The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  As the bus let him off near Belle’s neighborhood, his phone rang. “Hey, Pops,” came a voice he knew. “We need you.”

  “Let me guess,” Quinn said, walking against a stiff breeze and slashing sunlight. “Cousin Zack ditched you last-minute for another spin in rehab?”

  “It’s a disease,” Brandon said. He was twenty-one and had a friend in Jesus. They all did, and why not? Young and lucky, inheritors of dimpled chins and great teeth. They called themselves Resurrection Lane.

  Quinn jimmied his calendar out of his pocket. “When?”

  “Tomorrow. Eight cities, seven days. We’re back late Saturday.”

  “Things looking up in the praise trade?”

  Brandon laughed his clean, tenor laugh. “We’re on fire, Pops.”

  “I’ll ink you in.” Resurrection Lane paid well and promptly, thanks to Sylvie, Brandon’s fast-talking, deal-making supermom. Quinn had never met cousin Zack, the bad-seed guitarist whom Quinn was being hired once again to replace.

  “Awesome, he’s inked in!” That was Tyler, Brandon’s brother, crowing in the background. Their cousins, Jason and Jeff, collectively known as the Jays, rounded out the prayer circle.

  “Oh, wait, hold on,” Quinn said. “Wait a sec.” He had Saturday-morning chores: yet another week as Ona’s Boy Scout, and he hadn’t disappointed her yet.

  “Pops—?”

  “No worries,” Quinn said. “I’ll work it out.”

  “Awesome, he’ll work it out!” One of the Jays. Quinn felt a flush of pride, disquietingly paternal. Despite the group grace every time you so much as reached into a bag of Cheetos, Quinn liked them. They wrote hummable songs and acted like pros, though their puppyish affection sometimes made him think of Jesus herding apostles from town to town. He’d taught them famous licks from Hendrix and Clapton, advising them to hold their guitars low on their bodies. Untuck your shirts, for crying out loud. You look like the Dave Clark Five. They’d called him “Mr. Porter” until he told them to knock it off, then started calling him “Pops,” which stuck.

  “Remember last March in Worcester?” one of the Jays broke in. “That song we tried out? We changed the intro and added a bridge, just like you said, and they’re playing it on the radio, no lie!”

  He meant Christian radio. But still. Sylvie had muscled the song into the hands of a friend-of-a-friend deejay in Omaha, who played it more or less continuously for three weeks, whereupon the name Resurrection Lane miraculously washed over both coasts like parted halves of the Red Sea.

  “It’s happening, Pops!” Tyler again, or maybe Brandon; they talked the way they sang: a blend. “We did you proud.”

  “Hear it, hear it,” Quinn said as he signed off. The boys laughed, because that was the name of the song.

  He made his way to Belle’s door, pausing a moment to steel himself, but the door flew open and there was Amy.

  “She’s sleeping,” she informed him. “She’s got day and night reversed.”

  The irony of this revelation landed hard—their biorhythms had never matched up, and now, it seemed, they did.

  “I’ll wait,” he said.

  Amy’s face closed up. She was more striking than Belle, darker and smokier and possibly even beautiful, but she carried their father’s pugilistic air, leading with her chin even when she didn’t have to. She glanced at the check in his fist. “Quinn,” she murmured, “what exactly do you think you’re buying?”

  He said nothing, followed her into the kitchen, where she resumed scrubbing Belle’s sink as if intending to make it disappear. Sunlight flinted through the windows. The whole place clanged with an empty, metallic gleam, whether from Amy’s brutal applications or Belle’s shedding of material goods, hard to say. The toaster appeared to be missing.

  “Uh, Amy?”

  He waited until she looked up—at him—but she gave away nothing beyond the haggard nakedness of her face. Instead, she wiped her hands, opened the fridge, and poured out some lemonade with a great clattering of ice.

  Amy stood at the counter, sipping mutely. “What can I do for you?”

  “She wants me here,” he insisted, because he’d begun to believe it.

  “Be that as it may, the time when your presence in this house would have done her any good is long past. She has a perfectly nice man in her life.”

  He glanced around. “I don’t see him anywhere.”

  “He has kids,” she said. “Whom he spends rather a lot of time with.”

  The words stung, but he wasn’t sure whether she’d aimed them directly at him. In times of pain or rage, the Cosgroves resorted to the vaguely British terminology of the once-removed. Rather. Not quite. Be that as it may.

  “I’ll wait,” he said again. “She was never any good at napping.”

  “She’s good at it now.”

  He did wait, observing in silence as Amy padded back and forth with an array of cleaning supplies. From their mother, the Cosgrove girls had learned to scrub their way out of despair. There was no detergent in existence for what ailed them now, but Amy heaved into the old standby nonetheless, with an alacrity bordering on violence, much sloshing and clanging coming from the adjoining rooms. He listened to these sounds—like an animal crying hard, he thought—until she appeared again, hands red and raw.

  “Are you staying all summer?” he asked her.

  She opened a little closet—he’d once kept his gig bag in there—and took out a dust cloth. Back in LA she wrote a syndicated financial column, but she’d moved her headquarters to the guest room across the hall from the boy’s shut door. “I’m waiting for the legalities to settle.”

  He watched her unfold the cloth, then fold it again, into perfect quarters.

  “What legalities?”

  “If you must know,” she said, “we’re looking into wrongful death.”

  “We—?”

  “Well,” she said. “Not you.”

  “Who are you suing?” he asked, genuinely bewildered. “God?”

  “Don’t be absurd.” Her eyes, a dark gold-brown, recalled the doomy hue of dying leaves.

  “Who, then? His doctor?”

  She said nothing.

  He recalled the pediatrician as an old-school type who believed children outgrew everything. He’d never met the woman himself, but Belle had her on speed dial. The name came to him: “You’re suing Dr. McNeil? You’re kidding me.”

  “Dr. McNeil retired. Belle switched to CenterMed.”

  “CenterMed, then,” Quinn said. He knew the place: huge practice, you never saw the same person twice, but you could get in on short notice. “You’re suing them? For what?”

  “Not them, a PA who works there. Physician’s assistant. They’re supposed to assist. Anyway, the less you know about this, the better.”

  Leave it to the Cosgroves, who would indeed sue God if such a thing were possible. He imagined them dragging Belle through airless hearings as her pallor turned to ash. Now he was angry. “You’re suing a PA for not detecting a condition that’s undetectable? Look it up, Amy.”

  “You look it up,” she snapped. “If you’re dispensing drugs to children you’re supposed to comprehend the fine print, which is there for any competent medical professional to take under advisement.”

  Quinn’s understanding went tight and wiry, like a guitar string about to break. “What are you talking about?”

  She folded her arms. “Long QT is either inherited—”

  “I know that,” he said. “I know all that.”

  “—or acquired. There’s no way to tell after the fact. If he inherited it”—here she glanced at him with suspicion—“he’d likely have lived a long life in blissful ignorance, but the drugs tipped the scale. If he didn’t inherit it, then the prescription did the job all by itself.”

  Amy’s information was coming in as if on tape delay, the import of the words arriving a beat or two behind the actual words. “Make sense,” he said. “What drugs?”

  She hesitated. “Antide
pressants,” she said. “For chronic anxiety. Why don’t you know this? The pills weren’t doing squat, so the PA added a titch of antipsychotic about two months before he died.”

  “Anti-what? Jesus Christ.”

  “They’re supposed to help with night terrors.” A tear dropped down her cheek and off the tip of her chin and into the hollow of her throat. “But the PA was too rushed, too busy, over his head—something.”

  Quinn just stood there in the tin-bright room, weak and clueless, wondering what the hell were night terrors, unless she meant that eerie, soft, wee-hour keening, the boy sitting up, eyes translucent and pinned open and unconvincingly awake.

  His head ached. Didn’t Rennie’s daughter take medication? And one of Gary’s perfect little sons, come to think. The guys talked about these things all the time and now he wished he’d paid more attention. Every kid in America had prescriptions these days, he knew that much. “What were the chances?” he asked at last. “Are we talking, like, one in a million?”

  “He should have ordered an EKG first. He should have done the research. He should have looked it up.”

  They stared each other down for a few moments, the air between them charged with old rivalry.

  “When is she going back to work?” he asked.

  “She tried,” Amy said. Belle worked at the state archives, where she often aided ordinary people in their quest to nail down their ancestral trail. What’s the point? he’d asked her once—he who had never known a grandparent, whose mother had died young, whose father and brother were as distant as ideas. The question was a throwaway, a verbal shrug; but Belle responded with her usual thoughtfulness: They hope their descendants will do the same for them.

  “She tried twice, actually,” Amy said, “but she can’t bear the names of the dead.” She turned on him then, her face soft from weeks of crying. “How is it that you’re working so much, Quinn?”

  “I—it’s what I do.”

  “Why aren’t you prostrate with sorrow? Why aren’t you home right now, writhing in your bed of pain?”

  Because, he believed, he had not earned the release of grief.

  “Maybe if you’d been a different sort of father he would have been a different sort of kid,” she went on, her breath coming hard and uneven. “A kid who wasn’t so afraid, who felt safe in his bones, who didn’t need two prescriptions to face the wall of the world, who didn’t have to number every goddamn item in his universe, who didn’t have to ride his bike through the neighborhood at five in the morning for whatever incomprehensible reason and be killed by his own heart and found on the sidewalk with a gash in his cheek.” She covered her face. “Oh, God,” she breathed. “Oh, my God, I’m disgusting.” She looked up blearily. “This isn’t me, Jesus, please, this isn’t me.”

  Quinn gaped at her. Despite everything, he still thought of her as family. He suffered her anger now—desperation, misery, whatever it was—even welcomed it as his due, because the thing he’d felt since the boy’s death did not count as suffering. His heart hurt for her, for Belle, for all of them. And for the boy, especially the boy, vanquished by a deranged God before getting a decent toehold on his full threescore and ten.

  “You liked me once, Amy.”

  “I did.” She wiped her eyes with one bunched fist. “But not as a husband for my sister.” He could barely hear her. “I admired you. The artistic life always appealed to me, but I didn’t have the guts to go for it.”

  “Going for it is easy,” he said. He’d always liked her throaty singing voice; she’d sat in with the Benders a few times in their loose and headlong youth. “Sticking with it . . .”

  “High price.”

  “I guess.”

  She crossed her arms and held herself. “I was counting up the number of days I spent with him,” she murmured. “What does that say about me as an aunt, that I can count the number of days I spent with a child who was on earth for eleven years?”

  Quinn was beginning to see that Amy was here not because her sister needed her, but quite the opposite. It was Amy who’d bought the red bike he’d been riding on the clear, sweet morning of his death.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “How many days?”

  “Sixty-one,” she said, then her voice dropped as if from a great height. “Sixty-two if you count the funeral.” She was forty years old, with a married boyfriend and a craving for children. It struck him then that she was vying with him not for Belle, but for the boy.

  “You live in LA,” he said. “Sixty-one days is a hell of a lot of days, considering.” She was weeping now. “Amy. Remember that mini tape recorder you sent to him a couple of years ago?”

  She mopped her eyes with her sleeve. “Uh-huh.”

  “He carried it around like a pet.”

  “He did, I know.”

  “It’s the only material object that he didn’t own ten of. He adored you, Amy. You have nothing to regret.”

  “I—” she began, then he followed her gaze through the knife-clean windows. The breezy day had died, in its place a paralyzing sunlight, beneath which he received the numbing sight of a pajama-clad Belle moving methodically along the edge of the backyard with a pair of clippers, snapping fully bloomed heads from a vibrant bed of flowers.

  “What is she doing?” he asked.

  “I thought she was in bed.”

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  “Quinn?”

  He turned. She was still crying a little.

  “Thank you,” she said, then resumed her drubbing, leaving him to head outside, slightly disoriented, thankful that Amy hadn’t asked him for his own shameful number of days.

  He trudged down the long slope of the backyard, which was famously difficult to mow. The boy had been too scrawny to control the electric mower, though he’d mastered the push mower, a relic from Eric Chapman, Belle’s besotted neighbor. Today the lawn looked pooltable smooth, the work of an adult—Ted Ledbetter, no doubt—with impeccable organizational skills.

  Belle had moved to a stand of daisies that hemmed the prefab toolshed—a father-son project that had languished for months until Quinn arrived for a custody visit and found it fully assembled, painted a stolid shade of green. Ted and his sons had turned the thing into a Scouting project, a happy endeavor that earned all the boys a dual badge in something like woodworking and teamwork. She clipped a blossom and watched it float to the ground.

  “That one looked okay,” he said.

  “I find their sunshiny faces unendurable.” She offed its neighbor.

  “You, uh, probably don’t want to decapitate all of them.”

  “How would you know what I want?” she said, but allowed him to take the clippers and lay them on the grass.

  “Is the lawsuit your father’s idea?”

  “People have to fill their lives with something. I told him I’d sign the complaint if it’d make everybody happy.”

  “You don’t have to do what your father says.” Mac Cosgrove was an ex-titan of industry who wore wingtips on weekends, a hard guy to say no to, especially if you were a Cosgrove girl. “These things can take years, Belle.”

  “I don’t care who gets sued, or how long it takes. I just want to be left alone.” She looked up. “How’s the Scouting?”

  She always began here, wanting to know everything: how many scoops the feeders had required; which of the porch steps—which one exactly—he’d repaired.

  “She gave me cake.”

  “What kind?”

  “It tasted like chocolate but she made it with tomato soup.”

  “Your hearing must be getting worse.”

  “No, really. Secret ingredient. She wouldn’t give it up the first time she made it, but today I shook her down.” He paused. “I’ve got only a couple more weeks.”

  “Then your fatherly duties will officially be over.” She didn’t look to see how her words had landed. Instead, she squinted at the sky, asking, “What else have you got?”


  “Did I tell you she gets three papers?”

  “Which ones?”

  “You mean which actual papers?”

  “Yes. Which actual papers?”

  “Press Herald. Times. Globe.”

  She nodded, three quick snaps of the head. Counting, he realized. She looked alarmingly unhinged: much-sweated-in pajamas, sleep-slitted eyes, hair mashed on one side.

  “She keeps up, is what I’m saying. She’s in ridiculous shape, considering.”

  A trace of her old smile. “Better than you, I bet.”

  “Touché.”

  Belle ran her fingers over the remaining blooms, ruffling the petals as if in apology. He waited until she finally looked at him.

  “I didn’t know about the drugs,” Quinn said, ashamed.

  “Don’t second-guess me,” she said. “I can do that perfectly well myself.”

  “I’d never second-guess you.” He gazed at her helplessly. “Belle, you were a beautiful mother.”

  “He thought so. He wrote it down.” She closed her eyes. “Quinn, just tell me. Did you get yourself tested for Long QT?”

  “No.”

  “Because if you did—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Were you afraid to find out you have it?”

  He hesitated, then told her: “I was afraid to find out I don’t have it.”

  He watched her as it sank in. “Remember the time I borrowed my father’s car,” she said, “and then rear-ended the house with it? He still thinks it was you.”

  He laughed, in spite of everything. “That’s okay. He never liked me to begin with.”

  “You took one for the team is what I mean,” she said. She sat down on the grass and he knelt beside her. She asked, “How are you, Quinn?”

  His eyes stung: that she asked; that she meant it.

  “I’m going on the road with the God Squad.”

  “I always liked those kids. Cousin Zack back in rehab?”