"
"Just the question: why?"
"Perhaps it would do you good to have an answer to that. You deserve one."
"I've always thought so. It's just that when I imagine standing there and watching him come off that train, my whole body gets wrong. Like my nerves are firing backwards."
"It's a huge thing, Joe. Will you pray with me? Let's ask God what you should do."
We prayed and Daniel ended it with the twenty-third Psalm, my favorite. I tried to listen in my heart for God but I didn't hear anything except faint rushing in my ears. God is said to speak to people and I believe this, though he's never spoken to me. I felt like being baptized but didn't want to ask.
"Thank you, Reverend."
"Trust the Lord."
"Yes, sir."
"Honor your mother. She needs you now."
"I'll be seeing her in just a few minutes."
"Say hello to her from me."
My mother was the first woman I ever fell in love with.
The third time Will came to Hillview to see me, he brought Mary Ann. She was wearing a white dress. She looked like she'd just come from the beach, her face tanned and eyes clear, her blond hair a little windblown, her legs dark and smooth.
When they walked into the recreation room that Thursday evening. I watched them come through the door with one of our supervisors, enter, look around. I was stunned by their beauty. Will so tall and capable; Mary Ann so radiant and composed. They looked to me like beings from a superior planet, on Earth for a look around. I wanted them to be looking for me. I thought they were looking for me. But a voice deep inside me said that they absolutely could not be looking for a meatfaced five-year-old who could barely stand to look another human in the eye.
I was stacking blocks to form a small house. I stepped away from the house, trying to stand out. I looked toward the couple but not directly at them. When I saw them start walking in my direction, my heart soared and my ears got red-hot and my vision got misty.
Will introduced me to his wife, Mary Ann. She stepped forward and held out a tanned hand with a thin gold bracelet around the wrist. Her fingers were cool and I could smell her very clearly; water, sun, something sweet and flowery and tropical. She let go of my hand and she straightened. I came up just barely past her waist. She smiled at me and I looked at her for just a second, like glancing at the sun, then turned the ruined side of my face away.
"I'm so pleased to meet you, Joe."
"I'm pleased to meet you, ma'am."
"Will's told me all about you."
There was nothing I could say to that. We stood there for a moment and I felt something for the first time: belonging. It was such an easy, wonderful feeling. But one second later that sense of belonging turned into the glum assurance of abandonment. Orphans have a keen understanding of history. I knew that this thing with Will and Mary Ann Trona—whatever it was—would be short-lived. In fact, I assumed as I stood there and struggled for something to say that was already over.
"You can stay if you want," I said. I pointed to my project. "The house isn't finished."
"Let's have a look at it," said Will.
Unreasonably pleased, I led them over to the blocks. Pride of ownership.
"Too small," said Will. "You need somewhere you can spread out, play hard, learn something."
"It's a nicely designed space," said Mary Ann. "Isn't that the kitchen?"
I nodded.
One of my older institution mates wandered over, drawn like a moth the light of the Tronas. He was a rough and confident boy, eight, maybe who pinched my back or kicked my shins when the supers weren't looking. Called me Gargantua, after this gorilla who gets acid thrown on his face in a story. I angled to stand between him and my visitors, but he tried to squeeze past.
He tried to get close to Will and Mary Ann.
I attacked with a fury I always knew I had. By the time Will pulled me off, the boy was screaming and I could already feel the sharp pain in my hand where, later, x rays would show a cracked bone.
Save it, Joe, he'd said, holding me tight by the arms and settling me. Save your anger. Save it. Save it.
I spent the next three hours locked in the "Thinking Room," where you were supposed to reflect upon whatever deed it was that got you there. My hand was killing me, swelling up. There was a cut on the middle knuckle the size and shape of the cutting edge of a front tooth. But I hardly thought about the pain. All I could think about was the fact that I'd never see the Tronas again. I wanted to put my face in cold water, but there was no sink in the Thinking Room. The next day I tried to draw Will and Mary Ann with crayola and pencil, and the drawing came out pretty good. It decorated the wall beside my bed for nearly a week, until someone ripped it away, leaving only two jagged corners held to the plaster with strips of tape.
I wrote them several letters that I hid under my mattress. I thought about them every minute I was awake. I dreamed about them, that we were in a spaceship whistling through space to a planet where all you did was have fun and be together. But I didn't mention Will or Mary Ann to the supers or anyone else, because I'd learned by the age of five that dreams were not real and dreams you spoke about would almost always become a humiliation.
One week after the fight I was called to the director's office. I walked there slowly and with absolute dread. I glanced up at the motto on the wall outside the office, reading again the words I'd read so many times before: Heal the Past, Save the Present, Create the Future. My throat felt so thick it ached.
But there they were, waiting for me, Will and Mary Ann, from another planet, the future I had created in my mind. I sat and listened to the director and slowly came to understand—through a conflicting riot of excitement and pessimism—that these proceedings were to begin the process of my formal adoption into the family of Will and Mary Ann Trona. Her words were like words in a dream—pleasant but insubstantial and subject to change.
"Joe, what this means is that if you behave properly and everything works out, Will and Mary Ann could become your mother and father someday."
I sat very still and waited for the dream to end.
But it was just beginning.
I picked up Mary Ann and drove us out of the Tustin foothills and down Jamboree toward the County Art Museum.
She sat still beside me in a simple black dress, purse on her lap, hands on her purse, looking out the windows.
"These housing tracts were orange groves when I was a girl," she said. "Dad sold off these sections and made a pot-load. I look at it now and wish the groves were still here. Easy for me to say, though, with so much filthy lucre in my pockets."
"People need to live somewhere. And some people are better to have around than orange trees."
"Name three from any era in history."
"You, Dad and Lincoln."
She thought about that. "Dad and I. Will and I. I know you're trying to cheer me up, but you're not. We've got to change the subject."
"Summer's really here," I said.
"It makes me think of rafting those waves at Huntington."
"Let's do it again, when the water warms up."
"Sure, Joe."
My mother is a beautiful woman, full-bodied and shapely, with straight blonde hair, blue eyes and a lovely face. Her smile is easy and mischievous. When I fell in love with her at five, the second I met her, I really had no choice. My heart jumped into her, and there it stayed.
Back then, I didn't understand how I could go from the institution halls of Hillview to a home in the fragrant foothills, taken in by those TV magnificent people. I didn't truly believe it, kept waiting for the punch line, the laugh, the acid to
fly.
It was only much later that Mary Ann told me that I was a miracle of sorts, for them. Because after the birth of Glenn, Mary Ann and Will had wanted another child. They'd tried and tried, consulted fertility specialists—everything. Nothing worked. Six years of hope followed by frustration. And then Will had a conversation with one of the Hillview staff and my "case" had come up. Neither Will nor Mary Ann had considered adopting an older child. But the next weekend, Will Trona had walked into the Hillview library to audition me. And my "case" became a dream come-true for all of us.
We ate our lunch outside at the museum, then sat in the mild sun and drank lemonades. She wore her sunglasses and I couldn't see what she was thinking.
"Mom, I've got to know what he was doing. You were closer to him than anybody. He loved you and he trusted you. Anything he said about what he was doing that night. Anything he said about Savannah Blazak. Anything he said to anybody about anything. "
She looked at me again and her chin trembled. She took a deep breath. "Joe," she said quietly. "Will was world champion at keeping me out of the loop."
"You must have heard something, you must have had a feeling something was going on."
"You're going to have to be more specific. I wouldn't know where to start."
"Okay. Why didn't Dad trust Jack and Lorna Blazak?"
She studied me from behind the big dark glasses. "He hated Jack—you know that. Hated his politics, his money, everything about him. I suppose hatred makes distrust. So far as Lorna goes, I couldn't say."
"That night, the night he died, he was all set to take Savannah to Child Protective Services, not back to her parents."
"Something to do with the money?"
"No. He'd already collected that."
"Then maybe he'd learned something."
"What, Mom? That's what I need to know."
She shook her head. "I can't give you what I don't have, Joe. Maybe he never was going to deliver her to them."
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