The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  “I know, I know,” he said, frantic to soothe her. However meager his capacity for love—he’d been told by the woman after Belle that the dial barely moved in the gauge—he had splurged it all on her. “I went to Miss Vitkus’s house, Belle,” he said, feeling exactly as desperate as he sounded. “Like you asked. You asked me to go, and I went.”

  “That was your obligation. Like visiting your son was your obligation. It’s something people do.”

  At least she was speaking to him. How many times had they talked at this hour of the night, Quinn wide awake, Belle fighting off sleep in order to find her way to him? He wanted to speak to her now, in their old way, late-night confiding, voices hushed lest they wake their wakeful son.

  “Belle, I’ll bring it back.” Fifteen feet away were exemplary fathers and husbands who would know exactly what to say. Their wives considered them sensitive. Their children brightened their every hour. They believed in love, and God; they believed animals had souls; they believed their dead grandmothers watched over them.

  “Those years you were gone?” she said. “Those years chasing your big fat break?” Her voice was quiet now. “I expected so much more of you.”

  “Belle, please.”

  “I wanted you to send us more than just money. To care more. We missed you—well, he missed the idea of you. I missed the actual you.”

  “I felt his presence,” Quinn said. This dropped out of his mouth like a broken tooth—where had it come from?

  “What?”

  Her full attention graced through him. “In the old lady’s house. It was just like he wrote in his diary. There was, quote, magic afoot.”

  Belle managed something like a laugh despite her sorrow, for the boy’s syntactical oddities had always pleased her. He’d read obsessively—instruction manuals, record books, novels far too old for him—picking up linguistic baubles like a crow mining a roadside.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He wanted to ease her, mend her, pull her back from the lightless place into which she’d fallen. Knowing he was uniquely unqualified for this job only fortified his resolve. “It was like he was there in her house,” he said. His breathing felt off. He was improvising wildly now, a mixture of what he’d actually felt and what he wanted to feel and what he imagined Rennie might feel, or Alex, or Gary. “For a second there, it was like he came back from”—he groped for words—“his disappearance.”

  After a long, coiled pause, Belle said, “Our son didn’t disappear.” She was all cried out. “What ‘the boy’ did, Quinn, is die. He got up on an exquisite May morning, rode out on his bike for no perceptible reason, and dropped dead before the sun fully made it over the horizon.”

  Why did she keep doing this? Over and over. Why? How he wanted to take that first warm swallow, that matchless comfort.

  “Maybe if you came over there with me,” he said. “Maybe you could feel him there, in her house.” This was the kind of thing that sounded right in his head, but spoken words came out so different. His effort missed the mark so spectacularly that it almost counted as a bull’s-eye on some other target.

  “I feel him here,” she said. “In his house. The very house you yourself lived inside, twice, as a husband and father. You didn’t feel him here, in his own house? You don’t find that strange? To be so detached from your son’s existence that you found his so-called presence in the house of a stranger?”

  Her voice contained something new to her, an icy disconnection that he associated with a different type of woman. Three years ago, on the bus ride back from Chicago, passing sepia-colored depots and engulfed by regret, he’d embraced the naive hope of a soul in midlife: he resolved to become a better man. Belle and the boy had picked him up at the station, the boy motionless with misgiving. But Belle did not understand misgiving; she never had. Come back to me, she’d whispered to him in the dripping fog. Be his dad. They’d married again within weeks.

  “Of all the things to take from me,” she said now, her voice husking through the phone, “you take his last words.”

  “I’m sorry, Belle.” He could hear the guys tuning up. His phone beeped. “Belle, wait, I’m about to run out of juice.”

  “What a surprise,” she said, and hung up.

  He faltered back to the stage, where the guys avoided eye contact. The bartender turned off the house music and Gary settled behind his drums. As Quinn strapped on his guitar, he said to Rennie, “I’ll take a couple of shifts,” to which Rennie replied, “You got it.”

  Quinn faced the sheening crowd and played by rote an opening lick he’d been playing since he was seventeen years old. He took the mic and howled.

  Chapter 5

  On the fourth Saturday, before attempting his chores, the boy presented Ona with a printout of the vital statistics of a Madame Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France, who died in 1997 with the apparently unbeatable title of Longest-Lived Person.

  Ever.

  “‘One hundred twenty-two years,’” read the boy in a voice better reserved for sixteenth-century proclamations, “‘and one hundred sixty-four days.’”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ona said. “Let me see that.” There wasn’t much, really; Madame Calment’s life, like most lives, comprised a pileup of ordinary days, but that didn’t prevent her, like most people, from bestowing advice. “Daily chocolate?” Ona said. “That’s her recipe for a long life?”

  Checking these immortal pronouncements, the boy asked, “What’s port?”

  “Wine. The French do like their wine.” She looked up. “Where on earth did you get this?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Internet?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of the Internet. I went through the orientation at the public library in the spring of 2000. Big to-do about nothing. Worse than watching TV.” She looked him over: beneath the misdirection of his genteel conduct and crisp uniform, he was a boy of the twenty-first century after all. Since her birth she’d witnessed the advent of automobiles, airplanes, automatic washing machines, atomic bombs, space shuttles, disposable diapers, and Touch-Tone, had received them all as a matter of course, her capacity for wonder peaking around 1969 with the moon landing; but this old-timey boy who carried a phone the size of a baby’s rattle and plucked information from France out of a machine in his bedroom presented quite the conundrum. She smoothed her hands over her head, as if to tidy up the technology it had already absorbed.

  He produced several more sheets—more interviews with Madame Calment, which Ona read start to finish, the boy looking over her shoulder. His breath was warm and on the sweet side. “Your Madame Calment is quite the little cock-a-hoop, I’d say.”

  “Read this one,” the boy said, pointing.

  Ona read, “‘I have only one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it’? That’s what your famous record breaker chose to say? For all posterity? Or should I say for all posterior?”

  The boy laughed out loud—that unnerving yip of his. It started and stopped as if on timers.

  Ona merely tsked. “To think an honor such as this was wasted on a person of so little class.” She looked at the woman’s picture again—taken on the poor thing’s one-hundred-twentieth birthday. “That face could halt an anvil in mid-drop,” she muttered. She tried to compare Madame Calment’s squashy visage with others she’d seen but couldn’t think of a single soul within the squintiest vicinity of her own age, let alone Madame Calment’s. She hoped her hair didn’t look this bad. “How did the old crock manage it?”

  The boy pointed once again to Madame Calment’s page of pronouncements.

  Ona said, “Šokoladas ir vynas.” Chocolate and wine. The words rattled out, and the boy cocked his head like a listening bird.

  “There you go again,” he said.

  “I know.” She tapped her skull, hard.

  “When’s your birthday?” he asked, slipping a notebook out of his pack.

  “January twentieth.”

  He jotted down some numbers and slowly computed them.
“That makes eighteen years and ninety-nine days to beat the record.”

  “I can’t last that long,” Ona said. “This woman is some kind of freak.” But even as she spoke these words, the time between now and then seemed bridgeable. Since the age of ninety she’d awoken each morning with the thought, This could be the day. Now here was this French flapjaws redefining the rules of the race. Who could fathom God’s calendar? “However,” she told the boy, “I wouldn’t mind giving Madame Parlez-Vous a run for her money.”

  The boy all but caught fire with glee. “One,” he said, “competitors must set clear goals. Two, competitors must understand the competition.” He returned to his backpack, unzipped one of its myriad pouches, and removed another sheet. “The oldest currently living female is Mrs. Ramona Trinidad Iglesias-Jordan. Age one hundred fourteen. Country of Puerto Rico. Mrs. Ramona Trinidad Iglesias-Jordan is also the oldest currently living person.” He stumbled over the pronunciations. “The oldest currently living male is Mr. Fred Hale. Age one hundred thirteen. Country of USA.” He looked up to see how this news was landing.

  “Is there a record for oldest old crab?”

  The boy took this question, like all questions, without irony. “One, a record attempt has to be sanctioned. Two, a record attempt has to be witnessed. Three, a record attempt has to fall within the bonderies of the law.”

  “One, you mean boundaries. Two, Puerto Rico isn’t a country. It’s a territory of the United States.”

  “Thank you.” He flipped the pages of his notebook and made a brief entry on one list, then another.

  Ona read over the sheet of brief but vital statistics, trying not to care and failing utterly. Madame Calment’s record was ludicrous, certainly; but the others might be beatable. “Mrs. Puerto Rico might put up a fight,” she said, “but how many people could possibly stand between me and Mr. Hale? Men have the life expectancy of gerbils. I might be third or fourth in line.”

  “I’ll find out!” he fairly shouted, making another notation. He looked—full, is how she remembered it later. He bared all his short, bright teeth.

  “Oldest currently living person,” Ona said. “The ‘living’ part has a reassuring ring.”

  “You want the all-time record, though. For all posterity.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ve got a couple of other players to pick off first.”

  Shutting his eyes, the boy recited: “‘Competitors must fully and completely fulfill the requirements stated in the Guinness World Records record-breaker pack.’”

  “What’s in the—?”

  “One, you get official Guinness World Records instructions. Two, you get official Guinness World Records witness forms. Three, you get—” He shook his head, mentally backtracking. “One, you get an official claim form. Normal track or fast track.” He glanced at his notebook. “We’ll do fast track.”

  “How many times have you done this?”

  “Eight. But people take my ideas before I think them up.”

  As the boy wrote furiously—a “to do” list that reminded Ona what urgency had once felt like—she sat in a pleasing, lighthearted haze, observing the feeders through the window, imagining her name in a record book. All those demure round letters in the first name, followed by the stalky surprise of the surname. Ona Vitkus. She thanked herself for having the foresight to snatch back her maiden name, which in 1948 had been no small matter. She felt suddenly fond of her unremarkable life, that humdrum necklace of imitation pearls with the occasional glint of the real thing. The boy kept glancing at her as he would at a prize heifer, and she felt like one: round and healthy, clean and well brushed, a surefire winner.

  The day’s chores finished, she poured his milk and offered him cookies. “The Meals on Wheels pulled a fast one,” she said. “I was just getting used to the animal crackers and they come up with these phony macaroons.”

  The boy chewed one up and made a face.

  “I know,” Ona said. “But I’m supposed to purr my head off nevertheless, like a tabby cat grabbing up table scraps.” It was the thing she liked least, so far, about her second century on earth—the presumption of neediness, the expectation of gratitude, the general public’s disappointment at her refusal to be fulsome. Since when was a simple thank-you not enough? She’d had every species of do-gooder in and out of here for the past twenty-five years, from the Daughters of Isabella to the county social services, and every one of them, excepting this little boy, had found her wanting in the appreciation department.

  It wasn’t until later, after he’d finished his milk and double-checked his stalled list of birds, that the boy revealed the expanded nature of his mission. His every action was governed by an internal logic that she never did get the lay of. It was nearly time to go when he slipped a little machine from a secret pocket in his backpack.

  The tape recorder was the size of a half-eaten chocolate bar, a present from his aunt, who worked for a newspaper in California. “We’re supposed to tell an old person’s life story,” he said. “Mr. Linkman said old people love to talk.”

  “Oh, he did, did he?”

  “Mr. Linkman said to interview our grandparents but I picked you.”

  Ona took in the diminutive machine, which the boy slid exactly halfway between them. She shook her head.

  “You already told me ten stories,” he reminded her.

  “This is different.”

  “I won’t play it back,” he promised. “You don’t have to listen.” He looked at her beseechingly as he clicked a button.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if you turn out to be a Guinness world record holder?” he said. “Everybody will want to interview you and your voice will get very tired.” He passed his hand over the machine. “All you have to do is press this button. Presto, you can tell your life story and eat a pretzel at the same time.”

  Finally she consented, if only to prevent him from getting carried away again; his hopping around the kitchen last week had rattled her. He didn’t move the way other children moved—he carried a marionette-ish precision in his wrists and shoulders—and it had made her feel sorry for him.

  The boy rewound the tape and clicked it on again. “This is Miss Ona Vitkus,” he said hopefully. “This is her life story on tape. This is Part One.”

  Ona inspected the tiny whirling wheels. Part One? Instantly, she began to divide up her years.

  “Is it on?” she asked.

  The boy put his finger to his lips, nodding. Apparently he planned to remain invisible. He slipped her a sheet of preprinted questions—prepared, presumably, by Mr. Linkman—and pointed to number one. Where were you born? There were forty-nine subsequent questions.

  “I can’t answer all these,” she said. “We’ll be here till doomsday.”

  The boy said nothing, staring down the machine as if it might speak in her stead.

  “What do you expect me to do?” she asked.

  The boy looked up. He mouthed the answer: Regale me.

  Ona felt this turn of events a bit presumptuous—it was one thing to chitchat at the kitchen table, but quite another to compose your thoughts in a manner that might be graded by Mr. Linkman. But at this point in their friendship she found it impossible to refuse him. She had believed herself through with friendship.

  “I’ll answer the first one,” she said. “But that’s it.”

  Which it wasn’t.

  She blundered through some preliminaries, made inarticulate by stage fright. Finally, mercifully, he clicked off the machine. He smiled, showing his trimmed teeth. “That was very excellent.” He clicked the machine back on. “This is Miss Ona Vitkus,” he said. “This is her life story on tape. This is also Part One.”

  Chapter 6

  Quinn took an early bus to Rennie’s plant behind the mall, a sleek, hangar-size warehouse in which thrived Great Universal Mail Systems, the third-largest bulk-mail service in New England. The warehouse sat on a green picnic blanket of lawn. The entryway, constr
ucted of glass panels secured by a floridly patterned girding, lent the place an air of domestic muscle, as if it housed the headquarters of a home-decoration concern. On sunny days the glass winked all day.

  A young receptionist greeted him with a buoyancy born of an excellent benefits package. On her desk sat a vase of irises. “You’re here to see—?” she asked. Her hair lay close to her head, a sexy, flapper-girl haircut. A befuddling image of Miss Vitkus as she might have appeared in the twenties visited him unannounced: she was dancing the Charleston in one of those skinny dresses, a reckless girl with shining cheeks.

  Quinn introduced himself, wishing he’d shaved a little closer. “Rennie said he might have some shifts open.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she bubbled, getting up. “You came in the wrong way.”

  She eased him back toward the door and tapped a crimson fingernail against the glass. “See where the building turns? Like an L? There’s what you want.”

  “Rennie’s a friend,” Quinn said. “I thought I might—”

  “Oh, wow, he’s in meetings all day today,” she chirped. “Off-the-charts busy.”

  “We met in junior high.”

  The receptionist nodded, happy-happy. “Wow, that’s great.”

  Quinn lingered a moment. Behind the smiling girl was a pastel screen, and behind that emanated a soothing white-collar air rush of business being transacted: doors quietly opening and closing, high heels drumming on carpet, a muffle of polite laughter. Rennie was back there someplace, and Quinn wished, not for the first time, that he’d been born with his friend’s knack for contentment.

  “Right down there, big black doors,” the girl said, tapping. “You have to move your car if you parked out front. The line workers’ lot is over there, see the pole lights?” She flitted back to her post and tried to smile him out the door.

  “I know that,” he said. “Tell Rennie I was here.”

  “Will do! Don’t forget to move your car.”