The One-in-a-Million Boy (10 page)

She patted his shoulder. “Start counting.”

“One,” the boy said softly, “birth certificate.” He tore a page from his own pristine notebook—she couldn't begin to know what this cost him—and wrote at the top,
PROOF
. Then he recorded the first item in a careful, kindly hand that seemed to soothe him. He looked up again and handed her the page with solemnity, as if he were the parish priest from that long-vanished church, confirming her existence.

He assured her he'd return with a list of exactly what docs she would need. When the time came to record her, she felt jittery and short of days. The tape was running out; a sliver remained on one side, a fat coil—her life!—on the other. “Part Eight?” she said. “Are you sure?”

They recorded Part Eight.

“You won't give this part to your teacher,” Ona said. “Or that other part.”

“I won't,” he said. He knew. Possibly he had always known.

When the scoutmaster arrived she asked him to wait outside. They recorded Part Nine. The scoutmaster ran an errand, then returned. But she had to finish. She asked him to wait some more. They ended up with ten parts because the boy was the one running the machine.

Which was just as well. Ona had no more. The boy had taken it all. Or, she had given it.

She spent the remains of that day scouring the house for her birth certificate until she remembered what had happened to it. She intended to tell the boy, but on the tenth Saturday he did not appear. Nor did he appear on the Saturday following, when her bushes suddenly quavered with a mixed flock of jewel-colored birds that Ona could not hear.

On the Saturday after that, his father came.

 

PART TWO

Quinn's days jammed up with work. Out of each week, after completing his chores for Ona, he isolated a few hours to go to the bank, deposit his cash, and write out a check for twice what he'd been paying before. Then he took a bus to Belle's house to lay the money down. This ritual gave him too much time to think, but he believed it necessary to pay in person.

Visiting her was no longer easy—that, too, seemed necessary—for it meant facing the gauntlet of Belle's formidable sister, Amy; or one of their blowsy aunts; or sometimes their jittery mother; or, worse, their father; or, worse still, Ted Ledbetter. Quinn went anyway, because it was the least he could do. Also the most. She'd forgiven him the theft of the diary—he'd unhanded it, and she'd accepted it, in silence.

As the bus let him off near Belle's neighborhood, his phone rang. “Hey, Pops,” came a voice he knew. “We need you.”

“Let me guess,” Quinn said, walking against a stiff breeze and slashing sunlight. “Cousin Zack ditched you last-minute for another spin in rehab?”

“It's a
disease,
” Brandon said. He was twenty-one and had a friend in Jesus. They all did, and why not? Young and lucky, inheritors of dimpled chins and great teeth. They called themselves Resurrection Lane.

Quinn jimmied his calendar out of his pocket. “When?”

“Tomorrow. Eight cities, seven days. We're back late Saturday.”

“Things looking up in the praise trade?”

Brandon laughed his clean, tenor laugh. “We're on
fire,
Pops.”

“I'll ink you in.” Resurrection Lane paid well and promptly, thanks to Sylvie, Brandon's fast-talking, deal-making supermom. Quinn had never met cousin Zack, the bad-seed guitarist whom Quinn was being hired once again to replace.

“Awesome, he's inked in!” That was Tyler, Brandon's brother, crowing in the background. Their cousins, Jason and Jeff, collectively known as the Jays, rounded out the prayer circle.

“Oh, wait, hold on,” Quinn said. “Wait a sec.” He had Saturday-morning chores: yet another week as Ona's Boy Scout, and he hadn't disappointed her yet.

“Pops—?”

“No worries,” Quinn said. “I'll work it out.”

“Awesome, he'll work it out!” One of the Jays. Quinn felt a flush of pride, disquietingly paternal. Despite the group grace every time you so much as reached into a bag of Cheetos, Quinn liked them. They wrote hummable songs and acted like pros, though their puppyish affection sometimes made him think of Jesus herding apostles from town to town. He'd taught them famous licks from Hendrix and Clapton, advising them to hold their guitars low on their bodies.
Untuck your shirts, for crying out loud. You look like the Dave Clark Five.
They'd called him “Mr. Porter” until he told them to knock it off, then started calling him “Pops,” which stuck.

“Remember last March in Worcester?” one of the Jays broke in. “That song we tried out? We changed the intro and added a bridge, just like you said, and they're playing it on the
radio,
no lie!”

He meant Christian radio. But still. Sylvie had muscled the song into the hands of a friend-of-a-friend deejay in Omaha, who played it more or less continuously for three weeks, whereupon the name Resurrection Lane miraculously washed over both coasts like parted halves of the Red Sea.

“It's happening, Pops!” Tyler again, or maybe Brandon; they talked the way they sang: a blend. “We did you proud.”

“Hear it, hear it,” Quinn said as he signed off. The boys laughed, because that was the name of the song.

He made his way to Belle's door, pausing a moment to steel himself, but the door flew open and there was Amy.

“She's sleeping,” she informed him. “She's got day and night reversed.”

The irony of this revelation landed hard—their biorhythms had never matched up, and now, it seemed, they did.

“I'll wait,” he said.

Amy's face closed up. She was more striking than Belle, darker and smokier and possibly even beautiful, but she carried their father's pugilistic air, leading with her chin even when she didn't have to. She glanced at the check in his fist. “Quinn,” she murmured, “what exactly do you think you're buying?”

He said nothing, followed her into the kitchen, where she resumed scrubbing Belle's sink as if intending to make it disappear. Sunlight flinted through the windows. The whole place clanged with an empty, metallic gleam, whether from Amy's brutal applications or Belle's shedding of material goods, hard to say. The toaster appeared to be missing.

“Uh, Amy?”

He waited until she looked up—at him—but she gave away nothing beyond the haggard nakedness of her face. Instead, she wiped her hands, opened the fridge, and poured out some lemonade with a great clattering of ice.

Amy stood at the counter, sipping mutely. “What can I do for you?”

“She wants me here,” he insisted, because he'd begun to believe it.

“Be that as it may, the time when your presence in this house would have done her any good is long past. She has a perfectly nice man in her life.”

He glanced around. “I don't see him anywhere.”

“He has kids,” she said. “Whom he spends rather a lot of time with.”

The words stung, but he wasn't sure whether she'd aimed them directly at him. In times of pain or rage, the Cosgroves resorted to the vaguely British terminology of the once-removed.
Rather. Not quite. Be that as it may.

“I'll wait,” he said again. “She was never any good at napping.”

“She's good at it now.”

He did wait, observing in silence as Amy padded back and forth with an array of cleaning supplies. From their mother, the Cosgrove girls had learned to scrub their way out of despair. There was no detergent in existence for what ailed them now, but Amy heaved into the old standby nonetheless, with an alacrity bordering on violence, much sloshing and clanging coming from the adjoining rooms. He listened to these sounds—like an animal crying hard, he thought—until she appeared again, hands red and raw.

“Are you staying all summer?” he asked her.

She opened a little closet—he'd once kept his gig bag in there—and took out a dust cloth. Back in LA she wrote a syndicated financial column, but she'd moved her headquarters to the guest room across the hall from the boy's shut door. “I'm waiting for the legalities to settle.”

He watched her unfold the cloth, then fold it again, into perfect quarters.

“What legalities?”

“If you must know,” she said, “we're looking into wrongful death.”

“We—?”

“Well,” she said. “Not you.”

“Who are you suing?” he asked, genuinely bewildered. “God?”

“Don't be absurd.” Her eyes, a dark gold-brown, recalled the doomy hue of dying leaves.

“Who, then? His doctor?”

She said nothing.

He recalled the pediatrician as an old-school type who believed children outgrew everything. He'd never met the woman himself, but Belle had her on speed dial. The name came to him: “You're suing Dr. McNeil? You're kidding me.”

“Dr. McNeil retired. Belle switched to CenterMed.”

“CenterMed, then,” Quinn said. He knew the place: huge practice, you never saw the same person twice, but you could get in on short notice. “You're suing them? For what?”

“Not them, a PA who works there. Physician's
assistant.
They're supposed to
assist.
Anyway, the less you know about this, the better.”

Leave it to the Cosgroves, who would indeed sue God if such a thing were possible. He imagined them dragging Belle through airless hearings as her pallor turned to ash. Now he was angry. “You're suing a PA for not detecting a condition that's undetectable? Look it up, Amy.”

“
You
look it up,” she snapped. “If you're dispensing drugs to children you're supposed to comprehend the fine print, which is there for any competent medical professional to take under advisement.”

Quinn's understanding went tight and wiry, like a guitar string about to break. “What are you talking about?”

She folded her arms. “Long QT is either inherited—”

“I know that,” he said. “I know all that.”

“—or acquired. There's no way to tell after the fact. If he inherited it”—here she glanced at him with suspicion—“he'd likely have lived a long life in blissful ignorance, but the drugs tipped the scale. If he
didn't
inherit it, then the prescription did the job all by itself.”

Amy's information was coming in as if on tape delay, the import of the words arriving a beat or two behind the actual words. “Make
sense,
” he said. “What drugs?”

She hesitated. “Antidepressants,” she said. “For chronic anxiety. Why don't you know this? The pills weren't doing squat, so the PA added a titch of antipsychotic about two months before he died.”

“Anti-what? Jesus Christ.”

“They're supposed to help with night terrors.” A tear dropped down her cheek and off the tip of her chin and into the hollow of her throat. “But the PA was too rushed, too busy, over his head—something.”

Quinn just stood there in the tin-bright room, weak and clueless, wondering what the hell were night terrors, unless she meant that eerie, soft, wee-hour keening, the boy sitting up, eyes translucent and pinned open and unconvincingly awake.

His head ached. Didn't Rennie's daughter take medication? And one of Gary's perfect little sons, come to think. The guys talked about these things all the time and now he wished he'd paid more attention. Every kid in America had prescriptions these days, he knew that much. “What were the chances?” he asked at last. “Are we talking, like, one in a million?”

“He should have ordered an EKG first. He should have done the research. He should have
looked
it
up.
”

They stared each other down for a few moments, the air between them charged with old rivalry.

“When is she going back to work?” he asked.

“She tried,” Amy said. Belle worked at the state archives, where she often aided ordinary people in their quest to nail down their ancestral trail.
What's the point?
he'd asked her once—he who had never known a grandparent, whose mother had died young, whose father and brother were as distant as ideas. The question was a throwaway, a verbal shrug; but Belle responded with her usual thoughtfulness:
They hope their descendants will do the same for them.

“She tried twice, actually,” Amy said, “but she can't bear the names of the dead.” She turned on him then, her face soft from weeks of crying. “How is it that you're working so much, Quinn?”

“I—it's what I do.”

“Why aren't you prostrate with sorrow? Why aren't you home right now, writhing in your bed of pain?”

Because, he believed, he had not earned the release of grief.

“Maybe if you'd been a different sort of father he would have been a different sort of kid,” she went on, her breath coming hard and uneven. “A kid who wasn't so afraid, who felt safe in his bones, who didn't need two prescriptions to face the wall of the world, who didn't have to number every goddamn item in his universe, who didn't have to ride his bike through the neighborhood at five in the morning for whatever incomprehensible reason and be killed by his own heart and found on the sidewalk with a gash in his cheek.” She covered her face. “Oh, God,” she breathed. “Oh, my God, I'm disgusting.” She looked up blearily. “This isn't me, Jesus, please, this isn't me.”

Quinn gaped at her. Despite everything, he still thought of her as family. He suffered her anger now—desperation, misery, whatever it was—even welcomed it as his due, because the thing he'd felt since the boy's death did not count as suffering. His heart hurt for her, for Belle, for all of them. And for the boy, especially the boy, vanquished by a deranged God before getting a decent toehold on his full threescore and ten.