Trophy Kid (13 page)

“Hey, how’s it going?” he said.

“Fine,” I said cautiously.

“Great. Great,” Cal said to all of us, running his bony fingers through his wavy black hair.

“Later on, we’re going to get some footage of you talking about your expectations for the trip, your last memories, that sort of thing, you know, you know?” The double “you know” seemed to indicate that Cal was either naturally hyper or had drunk one too many espressos.

“His last memories are of his mother and sister being killed,” Hana said disapprovingly, obviously having taken a disliking to Cal.

“Well, sure, sure,” Cal responded, surprised to have been challenged. “I mean, that was just a figure of speech.”

“His mother and sister being killed was a figure of speech?” Hana responded.

Cal looked at Tom and Jessica for help, but they just stared back at him blankly, letting him fry himself.

“No, no! What I meant…What I meant was…I’ll be back later with my camera and my sound guy and we can do a little interview, that’s all. Okay, great, great.” And with that Cal made his way back up to where Robert, Larry, and the mini film crew were sitting.

“That was awesome,” Martie said to Hana after Cal had left us.

“Where I come from, we say our opinions,” Hana said.

“He was being a total idiot,” Jessica said sharply.

“So, Joe, before the press conference Hana was telling us stories from when you were little,” Tom said, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “And you made her out to be ancient. I was expecting an old lady using a walker to get around.”

“Josef, I am only fifty-six,” Hana said.

“Really?” I asked, making everyone laugh. In my memory, Hana had seemed so old, but I could see now I was wrong.

“Yes, really,” Hana said, making me feel a little embarrassed.

“What did you tell them about me?” I asked, instantly regretting it.

“That you were always a wise guy, and stubborn, never taking a bath when I ask you to, and when I finally get you in the bath, I cannot get you out of the bath.”

Greta appeared next to me. “You all seem to be enjoying yourselves,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“Josef not wanting to take a bath,” Hana said.

“Oh, I love baths,” Greta responded, instantly bringing the conversation to herself. “I can spend hours in the tub. When I get a new script, I make a big bubble bath, pour a glass of chardonnay, and start reading. Of course, I end up getting water and suds all over the script and it smears and I can’t read half of it.” Greta laughed; everyone else smiled politely. She cleared her throat. “Well, I think I’ll go see when dinner is being served. I’m starving.”

It was hard to think of America’s favorite actress as an outsider, but that was what she’d just been. I sort of felt sorry for Greta, unable to fit in with our small group.

“This really was a great idea, Tom,” she said, placing a hand on Tom’s shoulder, a gesture that did not go unnoticed by Jessica. “I know this means a lot to Joe. I’m glad you’re all with us,” Greta said sincerely before walking toward the front of the plane.

“She’s an odd one,” Jessica said.

“What do you mean?” Tom asked.

“I mean, she can be so self-involved one moment and so sweet the next,” Jessica answered.

“I wouldn’t exactly say the next,” I said. “More like a bunch of moments of being self-involved, then one of being sweet, then a bunch more of being into herself.”

“You see?” Hana said. “A wise guy.”

“And she’s got a thing for you, Tom, I swear it,” Jessica said.

“You’re crazy,” Tom said.

“I don’t know,” Jessica replied.

I was thinking that Jessica would be surprised to learn how hard Greta had been pushing Tom to propose to her.

We were scheduled to make two refueling stops along the way: one in New Jersey and the other in Paris. The leg of the flight that took us to New Jersey seemed to go quickly. After we’d been served dinner, I played Scrabble with Jessica and Martie. Tom was working on the book on his laptop, and Hana was sleeping.

“We should ask your sister and Greta if they want to play with us, too, don’t you think?” Martie asked.

“I don’t think they’d want to,” I said.

“Greta looked like she wanted to be with us. I bet this happens all the time. People think she doesn’t want to do normal things just because she’s a movie star. I think it’s kind of a reverse snobbery. We assume she thinks she’s better than us, but maybe it’s the other way around. I’m going to ask them if they want to play,” Martie said decisively, rising from her seat and walking up the aisle.

A few moments later, Martie returned with Greta and Guava.

“Told you,” she whispered to me as Greta and Guava got their Scrabble tiles.

I smiled. She was right—again.

fifteen

We had just gotten back to our cruising altitude and speed after the refueling in New Jersey when Cal Noonan asked everyone to be quiet. He wanted to get some tape of Robert talking about the trip; my turn would come on the leg from Paris to Dubrovnik. Cal wanted us to be as close as possible to our destination before interviewing me.

I moved up the aisle, close enough to hear Robert speak.

Robert’s appearance seemed to have changed simply because he’d announced he was running for public office. It was as if he’d put on a politician’s mask, one whose strict lines of professional sincerity and righteousness had replaced the malleable lines of an actor.

“This is not my trip, this is Joe’s trip,” Robert said to Cal. It was about the fifteenth time he’d made this statement since Tom suggested we go to Dubrovnik. “Joe is but one of the thousands of boys and girls who were made orphans by war in the Balkans. There are also over ten thousand children orphaned by wars in southern Africa, not to mention the children’s lives that have been lost due to famine in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Only when we make children our number-one priority will we be—”

“Hold on,” Larry said, stopping the interview.

“What?” said Robert.

“The orphans are in Liberia and Sierra Leone and the famine is in southern Africa,” Larry said.

“Are you sure?” asked Robert.

I rolled my eyes and looked at Tom.

While Robert scanned his notes, I heard Larry say to Cal, “I smell an Oscar nomination.” I nudged Tom, but he just shrugged in that
what can you do?
manner I’d come to know very well in the two months we’d been working on the book.

“Hana, tell us a little about where we’re going,” Tom asked.

“Did you know that Dubrovnik is called the pearl of the Adriatic?” Hana said to our little group.

Everyone said, “Yes.”

“How did you know?” Hana asked.

“Google” was the chorused reply.

Even I’d learned more online about my home than I remembered from living there.

Everyone seemed to know that Dubrovnik was a beautiful seaport city on the southern tip of what was called the Dalmatian Coast of the Adriatic Sea, north of the Mediterranean Sea and east of Italy.

“What they did to that beautiful city was inhuman and for no reason,” Hana said.

“I read that there was no military presence there when they started bombing in 1992,” Tom said.

“True,” Hana said.

“Why did they bomb you, then?” Martie asked.

“I don’t know. Everything was changing so fast. We wanted our independence. Why not? This was just before you were born, Josef. There was no water or electricity. There was an old Franciscan monastery with a well. In the morning we would go with our pails to fill them with water. I am sure your mother did this, too. There were no telephones, so we could not talk to our relatives to tell them we were all right. Can you imagine?”

“That must have been horrible,” Jessica said.

“To take a bath we had to go into the ocean. It was December and the water was freezing, but it was the only way to get clean.

“There was one day,” Hana went on, “when the bombing started in the early morning and did not end until late at night. It was December sixth. I never will forget that day.

“You know Dubrovnik is a very old city. It has been through many hardships but has always been beautiful. Many churches. Maybe they did not like our churches,” Hana said, bittersweet.

“Another thing I read,” said Tom, “was that the city used to be covered with red-tile roofs, but most of those were destroyed or damaged.”

“I read they’ve fixed them,” Martie said.

“Hana, how did you come to be Joe’s nanny?” Jessica asked.

“My older brother was an army officer. He wanted me to be safe. My English was very good, and when Josef came to be taken by Mr. and Mrs. Francis, I was hired to come with them to America.”

“Have you been back often?” Martie asked.

“Two times. The last time was two years ago. It is a very special place,” Hana said with pride. “People from other parts of the country say that those of us from Dubrovnik think we are better than everyone else. It is not true. We are no better or worse. We are just from a better place.” She winked at me.

Cal Noonan’s interview with me began shortly after we’d taken off from Paris.

Before the filming started, Larry Weinstein prepped me.

“Just be yourself,” he said. “Don’t forget to say how grateful you are to your mom and dad for coming to your rescue. I like that, ‘coming to your rescue.’ Be sure to use that phrase.”

“Got it,” I said, fighting back the impulse to tell him to leave me alone.

“When Cal asks you what you’re most looking forward to, say, ‘Meeting the soldier who rescued me from that street.’”

“Do you want me to use
rescue
twice?” I asked with faked sincerity. Hana was right; I was a wise guy.

“Good point,” said Larry. “Okay, well, you should use
rescue
for your mom and dad. How about
saved
? Yeah, that’s good. The soldier who
saved
you during that battle or whatever was going on. If you say that Robert saved you, people might think you mean in a religious way. We don’t want them to get that message. Not that your dad isn’t supportive of people of faith.”

Martie had come up behind Larry and was doing imitations of him as he gave me my instructions. When I started to laugh, Larry’s antenna-like eyebrows picked up that something was going on behind him. But by the time he’d swung his neck around, all he found was Martie smiling innocently.

“And you need to change,” Larry said, after turning back to face me.

I changed back into the clothes I had worn at Robert’s press conference twelve hours before. Although almost everyone else had sacked out along the way, I had remained awake the whole time, too keyed up to sleep.

“Okay, Joe, don’t look at the camera, look at me,” Cal said seriously. “I’ll ask you a question, but my voice will be cut out in editing, so try to incorporate my question into your answer.” Cal and his minicrew had set up special lighting and clipped a microphone onto the collar of my shirt.

“For instance,” Cal continued, “if I ask you, ‘How long has it been seen you’ve been in Dubrovnik?’ you’ll say, ‘It’s been twelve years since I’ve been to Dubrovnik.’”

“It’s been ten years,” I said.

“It has?” Cal said, looking down at a clipboard with scribbled notes on a pad. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re fifteen, right?”

“I’m thirteen.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I smell an Oscar nomination for Worst-Researched Documentary.

The interview continued in much this manner, with Cal asking me questions filled with false premises that I corrected when incorporating them into my answers:

“What was it like growing up as a Serb in Yugoslavia?”

“I’m Croatian. I wish I had had the opportunity to grow up in Croatia, but I was only three when I lost my family.”

“Your real father was in the army, correct?”

“My father was an engineer. He was drafted into the army to rebuild bridges during the war.”

“Would you like to be in the army someday?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “The last thing I want to do is make more orphans.”

“That was brilliant,” Cal said, stopping the filming. “Ties right into your dad’s—I mean, Robert’s message. At least, I think it ties into Robert’s message. Larry, what’s Robert’s message?”

“No more war orphans,” Larry said from behind the
New York Times.

“Exactly,” Cal said.

“He has an amazing talent for bringing a picture together in post,” Larry told Martie and me after the interview was concluded.

“What’s post?” Martie asked.

“Postproduction,” Larry said. “He’s great at cutting segments together, adding music, film clips, photographs, finding the right actor to do the narration. All that.”

Larry was pleased that I had gotten in everything he had told me to—about wanting to meet the soldier who had rescued me during the shelling on the day I’d lost my mother and sister, and how grateful I was to Robert and Greta for saving me from life in an orphanage. In truth, I
was
looking forward to meeting the soldier who had pulled me out of the street, and the ones who had taken me door to door in my old neighborhood. But more than that, I hoped I might find out what had happened to my father, and I clung to the remote possibility that, somehow, he might still be alive.