The One-in-a-Million Boy (6 page)

The boy rewound the tape and clicked it on again. “This is Miss Ona Vitkus,” he said hopefully. “This is her life story on tape. This is Part One.”

Ona inspected the tiny whirling wheels. Part One? Instantly, she began to divide up her years.

“Is it on?” she asked.

The boy put his finger to his lips, nodding. Apparently he planned to remain invisible. He slipped her a sheet of preprinted questions—prepared, presumably, by Mr. Linkman—and pointed to number one.
Where were you born?
There were forty-nine subsequent questions.

“I can't answer all these,” she said. “We'll be here till doomsday.”

The boy said nothing, staring down the machine as if it might speak in her stead.

“What do you expect me to do?” she asked.

The boy looked up. He mouthed the answer:
Regale me.

Ona felt this turn of events a bit presumptuous—it was one thing to chitchat at the kitchen table, but quite another to compose your thoughts in a manner that might be graded by Mr. Linkman. But at this point in their friendship she found it impossible to refuse him. She had believed herself through with friendship.

“I'll answer the first one,” she said. “But that's it.”

Which it wasn't.

She blundered through some preliminaries, made inarticulate by stage fright. Finally, mercifully, he clicked off the machine. He smiled, showing his trimmed teeth. “That was very excellent.” He clicked the machine back on. “This is Miss Ona Vitkus,” he said. “This is her life story on tape. This is also Part One.”

Quinn took an early bus to Rennie's plant behind the mall, a sleek, hangar-size warehouse in which thrived Great Universal Mail Systems, the third-largest bulk-mail service in New England. The warehouse sat on a green picnic blanket of lawn. The entryway, constructed of glass panels secured by a floridly patterned girding, lent the place an air of domestic muscle, as if it housed the headquarters of a home-decoration concern. On sunny days the glass winked all day.

A young receptionist greeted him with a buoyancy born of an excellent benefits package. On her desk sat a vase of irises. “You're here to see—?” she asked. Her hair lay close to her head, a sexy, flapper-girl haircut. A befuddling image of Miss Vitkus as she might have appeared in the twenties visited him unannounced: she was dancing the Charleston in one of those skinny dresses, a reckless girl with shining cheeks.

Quinn introduced himself, wishing he'd shaved a little closer. “Rennie said he might have some shifts open.”

“Oh, I'm
sorry,
” she bubbled, getting up. “You came in the wrong way.”

She eased him back toward the door and tapped a crimson fingernail against the glass. “See where the building turns? Like an L? There's what you want.”

“Rennie's a friend,” Quinn said. “I thought I might—”

“Oh, wow, he's in meetings all day today,” she chirped. “Off-the-charts busy.”

“We met in junior high.”

The receptionist nodded, happy-happy. “Wow, that's great.”

Quinn lingered a moment. Behind the smiling girl was a pastel screen, and behind that emanated a soothing white-collar air rush of business being transacted: doors quietly opening and closing, high heels drumming on carpet, a muffle of polite laughter. Rennie was back there someplace, and Quinn wished, not for the first time, that he'd been born with his friend's knack for contentment.

“Right down there, big black doors,” the girl said, tapping. “You have to move your car if you parked out front. The line workers' lot is over there, see the pole lights?” She flitted back to her post and tried to smile him out the door.

“I know that,” he said. “Tell Rennie I was here.”

“Will do! Don't forget to move your car.”

In the ell, Quinn encountered another receptionist, this one in jeans and a red T-shirt that read
GUMS: WE MEAN BUSINESS
. “I'm already on file,” he told her.

“It's been over a year.” She handed him a clipboard. “You have to do this again.”

At the end of the new-employee orientation, a numbing routine that concluded with an assigned locker and a complimentary cafeteria ticket, Quinn followed a section leader into the plant, an open floor with exceptional light and the kind of ubiquitous machine noise that could either inure you to all sound or drive you slowly insane. He was assigned to a chicken-faced woman named Dawna whose clucking voice carried. Because Quinn had performed many of these tasks before—after the boy was born, after the first divorce, after his big return and hasty remarriage, and again after the second divorce—Dawna deemed him a genius quick study. They were buddied up in the Rennie system, composing a fabulous duo entrusted to a complicated station that sorted and labeled and routed mail by the literal bagful. The place vibrated with the sound of gears and ignition and conveyance and old-fashioned human exertion.

For the first fifty minutes he tagged mailbags; for the second fifty minutes he stacked the labeler. For the third fifty minutes he snatched Zip Code–matched brochures from the conveyor and fastened them with rubber bands. Then it was time for lunch, which he got with his free ticket, and in the time left over he strolled the herringboned pathways of a sunny acreage called the “campus.” Rennie's people got regular breaks, footrests, English lessons, and nine bucks an hour to start. There was almost no turnover. Quinn recognized a group of Somali women from his last go-round.

By two o'clock Dawna had graduated him to a station set up for a massive run of an office-furniture catalog. The machine performed separate tasks at complementary intervals, which had an almost lulling effect on his spirit until the sorter underwent a paper jam that required outside intervention.

The place spit him out at three. He sat in the back of the bus, nothing awaiting him but a long, empty, gigless evening. Normally he'd call one of the guys, get a burger someplace or sit in for supper with one of their burbling families, but he suddenly felt like a man in see-through skin. He recoiled from being looked at—looked into—by people who knew him.

At the first transfer, he impulsively caught the number 4 going west past Sibley Street. He pulled the cord, got off, and walked beneath a cool sun to Miss Vitkus's house. Affixed to the phone poles along the street were lime-green flyers that hollered
NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING
. They flapped like caught bugs.

Her house looked tidy. The grass was trimmed and the feeders blinked with birds. The place seemed freshly rinsed, and he felt a stab of pride to have had a hand in it.

“You,” she said when she found him on her doorstep. She looked up the street. “How is it you don't own a car?”

“I sold it,” he said. “I needed the cash.” He didn't care how this sounded; at her age she'd probably heard everything.

“For what? Alcohol?”

“A conscience debt.” Why was he telling her this? “It didn't work. Isn't working.”

“Money rarely does.” She said nothing more.

He handed her a five. “You owe me some magic.”

She took the money, giving him a meticulous once-over, and let him into the kitchen.

Quinn sat down, his feet throbbing from Rennie's concrete floors. Her cards were stacked just where she'd left them, though the quarters were gone, and the newspapers had vanished from the counter except for a single clipping, neatly folded.

“My son says you inspire him.”

She looked him over, unreadable. “Have you been drinking?”

“Not for eleven years.”

“I have a whistle here,” she announced, rattling a thin chain that hung around her neck. “They had a break-in down the street.” From the depths of her rumpled sweater she extracted a plastic contraption, one of those summons buttons worn by old people who fear a solitary death.

“I press the button and bingo,” she said, pointing to a box that looked like a piece of studio equipment from the forties. “Some Johnny-on-the-spot saves my bacon.”

Did he look as untethered as he felt? He nudged the cards. “Do something.” He didn't know what he wanted from her. She was the oldest person he'd ever met—shouldn't she know some things?

She hesitated, then moved creakily to the counter to snatch up the clipping. “You tricked me,” she said. “You're the trickster, not me.” She shook the clipping, her eyes big and angry.

He knew what it was.

“I had boys in here before him,” she said, “and not a one of them cared to work. It's the fathers who end up here, but they come with a thousand excuses. The boy has too much homework, the boy joined a baseball team.” She lifted her bunched chin. “You made me believe your boy was one of those.”

Quinn stared at Miss Vitkus's neck, skin like crushed satin.

“Then I got an intuition. Something I'd half read, or half heard. I listen to the news. I read my papers, but not the obits. Not religiously, like I used to. Almost everyone I ever knew is dead.” She picked up her glasses and wrestled them onto her face. “Unexpectedly, it says here.” She looked up. “I should say so.”

Quinn could barely meet her eyes, which blazed with grievance. “It's called Long QT Syndrome,” he told her. “Something electrical goes wrong in the heart.”

“A blinky electrical system?”

“Of the heart, yeah,” Quinn said. “The first symptom is usually death.”

Her voice softened. “How does a little boy get it?”

“You either acquire it through a drug reaction, or else you inherit it through a parent. He must have inherited it. It's rare. Obviously.”

“Through a parent?” She frowned. “Are you next?”

“If you make it to middle age the risk goes away. What I didn't know didn't hurt me.”

“If it
was
you,” she said. “It might have been his mother.”

“Let's assume it's me. His mother has enough weight on her heart.” He tapped the cards, an old hand at misdirection himself. “I paid you the full amount.”

“So you did.” She took up the cards and began to work them, rocking the deck from one hand to the other. Her fingers, despite their aged knots, managed the rhythm. She'd been practicing.

“He's your only one?” she asked. Quinn caught her look: apparently they would be using the present tense.

“Just him,” Quinn said, eyeing the cards' undulations. The boy had sat here, watching these same preparations. His son, expecting magic.

She fanned the deck. “Pick one.”

He took the queen of clubs, slipped it back into the deck, and waited as she worked the cards. She turned over his card. “That it?”

Quinn nodded, surprised.

“I got a little flubby there for a second. I'm not myself today.”

“Make something disappear,” Quinn told her, wringing another five from his wallet.

Her eyebrows—or the creases where her eyebrows had once resided—rose. “The mark doesn't get to choose.” She pocketed the money and waited. The air between them went still with possibility. All at once, so quickly that Quinn wasn't sure he'd actually seen it, she plucked the news clipping from the table, closed it into her freckled fist, then opened her hand again, revealing nothing but her own naked palm engraved with a century's worth of lifelines.

“Where is it?” Quinn asked.

“You paid for magic. I gave you magic.” That she refused to pity him—that she was, in fact, furious—made him feel a little less bereft.

He gave her yet another five. “What else you got?”

“Children take what they get. But adults, nothing's ever enough.” She added, “Your boy and I were friends.”

“I should have told you,” Quinn said.

She sat back and folded her big hands. “And here I was thinking he turned out like all those other boys, a layabout with no follow-through.” Her mouth appeared to tremble, but it was hard to discern her meaning through the hatch pattern of wrinkles. “His sterling reputation in this house was being tarnished through absolutely no fault of his. I feel very bad about that. Why didn't that scoutmaster inform me? I have a working phone. Your boy and I had plans.”

Quinn felt strangely heated, as if he'd been caught under a police lamp. He looked around the house for signs of unfinished projects. “What kind of plans?”

“It hardly matters now.” Then he saw her expression change, as if second-guessing herself, or giving Quinn the benefit of the doubt. “He was a good boy and I'm terribly sorry,” she said to him. “It's a pitiful thing to outlive your children.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Frankie perished in the war,” she said. “Randall died of cancer. He never did settle down—lots of ladies but no wife—though he was an excellent attorney-at-law. People said lovely things at his funeral.”

“I'm sorry.”

“This house was Randall's, in fact.” She blinked at him. “Is there a worse indignity, do you think, than inheriting your children's money?”

“Probably. But I see what you mean.”

“At the time I was low on funds and heading into the mixed blessing of a long life.” She leaned across the table to say this.

“You don't have to explain.”

“Randall was sixty-one. Not a long life. But not a short one, either.” She paused. “Frankie's the one I miss.”

A moment passed.

“His mother had to remind me before every custody visit,” Quinn said. “Even then I didn't keep up. I barely knew him. That's the truth.”

Miss Vitkus reached into the warm cavern of Quinn's jacket. He felt her hand on his chest, brief as an alighting bird, before she withdrew it, the folded obituary materializing on her palm, and inside that, his five-dollar bill. She gave them over without a word. From someplace far outside himself, he accepted a knifing pity for the boy, who was missing this. That he could muster a feeling beyond disgrace felt like magic enough.