The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  She had looked this way on the night before the boy’s third birthday, sitting Quinn down in their darkened house after he’d dragged in from a gig and set down his gear. “This wasn’t my idea of family life,” she said to him, snapping on a lamp. “Loneliness was the last thing I expected.” It was one of those moments in which clocks seem to stop ticking. “I’d rather do this by myself,” she said, “than feel resentful all the time. I’d rather have you be actually absent than virtually absent.”

  Bleary from an hour’s drive on rainy roads, he fished the night’s take from his pocket. “I’m making a living,” he said. “I’m holding up my end.”

  “We need more than a living,” she whispered. “We need a life.”

  He wanted his bed, his wife’s warm body laid against his, and two or three hours of oblivion before being woken by their son, who was fearful of insects and dust bunnies and bulky coats and the color yellow. Every morning was the same: the same tremolo of panic scaling the octaves as Belle bolted out of bed and Quinn woke to a head rush of adrenaline.

  “I thought we’d rise to the occasion a little better than we have,” she said. But of course Belle had risen to the occasion. If there were a theoretical maximum height to which a person could rise to an occasion, Belle had reached it; she had scaled the craggy summit of occasion through icy winds, in bare feet, pursued by wolves.

  “What?” Quinn said, alarmed by her expression. “Wait.” Words harbored myriad meanings and he was a poor interpreter. He felt swimmy and cockeyed, though he’d been sober since the day the boy entered the world. Their son: fifth percentile in height and weight but bright to the point of unease, completing puzzles made for ten-year-olds and copying words out of books. Belle’s aunts, who baby-sat in shifts, dotingly claimed that he wore them out just by existing.

  “Here’s what I want,” she said now, unfolding a piece of paper. It looked like a long list. “I want you to fix the fence,” she began. “I want you to like getting up early. I want you to take us to the park on Saturdays. I want you to quit gigging.” She paused. “I want you to act like you love us.” Her voice took on a harmonic understory, the sound of an old, wooden instrument, the same plangent voice in which she’d first revealed her pregnancy. She’d missed a pill—an unconscious act of will, they decided later—but at the time she could not fathom how such a thing had come to pass. Now that it has, though, it’s ours to embrace. Then, as now, she’d emanated a slow burn of core belief. You don’t have to marry me, Quinn. A lot of guys wouldn’t.

  “There’s a studio starting up in Cambridge,” he said carefully. “I know the guy.”

  Belle shut her eyes.

  “No, Belle, listen, he’s looking for session players.” He took her hands. “We wouldn’t have to move. I’ll commute.”

  “Oh, Quinn.” Belle sighed and covered her eyes. “All this was fine for us once. I liked getting sucked down the rabbit holes. But that was before.”

  “Belle, listen—”

  “I loved your music,” she said. “I thought—” She folded her hands on the cottony lap of her nightgown, where her list of requests made an ominous crackle.

  “You thought what?”

  “I believed you. I believed it all.”

  Her use of the past tense flooded him with grief. He flashed to her dorm room after his gig with the Benders in the quad, Belle a girl of nineteen, her walls pulsating with abstracts framed in pine. “I thought I wanted something different,” she added softly. “I wish I could have wanted something different. Really, Quinn, I do. But it turns out I want the same things everybody else wants.” Her voice retained that timbre, that wearified resonance. A voice made for singing, except that Belle couldn’t carry a tune. He loved this about her: to Belle, all music was a miracle.

  He said, “I wish I could’ve wanted something different, too.”

  “What I want”—she looked at him—“is another baby.”

  “Oh. No. Oh, Belle. I can’t.”

  She nodded solemnly. “I know.”

  A small clang went off in his head. “There isn’t—is there someone else?”

  “No,” she said. But he heard: Not yet.

  He’d married her when to do otherwise would have been easier—proof, as if he needed it, that he loved her. He’d claimed their child. He hadn’t blamed her for the missed pill. This slender sign of his own decency—his hope that he wasn’t a lot of guys—guided him through their parting. There were ultimatums and slip-backs; long, anguished nights of lovemaking; promises made and broken; and many tears; but in the end Belle’s heartfelt list amounted to one impossible task: become somebody else.

  When finally he took to the road, he vowed to do just that, become somebody else, like the gold rushers and stake claimers of the American West who chased the horizon and sent their money back home. He’d establish a presence in a good studio, become the flexible journeyman, the musician’s musician, the go-to guy who showed up in liner notes and album credits. He’d prove to her how worthy was his dream.

  The legal dissolution reached him in Chicago, where he read all the fine-printed paragraphs, every whereas reminding him of their history, so intricately woven it could be sundered only by force of law. Five years later, when he married her again—Because I missed you, Quinn, and sons need fathers—he said “I do” with such force and volume it made her laugh out loud.

  But he meant it, that second “I do,” even with his mysterious son standing by—staring, listening, counting something unknowable on his bonelike fingers. Was the boy counting Quinn’s thoughts? Is that what he was counting?

  He’d felt like a bulldog presented to a boy who had asked for a parakeet.

  Did he try hard enough? He thought he did. A year later, numbed by a job assembling sound systems at Best Buy, Quinn was suffering the old, awful, needling itch of restlessness and Belle was talking once again about babies. His fingers ached from not playing, and the plodding months had dulled his shiny wish to restore Belle’s happiness.

  “He likes to list things,” he ventured one night, washing the dishes as she dried. “Is that unusual?” For weeks he’d kept the question unasked, but it blundered out unbidden, spoiling their tableau of domestic calm.

  Belle shrugged. “One, two, three were his first words.” The words had not come till the boy turned four, one of countless troubling details Quinn had strung together since his return.

  Amy, visiting for the long weekend, chimed in then: “They call it personality, Quinn.” She tore off a piece of homemade gingerbread and offered it as compensation for trumping him, but his hands were wet and he refused it.

  Carefully, he said, “It’s just that the other kids don’t seem so—” He stopped, regrouped. “I wonder if there might be a concern. Some possible—concern.”

  Belle continued scrubbing, though her body showed she was listening. “What do you mean by ‘concern’?” she asked, confirming his belief that she planned to transmit information in orchestrated stages for fear of derailing the family reunion. His dismay was tempered by the pride he felt in reading her so well between the lines.

  “One, he stares,” Quinn said, using his fingers to make an additional, not-heretofore-mentioned point. “Two, his arms don’t move when he walks.”

  Belle was watching him now, holding a filigreed saucer. She’d taken to serving coffee in old-fashioned vessels, which struck him as an overreach.

  “He doesn’t move like other kids,” he went on. “His arms just sort of stay—put. Straight down. At his sides. Like somebody tied him up.”

  Belle’s forehead crinkled. “Are you—you’re not making fun of him?”

  “No! God, no, Belle. I’m being a, an involved father.” He shot a panicked glance at Amy. “I don’t have experience with kids”—an eye roll from Amy here—“so I don’t know what’s normal and what . . . isn’t.”

  Silence.

  “Three,” he said, “it’s like there’s a tape recorder in his head. If he hears something wrong t
he first time—somebody’s name, say—it sticks there, like it’s on a tape loop and can’t be overdubbed with the correct information.” He’d dug his hole now and decided to keep digging. “It just seems like there might be a couple of areas of concern. Possible—areas. In his social development or whatever.”

  “His vocabulary blows the doors off those other kids,” Amy said.

  “I know, he does, he has a great vocabulary. Stupendous vocabulary.” He didn’t understand where the boy got his words, or the often elaborate syntax into which he inserted them. “But, okay, how about the way he calls his teacher Mr. Linkman? I’ve corrected him fifty times, but he still says Mr. Linkman. I mean, he knows that the sixteenth president of the United States was Abraham Lincoln. He can tell you all about Lincoln’s childhood home and Lincoln’s wife’s name and what play Lincoln was watching the night he was shot and the names of the men who made up the Lincoln cabinet and who built the Lincoln Memorial, but he still insists on calling his teacher Mr. Linkman.”

  Belle and Amy exchanged deflatingly knowing glances. “Maybe that’s because his teacher’s name is Mr. Linkman,” Belle said. “Andy Linkman.” The women burst into laughter, and the sustained tension of the conversation reached a chordal resolve that came as a relief to all.

  “Gosh, Quinn,” Amy said, “it’s like you’ve got a tape recorder in your head.”

  “Leave him alone,” Belle said amiably. “I like a man who worries.”

  “Obviously that was a bad example.” But there were others: the boy called grasshoppers grasshornets. He called boundary bondery, gratitude grabitude.

  The women laughed again, especially Amy. He let her have her moment—it was part of his campaign to be a better person—then said, “What I’m saying is that no matter how many times he sees or hears the word grasshopper, he’s going to say grasshornet. And I’m wondering—if you don’t mind, Amy—if that might be a problem. I’m wondering, as a concerned father.”

  Belle stiffened. “There’s nothing wrong with him.”

  “You’re not listening,” he said, geared up now for no reason he could rationally name. “Can’t his teachers help him?”

  “I don’t know, Quinn. Why don’t you march on down to his school, if you can find it, and ask Mr. Lincoln? If you think you’re in over your head, tell me now.”

  The moment, it seemed, had come. For a year and a half now he’d been watchful, his questions cautiously posed and artfully dodged as the boy went about his mystifying business. “I’m asking, all right?” he said. “As his father. He’s in his room right now, doing what? Counting shoelaces or memorizing world bowling scores or arranging two hundred blank CDs into an indecipherable pattern or writing unexplainable items on a list. Why doesn’t he have friends? Why the hell does he count everything?”

  Amy sat up. What CDs? her eyes asked. What do you mean, no friends? Belle returned a look of helpless indignation. Did she decide to consider medication then? Right here, when Quinn intimated that the boy was damaged and Amy sat up, noticing?

  “He’s just who he is,” Belle said, facing them both. “Our own funny little boy.” Which was exactly the right thing to say—quintessential Belle. In one exquisitely calibrated sentence, she managed to round them up as a trio, beefing up Amy’s responsibility while diffusing Quinn’s.

  Later that night, while Belle saw to the boy’s elaborate bedtime ritual—ten sips of water, ten fluffs of the pillow, ten deep breaths—Quinn confided to Amy, “Shouldn’t a nine-year-old kid be on a baseball team?”

  “He’s in Scouts.”

  “But he can’t name a single other kid in the troop.” Quinn had taken him to a den meeting that very morning, a humbling exercise wherein he watched Ted Ledbetter, his unbeknownst future rival, demonstrate his skill with children. “You don’t think that’s strange, Amy? From a list maker? That he can’t name one kid in his troop?”

  They were drinking Scotch in the living room—or, Amy was drinking Scotch; Quinn had a Sprite. “Actually,” Amy said, “what’s strange is that you told him fifty times that his teacher’s name was Mr. Lincoln, and he knew it wasn’t, and he didn’t correct you.”

  Quinn took a long, unproductive guzzle of his fake drink.

  “He’s afraid of you, Quinn. You have to try harder.” She set down her own drink, which quivered alluringly. “Sisterly advice? Belle thinks you never bonded with your own child, and whether or not that’s true”—here she paused significantly—“making judgments about his basic and unchangeable nature just adds fuel to the fire.”

  Quinn despised the word bonded, which reminded him of liability insurance, and he suspected Amy of using it to goad him. But she was a little drunk, and they were otherwise getting along, so he gave her a pass.

  “He’s not an easy kid to bond with.”

  “What could be easier?” she said, without rancor. “He’s a beautiful, beautiful child,” she said. “I love him.” Then she faced him with an expression so unguarded, so achingly helpless, that he couldn’t muster the guts to hold her gaze.

  Belle and Ted were waiting for his answer. He sensed the party of high schoolers watching from their corner booth.

  “I’ve never been in a wedding,” Ona twittered. “No one has ever once asked me.”

  “I wanted to get married at home,” Ted said, “but this’ll be just fine. Just perfect.” He turned to his bride-to-be, unable to hide his bafflement. “My mother and the boys will be disappointed, though.”

  “We’ll have a party eventually,” Belle said. “Maybe even another ceremony.” She slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow exactly as she’d once done with Quinn.

  Oh, God, Quinn thought. She loves the guy. And why wouldn’t she? Ted Ledbetter wanted a real wedding in which he rounded up his creaky mother and charming sons and all of Troop 23 and the other teachers at King Middle School and the women who’d known his angelic late wife; he wanted to assemble on a beach to proclaim his love over the music of gulls and cellos, but because Belle could not bear a meeting of dearly beloved—not now, maybe not ever—he’d agreed to repeat a few boilerplate phrases after a pokerfaced Vermont town clerk. He was committing to the crushed remnants of the woman he loved, to a lawsuit that would take years, to a sister-in-law who would engage him in a lifelong border dispute, to a father-in-law who would chew him up so hard there’d be no need to swallow.

  Quinn tried to marshal his envy and resentment; instead, he dredged up a surprise: awe.

  “It won’t take five minutes,” Belle said.

  He couldn’t smile. “I’d be delighted.”

  Ted edged in, smelling of peppermint, wearing the same shirt from the day before, a far cry from the wedding coat he’d likely kept for months in a dry-cleaning bag. “She won’t regret me, Quinn, I promise.”

  Quinn didn’t doubt it, much as he longed to. Ted was the kind of man Belle should have married in the first place. “Goddamn it,” he said under his breath, “let’s just go.”

  Ona got up. “I’m hardly presentable to attend a wedding, much less participate.”

  “Neither am I,” said the besotted Ted, “but try and stop me.”

  The overfilled bouquet turned out to be two separate bundles, one of which he presented to Ona. “For the matron of honor.” His smile lengthened and he seemed to relax, his happiness at last immune to Quinn’s presence, to the functional ceremony, to his closest kin being two states away.

  “I accept,” Ona said, as if her hand were the one he wanted. Quinn shot her a punishing glare for so fluidly switching sides, but she merely opened her eyes wider, silently urging him to rise to the occasion.

  “Good luck, you guys!” called one of the high schoolers, a girl in a pink baseball cap.

  Quinn paid the bill and Ona took his arm as if they were in an official wedding party. Mac Cosgrove had always admonished Quinn to associate with “goal setters.” Well, he was escorting one out to the car this very minute; she’d freshened her lipstick and smelled very nice.


  “You’re a gentleman,” she informed him as he ferried her through the grease-printed doors. “You’re doing the gentlemanly thing.”

  Despite her age, her infirmity, her lack of physical wiles, she managed to float on his arm in Belle’s red blouse like the girl she must once have been, and her attentions flattered him. He found them improbably welcome. She looked up at him as if appraising a gem; the least he could do was stand up for the bride and try his best to shine.

  PART FOUR

  Draugas (Friend)

  * * *

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

  . . .

  We were talking about Louise. And that awful rumor. Louise first landed on my doorstep very shortly thereafter.

  . . .

  I think it was October. Couldn’t have been winter yet. But all the same I recollect her arrival as a wintry one, her cheeks afire with cold. Seems like a January night in my mind, now; the air had that midwinter crackle. You know that feeling, like the air might break?

  . . .

  Well. Weather was different back then. I’d just made one of my favorite suppers, and suddenly there was Louise Grady at my door.

  . . .

  Meat pie, with fried cabbage on the side. The secret is caraway, if you ever take a notion.

  . . .

  It’s a seed. Possibly I had my mother in mind. She’d died over the summer and Papa had passed long before that. But until the summer of 1955 Mama was living on Wald Street, ninety-one years old and still minding her parsnips. She dropped right there in her garden on a hot July day, which struck me even at the time as an easeful way to go.

  . . .

  All those growing things must soften the blow, don’t you think? A dressy row of carrots calling, “Don’t be afraid! It smells marvelous under here!”

  . . .

  I know. Funny. So, there’s Louise and her fiery cheeks in October. I invited her in for supper—couldn’t very well avoid it, since she was standing there with a clear enough intention.