The One-in-a-Million Boy (8 page)

. . .

Well, you're a reader. I guess you know all kinds of things.

. . .

Were you, now? Well, Laurentas wasn't premature, he was late. Thank God I was young. Hard to believe now, but I was. Young and hardy.

. . .

That's very kind. Thank you. Where was I? One little compliment and I'm all balled up.

. . .

The baby, yes. Papa cut the baby out, a neat trick that rivaled anything I'd seen on the midway. My own father, with his farmer's face. If not for Papa, I'd have died. I'm not upsetting you, I hope?

. . .

Good.

. . .

Oh. All right. For posterity, yes: Jurgis Vitkus. My good father. He gushed tears beforehand. And afterward. But not during. During, he was steady as a post. You saw no blubbering from me, either. I'd dragged home enough shame as it was. So I stood the pain for two and a half days, until finally my father—who as far as I knew was a cherry farmer turned acid cooker—unearthed a leather bag from someplace in their bedroom and produced a scalpel so shiny it hurt my eyes. I didn't know what to make of it. “Papa,” I cried to him, “Papa, what are you doing!”

. . .

Well, I thought—for a minute there, I thought he intended to murder me in my bed for canoodling with a Russian.

. . .

. . .

I'm sorry. I forgot you for a second.

. . .

The beginning? Well, I was glad to be back home from the midway, despite everything. I was obviously with child. Maud-Lucy came back from Granyard to take care of me.

. . .

Oh, but she
jilted
her ailing auntie. For
me.
Papa's English had improved somewhat over the years, but his written communication was a fright. Mama's even worse. Such spelling you simply would not believe. I never saw the letter, but Maud-Lucy got the idea I was half dead from consumption. Imagine her shock to find me perfectly hale and big as a pumpkin.

. . .

Oh, but I was! It takes a little imagination, but I was a round and vigorous girl.

. . .

You certainly
do
have a good imagination. Who's the one who imagined my decrepit old self as a record breaker?

. . .

There you go. Anyway. Maud-Lucy took immediate charge of my confinement, reading to me in her third-floor parlor while I ate tinned marshmallows and kept my feet up. She played piano and sang to me and read out loud a very long novel by Mr. Charles Dickens.

. . .

Bleak House.
It took her days to read that book. I was so happy. It's possible that my circumstances—being coddled by the woman I loved most in the world—misled me into believing that time could be peeled back. You're too young to know how alluring a notion that might be. I kept forgetting that a baby was en route. But when my time came, oh, what a string of surprises.

. . .

One, Maud-Lucy Stokes was bone useless: boo-hooing start to finish, her hands rubbed raw from wringing. Mama fed me whiskey in a porcelain egg cup bordered with hand-painted ivy leaves. Something else from the motherland that I'd never seen. “
Sha, sha, sha,
” she kept saying. “
Sha, sha, sha.
”

. . .

I have no idea, though I took it for comfort. Maud-Lucy was just a flitter-flutter at the periphery, bawling and yelling at Papa. Quite rudely, I might add.

. . .

“For the love of God, Jurgis, get her to the hospital!” Surprise number two—that's right, count 'em up—Papa and Mama defied her. “No,” they said. “No no no.”

. . .

Because the Kimball hospital was a grim and perilous place. Mama heard stories of this one or that one, and it always ended the same:
Go inside, not come out.

. . .

Surprise number three, oh, that was the doozy: Papa with a scalpel. He gave me something from his satchel, a powder that Mama mixed with the whiskey, and I fell calm. “Ona-my-love,” he whispered. His eyes were so blue and fond. “Don't scare, don't scare,” he said. So I didn't. I didn't “scare.” I did go a little hazy, though, as you might imagine, floating there, connected to the shushing of my parents, about whom I knew so little. I longed to speak to Papa in the language they'd denied me. But it was too late; I was Maud-Lucy's American girl. I couldn't summon a single word. “I thought you were a cherry farmer,” I said to Papa. “Also doctor,” he said, and the next thing I knew Laurentas was screaming his head off. An August potato with good lungs.

. . .

Never. Maybe they didn't have the vocabulary. How do you come up with the American words for scalpel? For whiskey in an egg cup? For country doctor and cherry farmer who packed up his family to take a job in a mill five thousand miles from home? It must have been a complicated story.

. . .

Maud-Lucy, well. It hadn't yet occurred to me that she planned to raise the baby in Vermont, among her own people. How could a woman like that return to those boring apple trees? Those big, square uncles and sickly aunts?

. . .

Well, she could. She did. Maud-Lucy herself was a big, square woman. It took me a time to sort out that she wasn't beautiful. Too plain for a rich man, too bright for a poor one. Unmarried ladies took the bottom rung of the ladder then. Maud-Lucy had stopped off in Kimball in 1905 on her way back from a trip to the Rangeley Lakes to paint the landscape, a trip she'd made to defy her father, who was trying to marry her off to a dullard who sold trees. Her father's mistake was in educating her beforehand.

. . .

There was an upset on the tracks, so the passengers spilled out to find rooms in town for the night, and Maud-Lucy ran into my mother coming out of the
Kimball Times
where she'd just placed an ad for tenants. Their building wasn't three days finished.

. . .

We did. We thought it was God himself running the show. My mother had me by the hand, a little girl with plaited hair and a dress hand-stitched from flour sacks. Maud-Lucy always said I looked bathed in light.

. . .

I know, isn't that grand? That was our beautiful story: love at first sight. She stayed with us that night and couldn't leave me.

. . .

True, there was the tree-selling dullard waiting back home. But you make your stories, and that was ours. It was true enough. In the end, she went home anyway, with a baby in her arms.

. . .

Mama and I walked her to the station. Maud-Lucy looked the same as always—no hat, no gloves, an overdone coat from the 1890s. You know, I can still feel the cold if I try hard enough. It was one of those blue and blustery days. Maud-Lucy took her ticket, then opened the blanket to show the baby's face. I hadn't seen him since the first day. I didn't want to kiss him, but Maud-Lucy insisted. He smelled like a ripe peach.

. . .

Mama was crying, to be honest. “Is good life for boy,” she said. Then Maud-Lucy stepped onto the car. All I could think of was crows.

. . .

You know the way they hop, all black and flapping? Then the train whistle started up. I can still hear it.

. . .

Whooo,
it went. Like that:
whooo.
In my head I was shouting over the noise:
Is good life for
girl.
Is good life for
girl,
too.

. . .

Well, I watched her go, what else? I was just a baby myself. The train vanished down the tracks, speeding Laurentas to a future filled with science and literature and sizzling conversations that led to a thing being looked up or written down or sent away for. I was the only creature on earth who understood how happy he'd be. Away he went, taking her wit, her zeal, her notorious independence. Her love for me.

. . .

. . .

Sorry. What?

. . .

No. She never even came back for her piano.

The boy had decided to take no chances. On the sixth Saturday he brought her a list of the most statistically dangerous pursuits, ranging from death by cave diving (
getting lost while; running out of air while; being eaten by sea creature while
) to death by door (
walking into; burning alive while searching for key to; discovering stairs removed from other side of
). There were fifty-two items on the list.

“Read this just in case,” he cautioned. “You don't want to get all the way to one hundred twenty-two years, one hundred sixty-four days, and then accidentally die because you”—here he reconsulted his list—“cut off your thumb while slicing a bagel.”

“I wouldn't want to go like that at any age.”

After they'd perused the List of Death and Dismemberment, he produced an addendum: home exercise routines for the elderly, plus an updated inventory of supercentenarians (the woman from Japan had died, along with a sketchy contender from Guam), plus ten supercentenarian profiles he'd procured from God knows where. She envisioned the boy's Internet as a magic cube that crackled with news.

“Look here,” Ona said. “The Hartley woman still reads without her glasses.” She squinted through her own glasses, shuffling the sheets. Some of the profilees were half blind or deaf or off their rockers—these she skipped over with a shudder—but most of them weren't. “This Wong fellow mows his own lawn. He could be a problem.”

The boy said, “Maybe we can think up a record to hold your place till you get older.”

“You mean in case I don't make it.”

His eyes flew open. “No! That's not what I meant!”

She believed him.

“Oldest sky diver is taken. Plus oldest pilot. Plus oldest showgirl.” He frowned. “But the record holders are way younger than you. Are you interested in breaking a record that has already been set?”

“Not without a bone transplant.”

He ticked off a preposterous list of possibilities—wing walking, pogo-sticking—and at the end Ona could think of no plausible record for herself except Oldest Woman to Have Sat Around Wasting What Turned Out to Be Seventeen Years After Louise Died.

“You're thirty-six days older than when I first met you,” the boy said, setting up the recorder.

“Ditto.”

He peered out the window. “Can you hear those?”

“No,” she said ruefully. She could see them—goldfinches quarreling—but their music was beyond her hearing.

His face filled with sympathy. Then he said, “I need six more birds for my badge.”

“Spring is nigh. You wait.” She smiled at him, lightheaded with sudden affection. He was so young, and for that alone she liked him.

“Is that your car out there?” he asked.

“Of course that's my car.” Randall's old Reliant. “Who else's would it be?”

His eyes moved to her, pinning her in place. He had something.

“Does it work?”

“It most certainly does. I have it inspected and registered once a year. A man from the Knights of Columbus takes it to the service station for me, since I was unable to renew my license last time I tried and I can't sashay into a car-inspection establishment with an expired license in my wallet.”

“Oh,” he said. “Darn.”

“That's not the word I used.”

“I thought you might be a driver. A car driver.”

“I didn't say I wasn't a driver. I said I didn't have a license.” She leaned in. “Because of my age I was required to take a road test, and the sixteen-year-old tester flunked me.”

“Maybe he made a mistake.”

“I told the church ladies I passed.” She hoped he wouldn't mind. “I told a fib.”

“I told a fib, too,” he said. “I told my dad I like music. But I don't. There's too many chords, and it's hard to keep your fingers in the right place.”

“Now listen,” she said. She straightened up and sang a few bars of “Beautiful Dreamer.”

“That was excellent, Miss Vitkus.”

“See there, you do like music. It's musical instruction you dislike, and I can't say I blame you.” She tapped his ghostly hands. “In any case, I drive my car one and a half miles to the supermarket and back once a week, same route every time.”

“That sounds very safe.” His sweet mouth softened.

“Tell it to the nosey parker down the street. You know what a Realtor is?”

“A Realtor is a person who sells houses.”

“Well, this Realtor is a person who
snatches
houses. You see her picture on lawn signs all over town. Lime-green blazer, high red hair. She's dying to sell this place out from under my creaky old feet and watches my every move like a cat watching a mouse.”

“Does she have a pink face?”

“That's the one.”

“Don't let her sell your house out from under your creaky old feet.”

“Don't you worry.”

The color of his eyes did its odd shifting, gray to blue-gray; it was one of the first things she'd noticed about him. “Mr. Fred Hale, age one hundred eight, country of USA, holds the record for oldest licensed driver.”

“Wait a sec. Isn't Mr. Fred Hale one of my chief rivals? Age one hundred thirteen. Am I recalling correctly?”

“Mr. Fred Hale, age one hundred thirteen, holds the record for oldest living male. But he also holds the record for oldest licensed driver. But his age for oldest licensed driver is one hundred eight. Not one hundred thirteen.”

“Somebody probably grabbed it away the second he passed the test.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Maybe it was a ceremonial record. Maybe he never intended to use his shiny new license.”

“I never thought of that, either.”

“Well, I don't want a ceremonial license. In fact,” she said, “I would love nothing better than to once again become a legitimate driver. I could roar right past Mrs. Pinkface Billboard and she wouldn't have a thing to say about it.”

He stood up. “Can you get your license back after they take it away?”