The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  Instead, she worked out what she’d done wrong. The trip to Granyard had wound her up: when had she last lived so full a forty hours? Her head too full of heartache and surprise, she’d forgotten the porch light, her nightly precaution since the break-in down the street back in May—a lifetime ago, just as the boy exited her life and his father entered.

  Breathing open-mouthed in the dark, she let her pulse relax. Only then did she dare switch on her bedside lamp; it was a little after three. She’d slept for eight hours. She put on her slippers and robe, unlocked her door, and peeked into the dark. In the empty hall she perceived nothing but the renewed skittering of her own breath.

  One foot in front of the other, she told herself, quoting Louise in her final days. The memory calmed her. She flicked the switch for the stairwell and inched down the stairs. In the foyer she snapped on another light. Louise’s vase lay shattered on the soaked floor, the flowers spilled and trampled. She bent to gather the pieces, thinking again of the boy and his miniature recorder. It was out there someplace, a whirring tape with her life affixed. Her paltry shards. She straightened up with a groan.

  Then a man walked out of her parlor.

  “Drop that, Granny,” he said. His voice: even, relaxed.

  The glass fell with an innocent-sounding plink. Not a man, quite. A big, greasy-haired teenager in a black mask of the sort used by Zorro in the old TV show. The mask was cheap and cracked across the nose. Through the holes in the mask his eyes showed pale and hazy and pink-rimmed. In his hand glinted a small and terrifying gun. He looked her over and laughed.

  “You alone?”

  She nodded, too scared to speak. He slipped the pistol down the pocket of pants so big they looked like a skirt. Behind him, in the parlor, she glimpsed Randall’s sideboard, all its handsome drawers tipped out. Linens tossed into heaps. Chair cushions flipped over. She’d slept straight through the damage.

  Awaiting instruction, she stood still.

  “Where’s the cash, Granny?” Calm as a very old cat.

  “I have nothing but what’s in there,” she said, meaning her purse, splat on the floor with the wrecked flowers, wallet dismantled, everything soaked: a credit card, her expired license, her insurance cards, a picture of the boy in his Scout uniform, an ancient coupon for Meow Mix. She burned with shame to see her spilled things, exactly what a burglar would expect from an old lady’s wallet. Her useless docs.

  “Come on,” he said. He beckoned with all his fingers. “Cookie jar? Flowerpot? Come on, Granny, give it up.”

  “I’m not one of those old people you see in the movies,” she said, suddenly quaking with rage. “I keep my money in the bank, like everybody else.” I won’t go out this way, she told herself, I won’t.

  He pinched her shoulder and urged her up the stairs, where he dropped her, breathless and shivering, into Louise’s rocker. Her hip twinged but she sealed her lips against the pain. “What’re you, a hundred?” he asked, showing his awful teeth. His hair was wet-looking and dandruffy, and he had a peculiar smell, swampy and medicinal. His bone-white arm had been blackened with letters she couldn’t resolve into a word. As he looked her over, her fear returned and all but melted her legs.

  “There’s nothing here,” she said, gripping the chair rails. The floor felt movable.

  “Stay,” he ordered, jabbing her chest. The aftershock jangled in her breastbone. He hunted through her dresser and nightstand, pitching everything more or less bedward. The Guinness World Records pack slipped to the floor in a fanning sheaf. He found her beehive case and the emergency five that had lived in the silk pocket since she’d carried it out of the Woodford Street house in 1948. “See?” he said, waving the bill under her nose.

  As her intruder pillaged her bedroom, Ona considered the lifeline button hanging from her neck, hidden beneath her nightgown and robe. She’d been told to test it periodically but had done so only once. After the initial bell and ninety seconds of silence, a woman’s voice had come through the box in the parlor, calling her “honey” and asking if she was “A-OK.” For all she knew, the batteries had run down.

  “You got nothing,” her intruder said. “Not a motherfuckin’ thing.” He pursed his lips as if deciding whether or not to blame her.

  “Your friends left without you,” she quavered.

  He showed his teeth again. “They won’t get far. Car’s a piece of shit.”

  “Funny you didn’t go with them,” she said hopefully.

  “I like a challenge. Not that you fuckin’ count.” He unzipped a makeup bag she hadn’t used in forty years and dumped out a half-used lipstick. Her hip hurt from sitting so still but she feared the slightest shift might set him off. People like this either killed you dead when startled, or fled like bees, if she remembered correctly from the cop shows she used to watch before they got so violent. She fished the button from her bodice, made her decision, and gave the thing a squeeze.

  Downstairs, the buzzer engaged, a high-pitched double blast. Amazingly, he barely flinched, and she realized he was in another world altogether. “Who’s that, your boyfriend calling?” he asked, as she silently began to count. He got up, tossed the last of her doodads and pocketed the five, and leered at her through his sweating mask. “One thing, Granny,” he said.

  She made an involuntary peep, like a baby chicken, then sucked in all the air she had and roared it back out, loud and guttural: “No!”

  He laughed. “Aw, you think I’m gonna what?” he said. “You think I’m gonna what?” He laughed again. “You waaay too ugly.”

  As she swallowed back a rising bile, he raised his hand, let it float a moment in midair, and then, almost gently, slapped her cheek. “Be good,” he said, then sauntered down the stairs and left the house with a quiet click as a voice came over the intercom, ninety seconds on the dot: “Hey there, Miss Vitkus, you A-OK?” Ona rubbed the memory from her cheek and tottered toward the window, where she saw her intruder sprint into the night like a frightened squirrel. She had at least that satisfaction.

  Minutes later, paramedics arrived; after that, two patrolmen. Then a detective showed up, followed by a loose knot of neighbors, shy and timorous, excepting Shirley Clayton, who looked maddeningly put together at three in the morning.

  “Oh, my Lord,” Shirley crooned. She forced a handshake on one of the patrolmen, who looked too young to drive. “I’m the neighbor. Mrs. Vitkus, who can I call?”

  “Nobody. Go away.”

  “She has a grandson,” Shirley said. “They just got back from a trip.”

  “What’s your grandson’s name, ma’am?” asked the detective, a young woman in a gray blazer. Ona had once had skin like hers.

  “Please,” she said. “I don’t need anybody.”

  The pretty detective wanted a description of the intruders, but Ona remembered her tormentor not in physical form but rather as an embodiment of mockery. Granny. He’d made her see through his eyes: her age, her fright, her balding head, her piddly size. The only possible revenge would be not to mind.

  But she did mind. She felt slight and ugly and gawked at: a trifling nobody. Just yesterday—Or was it this morning? Time had gone gluey and soft—Quinn had seen her in this light when he’d caught sight of her skinny, accordioned, eyeball-white legs. The greasy-haired intruder had confirmed her as a dusty, frightful, genderless shell, and she hated him for it.

  “Bad case of the pinkeye,” she said, remembering now. “And letters tattooed on his arm. The other two got away before I could get a look.”

  The detective asked her age, and as she proclaimed it a shock of sympathy rippled through a trio of neighbors who had inched into the house with Shirley. They were unrecognizable in their pillow-marked faces and thrown-on clothes. She was afraid of them, she realized; afraid of their goodwill, their outrage on her behalf, afraid she might have been wrong in her judgments; and she felt unaccountably stranded when the older patrolman urged them out of her house.

  Out on the porch a middle-aged man in
a bathrobe was waving a flyer at the younger patrolman, snatches of their conversation carrying inside. There had been a string of break-ins, she gathered—discussed at the neighborhood meeting she’d scorned. She was the first one caught at home.

  The detective glanced around the kitchen. Did she assume the house always looked like this—turned inside out and smattered with glass?

  “I’m an immaculate housekeeper,” Ona said.

  The first patrolman was back. “When we find these guys, Mrs. Vitkus,” he said, “we’re gonna kick their sorry butts from here to the moon.” He put a hand on her shoulder, which ached from the intruder’s grabbing fingers; she’d have a doozy of a bruise for sure. But the officer had a consoling face and her eyes filled without warning.

  The remaining protocol required Ona to inspect the wreckage, now blighted with boot prints, and determine what had been taken. Nothing, as it turned out. Only Louise’s vase was gone, in its way. “Money and drugs,” the lady detective said, and Ona hadn’t much of either. Her medicine chest contained nothing more alluring than aspirin and Metamucil, which the thieves had left behind.

  “Can you keep this out of the news?” Ona asked. “I feel like a sitting duck.”

  They said they’d try and she had to believe them.

  When at last the police left her in peace, Shirley came back to reassemble the furniture and wash up the fingerprinting dust and clear the front hall. “I saved a few lilies,” she said to Ona. “Most of them got stepped on.”

  Another neighbor, a very young woman, returned with a generic frosted vase of the sort found in households accustomed to flower deliveries. Another woman—possibly Shirley’s daughter, same pink roundness—put Ona’s purse back together and offered her a cup of tea, which she meekly took. They were like Louise, these women, multiplied many times over: energetic people who enjoyed a crisis, who easily rose to righteous outrage, who revealed stores of affection at the least expected times. How had she lived here so long without knowing this?

  By daybreak everyone had gone and there was no more night to get through. Ona decided to spend the day washing everything the intruders had touched, including her blankets and nightgown. The young patrolman, who had a great-grandmother still living, had parked outside until his shift change, when another drove up to relieve him.

  Once the day fully lightened—she’d been thinking of Laurentas wheeling through the jaundiced light of the day room—Ona turned on the radio for company and heard her story leading the commuter news, a brisk, affronted voice making much of the presumed frailty of the “victim” and the corresponding rottenness of the home invaders.

  She suspected Shirley as the snitch. The phone began to ring and ring with local media wanting her “own words.” But she had no words for these recent, dizzying hours, which had felt like the midway, filled with hubbub and confusion and homesickness and shame and conflicting desires.

  How, she wondered, had an eleven-year-old boy talked her into wanting eighteen more years of this? Fatigue assaulted her from the inside out, slowing her blood and jellying her bones. She unhooked the phone and sat with her thoughts, replaying in her head the long, discouraging interview by the lady detective. Except for the bills lifted from her wallet and the five from her beehive case, the intruders—hard as they may have tried—had found nothing here of value.

  COMPETITION

  Jeanne Louise Calment. 122 years and 164 days. Country of France.

  Shigechiyo Izumi. 120 years and 237 days. Country of Japan.

  Sarah Knauss. 119 years and 97 days. Country of USA.

  Lucy Hannah. 117 years and 248 days. Country of USA.

  Marie Louise Meilleur. 117 years and 230 days. Country of Canada.

  Maria Capovilla. 116 years and 347 days. Country of Ecuador.

  Tane Ikai. 116 years and 175 days. Country of Japan.

  Elizabeth Bolden. 116 years and 118 days. Country of USA.

  Carrie White. 116 years and 88 days. Country of USA.

  Kamato Hongo. 116 years and 45 days. Country of Japan.

  Chapter 19

  Her voice arrowed through the crackle of his cell phone, piercing the shroud of sleep from which she’d roused him. Seven o’clock: an hour for deer hunters and bird watchers.

  “A speck of emergency,” she said.

  He sat up. “What kind of emergency?”

  She said, “It’s nothing.” She said, “Would you come over, please, right now.” She sounded like herself: solid and self-possessed. He figured: busted faucet, a bird-hit window.

  He’d done his job, fulfilled his duty, dispatched his obligation, and then some. Perhaps it had never been possible to complete the sworn duty of an uncompleted boy. Seven charity visits—what could be easier?—had somehow led him into a fronded jungle of human entanglement.

  Then she said, in a different voice altogether, “I’ve no one else to call,” and he pulled on a shirt as he clicked off the phone.

  He found her on the porch, inspecting the door.

  “I was burgled last night,” she told him. “I need to get this house buttoned up.”

  She looked small and translucent, like a baby turtle from a nature documentary. He fought an impulse to pick her up and carry her to safer ground. As she stood there, fading before his eyes, he extracted the details as if through an old telegraph, dots and dashes that he gathered into a story. When Ona trotted off to the bathroom—The neighbors poured tea down my throat all night—he called Belle from Ona’s ten-pound rotary.

  “I just found out,” she said. “Ted heard it on the radio. Is she all right?”

  “She says she is.”

  “Give her my best,” Belle said. “Will you give her my best?”

  “Right, I will, but I was thinking, this looks like more of a female thing to me.” He should have changed the locks; they were ass-crap locks, he knew they were ass-crap locks, and he should have changed them.

  “Ted’s bringing over a lasagna.”

  “Right, but I thought you could maybe come over here. Seems like you two hit it off pretty well. She’s acting like nothing happened but she’s so white she looks invisible.”

  “I’m going back to work today, Quinn.” She paused. “I won’t take this burden from you.”

  “I didn’t ask that.”

  “You did, though.”

  “She’s not my burden anyway. I mean, she’s not mine.”

  “Then whose?”

  He glanced out the window at a cruiser parked at the gate. The grass was overdue for cutting; the new kid was in for a sweat. “The cops are watching the house,” he said. “She’s not alone.”

  “I have to go, Quinn. I can’t be late on my first day back.”

  “Good luck,” he said. “You can do it, Belle.”

  She paused again. “So can you.”

  He checked Ona’s windows and put a fresh bulb in the porch light and changed her locks and, just because, replaced the batteries in her smoke alarms and paid for everything himself. Late afternoon, returning from Lowe’s with a sign that said ROTTWEILER, he found her in the kitchen with Ted Ledbetter. They were eating lasagna on plates he hadn’t seen—filigreed with tiny gold birds.

  “Mr. Ledbetter brought me a big treat,” she said.

  How Ted had managed to teach a full day of summer-school math, bake a lasagna, and deliver it was another of his many mysteries. Quinn gave Ona the ROTTWEILER sign. “My,” she said. “That ought to do it.”

  “The locks look great,” Ted said. “Super job.”

  “Quinn’s quite handy,” Ona said. “You wouldn’t think that about a musician.”

  He owed his father for teaching him the manly arts. Your mother spoiled you boys rotten. Brutal as the lessons were, poisoned by his father’s disgust, Quinn had managed to learn a thing or two.

  “I’ve got a gig, Ona,” he told her. “Will you be okay?”

  “I talked to her patrolman,” Ted said. “They’ll be watching the house for a few days.”

  Q
uinn had never been good at feeling two things at once. Knowing that the patrolman—and Ted—were on the job came as a relief, but he felt relieved in an entirely different way when Ona followed him out of the kitchen and stopped him at the front door. “He put spinach in it,” she whispered. “If I had a real rottweiler I’d feed it under the table.”

  “Bon appétit,” he said, and she laughed.

  He checked his watch. “Damn, I missed my bus.”

  “Why on earth is a man with your ridiculous musical schedule relying on the city bus to get around?”

  “I’ll get a car eventually. Right now I’m in savings mode.”

  “I took the bus for months after failing my road test. I didn’t care for it. Too many ne’er-do-wells.”

  “I’m a ne’er-do-well.”

  “You’re the opposite of a ne’er-do-well, Quinn. And you may borrow my car, is what I’m getting at. It’s a good car. You said so yourself.”

  If he took the car he’d have to bring it back.

  “I can’t drive it for another week anyway,” she said. “The police are watching me.” She folded her scrawny arms. “You took me to Vermont, Quinn. It’s the least I can do to repay you.” Before he could answer, she added, “Please, Quinn. Take it.”

  So he accepted, promising to return the car the following week, after his shift at GUMS. She dropped the key into his palm, then laid her hand over his, as if she’d just conferred the key to her heart.

  A week later, the cops nabbed the thieves—three hopeless junkies caught in someone else’s house. “Straight to the clink,” Ona said, undoing her shiny new lock. “That lady detective’s a ticket.”

  Quinn thought she looked a little shopworn, but she pronounced herself fiddle-fit and in need of nothing. “They filched five dollars and broke a vase,” she reminded him. “You’d think I’d been hauled off by the Russians.”