The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  Finishing, she blushed hotly. “This was just a bit of foolishness on my part,” she said.

  “He entered you in four categories,” Belle said. “What are your chances?”

  “I’m far too young for a, b, and c. As for my license, your boy prepared me quite well for the written test, but I have remaining concerns about the road test.”

  “Maybe you just need a refresher,” Belle said.

  “I don’t have the proper docs. It was all pretend.”

  Her guests went quiet, so Ona again filled the breach by laying out the p’s and q’s of record making. She related the probable number versus the official number of supercentenarians worldwide; provided an oral précis of recent record holders; added all she knew about the obscenely long life of Madame Jeanne Louise Calment. Her voice took on an authority borrowed, to the subtlest inflection, from the boy. Her recitation seemed to calm the boy’s mother—Belle, this strange animal in her house—and she herself felt calmer. How tranquilizing it was to arm yourself with information, how consoling to unpack the facts and then plant them like fence pickets, building a sturdy pen in which you stood alone, cosseted against human fallibility.

  She missed him awfully.

  “So,” Belle said, “you’re—what? Just floating in space? Nothing to prove you actually exist?” She made this sound magnificent.

  “I have ample proof of my existence,” Ona said. “Proving the duration of that existence is another matter.” A whiffling drop in blood pressure went straight to her head; she preempted a dizzy spell by sitting down.

  “Belle,” Quinn said—certainly it was about time—“let me take you home.”

  “In what? A pony cart?”

  “In your car. Then I’ll take the bus back into town.”

  Belle either didn’t hear him or chose to ignore him. “I guess you two were in cahoots,” she said to Ona. Again, a trace of a smile. “He had your age calculated to the day—he talked about you incessantly—but I didn’t realize what he was up to. I’d been trying to ease him away from world records and onto something a little more productive.” She glanced at Quinn. “Scouts. Music.”

  Quinn kept still. Biding, Ona thought. Biding struck her as a handsome quality in a man.

  “I may have instructed him to keep it under his hat,” Ona admitted. “And I don’t relish being found out now.”

  She wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to the tape recorder. She’d confided such private things, and now they existed someplace, possibly in a secret sleeve of the boy’s backpack, undiscovered. Perhaps undiscoverable, that earthly link between herself and the boy. She didn’t know how to ask without exposing herself. She stood up slowly, blood tossing in her head.

  “My son loved secrets,” Belle said. “Surprise-party-type secrets, not deep dark ones.” Quinn had slid his arm lightly across Belle’s shoulders, but she seemed unaware of him.

  “This was the surprise-party type,” Ona told her. “Of interest to no one but a blundery old hen.” She stuffed the record-breaker kit back into its envelope.

  “Belle,” Quinn said, “why don’t I—”

  “Surely you have a birth certificate,” Belle said.

  “Not at hand.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “My birth certificate,” Ona said, “is in the possession of somebody I haven’t seen in a very long time. That’s all I care to reveal about the matter.”

  Belle tapped the envelope, which Ona held crushed to her chest, as if the envelope were the boy, whom she had never hugged in real life. “I’d like to see you get in the record book,” Belle said. She turned to Quinn. “I’d really, really like to see that happen.”

  Ona felt caught, thoroughly discombobulated: exposed as a goosy girl in her own house!

  “Can’t you ask the person who has your birth certificate—?”

  “Belle,” Quinn said quietly, “I think she prefers not to say.”

  Belle seemed to come to herself then—or whatever facsimile of herself she could muster. “I’m sorry. I’m just—I’m just dreaming. I don’t know what I’m doing.” She took Ona’s hand and squeezed. “My son liked you, Miss Vitkus. He liked people who paid good attention. Thank you for your good attention. That’s really all I came to say.”

  And then she was gone, Quinn walking her to her too-high vehicle, where they exchanged some tender, indecipherable words. Then she got into her car and drove away.

  “My goodness,” Ona said when Quinn returned. “I don’t believe that poor thing is fully buttoned.”

  “That’s not her. She’s still in shock.”

  “Someone should be watching her.”

  “Someone is.” His face—like Frankie’s, easy to read—showed a flood of love and shame.

  Quinn looked around. “Anything else? As long as I’m here?” He was in a hurry now. She felt like her little-girl self waving to Maud-Lucy Stokes from a train platform.

  “I have something for you, Quinn,” she said. “I was saving it for your last day, which I didn’t realize was so hard upon us.” She opened a drawer and handed him a small, well-preserved phonograph cylinder she’d found in a box of oddments during the fruitless hunt for her birth certificate.

  “‘Some of These Days’ by Sophie Tucker,” Quinn read from the label. “‘Nineteen eleven.’ What is this, a recording?”

  “I suppose you’d need an Edison machine to play it.” She saw her mistake: she’d given a musician music that couldn’t be heard.

  But he was smiling, lifting the cylinder from its case. The cloudy trail left by the boy’s grief-shocked mother lifted a bit as he admired the strange old thing. Even to Ona it looked strange, and she had a vivid, momentary sensation of being back in Maud-Lucy Stokes’s third-floor apartment: whatever Quinn washed his hair with smelled like Maud-Lucy’s starched doilies.

  “This is great, Ona. And what’s this, the sheet music?” he asked, removing a discolored paper sleeve that had been curled inside the case. “‘Hiding Place’ by Howard J. Stanhope?”

  “What,” Ona said, “let me see,” but he was right, it was one of Howard’s seventy-five-year-old song sheets. How it had wound up in her things she couldn’t guess; maybe Howard had stashed it there in the hope she’d come across it one day and miss him. She did miss him, oddly enough, in the generalized way she missed her whole life.

  “Howard’s flaming ambition was to get into Tin Pan Alley,” she told him. “But he was a dreadful songwriter.”

  “Ambition like that can kill a man,” Quinn said, then hummed the opening bars, puzzling out the melody.

  “You can read off a sheet?”

  “A little credit, please.”

  Maud-Lucy had been a marvelous sight reader, and Howard, too; but she had never met another one. She’d enjoyed Quinn’s stories of the road. He’d spent the week with the religious fellows, which had struck her as an odd match until he admitted what they paid; this week he was going off with them again. His stories reminded her of trailing Maud-Lucy to the Kimball Opera House to hear tales of the Congolese jungle or the Wild West, a world apart.

  “You can’t imagine how much money Howard burned through,” she said, “on all manner of scalawags who promised to make him rich.”

  “I guess some things don’t change.” He flashed her a self-deprecating grin. This was how their friendship had progressed, in increments measured in twitches.

  He faltered his way through the song, which Ona remembered as a silly thing about making up with the Lord over a bottle of whiskey—a product of Howard’s religious phase, after Frankie died and before she left. How many times had she sat in that ruffled green chair on Woodford Street, listening to Howard’s flat, Protestant voice, all the while dying to tune in Jimmy Durante on their tabletop Crosley?

  “Howard was a teetotaler,” she told Quinn. “Prohibition had absolutely no effect on us.”

  Quinn was still humming. “Honestly, Ona, it’s not bad.”

  “Those religio
us fellows of yours might like it,” she said. “Those boys on the brink.”

  “Maybe,” he said. He hummed a few more bars. “I’m hearing it with a music-hall vibe.”

  Ona didn’t know what a vibe was, exactly, but the word recalled the quivering boxes of unsold song sheets delivered by truck to the Woodford Street house. Poor Howard, with his grand delusions. Then it struck her: she’d given Quinn the cylinder to make herself appear musical.

  “I hope you’re not planning to let those boys save you,” she said.

  He looked up slyly. “Not in the way they think.”

  “Oho,” she said. “Something up your sleeve.”

  He shrugged. “You get a big enough audience, it doesn’t matter if you’re praising God or the devil.”

  “The Lord and I worked out our differences over time. But I think I like you better in league with the devil.”

  “I’m about as devilish as an actuary, Ona,” he said. “It’s work, that’s all. Work I love.”

  “That’s a handsome thing indeed,” she assured him.

  He added quietly, “You want to think your choices were worth something.” He resleeved the music sheet and put out his hand. “I’ve enjoyed knowing you, Ona.”

  “You know nothing about me,” she informed him. “I told you nothing.”

  “You’d be surprised how well I read between the lines.”

  All at once, she felt seen, and she forgave him for leaving.

  Then, a cheerful rooty-toot from the driveway, where the scoutmaster was pulling up in his gray van. “Hello, Mrs. Vitkus!” he called, getting out. “Sorry we’re late!”

  Handsome, hale, well intended, he strode up the walk, towing a boy—a boy of the same age as the previous one—who wore an ill-fitted outfit with a single badge. This boy did not have round, serious, dove-gray eyes. This boy did not have wrists the size of stripped twigs. This boy did not say, “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” like the romantic lead in a movie from the forties.

  This boy, in fact, remained mute—as did Ona—as the two men eyed each other.

  “Just finishing the job, Ted,” Quinn said. “To the letter.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  The young Scout swiveled his head from one man to the other.

  “I wasn’t expecting a new boy,” Ona said.

  “We didn’t want to leave you in the lurch, Mrs. Vitkus,” said the scoutmaster. His uniform was cleanly pressed despite the wilting heat. “This is Noah.”

  The new boy mumbled something unintelligible. Oh, he would not do. He’d prove dull, or sullen, or allergic to work. In any case, she wanted them both gone, these twin pillars of the community in their tan shirts. Besides, if she were to get another boy, she’d want a Sunday boy. Or a Tuesday boy. She did not want another Saturday boy.

  “You’re a week early, Ted,” Quinn said.

  The scoutmaster dug for the same gizmo he’d used last time. “Let’s see,” he said, stabbing a tiny screen. “Nope. Here it is. Right here.” He had a nice-looking, earnest, trustworthy face.

  “There were seven weeks left to go,” Quinn said, “and this is week seven.”

  So many, many weeks now gone: the son’s winter-spring Saturdays, the father’s spring-summer ones. All of a piece, an ongoing beginning, until today: the end.

  The mention of the boy, however oblique, deepened the pall over the little crowd on the porch. The new Scout withdrew into the scoutmaster’s treelike shadow, betraying a vacant discomfort. Oh, he wouldn’t do at all.

  “Next week it is, then,” the scoutmaster said, snapping shut his calendar. “This is Noah, by the way. I guess I already said that.”

  As the visitors hupped back to the van, a whining note emanated from the smaller one, who clearly found his charity assignment unequal to his expectations. Did he think she’d killed the boy herself? She felt once again like the crone in the dead-end house.

  “Apparently the sainted scoutmaster can’t tell time,” Quinn said. “Did I mention he’s got a thing for my ex-wife?”

  “You most certainly did not.”

  “She’s probably in love with him.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Devoted single father. Wife died. A hard guy to hate, in other words, but I seem to be able to manage it.”

  “Well, he’s prepared,” Ona said. “And kind and obedient, if you like that sort of thing.”

  Quinn laughed, the spell broke, and their goodbye arrived at last. He gathered up the cylinder, his musical gift, and put out his hand. She accepted it, hanging on, then letting go.

  “The place has never looked better, Quinn,” she told him. “Thanks for your—for your good attention.”

  “My pleasure.” He trotted down the steps.

  “Ir man malonu,” she said.

  He turned abruptly. “What was that?”

  “I think it means ‘My pleasure.’”

  Poised on the bottom step, his present tucked under his arm, his cheeks suddenly pinked up like a girl’s—like the boy’s, come to think. Was it too much to hope that he was sorry to quit her? Behind him, the hosed-down walk still glittered with spray, reflecting dime-size bits of sky. Before she could stop herself, she blurted, “I need a ride to Vermont, Quinn. To Granyard, Vermont.”

  He regarded her for a long moment. “Who’s in Vermont?”

  “My son,” she said. She waved away his next question. “My first son. I was practically a baby myself.” She hesitated. “I told your boy. I suppose it’s not a secret anymore.”

  And so she told the father what she had told the son. Not all of it. Most of it. The father took it in, his eyes dark and warm, with those Frankie lashes.

  “You’ll have to wait a week,” he said. “I’m booked with the God Squad.” He fiddled his calendar out of his pocket and she felt a little wing lift of delight.

  “A week will be fine.”

  “And we’ll have to take your car.”

  “It’s a good car, Quinn. Not a speck of rust. Twenty-five thousand miles on the odometer.”

  “Maybe I can give you a driving refresher en route,” he said. “As long as you’re going for it.”

  “I’m a menace on the highway. With an expired license to boot.”

  “That never stopped me,” he said, and as she watched the father smile, she caught another bewitching way in which the son might have come to resemble him.

  TRAVEL

  Longest backward walk. 8,000 miles. Plennie Wingo. Country of USA.

  Largest pedal-powered vehicle. 82 riders. Country of Sweden.

  Longest car trip. 383,609 miles. Emil and Liliana Schmid. Country of Switzerland.

  Fastest bathtub racer. Greg Mutton. 36 miles in 1 hour and 22 minutes and 27 seconds. Country of Australia.

  Largest parade of BMW cars. 107. Country of Netherlands.

  Fastest time nonelectric window opened by dog. 11.34 seconds. Striker. Country of USA.

  Highest limousine. 10 feet and 11 inches. Country of USA.

  Greatest speed achieved on motorized sofa. 87 miles per hour. Edd China. Country of UK.

  Heaviest car balanced on head. 352 pounds. John Evans. Country of UK.

  Oldest licensed driver. Fred Hale. Age 108. Country of USA.

  PART THREE

  Kelione (Journey)

  Chapter 13

  Ona woke on departure day with a terrible word in her head: mirtis. What if Laurentas was dead?

  She shook the word away. Surely Laurentas was alive and thriving, enjoying life at the address crumpled into her purse; he had to be. She envisioned the day ahead with a fervor borrowed from the boy, with whom she shared a stake in its outcome. This journey was for him, and so: Laurentas had to be alive.

  In her hasty preparations for the trip, however, she kept forgetting its purpose. Travel became an end in itself: the novelty of it, the pleasure. She had her hair done for the first time in twenty-five years by a girl who stiffened Ona’s white wisps into a lacquered helmet costing too much money t
hat she didn’t mind paying. All week she’d felt young and impulsive, telling Louise in her head: I’m taking to the road with a slipshod musician.

  An odyssey, after all, composed her first conscious memories, recalled in bright, unrelated glints: An exhausted horse being shot for food. A Gypsy offering peaches from a sack. Clouds of dust the color of pulverized roses. She recalled mashing her face into her father’s neck, her mother’s tears dampening the pages of a contraband book written in the forbidden Latin alphabet. They walked and walked, missing their bloom-heavy dooryard, their chickens and cherry trees, their dearest farm that would be burned a decade later by the Germans, an outrage recorded in a letter from Uncle Bronys, the envelope marked with a black cross: death in the family.

  Despite the dust and misgiving, there existed on that journey an air of moving toward. Toward what, it hardly mattered. Ona had been born on the twentieth day of the twentieth century, a good omen to her superstitious Catholic parents. They chose a country that embraced progress as a sacrament. Aldona bribed a border guard, claiming her sick child needed a special type of doctor, a story deliberately elaborate and confusing, Ona wailing on cue. The guard—a rangy teenager—waved them through, a seemingly desperate woman dragging a small girl and a few days’ worth of supplies. Over the border they went, Jurgis secretly entombed beneath the planks of a donkey cart. They reached a city, finally, and a ship, and made the perilous crossing with the words Kimball, Maine pinned to their coats.

  This was their story, pieced together from the tatters of their English, but only now did it feel to Ona like a lived experience. She recalled a lot of coughing, an uneven horizon, a piece of cheese with star prints of mold that her mother nibbled clean before offering little Ona the rest. And long, fretful conversations between her parents, who disdained their cohorts sardined into clammy, flea-ridden quarters. They murmured their dread of losing their papers, their hatred for the Russian army, their relief at having made it this far without detention.