The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  That’s it. That’s all I have for you.

  Chapter 2

  Quinn left Miss Vitkus’s house five dollars poorer and deprived of magic. He took the bus all the way to Belle’s neighborhood of North Deering, where he found her raking a tulip bed behind a cliché of a fence—all those smiling pickets. He’d always thought of the house as Belle’s place—which it was, legally speaking—despite the five and a half nonconsecutive years he himself had lived there. The bay windows reminded him of the sitcoms of the sixties, which the boy had ardently watched, one after the other, on a TV channel lousy with proper husbands and fathers, stand-up guys who stayed home nights to anchor the home vessel.

  “So?” she asked. Even her voice had thinned, its layered notes erased.

  “It’s out near Westbrook,” he said. “Her yard’s a mess.”

  “He committed till mid-July. I told Ted we’d take care of it.”

  “She’s got like twenty feeders, hung way too high. He had his work cut out for him.”

  Belle checked the street. “You on foot?”

  “I sold the Honda.” He slipped a check from his pocket and gave it to her. He’d mailed her a child-support check every Saturday since their second divorce and had yet to miss a payment.

  She regarded him woodenly. “I told you, Quinn. There’s no more—need.”

  He wondered, not for the first time, if a person could literally die of grief. She was wearing a pink shirt so desperately wrinkled it looked as if it had been filched from a washer at a public laundry.

  “Belle,” he said. “Let me.”

  She didn’t let him, not at first, but he stood there with the proffered check, blood sloshing in his temples, the check lifting in the weak breeze, until he made clear his intention to outlast her. She relented, took the check, said nothing, and his head calmed.

  The place looked deceptively renewed. Late-May flowers popping up everywhere, windows a-twinkle, and another collection of things set out for the trash man.

  “Cleaning out again?” he asked.

  “Just the things I can’t bear.”

  What she meant remained a mystery. He took stock of the rejects: a stuffed chair, a blender, a table lamp, some flatware. Then he caught it, sitting apart from the rest: his first amplifier, two watts, a present from his thirteenth birthday.

  “Isn’t that my Marvel?”

  They stared at it, together, as they might inspect a dead animal. It was a cheap Japanese import in a case so heavily lacquered it appeared wet even under a three-decade layer of grime.

  “It’s ugly,” Belle said, “and it doesn’t work. Nobody wants it.”

  “My mother gave me that.” Six-inch speaker, three knobs; junk, pretty much, the sole surviving relic of his adolescence. And of his mother, for that matter.

  “It still works,” he said, defensive now. He’d loved that amp. It had meant something.

  “How about if you remove your junk from my house once and for all? There isn’t a damn thing to hold you here now.”

  “Belle,” he said, wounded. “Don’t.” He had missed his last two custody visits and there would be no forgiving him. Certain things, examined in the frozen light of retrospect, were simply unforgivable.

  He looked around. For two weeks Belle’s family had swarmed like a gang of hornets, led by Amy, Belle’s sister. Also Ted Ledbetter, another matter entirely. But today the house was quiet, the driveway empty.

  “Is Ted here?”

  “No. And how is that your business?”

  “Sorry. Where’s everyone else?”

  “The aunts went home. Amy’s out mailing thank-you cards. I pretend to need things to get four seconds of peace.” She set the rake against a tree and stuttered out a breath that reminded him of childbirth exercises. He followed her inside, where she seemed surprised to see him.

  “Can I have some water?” he asked.

  She went into the kitchen and poured him a glass. The house was a tidy Cape, a suburban classic, though technically they were inside Portland’s city limits. Lawns stamped into the once-bumpy landscape. Swing sets, treehouses, dog runs aplenty. Belle’s parents had owned the house and passed it to Belle under condition that Quinn’s name be omitted from the paperwork.

  “Did she mention him? The old woman?”

  He shook his head. “She cheated me out of five bucks.”

  “They had charming conversations,” she said. “I’m quoting.”

  “I don’t know how he put up with her.” He meant to sound lighthearted but lately everything landed with the weighted thud of trying-too-hard.

  “Did you mention him?”

  He drained the glass. The animal crackers had made him thirsty. “To her?”

  “Yes, to her. Who else, Quinn?”

  “I didn’t.” He added, “Couldn’t.”

  The icy surface of her anger—she was encased in it—thawed incrementally. “It’s not a strike against his character that he put up with her,” she said at last. “She’s absurdly old.”

  “I took that into consideration.”

  She laid her fingers on his arm. “It’s the one thing I asked you to do. He made a commitment, and to him the word means something. I’d do it myself, but this”—she searched the air for some words—“this is the job of the father.”

  Quinn said nothing. What was there to say? He’d left when the boy was three, returned when the boy was eight. Five years willingly hacked from the fragile core of fatherhood. She could call him on it now, but didn’t. Boston, New York, and finally Chicago, until it came to him that he was living the same life he’d left, only lonelier. After that, a long, humiliating bus ride home. He’d made a decent living—had always made a decent living, his one source of pride—but still he dreaded facing his former bandmates and day-job shift supervisors with the predictable news that no, ha-ha, he hadn’t Made It, and yeah, he was back for good.

  “I didn’t say I was quitting. All I said is that she’s no twinkly old gal in a gingham apron.”

  “Poor you,” Belle said. “What else have you got to do today?”

  “A wedding at five.”

  “You always have a wedding at five. Mr. In-Demand.”

  This was their old struggle, and her willingness to unearth it now made him feel less alone. Belle had once compared his chronic gigging to the daily requirements of a maintenance alcoholic. To Quinn, for whom alcohol was a touchy simile, the truth was this: playing guitar was the single occasion in his slight and baffling life when he had the power to deliver exactly the thing another human being wanted.

  He trailed Belle into the living room but was not asked to sit. He looked around, sensing a false note, and then it came to him: she’d put her books away. A profligate reader, she usually had four or five going at once, leaving them everywhere, spines flattened by her passion. How many nights had she spent with him recounting plots as he pleaded with her, laughing, not to give it all away? But she always did; when she loved a story she gave it to him whole. Now those same books were stacked by size into a bookcase that looked freshly washed.

  “It’s only a few more Saturdays,” she said now.

  “Seven, actually.”

  “Seven, then. It takes, what, two hours out of your busy day?”

  “Yeah, but then you have to eat poisoned cookies.”

  She laughed, a brief bark that startled them both. He took her hands and held them; his sympathy filled him to bursting. It was bottomless, this sympathy.

  “Can I see his room again? Just for a minute?” He hoped to return the diary before she missed it. He couldn’t imagine her not knowing of the diary’s existence, she who had observed the boy’s life as if in the belief he would need a biographer someday.

  She withdrew her hands. “Not now.”

  She was punishing him, this fierce and lovely woman, his truest friend. He deserved it; but he knew her well, knew she didn’t have the juice to sustain her rage.

  “I’ve got cards to write out,” she said. “
Your father sent a note. And Allan called, all the way from Hong Kong.” She waited. “Allan didn’t know about our divorce. Probably he didn’t even know about our first one.”

  He shrugged. “You know us.” His father was in Florida year-round now, his brother on the other side of the world. They rarely spoke.

  It was ten o’clock. He had hours to fill. He asked, “Are you eating?”

  The question seemed to confuse her. “Probably,” she said. “I guess I must be.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “Quinn,” she said gently. “There’s nothing you can do for me now.”

  The truth of this hurt him like a soft, blue bruise. Belle walked him outside, all the way to the sidewalk, as if he had a car waiting there. “I’m somebody else now,” she said, and if there had ever been a time in his life when he knew what to do with this kind of information, that time had long passed. He locked eyes with her until she released him with a slow shake of her head.

  He picked up the amp—it weighed nothing—and carried it out of his former neighborhood and all the way down Washington Avenue and around the Boulevard and up the long slope of State Street to the Peninsula and finally to Brackett Street and up the three dark flights to his apartment, which held beautifully tended music equipment, a few sticks of secondhand furniture, and a framed photo of the boy in his Scout uniform, his short teeth bared in earnest cooperation. Someone had told him to smile, and he’d done the best he could.

  BIRDS

  Smallest bird. Bee hummingbird. 2.24 inches and 0.056 ounces.

  Fastest bird over land. Ostrich. 45 miles per hour.

  Highest-flying bird. Ruppell’s griffon vulture. 37,000 feet.

  Most talkative bird. Prudie. African gray parrot. 800 words.

  Most feathers on bird. Whistling swan. 25,216 feathers.

  Least feathers on bird. Ruby-throated hummingbird. 940 feathers.

  Slowest-flying bird. American woodcock. 5 miles per hour.

  Longest bill on bird. 18.5 inches. Australian pelican.

  Nicest bird. In my opinion. Black-capped chickadee.

  Longest bird flight. Common tern. 16,210 miles.

  Chapter 3

  On that first Saturday, at the beginning of the early March thaw, the boy arrived in a gray van commandeered by a well-constructed scoutmaster in a pressed uniform. Water dripped off Ona’s gutters, her porch rails, her bird feeders, and the van’s sideview mirrors. The scoutmaster disconnected the boy from the rest of the troop—all of them larger and lunkier than the boy—and marched (literally, it seemed) up the steps. He introduced himself as Ted Ledbetter, then presented the slender, crewcutted boy, whose air of willing restraint instantly unsettled her.

  The first word plinked into her conscious mind, odd as a stray hailstone: brolis. She blinked hard, as if the word had literally hit her on the head.

  Brother.

  Eleven, he was, though small enough to pass for eight. Over his uniform he wore a ludicrous, water-stained leather jacket from which his neck rose, skinny and naked, an unearthly white. He looked open to wounding. The scoutmaster left the boy with several well-turned instructions and promised a pickup, two hours hence, expressed in military time.

  After the van lumbered off, the boy stood wordless and waiting, as reedy and guileless as a grasshopper. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said.

  “Hmm,” Ona said.

  The boy stared. “How old are you?”

  The second word dropped: šimtas.

  He blinked once. “What?”

  “One hundred.”

  “What language is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ona said, mystified. “Lithuanian, I surmise. I’m one hundred four, not one hundred. One-oh-four.”

  They stood together in the dripping world, sizing each other up, the boy appearing to marvel at the weight of a century-plus, Ona wondering how in hell she’d unearthed two unrelated words in a tongue she couldn’t remember ever speaking.

  “Come in, then,” she said, and he did, staying politely on the mat in his trickling shoes.

  “I have several jobs for you,” she said, “and if you can’t do them, or don’t want to, I’d just as soon know now.”

  “I can do them.”

  “I haven’t told you what they are.”

  “I can do them anyway.” He enunciated beautifully, though his diction contained barely perceptible pauses in the wrong places, as if he were a foreigner, or short of breath.

  But he proved a good worker, willing and persistent and agreeably thorough. Saturday was trash day; he rolled her big trash can all the way from the curb to the shed, which she expected, then replaced the bungee cord over the lid, which she did not expect. He removed all the bird feeders, filled them to brimming, then rehung them with the assiduous care of a window dresser. He cleared straggling blots of snow from the edges of her walk. By the time she got around to offering him a cookie, the scoutmaster had returned.

  Ona agreed to take the boy on. Mr. Ledbetter looked relieved; she’d sent the others back on day one.

  On the second Saturday—after he’d cleaned and filled the feeders in so precise an imitation of the previous week that she suspected he’d written instructions on his hand—the boy confided his passion for world records. They were sitting at her table, eating animal crackers, which the boy did in stages: tail, legs, head, body. Each one exactly the same.

  “Not sports-type records,” he assured her. “Records like . . . One, how long can you spin a coin. Two, largest collection of golf pencils. Three, longest ear hair.” He took a short breath. “Four—”

  “Guinness records,” she said. She had no trouble hearing him, which delighted her.

  “You’ve heard of it!” He looked absurdly pleased. “It’s harder to get in than people think.”

  Normally, Scouts bored her, with their Game Boy stats and soccer scores and lazy, shortcutting ways. This one, though, brought a literal sense of second childhood: she felt as if she were speaking to a child she might have known when she herself was eleven. How easily she placed him at McGovern’s, installed at the white marble soda fountain, sipping a chocolate phosphate. She could see him amid the white-shirted boys playing stickball on Wald Street, tagging the door of Joe Preble’s black REO. There was something vaguely wrong with him that made him seem like a visitor from another time and place.

  He reminded her that she’d once found people fascinating. That she’d lived more than one life.

  She pulled a quarter from her pocket. After a few fumbling tries, she got it to spin. “Five seconds plus,” she said, after it wobbled free and succumbed to gravity. “What’s the record?”

  “Nineteen-point-three-seven seconds,” the boy said. “Mr. Scott Day, country of Great Britain. Your table isn’t smooth enough.”

  She eyed the sash he wore across his chest, bedecked with shiny patches. “Do you hold the record for merit badges?”

  “Mr. John Stanford, country of USA, earned one hundred forty-two merit badges.” He looked out the window. “There’s a badge for bird study.”

  “Really?” She pointed. “That’s a goldfinch.” She had learned the basics from Louise back when life still held its little surprises. She’d kept a list for about ten years but couldn’t now recall the last time she’d actually observed a bird. She fed them out of pity.

  “I already know some regular ones,” he said. “One, crow. Two, robin. Three, cardinal. Four, chickadee. But one, you have to know twenty birds to get a badge. Two, you have to build a birdhouse. Three, you have to name five birds by their song.” His soft mouth slackened. “I’m bad at music.”

  “Really? Because of my husband, Howard, who was a failed and frustrated songster, I’m somewhat ambivalent about music myself.” Ona patted her ear. “Birdsong is different, but I’ve lost the high-pitched ones. Last time I heard a warbler I was seventy-two. Even the robins drop out at times, like a broken radio.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said. His entire bo
dy stilled in a way that telegraphed his sympathy, and she began to feel fully, truly sorry to have lost all those birds, whose fluting notes had apparently escaped for good down a decrepitating hatch in her inner ear. After nursing Louise through the final dregs of cancer, Ona couldn’t relocate her former pastimes and believed they had quite literally fled with Louise into the Great Unknowable Somewhere. Don’t turn into an old crab, Louise warned her in those final days. It’s too predictable. But that’s exactly what Ona had turned into: an old crab.

  “Mr. John Reznikoff, country of USA, got into Guinness World Records by collecting hair,” the boy said. “One, hair from Abraham Lincoln. Two, hair from Marilyn Monroe. Three, hair from Albert Einstein. Four . . .”

  This list was very long, and she waited for him to complete it. His eyes never moved from her face. He’d committed a stunning number of records to memory, all of them of the hair-collecting/coin-spinning variety. He, too, collected things—unsuccessfully, he confessed. Serious collecting apparently took a measure of money and opportunity not readily available to the average fifth-grader. “Mr. John Reznikoff buys his hair,” he informed her. “It’s not like he dug up Lincoln’s grave.”

  “Oh. I wondered.”

  “Mr. Ashrita Furman, country of USA, walked eighty-point-nine-six miles with a glass milk bottle balanced on his head.”

  “All at once?” Ona asked, incredulous.

  “Mr. Ashrita Furman also holds the record for number of records.” He stopped. “One, where would I get a glass milk bottle? Two, how would I measure eighty miles? Three, my mother wouldn’t let me walk eighty miles with a bottle on my head even if I wanted to.” He paused again. “Which I sort of do.”

  Though he offered little more about himself, Ona gathered that school was a trial, day upon day of skulking in the back row for fear of being called on. Possibly he stood alone at recess. Her own boys had been so easy with their friends, Frankie especially, so sunny and well liked. This boy, with his measured voice and forbearing demeanor, seemed more like someone she could actually be related to.