Silent Joe (22 page)

"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."

Interesting. I hadn't considered it. "Why not?"

"I don't know, Joe, I'm speculating."

If the life of an eleven-year-old child wasn't at stake, I'd admit that Will would have used just about anything to make things hard for Jack Blazak. He would have delighted in it. Because Jack Blazak was everything Will loathed.

Blazak was an immensely wealthy man, and his influence in the county was large. He'd put two politicians into the California Assembly recently, mostly with soft PAC contributions made through the Grove Club Research & Action Committee. Likewise, he backed both the north and south Orange County U.S. Congressional Representatives. He sat on the board of eleven companies, all of which rank in the Fortune 500. Estimated personal worth, something like $12 billion. He was four years younger than Will--- fifty.

"What about the airport, Joe? Will would have . . . gone to some lengths to throw a monkey wrench into that."

The new airport was Jack Blazak's signature project. In the last year he'd spent hundreds of thousands of his own dollars, trying to convince voters to build a new international airport on the abandoned marine base at El Toro.

Although the airport we have now is new by airport standards, and
one
of the best organized and easiest to use in the whole country, Blazak and his business allies were contending that it was already too small, too outdated and too dangerous. He and his business allies also stood to make profane amounts of money by building it and—through their friends government—running it. Blazak and his friends called themselves the Citizens' Committee for Airport Safety. Their bureaucratic dance partner was of course, the Orange County Transportation Authority, led by Carl Rupaski.

To answer the question of cost, Blazak was proposing that the county spend eight hundred million dollars of its Federal tobacco settlement money to build that airport. The tobacco money was supposed to be spent on public health facilities and services, although technically each county free to spend it however it wants.

The pro-airport people said Blazak's plan was a stroke of genius and had spent five million dollars to convince the voters of it. The anti-airport crowd said it was illegal and immoral, and spent two million to convince them otherwise.

It was a hot topic, gallons of ink and miles of videotape devoted to it. Easily, the most divisive issue in county history. A special election was set for November, and a huge voter turnout was already predicted.

And Will had been fighting that airport, tooth and nail, ever since Blazak had proposed it.

Yes, Will despised Blazak's greed, but I couldn't fit Savannah into it. Will wouldn't play with an eleven-year-old. He wasn't that kind of man.

What she said next surprised me.

"I'm so angry at him, Joe. For his scheming and his conniving and his philandering. I know you were privy to all that. I know I was supposed to be in the dark about it. Somehow, I think that's what got him killed. All that night business he did. All the intrigue he just couldn't live without."