The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  Viktor stole the butterfly and sold it for a nickel. She wished now that she’d hidden it, secreted it away for all these decades; she’d like to have given it to the boy. Perhaps it had been meant for him all along, for the spilling-over joy with which he’d have received it. And named it. And counted it. And kept it. No one she had ever known would have loved it more.

  “Nothing fits,” she called through the door. “I’ll just have to wait.”

  Silence. “Do you want to borrow a nightgown?”

  Time stretched and contracted; a flowery garment floated down over her head; she felt her arms being worked through silken straps. “You must have been a good mother,” she remembered saying, before waking up in overstarched sheets, a Styrofoam cup of tea at her bedside. Belle was at the door, speaking to Quinn, who hovered just outside. Someone else, too: in the fog of waking Ona thought she recognized the sturdy corporeal architecture of the scoutmaster.

  “I don’t want trouble,” someone was saying. Ona sat up, her normal clarity returning. She pulled the sheets over the slithery folds of Belle’s nightgown. Yes, indeed: Mr. Ted Ledbetter, in the flesh.

  “What’s going on?” Ona said. “Why are all these men in our room?”

  “Stop it,” Belle said, and slammed the door. Outside, the men’s voices rose and fell, fighting over a woman who wore butterflies on her backside. Ona fell back against the pillows, which had been fluffed—by Belle, presumably—into a virtual meringue. “For crumbsake,” she said, “are they planning a duel?”

  “Amy told Ted where we were staying,” Belle said. “Otherwise, he’d still be driving around Granyard looking for your car.” She sat heavily on Ona’s bed and stared at her little pink phone. “He would have searched forever. For me.” Her hair hung in defeated hanks from her translucent skull, and she had on the clothes she’d been sweating in all day—all week, more likely. Ona felt a brief, blade-thin twinge of maternal alarm, a pang she hadn’t experienced in well over half a century.

  “So,” Belle said. “You thought he had your birth certificate. That’s all it was?”

  Ona didn’t know what to do with fragile people; she’d spent so much of her life around bullies. “Laurentas did beautifully without me for nine decades,” she said, “and to think otherwise is to shoehorn me into the wrong story.”

  “Larry has six children,” Belle said. “Four daughters, two sons.”

  “I recall that,” Ona said.

  “You have a great-great-great-grandchild.” She paused. “Why weren’t you thrilled to see him? Why weren’t you upside down with joy?”

  “You didn’t know Maud-Lucy,” Ona said. “A man with such a mother doesn’t go looking for another one.”

  “I’m not talking about Maud-Lucy.”

  “Well, I am.” All those letters, full of fib and blandishment. Not a word about the fire. And not one flittering peep about keeping Laurentas’s origins a secret.

  She jimmied herself up in the bed, pulling the covers with her. “It won’t surprise you to know that I was a distracted mother, even an unwilling one. I was touchy and cross and too young and impatient much of the time. My boys were such a handful, I didn’t have a single girlfriend, I’d married a man far too old for me and hated being his wife. Howard had delusions that weighed too much for our family.”

  “That part sounds like Quinn.”

  “Quinn is an optimist. Howard was crazy. For that I blame President Wilson. But my point: Mother of the Year I wasn’t.” When the telegram arrived about Frankie, her first thought was: I deserve this. “I wasn’t like you,” she said. “Your boy was lucky.” She added, “If it makes you feel any better, I did love the sons I raised.”

  For a time, neither of them spoke. The room smelled of their own bodies and ancient applications of carpet cleaner.

  “I don’t honestly believe he’s gone,” Belle said. “I keep hoping he’s here someplace, that he’s only hiding from me.” Slowly, reverently, in surrender and exhaustion, she pressed her unlined forehead to Ona’s age-pebbled chest.

  Without a single thought otherwise, Ona petted this weak and suffering soul the way she’d once petted Frankie. Before the army made a man of him—a dead man, it turned out, but Howard thought the boys needed beefing up.

  “During the Battle of Saipan,” Ona murmured, “my Frankie’s job was to pull other boys from the tides. Boys who churned up and then fell apart in his hands. The very same shipmates he liked so well. His job was to remove their dog tags, weight down their remains in loops of chain, and return them to the seas.”

  “My God,” Belle whispered.

  “Twenty years old and his paid employment for the United States Navy was to wrap other mothers’ sons in chains. How did my son manage a job like that? How does any son?”

  She leaned back against the pillow and Belle leaned with her, her head heavy now against Ona’s chest. Ona understood, after all these years, that as much as she’d loved Frankie, she’d have loved a daughter more.

  “Howard suffered something awful after Frankie was killed,” she said. “I remember he bought a toy jeep from Binny Morris at the Forest Avenue five-and-dime. Might have been one of your father’s jeeps, now that I think of it, a pot-metal replica of the type of jeep Frankie had joy-ridden to his death. A morbid, infantile purchase, I always thought. He kept it on the mantel even though the sight of it gave me the woozies. That’s when I decided to go back to secretarial school on the sly, just in case.”

  Belle’s breathing had steadied. Perhaps she was asleep.

  “You know,” Ona said, “I’ve always had the strangest feeling. As if I was there with Frankie. Not when he died. When he did his job, returning some poor child to the deep. I can almost see it happening, like a vision or a daydream, as if I’m standing right there next to my son as he performs this unpardonable task.” She ran her hand gently over Belle’s thin back, the tiny knobs of her spine.

  “I’m so sorry,” Belle whispered. “So sorry.”

  “It takes about a year,” Ona confided, “to get shut of that shocked-up feeling.”

  “I can’t last a year,” Belle said. “I really can’t.” She went very quiet, and Ona continued to caress her, withholding the news that the second year would be harder than the first. Instead, she whispered, “Sha, sha, sha,” her mother’s old, soothing chant.

  The men’s voices had quieted, but they were still out there, warring blocs of testosterone radiating from the other side of the door. Why, she wondered, at this late date, had the Almighty deigned to drag her back into the fray? She’d been doing fine on her own. Just jim-dandy. Then he sent that boy, setting into motion a fireworks of possibility—that long-dead sensation of possibility—that she was simply too old to accommodate. And now this: where in her dwindling, circumscribed life was she to store this sweet, pitiful little draggletail who reminded her of things she’d rather forget?

  “My friends have been so good,” Belle said suddenly, lifting her head. “But they all have kids, and they hold on so tight. To their kids, I mean. They don’t even know they’re doing it. Tight-tight-tight. Right in front of me, like sudden death is contagious. There but for the grace of God, you know?” She took a long, juddering breath. “He took up hardly any space. Ted’s boys, they leave everything everywhere. Finished with the sandwich, the sneakers, the math book, the backpack, drop it on the floor, in the yard, under the bed, let Dad get it later. My son wasn’t like that. I pretended it was me. My shimmering influence. But, you know, it was just him. The way he was.” She sat fully upright, crossing her hands over her heart. “Every day, I wake up stunned. I have this coil of ill will that stuns me, I want everyone to know how I feel, but there’s only one way to know. And I want them to know anyway. Even though there’s only one way.” Her face flinched but no tears came. “Do you know how I feel?”

  “Yes,” Ona said. “I never knew Laurentas and I make no apology for that. It was my Frankie I wanted returned to me, my best and most beloved.”

&
nbsp; Belle regarded Ona for a long moment. “You would have liked me,” she said at last. “I was a nice person.” She tried to smile. “Ask anyone.”

  The men had started up again—an argument that Ona couldn’t quite make out. How bracing it must be, she thought, to be so zealously sought after. One of them was tapping at the door but Belle ignored it. Meilė, Ona thought. Love.

  “Your boy gave me a present,” Ona said.

  Belle leaned in. “What?”

  “My mother tongue,” Ona said. “From the moment I laid eyes on him, it’s been coming back. Dribs and drabs. I can’t explain it, unless he had some magic up his sleeve.”

  “He was made of magic.” Belle gave Ona’s hand a squeeze. “This tea’s for you.”

  Ona had given her next to nothing, but as Belle moved through the soulless little cell toward the tap-tapping door, the room all but brimmed with her gratitude.

  When she opened her eyes again, it was dark.

  “How long was I out?” she asked Belle, who sat cross-legged on the other bed. She looked as if she, too, had gotten a little sleep.

  “About three hours. It’s nine o’clock.” She flicked on a lamp.

  “Are my clothes dry?” Ona’s humiliation burned afresh: to have piddled like an untrained poodle in front of a young woman with a candy-pink bladder that could hold through a hurricane!

  Belle turned her back as Ona dislodged herself from the flimsy nightgown and reclaimed her clothes. Her blouse was irredeemable so she took the shirt Belle had offered her earlier, red with little gold buttons. It smelled wonderful and looked so unlike anything she’d ever worn that it recalled the spirit of adventure with which she’d embarked on the long-ago beginning of this day.

  “Is Mr. Ledbetter still here?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Belle said. “I’ve been sitting here, thinking.” She picked up a pen from the phone table and shook it to get the ink started. “I’m going to help you.”

  “I don’t need any help.”

  “Oh, I think you do.” She waved the pen momentously, her mood thoroughly transformed. “I can help you get your world record.” Her expression filled with light. No wonder men dueled for her attentions. “Quinn didn’t tell you where I work?”

  “You’re a librarian. You work, I presume, in a library.”

  “I work at the state archives, and if there’s one thing on this earth I’m good at, it’s tracking down information.”

  “That may very well be,” Ona said, her hope redoubling despite herself, “but you can’t get blood from a turnip.”

  “Too true,” Belle said. The very air around her appeared to change color. “But you can get blood from a census.”

  Ona’s stomach did a little kerflop as a bright image plummeted into her head: A young man at her mother’s door. Suit and tie. Hair like a lit match. Maud-Lucy pattering down the stairs to translate, holding up her skirt to avoid tripping.

  “Maine’s census dates back to the seventeen hundreds,” Belle said. She grabbed a notepad printed with the motel’s filigreed logo. “Unless you were born before that, we’re in business.” She was writing now. “Where did you say you grew up?”

  Ona stood up. Belle’s blouse fit her beautifully. “Kimball, Maine.”

  “And when did you arrive there?”

  “Nineteen-oh-four. I was four years old.”

  “It’s amazing how much time some people get,” Belle said, lifting her pen. “I mean, there’s no rhyme or reason.”

  Her tone was ponderous, private, hard to read. Perhaps she expected Ona to blurt something along the lines of wishing she’d died in the boy’s place. She wanted to believe she’d have agreed, had God asked, but in her secret heart she knew otherwise. It wasn’t that she was selfish, or indifferent. Just too full of her own wants. She wanted to see her hydrangeas bloom come fall. To vote in another presidential election. To see the end of this war. And to find her name in a record book. She preferred life to death, that’s all. Most people did.

  “What was your address?”

  “Wald Street. We didn’t have street numbers.”

  “Your parents?”

  Another downpour of words inside her head, words upon words, and then: Aš esu lietuvis! I am Lithuanian! This was her father’s voice, a muffling despair from behind a shut door.

  Then, nothing but the beaded sound of pen on paper. Timidly, she asked, “A census is one doc.” She was thinking: Who am I? Who am I, really? “I need three.”

  “Were your sons born in Kimball?”

  “There’s no record for Laurentas with my name on it. But Randall and Frankie, they were born in Portland.”

  Belle said, “Birth certificates record the mother’s age.”

  Ona felt as if room 114 of the Apple Country Motor Court had just turned into a magic carpet; she experienced an agreeable sensation of flight. “I’m quite grateful,” she said.

  “Ditto.” Belle jotted a final note and dropped the works into her satchel. “Let’s grant that beautiful boy his dream come true.”

  Just then came another soft tapping on the door. Belle got up, futilely swiping a hand through her uncombed hair. “Ted and I are spending the night elsewhere.” She turned around. “Unless—”

  “I don’t need a minder.”

  “Quinn’s here, anyway,” Belle said.

  “I don’t need a minder of any type.”

  Belle opened the door, and in stepped the scoutmaster, looking hale as a new recruit despite his unbroken hours in the car. Behind him, at the approximate distance one dog would keep from a rival dog, Quinn leaned against a porch stay, glowering. “You all right in there, Ona?” he called. His voice knifed through the warm evening air, straight to her fast-ticking heart.

  “Of course I’m all right,” she announced to one and all. “For crumbsake, why wouldn’t I be?”

  Ona followed Belle and Mr. Ledbetter outside, where Belle sliced Quinn with a new expression: sympathy, perhaps, or whatever else floated in the watery unsayable between two long-connected people.

  “We’ll be back in the morning,” Belle said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “Quinn can drive me home.”

  Mr. Ledbetter said, “His license expired. Or something.”

  “I bought it back,” Quinn said. “Ona wouldn’t care even if I hadn’t.”

  “Not a whit,” she agreed, pleased to take sides. It had been so long since she’d embroiled herself in the business of human striving that she embraced all of it, even the parts that broke her heart.

  “Are you going, or not?” Quinn said.

  Mr. Ledbetter teetered with indecision. “We’ll come back in the morning,” he said. “Belle and I can follow behind, so if something happens”—here he zeroed in on Ona, with touching sincerity—“we can take you with us, Mrs. Vitkus.”

  “I don’t need a goddamn police escort, Ted,” Quinn told him. “Take your girlfriend and go.”

  The scoutmaster massaged his temples, not with rancor but with the resignation of a troop leader whose charges keep tripping up. “Mrs. Vitkus—”

  “I mean it, Ted. Go find a B&B with pineapples on the curtains. Go relate.”

  “Quinn, don’t be an ass,” Belle said. She patted Ona’s arm. “You’re okay with this?”

  “Perfectly,” she said, switching sides again. “Get yourself some sleep in that nice man’s arms.”

  “I don’t like to leave you stranded, Mrs. Vitkus,” that nice man said now. She’d refused the new boy—I can manage just fine in the summer—but resolved now to accept the Scout he brought come fall, no matter how objectionable the specimen.

  “She’s not stranded, Ted,” Quinn snapped. “Jesus Christ, you see me standing here, right?”

  “I’m not stranded, Mr. Ledbetter,” Ona said. “Merely afield of my usual haunts.”

  Belle headed off toward the van, then turned back. “Feed her,” she said—to Quinn, presumably. “Last time she ate was in Keene.” It was fully night now, and she
disappeared into it.

  “All right, then,” the scoutmaster said to Ona. “I guess . . .”

  “She’s fine, Ted. Go.”

  At last Ted Ledbetter turned to Quinn, his presumed rival. From a young woman’s point of view it wasn’t much of a contest, and in Belle’s red blouse Ona gauged the men as Belle might have. Quinn: vaguely dangerous-looking, tall and slouchy, the lines on his face hard earned. Mr. Ledbetter: safe as gingerbread in his polo shirt and puckered elbows, a gangling Honest Abe, a guileless, wifeless family man in search of a family.

  He turned to Quinn now, without malice. “I loved your son,” he said. He betrayed not a pin drop of irony. This was no dogfight. This was a cry from a suffering man, and Quinn seemed to know it, so he backed down, thoroughly disarmed.

  Mr. Ledbetter walked quietly away. They watched him get into his van and join the sparse line of traffic headed back toward the town of Granyard.

  “You hungry?” Quinn asked. “The restaurant looks passable.”

  “I could eat.” In truth, she was ravenous. Her run at immortality, doomed by a house fire, had been resurrected by an unstrung woman who’d horned in on her road trip. How could it be that Ona Vitkus, after so many years alone, had been netted by the maneuverings of lovers and interlopers, tangled into their grief and envy and clumsy efforts at peace? And oh, weren’t they a show: their puzzling wants, their cross-purposes, their own mundane, ticking-down minutes.

  * * *

  This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life memories and shards on tape. This is Part Six.

  Go ahead. You pick one.

  . . .

  The Roaring Twenties? Let me see those. The Jazz Age? The Great Depression? I see where this is going. If you’re looking for a history of the twentieth century you’re better off with a textbook. Or a man. Tell your Mr. Whoozinwhat that people don’t live in capital letters.