The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  . . .

  She hated getting old. She was sick already but we didn’t know. She creaked along, cranky and stiff-legged and out of charm and yet she expected to be treated like the reincarnation of Cleopatra.

  . . .

  Well, the guide helped us out of the car and we couldn’t guess what he was up to. This was the dullest piece of roadside you ever saw.

  . . .

  Post-and-wire fence and a pasture beyond, same view you see all over Texas, except that here you could see the Gulf of Mexico a few hundred yards away, behind a clutter of wind-beaten houses just begging to be flooded out. Our guide whispered something, but Louise’s ears were gone by then and she couldn’t make him out.

  . . .

  “Fallout.” I thought it was a religious incantation. You never know in Texas. But then we looked where he was looking. We stood there with our mouths open. It was a fallout, all right.

  . . .

  When birds come back all at once, completely tuckered, so spent and parched and hungry they quite literally fall out of the sky. Not many people ever see this, but we did, right there on a dusty Texas roadside.

  . . .

  Hummingbirds! Hummingbirds everywhere! Panting on fence wires. Resting in the grass. Sitting in the dust. One of them lighted on the bill of the guide’s cap and sat there like a jewel. The fellow froze there, hardly breathing, while more hummingbirds appeared, having cleared the perils of the Gulf and spotted their first dry land in five hundred miles. Out of the hundreds of wildflowers on that weedy roadside, not a one was missing a bird, drinking to its heart’s content.

  . . .

  This is the sort of thing Louise invited into my life.

  . . .

  I don’t know how long we stood there. It was like watching the creation of the world, it really was.

  . . .

  Not a miracle—just nature at work. The miracle is that I wasn’t home in my parlor watching The Price Is Right, which is exactly what I would have been doing if the Almighty hadn’t put Louise Grady in a house on Sibley Street in Portland, Maine, a good twenty-plus years after I thought she was gone forever.

  . . .

  They disappeared. As hummingbirds do. Here and gone, like a magic trick. Picture it: one thousand hummingbirds with ruby throats fell out of the blue and straight to us, two old ladies who couldn’t believe their eyes.

  . . .

  Louise was the one who counted. She grabbed my hand and squeezed once for every bird that fell. My hand hurt for days afterward.

  . . .

  No, I liked it. Those hummingbirds seemed like something I dreamed, and the pain helped me remember it was real.

  . . .

  Two years later.

  . . .

  Bone cancer. She moved in with me after a real-estate woman made a bad deal for her house.

  . . .

  I did. I took care of her to the end. Right here in this house. And you know the funny thing?

  . . .

  I had to be quite stern with doctors and insurance men and official wet blankets of all stripes, some of them a hundred times meaner than Mr. Shiny Shoes.

  . . .

  I stood my ground! Then one day it struck me that I’d borrowed Louise’s personality in order to care for her properly. I was the one saying, “No, you listen!” or “That won’t do at all!” I’d waited all my life to stand my ground, and here I was, finally, doing just that.

  . . .

  Exactly like a Eurasian eagle-owl.

  . . .

  In January, just before my eighty-seventh birthday. A lovely snowfall outside, I remember. The kind of day when you’d want to go, if you were ready.

  . . .

  She most certainly wasn’t. Louise kicked and scratched at life until the very end.

  . . .

  I gave her morphine.

  . . .

  It’s a terrible thing, to control the comfort of another human being. She calmed right down, though. I was sitting on the bed next to her, watching her perform a pantomime, which is the effect morphine had on her.

  . . .

  She mimed opening a bottle, pouring wine into an invisible glass, swirling the wine, sipping it. So graceful and precise I could almost taste it.

  . . .

  It was sad, yes, I suppose, but it made me remember how enthralling Louise could be, how unlike this bone-thin creature lying against her pillows, sipping imaginary Chardonnay. Her eyes shone with the morphine, but also, I hope, with the light of her whole life. I was proud to be the one she chose to care for her.

  . . .

  She didn’t say anything. But I said . . .

  . . .

  I said, “Lou, what do you suppose ever became of the Hawkins boy?”

  . . .

  It just popped out. I don’t know why. The snow, I suppose, had put me in mind of Lester Academy, all those dark winter afternoons at my desk.

  . . .

  Nothing. She just lay there in her bed, looking around the room, preparing to go, I suppose. Memorizing the last moments of life. I was deeply moved by this, because she was memorizing a room in my house, where I had cared for her. And loved her.

  . . .

  I did. Very softly.

  . . .

  “I love you, Lou.” Like that.

  . . .

  Her eyes cleared, as keen and haunting as I’d ever seen them.

  . . .

  She said, “Miss Vitkus, that boy was delicious.”

  . . .

  I don’t know exactly. It might have meant nothing. Could have been the morphine talking.

  . . .

  I thought about the boy who’d started the rumor. The cannery boy expelled for lying. I couldn’t even remember his name.

  . . .

  She died that evening and left me, in Louise fashion, sitting in ten kinds of dark. I’d suffered mightily over my Judas kiss, as you know, for years and years.

  . . .

  I thought I’d betrayed a person who had given me so much. For years I mourned. It was hard to make friends because of that. But who was the betrayer?

  . . .

  We’ll never know. I was eighty-seven years old, but I didn’t feel like an old lady until Louise died. She beautified my life, and that’s the truth. In time, I forgot the rest and remembered only that.

  . . .

  Forgiveness is a handsome thing indeed. Eventually I turned her back into Louise of the one thousand hummingbirds.

  . . .

  You?

  . . .

  You’ll be the lovely boy who told my stories.

  Chapter 23

  Every enviable detail of the Mills family compound flared inside a chamber of Quinn’s brain that stored untreatable desire, and he needed a moment, simmering in the rich sunlight of Sylvie’s circular driveway, to absorb its complicated ache.

  Sylvie flung open the door. “Good, you’re here.” She squinted far down the pink-tinged drive. Sylvie was fussy about parking.

  “I hitched a ride,” Quinn told her. “You’re three miles from the bus stop.”

  She looked briefly muddled, as if he’d spoken in tongues. “Come in,” she said, leading him through the house. “The kids are rehearsing.” Her bracelets rattled as she opened a set of French doors on a lurid garden and paved walkway that connected the house to the studio. “I suppose you know it’s been a snark-fest around here,” she said. “Honestly, I’m so mad at those kids I’m spitting nails.” She flashed him an enigmatic grin. “But I had a talk with them last night, and thank God there’s one thing we can agree on.” She pushed open the silently hinged studio door. “You can probably guess.”

  Relief warmed through him like lamplight, soft and golden, for he’d been guessing and second-guessing all day. He followed her into the studio, which was pristinely appointed and smelled of fresh plastic. Large equipment had been intelligently stacked, smaller gear tidied into open cabinets, miles of cable coiled onto color-coded hooks. Scanning t
his bounty, Quinn’s entire history of gear—beginning with the lacquered Marvel amp from his mother—whooshed through his memory in the kind of cinematic flash reported by people snatched just in time from the jaws of death.

  Sylvie gusted into the performance space, empty but for a few chairs gathered on the floor and a fifties-era, butterscotch-blond Telecaster resting in a guitar stand. The boys were gathered at the piano with their backs to him, discussing a marked-up music sheet.

  “Everybody, listen up,” Sylvie said.

  Brandon whirled around. “Hey, it’s Pops!”

  “Hey, Pops! Listen to this!”

  Over Sylvie’s objections, he was being herded to the piano, the boys urging him to listen, listen to this, Pops, you’re gonna love this, Pops, do you think we should record this, Pops, whereupon a quartet of jeweled notes from the boys’ kissed throats ascended a sweet and percolating tide of sound, Brandon and the Jays singing with eyes shut, shoulders thrown back, fingers snapping, Adam’s apples aquiver, Tyler bent over the keys like a monk at prayer.

  Eight bars in, Quinn understood what he was hearing. Howard Stanhope’s unpublished song sluiced down the decades and landed in a flood of harmony, a hybrid of Tin Pan Alley and hallelujah that sounded freshly made, the lilting lament of an unworthy man begging the Lord for a break.

  “Whoa,” Quinn said, genuinely impressed. “You guys have turned into first-class arrangers. When the hell did that happen?”

  As the boys laughed—their faces peach-ripe in the glow of Quinn’s approval—Sylvie zipped the sheet off the piano. “Who wrote this?”

  “The husband of a friend of mine.”

  Ona had called Howard a dreadful songwriter, and she’d been wrong. If the man had lived another few decades—not so long, not really—he could have stood in Quinn’s place and listened to his song and blubbered like a grateful fool.

  “Says here, nineteen nineteen?”

  “She’s a hundred and four. He’s been dead for decades.”

  “Pops thought we’d like it.”

  “It’s old enough to be public domain,” said Sylvie the businesswoman. She glanced at Quinn. “But of course we’ll pay. We’ll draw something up.”

  “We could be, like, conservators,” said one of the Jays. “Like Paul Simon when he brought that music back from Africa.”

  “You’ve got a friend who’s a hundred and four?” Sylvie said.

  “I do.”

  Sylvie peered at him. “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” Quinn said. “Seriously.” He turned to the boys. Was he beaming? Is that what he was doing? “I think old Mr. Stanhope’s been waiting all this time for you guys to show up.”

  “Great, great, they’re musical geniuses,” Sylvie said. “Can we get down to business here?” Despite her diminutive size, she looked entirely capable of wrenching a door from its hinges.

  “I’m listening,” Quinn said, the old-penny taste of adrenaline flooding his tongue.

  The boys, too, came to attention.

  “Here’s the deal,” Sylvie said. “I’m about to board a circus train with these kids and I’m sick and tired of playing ringmaster all by myself.” A collective sigh from her sons and nephews; they’d heard this part already. Sylvie adjusted her bracelets and continued: “Especially when it turns out that my hard-earned counsel and advice count for exactly zip when it comes to the biggest decision of their career.”

  “Aunt Sylvie,” said one of the Jays, “we took a good deal.”

  “You shut up.” Sylvie pointed at him with a lethal-looking fingernail the exact color of fresh blood. His head shrank turtlelike into his collar. “You took a good deal after turning down a great one—a deal I spent weeks finessing.”

  Brandon said, “Mom still thinks faith is a phase.”

  Sylvie shot her son a look that could bend spoons. “Your cousin walked the lane just great and he turned out to be an atheist.”

  Brandon regarded his mother with a lush and layered affection, and in her returning sigh Sylvie, too, betrayed the marshy depths of her love. They were ill matched, mother to sons; and yet here they were, jumbling toward their twining future, come hell or high water or the ten plagues.

  “What exactly did they offer?” Quinn asked.

  “Nothing we want,” Tyler said.

  “They offered you the flippin’ moon.”

  “It’s over, Mom,” Brandon said. “Time to move on.”

  “You are so right, oh, my sage young sons. Oh, my wise young nephews.” She turned again to Quinn. “I have to get their contracts zipped up, a schedule worked out, a thousand little things I don’t want to do alone.” She clenched his arm. “I need somebody I can count on.”

  “You do,” Quinn said.

  “Full-time, ridiculous hours—as you well know—but it’s an opportunity I’m offering, Quinn. I know this sounds like Mom blowing smoke, but these kids are going places.”

  A flood of inner light, a hyperawareness of the fresh equipment, the seamless soundproofing, the spotless gleam on the control-room window. All of it his now, in a way: the performance space with its baby grand, its sleek, armless chairs—

  The chairs. Something wrong about the chairs.

  “We can negotiate your salary,” Sylvie was saying. “You’ll find out I’m a pussycat. For now, all I need to hear is that you’re onboard.”

  As Quinn realized exactly how the chairs were wrong, and what their wrongness signified, Sylvie picked up a clipboard and said, “What do you want for a title? Co-Manager? Operations Supervisor? King of the Road?”

  “Wait,” he said, louder than he meant to. He sat on one of the chairs, noting its careful placement—not random at all, as he’d first thought. Four chairs side by side, one chair set apart, near the Telecaster, which was plugged into a practice amp.

  “Wait for what?” Sylvie said. “This is a promotion. You’re being kicked upstairs.”

  They were preparing to run auditions. For a permanent guitar player. One with a saved soul and—far more important—a sunny, youthful visage that wouldn’t fuck up the cover art. Of course they were running auditions. Of course they were.

  “I’ll call you Commander in Chief if you want,” Sylvie said, begging now.

  But he was a player: he wanted to play. His head began to pound, and an image blazed: Dawna the Supervisor’s tanned arms going spotty and pale, her hard-won muscles deflating over the years. He saw her feeding the sorter decades hence, tagging catalogs for a type of baby shoe yet to be invented. He was the guitar-player equivalent of Dawna: dogged; good at it; replaceable.

  “I need you, Quinn,” Sylvie was saying. “They need you. You’re a stabilizing influence.”

  This seemed, astonishingly, to be so: there they were, four boys, waiting for his answer. Banking not on his musical skills, but his fatherly ones.

  “Quinn! Hello? I’m looking for a yes.”

  If Belle could only hear this: after all this time, in fulfillment of her father’s barbed and oft-repeated wish, Quinn Porter had finally been offered “something in management.” Quinn briefly considered dangling Howard Stanhope’s song as bait—an exchange, a barter. But he didn’t want to be the man in Howard’s song, the guy who rued his trespasses against the Almighty but still retained the gall to put in a request. He wanted to be the man who was that man’s opposite. He wanted to be—God help him—Ted Ledbetter.

  “You’re our only choice, Quinn,” Sylvie said. “We agreed to keep it in the family.”

  “I’m not family, Sylvie.”

  “Close enough,” she said, followed by a mollifying rumble of agreement from the boys. Not boys, men: four young men rock-solid in their hearts. Gone were the teenagers whom he’d once advised to untuck their shirts. As Quinn had been darting from gig to gig in a wheezing rush, they’d kept their eyes on a prize of their own design. Four tortoises to his hare. The knowledge came to him like a voice from the burning bush: he admired them.

  “It’s me, isn’t it?” Sylvie said.
“I know I’m a bitch on wheels, I know that. You don’t want to work with me.”

  “Actually, Sylvie, I like you.” He liked that she got up every single morning and set herself on fire.

  “The job comes with health insurance. I’ll add your wife and kids.”

  “I don’t have a wife and kids.”

  “Oh.” She blinked at him. “I thought you did.”

  Quinn got up from the audition chair, vainly checking his pockets for aspirin. His first task as Resurrection Lane’s commander in chief would be to hire a guitar player. For the foreseeable future—the first foreseeable future of his life, really—he’d be watching from the wings, no longer playing and instead being played for. A foreseeable future of rehearsals and recording sessions and road trips, making suggestions and schedules and plans and money but not music.

  “Say yes,” Sylvie said. “Put me out of my misery.”

  “Yes.”

  A cheer rose up, a rushing in his ears like applause. Tyler and Brandon and the Jays high-fived as Sylvie jumped up and down and shrieked like a girl. An immoderate round of hugs, handshakes, and back-pats followed, along with a sensation of being cracked open. Quinn felt—there was no other word that came to him—loved.

  An hour later, he hitched a ride back to town with the driver of a laundry truck, Howard’s chummy melody looping through his head, the hummable pleasure of it cheering him unexpectedly. Howard, he thought, I’ll put in a good word with your lady. He was let off at the corner of Sibley, where he loped toward Ona’s dead end, intending to tell his friend that decades after the mortal end of his tortured life, Howard Stanhope had risen again to make a thing of beauty.

  The melody followed him and he matched his stride to its rhythm, recognizing all at once the “glittering girl” so ill used by the repenter in Howard’s song. He could see her grace, her dimples, her cherrywood hair. Howard, he thought, I’ve got your back, buddy.

  In her driveway was parked a familiar van, which released in him a baffling gush of jealousy. As he was deciphering its meaning—like a lover’s pique, though it couldn’t be—he noted that Ted had parked in a slapdash, un-Ledbetterly fashion; that Belle’s car was there, too; and that a small knot of neighbors had gathered ominously near the porch.