The One-in-a-Million Boy (16 page)

“The Lord and I worked out our differences over time. But I think I like you better in league with the devil.”

“I'm about as devilish as an actuary, Ona,” he said. “It's work, that's all. Work I love.”

“That's a handsome thing indeed,” she assured him.

He added quietly, “You want to think your choices were worth something.” He resleeved the music sheet and put out his hand. “I've enjoyed knowing you, Ona.”

“You know nothing about me,” she informed him. “I told you nothing.”

“You'd be surprised how well I read between the lines.”

All at once, she felt seen, and she forgave him for leaving.

Then, a cheerful rooty-toot from the driveway, where the scoutmaster was pulling up in his gray van. “Hello, Mrs. Vitkus!” he called, getting out. “Sorry we're late!”

Handsome, hale, well intended, he strode up the walk, towing a boy—a boy of the same age as the previous one—who wore an ill-fitted outfit with a single badge. This boy did not have round, serious, dove-gray eyes. This boy did not have wrists the size of stripped twigs. This boy did not say, “It's a pleasure to meet you,” like the romantic lead in a movie from the forties.

This boy, in fact, remained mute—as did Ona—as the two men eyed each other.

“Just finishing the job, Ted,” Quinn said. “To the letter.”

“That's what I heard.”

The young Scout swiveled his head from one man to the other.

“I wasn't expecting a new boy,” Ona said.

“We didn't want to leave you in the lurch, Mrs. Vitkus,” said the scoutmaster. His uniform was cleanly pressed despite the wilting heat. “This is Noah.”

The new boy mumbled something unintelligible. Oh, he would not do. He'd prove dull, or sullen, or allergic to work. In any case, she wanted them both gone, these twin pillars of the community in their tan shirts. Besides, if she were to get another boy, she'd want a Sunday boy. Or a Tuesday boy. She did not want another Saturday boy.

“You're a week early, Ted,” Quinn said.

The scoutmaster dug for the same gizmo he'd used last time. “Let's see,” he said, stabbing a tiny screen. “Nope. Here it is. Right here.” He had a nice-looking, earnest, trustworthy face.

“There were seven weeks left to go,” Quinn said, “and this is week seven.”

So many, many weeks now gone: the son's winter-spring Saturdays, the father's spring-summer ones. All of a piece, an ongoing beginning, until today: the end.

The mention of the boy, however oblique, deepened the pall over the little crowd on the porch. The new Scout withdrew into the scoutmaster's treelike shadow, betraying a vacant discomfort. Oh, he wouldn't do at all.

“Next week it is, then,” the scoutmaster said, snapping shut his calendar. “This is Noah, by the way. I guess I already said that.”

As the visitors hupped back to the van, a whining note emanated from the smaller one, who clearly found his charity assignment unequal to his expectations. Did he think she'd killed the boy herself? She felt once again like the crone in the dead-end house.

“Apparently the sainted scoutmaster can't tell time,” Quinn said. “Did I mention he's got a thing for my ex-wife?”

“You most certainly did not.”

“She's probably in love with him.”

“Oh, my.”

“Devoted single father. Wife died. A hard guy to hate, in other words, but I seem to be able to manage it.”

“Well, he's prepared,” Ona said. “And kind and obedient, if you like that sort of thing.”

Quinn laughed, the spell broke, and their goodbye arrived at last. He gathered up the cylinder, his musical gift, and put out his hand. She accepted it, hanging on, then letting go.

“The place has never looked better, Quinn,” she told him. “Thanks for your—for your good attention.”

“My pleasure.” He trotted down the steps.

“
Ir man malonu,
” she said.

He turned abruptly. “What was that?”

“I think it means ‘My pleasure.'”

Poised on the bottom step, his present tucked under his arm, his cheeks suddenly pinked up like a girl's—like the boy's, come to think. Was it too much to hope that he was sorry to quit her? Behind him, the hosed-down walk still glittered with spray, reflecting dime-size bits of sky. Before she could stop herself, she blurted, “I need a ride to Vermont, Quinn. To Granyard, Vermont.”

He regarded her for a long moment. “Who's in Vermont?”

“My son,” she said. She waved away his next question. “My first son. I was practically a baby myself.” She hesitated. “I told your boy. I suppose it's not a secret anymore.”

And so she told the father what she had told the son. Not all of it. Most of it. The father took it in, his eyes dark and warm, with those Frankie lashes.

“You'll have to wait a week,” he said. “I'm booked with the God Squad.” He fiddled his calendar out of his pocket and she felt a little wing lift of delight.

“A week will be fine.”

“And we'll have to take your car.”

“It's a good car, Quinn. Not a speck of rust. Twenty-five thousand miles on the odometer.”

“Maybe I can give you a driving refresher en route,” he said. “As long as you're going for it.”

“I'm a menace on the highway. With an expired license to boot.”

“That never stopped me,” he said, and as she watched the father smile, she caught another bewitching way in which the son might have come to resemble him.

 

TRAVEL

1. Longest backward walk. 8,000 miles. Plennie Wingo. Country of USA.
   

2. Largest pedal-powered vehicle. 82 riders. Country of Sweden.
   

3. Longest car trip. 383,609 miles. Emil and Liliana Schmid. Country of Switzerland.
   

4. Fastest bathtub racer. Greg Mutton. 36 miles in 1 hour and 22 minutes and 27 seconds. Country of Australia.
   

5. Largest parade of BMW cars. 107. Country of Netherlands.
   

6. Fastest time nonelectric window opened by dog. 11.34 seconds. Striker. Country of USA.
   

7. Highest limousine. 10 feet and 11 inches. Country of USA.
   

8. Greatest speed achieved on motorized sofa. 87 miles per hour. Edd China. Country of UK.
   

9. Heaviest car balanced on head. 352 pounds. John Evans. Country of UK.
   

10. Oldest licensed driver. Fred Hale. Age 108. Country of USA.
    

 

PART THREE

Ona woke on departure day with a terrible word in her head:
mirtis.
What if Laurentas was dead?

She shook the word away. Surely Laurentas was alive and thriving, enjoying life at the address crumpled into her purse; he had to be. She envisioned the day ahead with a fervor borrowed from the boy, with whom she shared a stake in its outcome. This journey was for him, and so: Laurentas had to be alive.

In her hasty preparations for the trip, however, she kept forgetting its purpose. Travel became an end in itself: the novelty of it, the pleasure. She had her hair done for the first time in twenty-five years by a girl who stiffened Ona's white wisps into a lacquered helmet costing too much money that she didn't mind paying. All week she'd felt young and impulsive, telling Louise in her head:
I'm taking to the road with a slipshod musician.

An odyssey, after all, composed her first conscious memories, recalled in bright, unrelated glints: An exhausted horse being shot for food. A Gypsy offering peaches from a sack. Clouds of dust the color of pulverized roses. She recalled mashing her face into her father's neck, her mother's tears dampening the pages of a contraband book written in the forbidden Latin alphabet. They walked and walked, missing their bloom-heavy dooryard, their chickens and cherry trees, their dearest farm that would be burned a decade later by the Germans, an outrage recorded in a letter from Uncle Bronys, the envelope marked with a black cross: death in the family.

Despite the dust and misgiving, there existed on that journey an air of moving
toward.
Toward what, it hardly mattered. Ona had been born on the twentieth day of the twentieth century, a good omen to her superstitious Catholic parents. They chose a country that embraced progress as a sacrament. Aldona bribed a border guard, claiming her sick child needed a special type of doctor, a story deliberately elaborate and confusing, Ona wailing on cue. The guard—a rangy teenager—waved them through, a seemingly desperate woman dragging a small girl and a few days' worth of supplies. Over the border they went, Jurgis secretly entombed beneath the planks of a donkey cart. They reached a city, finally, and a ship, and made the perilous crossing with the words
Kimball, Maine
pinned to their coats.

This was their story, pieced together from the tatters of their English, but only now did it feel to Ona like a lived experience. She recalled a lot of coughing, an uneven horizon, a piece of cheese with star prints of mold that her mother nibbled clean before offering little Ona the rest. And long, fretful conversations between her parents, who disdained their cohorts sardined into clammy, flea-ridden quarters. They murmured their dread of losing their papers, their hatred for the Russian army, their relief at having made it this far without detention.

In dropped another jewel, an uncut sentence:
Dievas davė dantis, Dievas duos duonos.
God gave us teeth, God will give us bread.

She must once have known her mother tongue, to recall these things with such urgency. Ona had no use for irony, but she nonetheless found it cruel that her parents fled in part because the Russians tried to take their ancestral voice. She wondered if their language bided somewhere secret in her body, not the chips and bits that had recently dropped from nowhere but a fully formed fluency that might yet erupt at a moment of willing surrender.

In her life so far, such a moment had not presented itself.

Quinn arrived exactly on time. “Rise and shine,” he called, the screen door banging behind him.

“I rose four hours ago,” she said. “The shining I shall leave to younger persons.”

“Ona, you look shiny as a new tuning peg. Look at that hair.”

“I could go to war with this hair,” she said. “It cost me forty dollars.”

His cheeks were all pinked up. Travel agreed with him, and she might have known: people like Quinn, always running from themselves, loved the road. He took her things and escorted her to the car. He'd made such a fuss about its vintage, its “legs,” owing, she felt privately bigheaded to hear, to her habit of starting it up twice a week for grocery shopping. Quinn helped her into the passenger side, cupping her elbow with his long fingers, provoking in her a paradox of helplessness and vigor.

She smoothed her slacks across her thighs as Quinn jaunted to the other side and took the wheel. She expected a leadfoot type who'd make the drive in record time (she wondered what the record actually was), but he proceeded with stupendous caution, bypassing the most obvious highway entrance and making a sudden turn into a neighborhood of well-kept houses.

“Where the heck are we going?” Ona asked.

“On a rescue mission,” Quinn said. “Damsel in distress.” He pulled up to a white Cape two blocks off Washington Avenue. With a jolt of dismay, Ona realized where they were.

“We're taking an unbuttoned mother on a road trip?”

“She asked to come,” Quinn said. “You have no idea what a relief it is to grant her a wish.”

Belle came out of the house, carrying a stuffed satchel. Another woman bounded after her.

“Uh-oh,” Quinn muttered.

Unlike Belle, the second woman was dark-haired and sturdily built. From a distance she bore the same untouched, untouchable quality Ona remembered in the girls from Henneford Academy, Lester's sister school, but closer up the façade melted off. She was grieving: taut and haunted.

“May I please speak to you, please?” the brunette asked Quinn.

As Quinn got out of the car, Belle slipped into the driver's seat.

“Belle—”

“I'm taking the wheel,” she said to him. “You're a terrible driver.” The skin beneath her eyes was purpled with fatigue; it had been nearly three months by Ona's count, too long to last without measurable sleep, though she herself had done the same after Frankie.

Quinn studied her for a moment as the brunette glowered at the lot of them. “All right,” he said to Belle, then turned to the brunette, who began to berate him in a stage whisper.

Belle tossed her bag into the back seat, where it merged almost conjugally with Quinn's duffel. Ona patted her stiff, see-through hair. “May I ask?”

“I told Quinn he couldn't do this alone.”

Ona bristled. “I don't require a nurse.”

“I wasn't planning to nurse you,” Belle said. “I was planning to get the hell out of town.” Her eyes brimmed. “You don't know how badly I want to jump out of my skin.”

But Ona did know. After Frankie, it would have been a balm of the first order to simply get into a car and
go.
She tried to swallow her consternation. She did not want to be one of those old people who detest change—Louise had warned her against this very thing. But she couldn't help reeling with disappointment. Last night she'd worked her balky faucets to fill the tub high and spritzed the water with almond oil. This morning she'd dabbed perfume behind her ears. She hadn't counted on being the third wheel. Already too hot in her long-sleeved blouse, she felt like a collapsed pudding, a leftover that someone had forgotten on the seat.

Belle flipped open the glove box. “No map?”

“I have a map,” Ona said. “I'm not so feeble-minded as to embark on a road trip without a map.”

“We'll make do.” Belle tinkered with the rearview mirror; Ona caught a whiff of body odor. Just outside, Quinn and the brunette were engaged in what might generously be called a discussion.