The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  He broke into a run, sprinted up the walk, and took the steps by twos, calling her name.

  Chapter 24

  He found her upstairs, tucked ghostlike into her bed.

  “Ona,” he said. Helpless, overcome. “Oh, God.”

  “Shh,” Belle said, putting up a hand to block his way, but Ted moved aside to make a path.

  “What happened?” he said. “What happened?”

  “She’s okay, Quinn,” Ted said. “Paramedics just left.”

  “Ona, hey,” Quinn whispered, drawing nearer. Her eyes were closed, her face motionless but oddly rosy, the way people sometimes looked in their coffins.

  “You’ll pardon me if I keep my eyes shut,” she murmured. “I’m going to sleep.”

  “No, no,” he pleaded. “You have to get your license record.” He peered into the mystery of her face. “Not to mention the long-life one. Think of Madame What’s-Her-Name. Madame French Lady.”

  She opened her eyes, perfectly alert. “Not the big sleep, you goose. I need a nap.”

  “Oh,” he said, caught short by joy. “Sure. Okay, Ona. Take a nap.”

  “I was taking a nap,” she said. “You woke me with your caterwauling.”

  “Excuse me for being sorry you were dead.”

  “I wasn’t dead.”

  “Well, I know that now.”

  “Jeanne Louise Calment.”

  “What?”

  “Her name is Jeanne Louise Calment,” Ona said. “The French lady whom I plan to best in the game of life.”

  He glanced back at Ted and Belle, who appeared to find this amusing.

  “Your lady and the scoutmaster have been here for hours,” Ona said. “I’ve known only one other librarian well, and as a result, this level of generosity has somewhat laid me flat.”

  It was then he noticed the tea cooling on her nightstand, the industriously fluffed pillow, the clean nightgown. These signs of care made him careful. He wanted to be generous—not to appear generous, but to be so.

  He knelt and took her hands, which were warm and bumpy. “There’s something—” He turned to Ted, made eye contact. “Can I have a moment?”

  Ted ushered Belle downstairs as Quinn tightened his grip on Ona’s hands. “There’s something you have to know,” he said. “About Howard.”

  “Howard who?”

  “Howard your husband. Howard Stanhope. Songwriter Howard.”

  “Howard wrote dreadful songs.”

  “No, he didn’t, Ona. He didn’t.”

  Her green eyes narrowed on him. “What on earth are you going on about?”

  “I just heard one of his songs, the one you gave me. The God Squad did a kick-ass arrangement, Ona, wait’ll you hear it.”

  “The religious boys? They liked it?”

  “Loved it,” he said. “But here’s the thing, Ona. Howard wrote that song for you.” Quinn had never been more sure of anything. “I think he wrote all his songs for you, Ona, for young and lovely you.”

  “Now you’re talking foolish.”

  “He wrote them for you, and you refused them because he didn’t know how to give them to you.” How could he, living his shadow of a life, floundering in the sludge of grief and failure?

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Listen to me,” he said. “You’re the glittering girl with the cherrywood hair. You’re the angel’s breath and sunlight.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She sat up crossly, her tufted hair seeming to quiver. “Quinn Porter,” she said, “I never took you for a romantic.”

  “Howard Stanhope loved you,” he declared. “I thought you should know.”

  “Well, all right.”

  “I thought you should know, Ona.”

  “Thank you.”

  “People should know these things.”

  “Yes, indeed. Thank you.” She patted his hand and his head calmed. “You’re a good boy, Quinn.” She shrugged what passed for her shoulders; the bedclothes sighed. “I’ve had myself a day,” she told him. “My mother tongue paid me a visit.”

  “Really? What did it say?”

  “It said the name of my original village, for starters.”

  “You mean in Lithuania?”

  “Could be there’s nothing left there but names in a graveyard.” She sat up straighter, with little apparent effort. “I went my whole life without the slightest interest in my homeland, and now I regret that I’ll never see it again, this place for which I have nothing but the blinkiest memories.”

  “If you went back I bet you could snag the record for oldest airplane passenger.”

  “I’d probably have to fly the plane myself. Nothing new under the sun.” She shook her head. “No, where I’m going is back to see Laurentas. I was unforgivably rude to my own flesh and blood and would like to make my apology.” She paused a moment, then: “The world’s oldest airplane passenger was Charlotte Hughes, by the way. Age one hundred fifteen. You can look it up.”

  He laughed. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  She patted him again. “I miss it. I’m suddenly homesick for a place I don’t recall. If a stranger walked in here right now to read War and Peace in Lithuanian, I believe I’d get the gist.”

  He sat with her in silence.

  “There’s more,” she said. “But for now I’d like to get some shut-eye.” She shooed him away, and, reluctantly, he went.

  The crisis—if indeed there had been one—was over. A quartet of paramedics had pronounced her fit and lucid, vital signs normal.

  “What was it, then?” Quinn asked Ted, who was pouring tea out of Ona’s good pot.

  “Delayed reaction to the break-in, is my guess. The guy said that can happen.”

  “It was magic,” Belle said. “That’s what it was.” She looked up at Quinn, as serious as he’d ever known her, and informed him that their son, their strange, departed boy, had returned to Ona Vitkus her language, her memory, and her lost brother.

  “I guess she had a little mix-up in her head,” Ted said.

  For a second Quinn thought he meant Belle, who indeed seemed to have a little mix-up in her head. Did she believe their son had floated in from the sweet hereafter, bringing with him Ona’s lost brother? Did she believe he was Ona’s lost brother?

  “A minor lapse of some sort, I’m guessing,” Ted went on. “In the brain. That’s the explanation, probably.” He squeezed Belle’s shoulder. “It’s probably that, honey.”

  “I believe it all,” Belle said. “I’m keeping this day forever.” She looked so happy; Quinn tried as hard as he could to believe.

  “I wish you’d called me,” Quinn said. “Somebody should have called me.”

  “Quinn,” Belle murmured, “when have you ever wanted to be called?”

  “Now,” he said. “I want to be called now.”

  She looked at him. Assessed him. They were in the kitchen, the very place where vanished things had reappeared, including his own sense of duty and willingness. He studied Ona’s neatly stacked cards. Her pile of coins. Her quartered hanky. The boy, too, had studied these things. Belle noticed him noticing, and he wondered if she felt the boy’s presence. As he did now. When he’d first told her this he’d been reaching—overreaching—and yet over time he’d managed to grab hold of what he’d placed beyond his grasp.

  “She’s going to be fine,” Ted said. “The guy said she’s got the pulse of a racehorse. She’s a lot younger than her age.”

  Quinn met his eyes. This decent man who had bested him in the game of love. “Thanks, Ted,” he said. “I appreciate the update.”

  “Sure.” He turned to his wife. “I have to go. The kids.”

  Quinn watched Belle walk Ted to the door. She gave him a wifely peck that Quinn felt as a sting on his own lips. Ted kissed her in return; not ostentatiously, as Quinn might have done in his place. She hung on, her arms belting his waist, her face nuzzled into his chest. Then she let go. Ted nodded once at Quinn, then loped back to his van, which was l
ikely grimed with dog hair and strewn with mildewed baseball cards and boys’ shoes and, in the way back, a carton of fresh merit badges waiting to be earned.

  It was now late afternoon, the flowers in Ona’s perennial bed releasing a heady scent. “I mulched those,” he said to Belle. “Back in May.”

  Belle took a seat on Ona’s porch glider, where she observed the flowers. “I’m moving in with Ted tonight. He’s been patient enough.”

  Quinn said nothing.

  She invited him to sit. They watched Ona’s birds flit back and forth from the freshly stocked feeders. “I’m taking a job,” he said. He told her about Sylvie.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I know you don’t want—” She paused. “I know.”

  “You’re the only one who does, Belle.”

  She nodded toward the feeders. “You the one still filling those?”

  “She could fill them herself if she really wanted to.”

  They laughed a little. Belle surveyed the tended yard, the resurrected lawn, the righted fence posts. “You did so much more than I asked.”

  “For once.”

  “More than he would have done himself, I mean. That’s saying a lot. He’d be glad.”

  She kept looking at him. Waiting. For what, he didn’t know. She seemed so far away, the boy filling the fragile expanse between them.

  “You could never see it, Quinn,” she said. “He was so like you. So single-minded. His eye forever on the wrong ball.”

  In the distance, the Brighton Avenue traffic sounded like a long, steady exhale. “I know you wondered,” she murmured. “But you decided to be his father anyway.” She waited for him to look at her. She said, “He was yours, Quinn. You know there was no one else.”

  He recalled the baby: pale, translucent, a network of blue veins visible through his skin. His see-through boy, too unformed for the world that lay in wait. He said, “I’m sorry you had to tell me that.”

  “You were entitled to your doubts. We were on and off back then, but I was a faithful girl. Not the wild child you thought I was.”

  “Me too,” he said. “Faithful as a hound.”

  “I knew that. I always knew that.” She slid her hand beneath his and he held on. “I kept hoping you’d want what I gave you. I waited for you to fall in love with him.”

  “I did fall in love with him. I did. But not until after he was gone.” His son, his undeniable boy.

  In answer, she rested her head on his shoulder. He was struck by the strangeness of time, how the three months since meeting Ona could feel so open-ended and slow to unfurl while that same period, using the boy’s death as the starting point, shrank to such a degree that the tragedy seemed like an event that had yet to happen.

  For some time longer they sat side by side, not talking, like a long-married couple in a private twilight. “Ted’s a stellar guy,” Quinn said. “You picked a good man.”

  “His sons rip me up, straight to the core. But eventually, I know, they’ll be mine.”

  “If you ever need me, Belle.”

  Softly, without a trace of malice, she said, “It’s too late for that.”

  “It isn’t,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  The sound of the coming evening fell upon them: beyond the last-call flurry at the feeders, human families could also be heard from down the street, opening doors, clattering plates out to patios and backyards, flipping on televisions, pulling cars into garages. For the moment this place—the house Ona still thought of as Randall’s—felt like his. The yard felt like his yard.

  “We should check on her,” Belle said, rising.

  “I’ll do it. You go.”

  She gathered her things. “I always believed,” she said, “that he was desperate to be born.” Leaning down, she kissed him on the cheek, then started down the steps, heading toward the life she would live without him.

  Upstairs, gaining strength by the second, lay Quinn’s inheritance, left to the father from the son: an old woman suddenly missing home. The bequest felt both heavy and light, welcome and not. It came with ten conditions and ten more after that.

  Belle turned around. “You won’t disappoint her, Quinn.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “She’s my friend.” He nearly said, I love her. What did he mean?

  He meant he loved her. That was all. It was simpler than he expected.

  * * *

  This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life memories and shards on tape. This is also Part Ten again.

  Hello, this is Ona Vitkus speaking. I am one hundred four years old. And one hundred one days.

  . . .

  Here is my—my list?—my list for—posterity?—for posterity. For all posterity.

  . . .

  One: Būk sveikas.

  . . .

  I’m thinking. I guess there’s just the one.

  . . .

  Very good! You’ve got a flair for accents.

  . . .

  I think it means “Take care.”

  . . .

  Thank you. You, too, dear. You take care.

  OLDEST

  Oldest caged mouse. Age 7 years and 7 months. Fritzy. Owned by Bridget Beard. Country of UK.

  Oldest shoe. Age 10,000 years. Country of Italy.

  Oldest tree. Bristlecone pine. Age 5,200 years. CUT DOWN!!! Country of USA.

  Oldest dog. Butch the beagle. Age 27. Owned by Mr. Gregory Duncan. Country of USA.

  Oldest vomit. Age 160,000,000 years. Country of UK.

  Oldest bowling alley. Age 3,400 years. Country of Egypt.

  Oldest chimpanzee. Age 73 years. Cheeta. Country of USA.

  Oldest musical instrument. Bone flute. Age 40,000 years. Country of Germany.

  Oldest merit badges. The year 1910. Bee farming, taxidermy, first aid to animals, music, and 53 others. Country of USA.

  Oldest fossilized child. Age 3,300,000 years. Country of Cradle of Civilization.

  Chapter 25

  After getting up in the dark (one) and using the toilet (two) and washing his face (three) and brushing his teeth (four), he puts on his pants and socks and shoes and shirt and jacket and cap (five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten). He steals out of the house (one) and into the garage (two), where he grabs his bike (three) and wheels it to the sidewalk (four). In the shadowy predawn, he commences his tour of the neighborhood, tape recorder secured in the deep, warm, silken pocket of his leather jacket.

  He loves this jacket. The squeaky leather sounds to him like encouragement. It counts his movements. The dark unnerves him, but the jacket’s weight feels like an arm slung across his shoulder, sanding the edges of his dread as he pedals up the street.

  Because he has never listened for the morning chorus and is not entirely certain what it is, he doesn’t know exactly how to go about finding it. Every few yards he stops (one), gets off his bike (two), and lays the bike down (three). He listens hard (four), withdraws the recorder from its hiding place (five), and lifts it to the trees (six).

  He wishes for more trees. He wishes for more light. He wishes for the stillest shadows to move, and for the moving shadows to go still.

  Yesterday, Troy Packard (puffy little targer; son of a gun; egg-eyed bully) received from Mr. Linkman a highly public A for writing a three-page life story of his boring seventy-year-old grandfather and turning it in early. Probably Troy Packard’s mother wrote those perfect pages, but Mr. Linkman is slow about certain things. It doesn’t matter. Not now. The other stories will come in on the appointed day, and nobody else—of this he is quite sure—nobody else picked a possible Guinness world record holder.

  They recorded Part Ten last Saturday, but this part—music!—is his extra idea. All week he has gone to bed practicing how to present to Miss Vitkus her finished tape, from which he will transcribe for Mr. Linkman the required three pages of not-secret things, in immaculate penmanship and flawless spelling, earning an easy A+ unless he accidentally does something B or C+.

  The tape itself is a secret. Nor
mally, he doesn’t like secrets. But this is the good kind. Miss Vitkus is his good secret.

  He pedals again, stops again, lifts the recorder again. Strange, muffling noises drift in: a car idling one street over (one); a rustle in a juniper (two) that might be hornets; a hornetlike hum of traffic (three) from Washington Avenue, where he is not allowed to ride.

  No birds.

  The quality of darkness is changing, right before his eyes, a single, flimsy layer at a time peeling back, leaving a less dreadful darkness and in the eastern sky a miraculous intensity that can’t quite be called light. More like the promise of light.

  There. A single note.

  He fumbles for the recorder and offers it again. Another note, two birds now, one responding to the other.

  Tweedle, the one bird says. Tweedle, says the second. The boy’s mouth drops open. Tweedle, he whispers. One, two.

  A robin? A blue jay? His list has stuck fast at fifteen—fifteen winter birds, the spring visitors still holed up in Rhode Island or Florida or Costa Rica or beyond—but even fifteen is too many: he can’t commit their voices to memory. The musical matches elude him, despite the CD his mother brought home: a patient-voiced man naming birds one by one, which then oblige him with a song. He’s listened to this astounding recording ten times—imagining a man in a sound studio with all the birds in North America perched side by side on a clothesline, his father in the control room pressing buttons—and yet he can’t identify the invisible birds singing here, now. The disappointment tastes like metal in his throat.

  He keeps the tape aloft, his arm beginning to ache. Gradually, from an unseen perch in the shadow of a tree between two houses, a third bird chimes.

  Then a fourth.

  Then ten, and ten again, chiming from concealed spots above and between and around the houses and garages and parked cars and telephone poles and the light urges into this astonishing hour, each chime pecking a pinhole in the sheeted dark until the last layers shred completely and the light pours in and in.