The One-in-a-Million Boy (23 page)

“Look here,” Ona said. “Look who's here.”

Ted and Belle: Ted hugging a lurid geyser of maroon and orange lilies, Belle in a fetching white sundress he'd never seen. The straps, trimmed in red, looked edible. Her hair shone.
Touché, Ledbetter,
he thought bitterly.
Well done.

“I need a favor,” Belle said. “Don't say no.” Before Quinn could duck for cover, she lobbed the grenade: “Ted and I are getting married in half an hour and we need witnesses.”

The high school kids applauded; Belle gave a them a startled glance, then smiled. Ted grinned like a sunflower as Quinn's head filled with bees.

“A wedding?” Ona said. Her color bloomed. He could see how someone might take her for, say, ninety-five, in exactly the right light.

“We got the license this morning,” Ted told her, “but we need witnesses to make us legal.”

Belle said, “The town clerks weren't very friendly.”

“That's just Vermont,” Ted said. “They don't say much.”

“Anyway, we wanted to have people we know.” Belle turned to Ona. “I figured you'd still be here. Quinn hasn't gotten up before ten since high school.”

“This isn't as sudden as you think,” Ted said to Quinn. “We've been talking about it”—here he looked lovingly at Belle—“for a while.”

Belle lifted her foot, from which dangled a white sandal decorated with gold rivets. “I picked these up at a Walmart. We've been up since six.” She looked—not happy, no; but less doomed.

“I've got a gig tonight,” Quinn said, head still buzzing. “We have to leave, like, ten minutes ago.” He'd been smacked in the forehead with a baseball once and this felt worse.

“It's those religious boys,” Ona reminded everyone. “They won't mind if he's a little late.”

“It won't take five minutes,” Belle said. “I don't expect cartwheels, Quinn, but if you care for me, then this is how you show it.”

She gave him a look, spectral and large-eyed, that embraced the length and breadth of their history. This was all he had left of her.

She had looked this way on the night before the boy's third birthday, sitting Quinn down in their darkened house after he'd dragged in from a gig and set down his gear. “This wasn't my idea of family life,” she said to him, snapping on a lamp. “Loneliness was the last thing I expected.” It was one of those moments in which clocks seem to stop ticking. “I'd rather do this by myself,” she said, “than feel resentful all the time. I'd rather have you be
actually
absent than
virtually
absent.”

Bleary from an hour's drive on rainy roads, he fished the night's take from his pocket. “I'm making a living,” he said. “I'm holding up my end.”

“We need more than a living,” she whispered. “We need a life.”

He wanted his bed, his wife's warm body laid against his, and two or three hours of oblivion before being woken by their son, who was fearful of insects and dust bunnies and bulky coats and the color yellow. Every morning was the same: the same tremolo of panic scaling the octaves as Belle bolted out of bed and Quinn woke to a head rush of adrenaline.

“I thought we'd rise to the occasion a little better than we have,” she said. But of course Belle
had
risen to the occasion. If there were a theoretical maximum height to which a person could rise to an occasion, Belle had reached it; she had scaled the craggy summit of occasion through icy winds, in bare feet, pursued by wolves.

“What?” Quinn said, alarmed by her expression. “Wait.” Words harbored myriad meanings and he was a poor interpreter. He felt swimmy and cockeyed, though he'd been sober since the day the boy entered the world. Their son: fifth percentile in height and weight but bright to the point of unease, completing puzzles made for ten-year-olds and copying words out of books. Belle's aunts, who baby-sat in shifts, dotingly claimed that he wore them out just by existing.

“Here's what I want,” she said now, unfolding a piece of paper. It looked like a long list. “I want you to fix the fence,” she began. “I want you to like getting up early. I want you to take us to the park on Saturdays. I want you to quit gigging.” She paused. “I want you to act like you love us.” Her voice took on a harmonic understory, the sound of an old, wooden instrument, the same plangent voice in which she'd first revealed her pregnancy. She'd missed a pill—an unconscious act of will, they decided later—but at the time she could not fathom how such a thing had come to pass.
Now that it has, though, it's ours to embrace.
Then, as now, she'd emanated a slow burn of core belief.
You don't have to marry me, Quinn. A lot of guys wouldn't.

“There's a studio starting up in Cambridge,” he said carefully. “I know the guy.”

Belle shut her eyes.

“No, Belle, listen, he's looking for session players.” He took her hands. “We wouldn't have to move. I'll commute.”

“Oh, Quinn.” Belle sighed and covered her eyes. “All this was fine for us once. I liked getting sucked down the rabbit holes. But that was before.”

“Belle, listen—”

“I loved your music,” she said. “I thought—” She folded her hands on the cottony lap of her nightgown, where her list of requests made an ominous crackle.

“You thought what?”

“I believed you. I believed it all.”

Her use of the past tense flooded him with grief. He flashed to her dorm room after his gig with the Benders in the quad, Belle a girl of nineteen, her walls pulsating with abstracts framed in pine. “I thought I wanted something different,” she added softly. “I wish I could have wanted something different. Really, Quinn, I do. But it turns out I want the same things everybody else wants.” Her voice retained that timbre, that wearified resonance. A voice made for singing, except that Belle couldn't carry a tune. He loved this about her: to Belle, all music was a miracle.

He said, “I wish I could've wanted something different, too.”

“What I want”—she looked at him—“is another baby.”

“Oh. No. Oh, Belle. I can't.”

She nodded solemnly. “I know.”

A small clang went off in his head. “There isn't—is there someone else?”

“No,” she said. But he heard:
Not yet.

He'd married her when to do otherwise would have been easier—proof, as if he needed it, that he loved her. He'd claimed their child. He hadn't blamed her for the missed pill. This slender sign of his own decency—his hope that he wasn't
a lot of guys
—guided him through their parting. There were ultimatums and slip-backs; long, anguished nights of lovemaking; promises made and broken; and many tears; but in the end Belle's heartfelt list amounted to one impossible task: become somebody else.

When finally he took to the road, he vowed to do just that, become somebody else, like the gold rushers and stake claimers of the American West who chased the horizon and sent their money back home. He'd establish a presence in a good studio, become the flexible journeyman, the musician's musician, the go-to guy who showed up in liner notes and album credits. He'd prove to her how worthy was his dream.

The legal dissolution reached him in Chicago, where he read all the fine-printed paragraphs, every
whereas
reminding him of their history, so intricately woven it could be sundered only by force of law. Five years later, when he married her again—
Because I missed you, Quinn, and sons need fathers
—he said “I do” with such force and volume it made her laugh out loud.

But he meant it, that second “I do,” even with his mysterious son standing by—staring, listening, counting something unknowable on his bonelike fingers. Was the boy counting Quinn's thoughts? Is that what he was counting?

He'd felt like a bulldog presented to a boy who had asked for a parakeet.

Did he try hard enough? He thought he did. A year later, numbed by a job assembling sound systems at Best Buy, Quinn was suffering the old, awful, needling itch of restlessness and Belle was talking once again about babies. His fingers ached from not playing, and the plodding months had dulled his shiny wish to restore Belle's happiness.

“He likes to list things,” he ventured one night, washing the dishes as she dried. “Is that unusual?” For weeks he'd kept the question unasked, but it blundered out unbidden, spoiling their tableau of domestic calm.

Belle shrugged. “
One, two, three
were his first words.” The words had not come till the boy turned four, one of countless troubling details Quinn had strung together since his return.

Amy, visiting for the long weekend, chimed in then: “They call it personality, Quinn.” She tore off a piece of homemade gingerbread and offered it as compensation for trumping him, but his hands were wet and he refused it.

Carefully, he said, “It's just that the other kids don't seem so—” He stopped, regrouped. “I wonder if there might be a concern. Some possible—concern.”

Belle continued scrubbing, though her body showed she was listening. “What do you mean by ‘concern'?” she asked, confirming his belief that she planned to transmit information in orchestrated stages for fear of derailing the family reunion. His dismay was tempered by the pride he felt in reading her so well between the lines.

“One, he stares,” Quinn said, using his fingers to make an additional, not-heretofore-mentioned point. “Two, his arms don't move when he walks.”

Belle was watching him now, holding a filigreed saucer. She'd taken to serving coffee in old-fashioned vessels, which struck him as an overreach.

“He doesn't move like other kids,” he went on. “His arms just sort of stay—put. Straight down. At his sides. Like somebody tied him up.”

Belle's forehead crinkled. “Are you—you're not making fun of him?”

“No! God, no, Belle. I'm being a, an involved father.” He shot a panicked glance at Amy. “I don't have experience with kids”—an eye roll from Amy here—“so I don't know what's normal and what . . . isn't.”

Silence.

“Three,” he said, “it's like there's a tape recorder in his head. If he hears something wrong the first time—somebody's name, say—it sticks there, like it's on a tape loop and can't be overdubbed with the correct information.” He'd dug his hole now and decided to keep digging. “It just seems like there might be a couple of areas of concern. Possible—areas. In his social development or whatever.”

“His vocabulary blows the doors off those other kids,” Amy said.

“I know, he does, he has a great vocabulary. Stupendous vocabulary.” He didn't understand where the boy got his words, or the often elaborate syntax into which he inserted them. “But, okay, how about the way he calls his teacher Mr. Linkman? I've corrected him fifty times, but he still says Mr. Linkman. I mean, he knows that the sixteenth president of the United States was Abraham
Lincoln.
He can tell you all about
Lincoln's
childhood home and
Lincoln's
wife's name and what play
Lincoln
was watching the night he was shot and the names of the men who made up the
Lincoln
cabinet and who built the
Lincoln
Memorial, but he still insists on calling his teacher Mr. Linkman.”

Belle and Amy exchanged deflatingly knowing glances. “Maybe that's because his teacher's name is Mr. Linkman,” Belle said. “Andy Linkman.” The women burst into laughter, and the sustained tension of the conversation reached a chordal resolve that came as a relief to all.

“Gosh, Quinn,” Amy said, “it's like you've got a
tape recorder
in your head.”

“Leave him alone,” Belle said amiably. “I like a man who worries.”

“Obviously that was a bad example.” But there were others: the boy called grasshoppers
grasshornets.
He called boundary
bondery,
gratitude
grabitude.

The women laughed again, especially Amy. He let her have her moment—it was part of his campaign to be a better person—then said, “What I'm saying is that no matter how many times he sees or hears the word
grasshopper,
he's going to say
grasshornet.
And I'm wondering—if you don't mind, Amy—if that might be a problem. I'm wondering, as a concerned father.”

Belle stiffened. “There's nothing wrong with him.”

“You're not listening,” he said, geared up now for no reason he could rationally name. “Can't his teachers help him?”

“I don't know, Quinn. Why don't you march on down to his school, if you can find it, and ask Mr.
Lincoln?
If you think you're in over your head, tell me now.”

The moment, it seemed, had come. For a year and a half now he'd been watchful, his questions cautiously posed and artfully dodged as the boy went about his mystifying business. “I'm
asking,
all right?” he said. “As his
father.
He's in his room right now, doing what? Counting shoelaces or memorizing world bowling scores or arranging two hundred blank CDs into an indecipherable pattern or writing unexplainable items on a list. Why doesn't he have friends? Why the hell does he
count
everything?”

Amy sat up.
What CDs?
her eyes asked.
What do you mean, no friends?
Belle returned a look of helpless indignation. Did she decide to consider medication then? Right here, when Quinn intimated that the boy was damaged and Amy sat up, noticing?

“He's just who he
is,
” Belle said, facing them both. “Our own funny little boy.” Which was exactly the right thing to say—quintessential Belle. In one exquisitely calibrated sentence, she managed to round them up as a trio, beefing up Amy's responsibility while diffusing Quinn's.