The One-in-a-Million Boy (15 page)

And why not? What, really, were the chances? The boy was
eleven.
She had ninety-three years on him. But the boy was gone for good, and so, now, would the father be. The father, in whose company she had come to feel the living presence of sons. His son, and hers.

Quinn rose to leave. “I'll call you sometime, Ona,” he said. “See what you're up to.”

“Nothing too interesting, but I appreciate the gesture.”

“You knew it was seven weeks, right? That was the commitment?”

“I did indeed,” she said. “I lost count, is all.”

“I work weekends, Ona. I go to bed at three.” He looked suddenly stricken, like a man who'd left a kitten by the roadside. “I mean, I couldn't keep this up indefinitely.”

“You did fine.” She patted his hand. “Could you get that saucepan down for me, as long as you're here?” She pointed to the top cupboard. She would make a soup today; she would drive herself to the supermarket with her fraudulent license and buy some vegetables and chicken thighs and make a soup to fill the afternoon hours and after three or four days throw half of it out.

“Your wish is my command,” he said.

My wish,
she thought.
What is my wish?

He set the pot on the counter. Then his face went still, focused on something behind her. She turned to find a slight and spiritless woman standing on her porch. Even through the mist of the screen Ona knew exactly who she was. In an unexpected burst of solidarity, Ona hurried to the door.

“Up with the birds, I see,” the mother said to Quinn.

“I was,” Quinn said, “if owls count.”

In the mother, the trace of a smile: her expression held so many competing emotions that Ona had to avert her eyes. For Quinn's part, he regarded his ex-wife with a tenderness that gave Ona to believe all would be put to rights.

Ona said, “How do you do?”

“How do I—?” Her hair wanted washing. “Oh. Awful. But thanks.”

“I'm so sorry for your loss,” Ona said. The door was open, but the mother—Belle, that was her name, Belle—stayed put. She appeared to have forgotten where she was.

“Your boy was my best one,” Ona offered. “So punctual. I enjoyed his company very much.”

“He was wonderful company,” she agreed. She had the boy's wide, oceanic eyes. “A lot of people didn't understand that.”

Ona checked the driveway and wondered how the poor thing had managed to operate her vehicle, a jeeplike affair too big for her. She walked straight into the house and stood there—facing Ona as the boy had, awaiting instructions. Quinn she ignored.

Ona didn't like being stared at and couldn't think of a polite way to say so. “I'd have attended the service,” she said, “but I didn't find out until after.” She flicked a look at Quinn, who'd gone mute. “I felt very bad about that. Very bad indeed.”

“It's all right. I don't know who was there and who wasn't.” Belle plundered the deep purse and dug up an oversize manila envelope. “This came to my house. I assume it's for you.”

It looked official. Ona took it with trepidation, for she'd learned from her parents to distrust official-looking things. But the envelope contained nothing more concerning than a record-breaker pack from the London headquarters of Guinness World Records. It had been opened already and appeared well thumbed.

“These people write to him all the time,” Belle said. “I almost tossed it, but then I realized I was holding his final thoughts, in a way. His last preoccupation.”

The mother moved on to the parlor, glancing around. “Quinn felt his presence here, did you know that?”

“I did not,” Ona said, again glancing at Quinn, who was watching his ex-wife as if she were a maimed animal: heart-rending and dangerous.

“It was an amazingly un-Quinn thing to say. Blowing smoke, probably, trying to free himself from an interpersonal spider web. If there's one thing Quinn Porter hates, it's interpersonal spider webs.”

“I'm standing right here, Belle,” Quinn said.

Belle monitored the ceiling, as if expecting the boy to materialize out of a light fixture. “He's been giving me money. From anyone else, it would be insulting, but I know why he's doing it.” She paused. “Quinn's a decent man with some broken parts.”

Quinn said nothing. He was patient, it seemed; forbearing. She had never noticed this.

“He's been most helpful to me,” Ona said.

Belle waited—a long while, it seemed. So Ona leafed through the Guinness forms just to hear a rustle of sound. Still, Belle waited, and Quinn watched her waiting.

Not knowing what else to do, Ona read the cover letter aloud, a handwritten missive from a “recorder” with the un-British name of Florence Wu. She'd taken a shine to the boy and troubled herself to explain to him exactly what his “elderly friend” had to do in order to make a run for the record of (a) Oldest Living Person, (b) Oldest Living Female, (c) Longest-Lived Person, or (d) Oldest Licensed Driver. Same in all cases: amass documents.
The docs,
she, too, called them, with the usual warnings and caveats about authentication and fakery.

Finishing, she blushed hotly. “This was just a bit of foolishness on my part,” she said.

“He entered you in four categories,” Belle said. “What are your chances?”

“I'm far too young for a, b, and c. As for my license, your boy prepared me quite well for the written test, but I have remaining concerns about the road test.”

“Maybe you just need a refresher,” Belle said.

“I don't have the proper docs. It was all pretend.”

Her guests went quiet, so Ona again filled the breach by laying out the p's and q's of record making. She related the probable number versus the official number of supercentenarians worldwide; provided an oral précis of recent record holders; added all she knew about the obscenely long life of Madame Jeanne Louise Calment. Her voice took on an authority borrowed, to the subtlest inflection, from the boy. Her recitation seemed to calm the boy's mother—Belle, this strange animal in her house—and she herself felt calmer. How tranquilizing it was to arm yourself with information, how consoling to unpack the facts and then plant them like fence pickets, building a sturdy pen in which you stood alone, cosseted against human fallibility.

She missed him awfully.

“So,” Belle said, “you're—what? Just floating in space? Nothing to prove you actually exist?” She made this sound magnificent.

“I have ample proof of my existence,” Ona said. “Proving the duration of that existence is another matter.” A whiffling drop in blood pressure went straight to her head; she preempted a dizzy spell by sitting down.

“Belle,” Quinn said—certainly it was about time—“let me take you home.”

“In what? A pony cart?”

“In your car. Then I'll take the bus back into town.”

Belle either didn't hear him or chose to ignore him. “I guess you two were in cahoots,” she said to Ona. Again, a trace of a smile. “He had your age calculated to the day—he talked about you incessantly—but I didn't realize what he was up to. I'd been trying to ease him away from world records and onto something a little more productive.” She glanced at Quinn. “Scouts. Music.”

Quinn kept still. Biding, Ona thought. Biding struck her as a handsome quality in a man.

“I may have instructed him to keep it under his hat,” Ona admitted. “And I don't relish being found out now.”

She wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to the tape recorder. She'd confided such private things, and now they existed someplace, possibly in a secret sleeve of the boy's backpack, undiscovered. Perhaps undiscoverable, that earthly link between herself and the boy. She didn't know how to ask without exposing herself. She stood up slowly, blood tossing in her head.

“My son loved secrets,” Belle said. “Surprise-party-type secrets, not deep dark ones.” Quinn had slid his arm lightly across Belle's shoulders, but she seemed unaware of him.

“This was the surprise-party type,” Ona told her. “Of interest to no one but a blundery old hen.” She stuffed the record-breaker kit back into its envelope.

“Belle,” Quinn said, “why don't I—”

“Surely you have a birth certificate,” Belle said.

“Not at hand.”

“What does that mean?”

“My birth certificate,” Ona said, “is in the possession of somebody I haven't seen in a very long time. That's all I care to reveal about the matter.”

Belle tapped the envelope, which Ona held crushed to her chest, as if the envelope were the boy, whom she had never hugged in real life. “I'd like to see you get in the record book,” Belle said. She turned to Quinn. “I'd really, really like to see that happen.”

Ona felt caught, thoroughly discombobulated: exposed as a goosy girl in her own house!

“Can't you ask the person who has your birth certificate—?”

“Belle,” Quinn said quietly, “I think she prefers not to say.”

Belle seemed to come to herself then—or whatever facsimile of herself she could muster. “I'm sorry. I'm just—I'm just dreaming. I don't know what I'm doing.” She took Ona's hand and squeezed. “My son liked you, Miss Vitkus. He liked people who paid good attention. Thank you for your good attention. That's really all I came to say.”

And then she was gone, Quinn walking her to her too-high vehicle, where they exchanged some tender, indecipherable words. Then she got into her car and drove away.

“My goodness,” Ona said when Quinn returned. “I don't believe that poor thing is fully buttoned.”

“That's not her. She's still in shock.”

“Someone should be watching her.”

“Someone is.” His face—like Frankie's, easy to read—showed a flood of love and shame.

Quinn looked around. “Anything else? As long as I'm here?” He was in a hurry now. She felt like her little-girl self waving to Maud-Lucy Stokes from a train platform.

“I have something for you, Quinn,” she said. “I was saving it for your last day, which I didn't realize was so hard upon us.” She opened a drawer and handed him a small, well-preserved phonograph cylinder she'd found in a box of oddments during the fruitless hunt for her birth certificate.

“‘Some of These Days' by Sophie Tucker,” Quinn read from the label. “‘Nineteen eleven.' What is this, a recording?”

“I suppose you'd need an Edison machine to play it.” She saw her mistake: she'd given a musician music that couldn't be heard.

But he was smiling, lifting the cylinder from its case. The cloudy trail left by the boy's grief-shocked mother lifted a bit as he admired the strange old thing. Even to Ona it looked strange, and she had a vivid, momentary sensation of being back in Maud-Lucy Stokes's third-floor apartment: whatever Quinn washed his hair with smelled like Maud-Lucy's starched doilies.

“This is great, Ona. And what's this, the sheet music?” he asked, removing a discolored paper sleeve that had been curled inside the case. “‘Hiding Place' by Howard J. Stanhope?”

“What,” Ona said, “let me see,” but he was right, it was one of Howard's seventy-five-year-old song sheets. How it had wound up in her things she couldn't guess; maybe Howard had stashed it there in the hope she'd come across it one day and miss him. She did miss him, oddly enough, in the generalized way she missed her whole life.

“Howard's flaming ambition was to get into Tin Pan Alley,” she told him. “But he was a dreadful songwriter.”

“Ambition like that can kill a man,” Quinn said, then hummed the opening bars, puzzling out the melody.

“You can read off a sheet?”

“A little credit, please.”

Maud-Lucy had been a marvelous sight reader, and Howard, too; but she had never met another one. She'd enjoyed Quinn's stories of the road. He'd spent the week with the religious fellows, which had struck her as an odd match until he admitted what they paid; this week he was going off with them again. His stories reminded her of trailing Maud-Lucy to the Kimball Opera House to hear tales of the Congolese jungle or the Wild West, a world apart.

“You can't imagine how much money Howard burned through,” she said, “on all manner of scalawags who promised to make him rich.”

“I guess some things don't change.” He flashed her a self-deprecating grin. This was how their friendship had progressed, in increments measured in twitches.

He faltered his way through the song, which Ona remembered as a silly thing about making up with the Lord over a bottle of whiskey—a product of Howard's religious phase, after Frankie died and before she left. How many times had she sat in that ruffled green chair on Woodford Street, listening to Howard's flat, Protestant voice, all the while dying to tune in Jimmy Durante on their tabletop Crosley?

“Howard was a teetotaler,” she told Quinn. “Prohibition had absolutely no effect on us.”

Quinn was still humming. “Honestly, Ona, it's not bad.”

“Those religious fellows of yours might like it,” she said. “Those boys on the brink.”

“Maybe,” he said. He hummed a few more bars. “I'm hearing it with a music-hall vibe.”

Ona didn't know what a
vibe
was, exactly, but the word recalled the quivering boxes of unsold song sheets delivered by truck to the Woodford Street house. Poor Howard, with his grand delusions. Then it struck her: she'd given Quinn the cylinder to make herself appear musical.

“I hope you're not planning to let those boys save you,” she said.

He looked up slyly. “Not in the way they think.”

“Oho,” she said. “Something up your sleeve.”

He shrugged. “You get a big enough audience, it doesn't matter if you're praising God or the devil.”