The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  “Bingo.”

  She picked at the grass. “The thing is, Quinn, even if we both have Long QT, let’s say we both have it, there’s no point in knowing. We’re home free, our chance to die young long past.” She shook her head. “His chance, too, would have passed him by, except for the pills I gave him. I’ve read all the literature, Quinn. It’s the pill that did the job, either all by itself or as an ‘enhancer’ to his preexisting condition.” She laughed a low, sad not-laugh. “What a word, enhancer. That extra pill, that harmless-looking salmon-pink pill I gave him every day for two months with a chaser of apple juice.”

  “Belle, why are you doing this?”

  “I wish I’d died young.” Her face looked whipped by branches. “But then I never could have brought that lovely child into this world.”

  “Belle. Sweetheart.”

  “Thing is?” she said. “The damn things worked.” Her mouth quivered. “He wouldn’t come out of his room without counting everything in it. I mean everything. He was sleeping under his bed.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “Oh, Quinn,” she said. “When would the subject have come up?”

  “I guess it wouldn’t have.” His custody visits had dwindled to pitiful, twice-monthly suppers in theme restaurants, the boy answering Quinn’s predictable questions in complete, often numbered sentences—the verbal equivalent of a chain-link fence. Does he bore you? Belle had asked him, incredulous, after that final canceled visit.

  “He was better,” she said now. “Couldn’t you see it? Wasn’t he better?”

  “It’s not your fault, Belle. It’s nobody’s fault. The odds were astronomical.”

  She closed her eyes. “Our one-in-a-million boy.”

  “Who had a beautiful mother.” Beneath her horrible pajamas her shoulders were oddly canted, as if her body had decided to collapse without her full permission. Such immense effort, it seemed, just to hold yourself upright.

  “There’s something you should know,” she said. “I didn’t tell you before because my father thought you might interfere.” Quinn waited uneasily; any mention of the old man usually heralded bad news.

  “You probably know the PA,” Belle said finally. “He introduced himself to me as Richard, but it turns out everybody calls him Juke.”

  “Juke Blakely? He’s a PA? The one you’re suing?”

  “He was new to the practice. I should have known. If only I’d asked more questions. If he’d introduced himself as Juke, I might have. I might’ve shown more prudence when it came to my son. My own unforgettable child.”

  Quinn, whose own acquaintance with prudence hardly warranted a mention, experienced an acute, electrical dread on behalf of Juke Blakely, who had stood next to Quinn at the rail of a ferry to Ransom Island on the day before the boy was born. They’d been met at the dock by three guys driving candy-red pickups, who loaded their gear and took them to a summer house perched atop a grassy cliff. The island’s owner had instructed the band—a party band called Fly by Night—to wear white shirts and black jeans, an expenditure Quinn intended to recoup at the end of the night in the form of quality alcohol from the outdoor bar. The gig coincided with his final tumble off the wagon before sobering up for good.

  Juke Blakely had a good ear and quick fingers, and Quinn sought out his company during the first break. They sat on a flattened boulder and watched the sea and shared their envy for the tiered house with its tennis courts and bandstand and ludicrous view. They were both thirty-one, both married, both liberal-arts dropouts with a two-year tech certificate in electronics repair. Juke had savings, though, and a five-year-old kid. He was looking to go back to school for something practical, possibly in the medical field.

  The status quo reigned until sundown—set lists heavy on Van Morrison, lame jokes from Freddy the bandleader, endless introductions of people in remarkable clothes, several rounds of “Happy Birthday” for the half-drunk birthday girl. Quinn went a little tipsy himself on the sea air, the smiling guests connected vaguely to the movie biz, the sensation that he himself was part of a movie. Around nine thirty, the birthday girl’s stepdad presented—ta-da!—the surprise guest, his old family friend, David Crosby.

  David freakin’ Crosby, of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Quinn went light in the head, sensing everything around him as suddenly hand-colored and fattened up and deep and rich and ownable. Even the quality of dark began to change as stars emerged from the blue-black sky, first faint and slow, then bright and fast. David Crosby strapped on a borrowed guitar and asked, “What’ll it be?” They played the ones they knew, the ones everyone knew, Quinn and Juke and David Crosby—Dave, he called him, Dave—trading lead lines for a while, then Juke seemed to understand Quinn’s urgency and backed into the rhythm role. For this one favor, Quinn never forgot him.

  A brotherly cohesion overspread the bandstand that night, subtle as the progress of the moon. Quinn and Juke exchanged looks of awe, fully receiving this memory in the making that ended softly, so softly and sweetly, with “Teach Your Children,” the throwback song Quinn had listened to a thousand times as a lonely teenager in his room at home, bent over his guitar, eyes half-masted, shutting out his father’s anger and his brother’s obsessive goal setting, pretending his mother was still alive and humming along and tapping her hip in that way she had. Dave took the melody, Juke the harmony, and Quinn simulated Jerry Garcia’s steel guitar by treadling his volume pedal exactly the way he had in high school. Threaded voices lifted and flew, shawling over the guests who drew nearer and linked arms out of nostalgia or maybe even love, a gathering of woven souls marooned high above a green and thrashing sea.

  As the song rolled out to the stars, Quinn could hear his friend Dave laughing between lyrics, drunk on the exquisite setting, the music, the adoring crowd in their swaying bliss. Look at this guy! he chortled into the mic. This guy’s amazing! Quinn laughed, too, acknowledging the shout-out as his fingers moved between frets, and the song went on, and wound down, and faded beautifully away, and then it was gone forever. Applause, applause, then the juiced-up birthday girl climbed the bandstand steps in her rackety heels, commanded the guest of honor to say something more, so he said, I love this beautiful place! Quinn heard “place” as “place in time,” and he loved it too. He loved this beautiful place.

  Sometime during that long, enchanted night, Quinn bade farewell to ol’ Dave; he recollected a sturdy handshake, an insider’s chuckle. At dawn Quinn turned up at the ferry landing, squinting into a crimson sky and suffused with the ardent, mistaken, hungover belief that David Crosby wanted to play with him again sometime, maybe take him on the road. Deeper down in his consciousness swam a watery recollection of phone numbers being exchanged, though he could not find such evidence on his person after rampaging the same six pockets for days.

  He’d been telling the shined-up version of this story for eleven years, leaving out the ending. After he burst through the door with his new and shapeless plans, he found on the table a note from Amy: Get your ass to the hospital. You’re a dad. It was Juke Blakely, helping to unload gear, who’d offered to drive him there.

  Now the story—his wonderful story—felt like poison. He stood in the mowed backyard among the bright corpses of flowers. He said, “Does Juke know what’s coming?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He wasn’t a PA when I knew him,” Quinn said. “He had a kid, though. And a wife. A good egg, I always thought. Good player, too.”

  “I can’t listen. I can’t listen to this.”

  “All right,” he said. Maybe he was wrong; maybe revenge—a long, protracted lawsuit—would get her over the hump. “Belle?”

  She scrambled to her feet.

  “I’m not second-guessing, Belle,” he said, following her up the slope to the house. “I’m not. I’m just asking. Amy said chronic anxiety. Is that what he had?”

  “I don’t know what he had.” She turned. “What he had was us. My body plus your body, and it made him who he was
.”

  Belle looked at him, distractedly at first, then intently. “This is none of your business anyway,” she said, very quietly. “It’s not your business now.” Her armored expression faded then, in stages, until the old Belle, the real Belle, the Belle who liked children and old ladies and him, appeared as a rush of blood in her cheeks. Her arms dropped to her sides. “I don’t cry,” she quavered. “I don’t cry because I can’t stand to wound them with my pain.”

  “Wound me,” he said, and this she was willing to do. She pitched herself into his arms, her cries soft and sloppy and heart-crushing. Her anguish left him feeling justly pummeled and rendered his own afflictions hardly worth mentioning. His own misery—or whatever you called it—existed as a mounting pressure, like breath held too long underwater. She cried and cried and he took it standing up.

  “Ted’s been a rock,” she said at last, swabbing her face with her sleeve. “Just an absolute rock. But he went through so much when his wife died. And he—he has his sons. I keep resenting him for it. I’m sick with envy.” She lifted her bloodshot eyes. “I’m telling you this because you won’t judge me.”

  “It’s all right. You’re entitled.”

  “No. I’m really not entitled. They’re beautiful boys. They’ve been so kind. Even the youngest, Evan, he’s only nine, he’s been so kind. But it’s there anyway. The envy. I’m aching with it.” She waved him away. “And Amy, my God. I feel like a specimen under glass.”

  It was time to go, he could see that, so he walked her back up the slope to the breezeway. He slipped the check from his pocket. He’d kept back just enough to keep his landlord paid and had taken to turning off lights behind him, making his morning coffee at home, switching to black to save money on cream. He’d disconnected his landline and bought a cell phone package even cheaper than the one he’d been using before.

  “I wasn’t bored,” he whispered to her. “It was never that.” He laid the check on a small table that had once held their joint mail.

  “You have to stop, Quinn. Money is—irrelevant.”

  “It’s what I have.”

  “What you owe him,” she said quietly, “you can never pay.”

  She let the check lie there. She didn’t pick it up or give it back. She just let it lie. Her anger toward him was gone, he realized; in its place, pity.

  “Ask the God Squad to pray for me,” she said, then went into the kitchen without him.

  Eventually, he left. Giving her money only made him feel worse. He supposed that was the point.

  After the bus dropped him off downtown, Quinn walked home by way of the art museum, where he peered through the fence, looking for the sculpture he always looked for: a massive human figure made from a net of steel wire, its insides packed with stones. A human figure literally weighted down, one colossal knee resting on the ground, torso bent nearly in half, head bowed but not bent. A man, Quinn thought, suffering in private. The man was mute. Sheltered by small sweet trees. To find him you had to already know he was there.

  Quinn took out his phone, which had a 104-year-old woman on its call log; how had this happened?

  “Oh,” she said, recognizing his voice. “I thought you were going to be a man from Pakistan trying to sell me a credit card.”

  “I can’t make it next week,” he said, and could have left it there, but she’d tripped him up by knowing him at hello. He added, “How’s Sunday?”

  “Do you assume,” she asked him, “that one day is the same as another to me? Because I’m old?”

  “I’ve got a gig I can’t pass up.”

  “I make my biscuits on Sunday morning.”

  “Make them on Saturday.”

  “After that, one of the ladies picks me up for the ten-thirty Mass.”

  “Then I’ll come early.”

  “You never come early.”

  “I’ll come early, Ona.”

  If you stared long enough, the sculpture appeared to quaver, as if the rocks themselves were breathing, giving breath to the man. “There’s these—kids. Their lead guitarist’s gone again, and I’m in, and it looks like they’re on the brink of something.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Something good,” he amended. “A good brink.”

  “Oh. I thought they were planning to jump off a cliff.” She paused. “Are these boys—do they play rock-and-roll music?”

  He smiled to hear her say it. “Gospel rock,” he said. “Nothing in it to worry your grandma.”

  “My grandma’s far beyond the reach of worry.”

  “They’re gallingly talented. And their mother’s a walking bank.”

  “Aha. Opportunity knocks.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  “Hope is a perilous thing, Quinn.”

  “So I hear.” He’d thought himself finished with hope, but here it was again, that urgent, nearly spiritual ache, an open wound looking for a balm. How did Ona know this?

  “Sunday’s good anyway,” she said. “I like the Saturday Mass.” She sounded chirpy. “Even if one day is the same as another around here, it’s not polite to make a lady admit it.”

  “I’ll make a note.”

  “You do that.”

  “Biscuits sound good,” he said.

  “I’ll make a note.”

  The sculpture was still breathing, or appearing to. Quinn felt suddenly stone-heavy himself, a caged body packed with rocks, a stone man hiding under the trees. Get up, he whispered, but the stone man remained where he was, suspended, poised to rise up despite his burden, or to give in at last to the force of its staggering weight.

  HEAVY

  Heaviest butterfly. Over 25 grams. Queen Alexandra’s birdwing. Country of Papua New Guinea.

  Heaviest baby born to healthy mother. 22 pounds and 8 ounces. Country of Italy.

  Heaviest bus pulled by hair. 17,359 pounds. Pulled by Letchemanah Ramasamy. Country of Malaysia.

  Heaviest annual rainfall. 38.94 feet per year. Mawsynram. Country of India.

  Heaviest object removed from stomach. 5 pounds and 3 ounces. Ball of hair. Country of UK.

  Heaviest flying bird. Great bustard. 46.3 pounds. Country of Hungary.

  Heaviest heart. Up to 1,500 pounds. Blue whale. Country of the oceans.

  Heaviest cat. Himmy. 46.8 pounds. Country of Australia.

  Heaviest dog. Kell. 286 pounds. Country of England.

  Heaviest man. John Minnoch. 1,400 pounds. Country of USA.

  * * *

  This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life shards on tape. This is Part Three.

  I don’t know about shards.

  . . .

  Because it makes me sound like something broken and un-put-back-togetherable.

  . . .

  Memories, then. But they’re not, really. They feel like something else.

  . . .

  Never mind. Shards is fine. Go.

  . . .

  I’ll tell you where I was: waiting. Same as the mothers now. Same as the mothers from the beginning of time. Randall was in law school, padding off to his tax-code classes on two flat feet; but Frankie, he joined the navy. Over my nearly dead body.

  . . .

  “Think of all those shocked-up boys who came back from the first one,” I told him. “Take a look at your own half-buttoned father.” But Frankie wasn’t a listener, like you. Frankie was a talker. He wrote the most beautiful letters, from his LCT in the northern Marianas.

  . . .

  It’s a large vessel that carries things. Tanks and men, mostly. It carries them across God’s great green sea and then dumps them spank into harm’s way. You should have seen his letters. Howard kept them from me when I left.

  . . .

  “I saw a bird with ten-foot wings, Mama.” “I like my shipmates real well, Mama.” That kind of thing. “The skies here turn such colors, Mama, like a fighter’s bad-punched eye.” My Frankie had a way with words.

  . . .

  Well. Six months later, after the Battle of Saipan, a sniper got hi
m on one of the boys’ rare evenings ashore. The rest of the fellows were on the beach watching a movie, but not Frankie. Frankie pilfered a jeep and off he went, unauthorized as usual, a joy ride down a secured road. Which was not as secure as he thought. There was liquor involved, no doubt. And a girl. Even out there in the middle of God’s empty palm, Frankie would have figured a way to work in a girl.

  . . .

  You know, I wondered the same thing? The exact same thing. But nobody could tell me. They didn’t think it was important. I figured something with Bob Hope in it.

  . . .

  Oh, Bob Hope was wonderful. Very funny man. So that would be my guess. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, probably one of those dopey road movies with Dorothy Lamour prancing around in her white sarong. All those well-behaved boys with better mothers, doing what they’re told, watching pretty Dorothy Lamour. And then there’s Frankie in his jeep speeding past a field of sugar cane.

  . . .

  Possibly. I never thought of that. Hmm. The sky out there is so famously open. But jeeps make such a commotion. And the sound system would have been a little on the mushy side. I don’t imagine he could make out actual words. But maybe he fiddled out the funny parts just from the rise and fall, the timing. Bing and Bob were famous for their timing.

  . . .

  Me, too. I hope the sound carried. I hope he died laughing.

  Chapter 11

  Quinn hadn’t entirely believed the Omaha-deejay coast-to-coast story until he got on the road and discovered shiny throngs of boys and girls wearing Resurrection Lane T-shirts and singing all the words. They bought the boys’ CD in multiples, the shows went long, and Quinn winged through the prodigal cousin’s smeared charts, improvising his own sluicing guitar hooks in a state of dislocation and glee.

  It was just a job—with a fangless pack of absurdly talented Jesus lovers who called him Pops—but the same thing happened every time: he cared. They pestered him for advice and he gave it out like money he didn’t need, feeling expansive and necessary. He shuffled the set list in Providence, tweaked a muddy house system in Springfield, finagled the primo spot in a Worcester triple bill. He cared about their quadrupling crowds and T-shirt sales. He cared about their music—straight-arrow constructions aquiver with chordal surprises—and he cared about what their music did to all those upturned faces. At the end of each night his jaw ached from smiling.