The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  * * *

  Raphael’s Son had met the boy’s mother in 2006, during one of his then-weekly trips to Las Vegas and back through Barstow. All he told Eddy about her was that she had schemed to have a child so she could live off the support money.

  “Can you imagine someone pulling one off on him?” Eddy smirked.

  Once a month, Raphael’s Son instructed Eddy to wire $2,000 in child support through Western Union. As far as Eddy knew, that was all the contact Raphael’s Son had ever had with the boy.

  “How do you know it’s a boy?” Leon asked.

  Eddy gave him a look that said there’s more to this than meets the eye, then went around and fell onto the couch.

  “All of a sudden this guy shows up at the office one day—this black guy with one of those Jew hats. He says he’s half black, half Jewish, and he’s a rabbi—but he’s got tattoos and wears jeans and a chain like he runs with gangs. He’s an ex-con, he says, but now he’s a social worker, and I know he doesn’t know Raphael’s Son because he asked if I’m him and I said yes—because we got served with shit all the time, you know, lawsuits and stuff, so I was supposed to say yes if anyone came to the door and asked. That way he hadn’t really been served, you know?”

  Leon knew.

  “So I said yes, and next thing I know this guy’s saying they’ve had the kid in foster care, the mother died in some accident in ’08, and they found the kid in the car, or in the car seat in a riverbed or something—who knows what these religious types come up with to make you feel sorry for them. He says the social services in whatever hellhole the kid was in were just gonna park him somewhere in foster care for good, but this ex-con black guy took an interest, he says, because the kid is something special, and he—the black guy—looks around and finds out the father is a Jew, and he finds out our address, and he wants me—because he thinks I’m him, you know, Raphael’s Son—to go see the kid.”

  They sat—Leon and Eddy and the shadow of Raphael’s Son—with the weight of the story between them. A bastard child who abandons his own.

  “How long ago was this?” Leon finally asked.

  Eddy blushed a sickly red. “I don’t know. A couple years. Maybe three?”

  “Did he have the kid with him?”

  “Who? The rabbi?” Eddy looked annoyed. “No. In case the father didn’t cooperate, you know? I guess that’s what he was thinking.”

  Leon studied Eddy. “So you’ve known for years about this child, and you’ve kept mum, and then all of a sudden, before the trial—”

  “Fuck you!” Eddy yelled, spit flying from his mouth. “I’m not the kid’s parent. It’s not my fucking responsibility to look after him.”

  In the bedroom behind them, the mother let out a long, urgent moan.

  Eddy yelled something in Armenian at the closed door, then stood up and started to pace the room. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “Didn’t mean to get excited.”

  Leon nodded. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You know,” Eddy continued, “it gets to a point, you see someone do so much harm and you think it’s not your business and you let him keep doing it and at some point, if you keep your mouth shut one more time, you’re the guilty one.”

  True.

  “So, you see,” Eddy paced furiously, “I think to myself, fuck the bastard, he’s already shortchanging the kid times a hundred, giving him $2,000 a month when, really, he should be giving a lot more, and if he finds out the mother’s dead and the kid’s in some foster place, he’s gonna stop sending any money at all—”

  “How do we know it’s his kid anyway?” Leon interrupted.

  Eddy stopped pacing, threw a sideways glance at Leon, rolled his one good eye, and started to pace again.

  “So I take the money every month, you see, and instead of sending it to the mother, I make a ‘charitable donation’ to the child services whatever-it-is where they keep these kinds of kids.” He stopped and looked at Leon, as if expecting disapproval.

  “Until he found out,” Leon guessed.

  Eddy went to the hot stove and scooped more coffee into the Turkish coffee pot.

  “A few months ago, April maybe, the black guy comes back, I don’t even know why, maybe to ask for more money, maybe to see if Son of Satan will grow a heart and visit the place where the kid lives. Next thing I know, the shit is calling me names and threatening to throw me in jail for embezzlement, the fuck. He’s got half a billion of other people’s money stashed away with those shit slimy cousins of his, and he’s gonna throw me in jail for sending a few thousand dollars to a bunch of orphan kids.”

  He put the pot on the burner, then turned to face Eddy full on.

  “So you told the wife.”

  They stared each other down for a moment, Eddy challenging Leon to condemn him, and when that didn’t happen, Eddy said quietly, “So I told the wife.”

  __________________

  The mother’s name was Jenna Rose Robbins and, yes, she was all of fifteen years old, penniless, and without a real family when Jonah was conceived. She had a boyfriend of sorts—a much older man who belonged to one of Barstow’s original motorcycle gangs, but they weren’t exclusive and he never gave Jenna Rose money. Her father was long gone and her mother tended bar all night at the San Manuel Indian Casino in Highland, which meant Jenna Rose grew up like a desert weed. She worked the four-to-midnight shift, as cashier, at the Shell station on Del Rosa down the street from the casino. She had already seen Raphael’s Son’s car when he came in to buy a pack of chewing gum and a bottle of water that first time, and she knew just what he meant when he eyed her and asked, “Is there a decent steak house around here?”

  She was pretty but pale, thin in the way of young people who live on junk food, cigarettes, and beer. It was nearly midnight, the end of her shift, so he waited for her in the car and afterward they drove to the casino and she ordered the most expensive steak on the menu. She made sure they sat at a table close to the bar because she wanted her mother to see them and their steaks, which she did; she even saw the twenty-dollar tip he threw into the cocktail waitress’s tray when she brought him a scotch and a beer for Jenna Rose. He hardly said a word to her the whole time they sat there, just complained that the place stank of body odor and rednecks, and that the steak was inedible, the leather in his shoes was more tender. The minute she was finished eating, he got up and walked to the registration desk, paid for the room in cash, and took her upstairs. When they were done, he gave her a hundred dollars. Buy yourself some decent meat.

  Jenna Rose’s mother was underwhelmed by Raphael’s Son’s supposed generosity. “That one can afford a lot more than this,” she said.

  * * *

  Barstow was exactly halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas—forty thousand square miles of desert that had been settled in the 1840s as part of the Mormon Corridor. More recently, it was simply a point of convergence for three major highways, and the Union Pacific and BNSF railroads. There was a Marine Corps logistics base and the Fort Irwin Military Reservation, a drive-in movie theater, a Popeyes, a Panda Express, a “Railroad Museum” that was really an Amtrak station, and a pair of factory outlet malls where weekend travelers from Los Angeles stopped on their way home from Las Vegas.

  Early 2005 was still a boom time for Vegas land speculation, and Raphael’s Son traveled there at least once a month. He didn’t stop to see Jenna Rose on every occasion; when he did, he told her nothing about himself, not even what country he was from. She guessed he was a contractor for one of the many companies that, in the days before the meltdown, couldn’t build condos and spec houses fast enough, but it never occurred to her that he may own the company because she never thought of herself as someone who would know a person of such means.

  He paid cash for everything, even when he took her to the shops in the casino and bought her things she liked. He never gave her a phone number or left the glove box of his car unlocked. Still, while Jenna Rose might have been young, she wasn’t stupid: s
he made a note of the license plate on his car and had her boyfriend dig up the registration through a friend at the DMV. She even rode down to LA on the boyfriend’s motorcycle one day and went into the lobby of the office building on Century Park East. That’s when she realized Raphael’s Son had real money. It’s why, when she found out she was pregnant, she decided to keep the baby.

  She wasn’t sure Raphael’s Son was the father, but she told him he was anyway. It was one in the morning and they had just finished their meal at the casino when the mother came and sat down at their table. Until then, Raphael’s Son had no idea who she was or that she even knew Jenna Rose. But he could see the resemblance, however faded, between the two women, and he could sense an ambush.

  He didn’t flinch or frown, didn’t do the usual, So what’s it got to do with me and how do I know it’s mine? He offered to pay for the abortion, plus $1,500 “pocket money.” She was about to accept, but the mother interrupted in a scratchy voice befitting an old man.

  “That’s a lot less than you’ll have to pay over eighteen years for child support.”

  Anger lit up Raphael’s Son’s eyes. To hide it, he glanced down at the table, then flicked a bread crumb with his thumb and forefinger. He stretched the silence until he could feel sweat breaking through his shirt.

  “You’re picking on the wrong guy,” he told the mother.

  After that, he ignored the mother entirely and told Jenna Rose this was his best offer, she had three minutes to make up her mind, and if she stalled, he’d leave and not give a damn what became of her or her purported pregnancy. He threw a hundred-dollar bill on the table and stood up, raised his left hand to chest level, and looked at his watch.

  “Starting now,” he announced.

  The mother called him an “A-rab piece of shit” and started back toward her place behind the bar. With her face turned away from them both she said to Jenna Rose, “Fuck him. He’s bluffin’.”

  Three minutes later, Raphael’s Son was walking out of the casino.

  * * *

  Jenna Rose said later that she had waited too long for Raphael’s Son to come back. Her mother had told her there was no way a man like that—rich, middle-aged, probably married though he didn’t wear a wedding band, A-rab or Eye-ray-nian or Jew—would take a chance on a girl surprising his family with a kid. Jenna Rose didn’t know how pregnant she was and how much time she had to wait for Raphael’s Son to cave in. It didn’t occur to her that he might not have believed she was pregnant at all, for all he knew she was lying, she’d keep the abortion money and the bonus for herself. And he didn’t know, either, if the thing was really his; she saw him once a month, saw the boyfriend much more frequently. He wasn’t stupid enough to have sex without protection and what are the chances, really, that one accident would result in a pregnancy? But this way of thinking—putting oneself in the other’s shoe and trying to see the world as he would—did not come easily to a girl of Jenna Rose’s age; nor did the awareness that with some matters, taking a chance may result in some very permanent consequences. Jenna Rose was still waiting for Raphael’s Son to come back with a better offer even after her stomach swelled through her Old Navy tank top and Salvation Army jeans.

  * * *

  A lawyer her mother knew from the bar wrote a letter threatening to file a paternity suit. Tellingly, the lawyer did not ask Raphael’s Son to submit to a blood test. He had only to commit to paying Jenna Rose’s medical expenses, plus $2,000 a month in child support.

  Two thousand dollars a month was much more money than Jenna Rose had ever seen or that any child of hers would be able to use, but it was a great deal less than Raphael’s Son could afford or was spending on his other children. On any other matter, he would have stonewalled and countersued and driven the other side into the ground by outspending them. But in this case, he was smart enough to understand that the potential danger of fighting far outweighed the cost of surrender.

  * * *

  Jenna Rose lost the biker boyfriend as a result of her pregnancy, but she otherwise didn’t mind having a baby. She enjoyed the attention she got from coworkers and strangers, the questions from the customers about when she was due and what names she had in mind. Her mother left work early to take her to the hospital for the delivery, but she smoked all the way in the car no matter how much Jenna Rose asked her not to, so they got into an argument and her mom dropped her off at the emergency entrance and drove away.

  No one at the hospital noticed the tiny spot of light behind Jonah’s belly button. A nurse showed Jenna Rose how to diaper and feed and swaddle him, and then she was on her own, back to the smoke-filled trailer where her mother, who slept in the daytime, flew into a rage every time the baby cried. Once the child support money started to come in, Jenna Rose moved right out of the trailer and into a Roadway Inn where she lived like a queen for sixty dollars a night and felt safe enough to leave Jonah asleep for a couple of hours at a time while she ran errands or stopped at the Home Depot where a boy she had started to see worked a forklift. Her first brush with Child Protective Services came when Jonah was ten months old and already walking. She had been gone less than an hour when the motel’s owner, a sour-faced Vietnamese woman who only understood English when she wanted to, called the police. A cruiser came by that afternoon, the cops spoke to Jenna Rose for a good ten minutes and filed a report with the county, but it would be a full seven weeks before a social worker stopped at the motel to look in on Jonah, and by then mother and child had moved on and were living with her boyfriend from Home Depot.

  At thirteen months, Jonah broke his arm when he fell off the bed in which he slept with Jenna Rose and her boyfriend. The ER doctors examined him for signs of physical abuse and noted the glow in his stomach. They saw the same light on the X-rays and the MRI, and they all agreed they’d never seen anything like it, but the waiting room was packed with seriously injured people and the gurneys inside the treatment area were all occupied with trauma patients and there was no time to dwell on the mystery of the little boy’s luminescence. The ER doctor recommended that Jonah be seen by his pediatrician in the morning, and a social worker gave Jenna Rose the phone number of the San Bernardino County Children and Family Services, where free lessons were offered in parenting and child safety. There was no pediatrician, and Jonah wasn’t sick. Even with his arm in a cast he was overactive and exhausting.

  In 2008, the Home Depot boyfriend decided to move back to his parents’ house in Arizona. He wanted Jenna Rose to go with him, but Jonah was another story—he took up too much room and had too many demands, so why not send him back to his “Jew-ass father”?

  Because Jenna Rose loved her baby, and because the three of them were living on the child-support payments. That’s why. So it’s her and Jonah or neither; Home Depot could go to Arizona alone for all she cared.

  They packed Jonah in the car and headed east on the I-40, but Jonah cried and fussed and wet his pants one too many times. In Needles, Home Depot rented a room at the Rio Del Sol Inn. He and Jenna Rose argued all night. In the morning, they drove to Riverside and checked into another motel where Home Depot got drunk and fell asleep. Jenna Rose took Jonah and the car keys and headed right back to Barstow.

  Ten miles out, the rain started and she realized the windshield wipers didn’t work. She braved it for a while, but the rain was coming down hard and the inside of the car smelled like a thousand seashells and there were flash flood warnings on the radio, so she pulled off the freeway and drove toward a gas station in the distance.

  * * *

  The fire department pulled her out of the car after she had been dead for at least an hour. They found the baby’s car seat, with Jonah still in it, trapped between two poles of the short metal railing on the side of the road. They guessed that the mother had released the seat and pushed it out the car door before it was completely submerged.

  __________________

  At twenty-seven minutes past two the next morning, Leon watched from his car as the
4 bus stopped on the corner of Sunset and Mapleton, and George P. Carter III, a.k.a. the Altoid Man, lumbered down to the street. He went straight toward the construction site. Leon met him on the sidewalk outside the gate.

  “What do you want?” the Altoid Man said, not bothering to stop or even slow down.

  Leon put his arm up to block the opening in the fence.

  “For starters, I wanna know why you said you’d seen the murder the other night when there’s no way you could’ve.”

  The Altoid Man examined Leon up and down, then reached into his pocket and took out the dirty box of mints. “You got something for me?” he asked.

  “I don’t believe you know anything,” Leon said. “I also think you made up the story about your eye.”

  Even in the darkness, he could see the Altoid Man turn purple with rage.

  “But I’m gonna help you out anyway,” Leon said. “You give me something useful, I mean really useful about what went on over there,” he nodded toward the dented gate of Raphael’s Son’s house, “and I give you my word that I’ll do my best to help you get your case reopened and investigated. That’s all I can do. I can’t get the police chief to apologize to you and I can’t get the mayor to shake your hand, so if that’s not good enough you can hold on to your bullshit story till you die because I promise you no one else is gonna give a shit.”

  They sized each other up. Then the Altoid Man pushed Leon’s arm away, shuffled into the site, and dropped his pants.

  “Chevy Impala,” the Altoid Man sighed with relief.

  Leon heard urine trickle down onto the ground.

  “Rental,” the Altoid Man announced. “Fake plates.”

  Leon reached into his pocket for his notebook. “How do you know that?”