The One-in-a-Million Boy (19 page)

The day room was studded with parked wheelchairs claimed by squashed, staring people. Though Ona undeniably blended in, Quinn saw that she was just as exactly a thing apart. He thought of the body-snatcher movies, how clever the aliens' disguises, but all the same you could just tell. “Which fellow is he?” she asked. She seemed greatly agitated, flinching in her skin.

“Right here,” Arianne said, somewhat wary. She led them a few paces away, to a rangy man in a high-tech chair near a large window that looked out on a courtyard. Around his neck hung a stethoscope and a pair of binoculars.

“Larry,” the woman said, touching his shoulder, “you have visitors.”

Larry turned around with effort, a sweet, mellow smile lighting his features. He had Ona's wide forehead and charged eyes.

“What are you doing in here, Laurentas?” Ona demanded.

“Do I know you?”

She put her hands on her hips. “It's Ona Vitkus.”

“Say again?”

“ONA VITKUS,” she repeated. “YOUR MOTHER.”

“Well, my gracious. So it is,” he said. His words slurred faintly. “My gracious me, what a surprise.”

“What are you doing in here?”

“I live here,” he said. “My gracious me.”

“He's having a wonderful day, aren't you, Larry?” Arianne said. “I'll leave you all to catch up.” Her fading footfalls left Quinn bereft.

“I retired in '92,” Larry was telling Ona. “My children all settled so far away.” He pointed across the courtyard. “That's my place, the corner unit. Independent, you understand. They give me three squares a day in the dining room.”

Quinn dragged a chair to Ona, and to his relief she took it, though she made a point of perching on its edge. Was she trying to look young in front of her ancient son? Whatever her motive, it prompted in Quinn a jolt of affection.

“This is no place for a healthy man,” she said. “A doctor, up to his withers in sick people?”

Quinn sensed Belle at his back; her keen attention had a nearly musical quality, like a rest between measures.

“I had a little stroke last year,” Larry said calmly. He fiddled with his stethoscope. “But I still manage rounds from this chair.” He smiled around at his default patients, who exhibited varying levels of interest in the visitors. “They find me reassuring.”

Ona said, “I thought you moved to a
condo,
Laurentas. I live in a house.”

“It
is
a condo,” Larry said, confused. He pointed again. “I've been watching for the yellow-breasted chat,” he said then. “I had one yesterday. Unusual for here.” The courtyard had little paths, a bird-feeding station, and a lush topography of flowering bushes. Quinn craned his neck to see, though what a chat might look like he had no idea. The boy would know. The boy had been listing birds along with everything else. “The view's better from over here,” Larry said.

Ona blinked at her son, looking miserable. An aide whisked in, carrying a tower of folded sheets, then disappeared behind another set of doors.

“I bet he was good-looking,” Belle whispered. She was gazing at him, enraptured. Quinn didn't want to stay for this, whatever it was; everybody here at cross-purposes.

“I feed birds,” Ona said.

“Pardon?”

“I feed birds. IN MY OWN HOUSE. This fellow here comes to help me, although he's finished now. Done with his duties. THIS FELLOW HERE.” Now everybody was looking at Quinn as if they expected him to pass out pills or examine their feet. He'd put on a new T-shirt this morning, and a freshly washed pair of jeans, and was suddenly glad.

“I don't recall that,” Larry said. “It must have slipped my mind. Things do, lately, I regret to admit.” He patted the top of his head. “This fine old brain.”

“I didn't feed birds back then,” Ona said. “Back then I was busy. I WAS BUSY.”

“Weren't we all, dear.” He smiled, revealing the same large, square teeth as his mother. His curiosity about her seemed mild, considering. He was a man enviably at ease, accepting the pace and vagaries of age. Dr. Stokes must have been a bygone type who traveled from house to house, whistling “She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain.” Quinn liked him; he chanced another peek at Belle, who had relaxed utterly. This mother-son reunion had to be far from her expectation—the son decades older than her fantasy, for starters—and yet she seemed transfixed. Satisfied.

“What happened to your things?” Ona asked.

Larry tapped his ear as if to jump-start a hearing aid, though he wore none.

“YOUR THINGS,” Ona repeated. “Your furniture. Books. Important papers. WHERE ARE YOUR THINGS?”

“Oh, my gracious, my things,” he said. “What an undertaking. The girls took the silver. The boys have the tools, I believe. The rest went in a house auction.” He adjusted a switch on the arm of his chair and the back reclined. Nothing was happening at the bird feeders. Quinn began to wonder if a yellow-breasted chat might be something on the order of a dodo, some extinct species with no chance of showing up.

“It's awfully nice to meet you,” Belle said.

Larry tipped an imaginary hat. “What have we here?”

“I'm Belle.” Was she beaming? She was beaming.

Larry consulted Ona again. “Would you have wanted something, dear? I'd have saved something for you, had I known.”

“Did you come across my birth certificate, by chance?”

Larry tapped his ear again.

“MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE.”

“What in the world would I be doing with your birth certificate?”

“My parents gave my papers to Maud-Lucy for safekeeping. YOUR MOTHER TOOK IT.”

Belle nudged Quinn, harder than she probably meant to; she was standing very close. “What is she talking about?” she whispered. But he didn't know. Ona hadn't given him the full story.

Ona put a gaunt hand on her son's gaunt arm and leaned into his ear. “She kept such things in a red enamel box.” When he turned to face her, she straightened up. “My parents were GREATLY PARANOID OF CONFISCATION,” she continued, “with good reason. And your mother was the ONE CREATURE IN THIS ENTIRE COUNTRY WHOM THEY TRUSTED WITHOUT RESERVATION.”

One of the captives called out like a baby bird—“
Dawk
tor,
dawk
tor,
dawk
tor.”

“Excuse me a moment,” Larry said. He motored to the west corner of the day room, where he indulged a hairless woman in a minute of conversation, listened to her heart, then returned.

“I do very little,” he explained, “except relieve fear.”

“I NEED MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE, LAURENTAS.”

“I don't have your birth certificate.” He resembled her eerily when he spoke, something in the shape of his lips, those square teeth. “Wouldn't it be more likely that you have mine?”

Ona said nothing for a beat or two, then charged ahead: “We're talking about people who kept their money in a FLOUR BIN,” she said to her son. “They owned an apartment building and later a grocery store, but they were afraid of everything. They couldn't settle. That was their problem. They couldn't settle into their own skin.” Her voice took on a different sheen, briefly. “Your mother was the opposite.”

“I'm sorry. Come again?”

“YOUR MOTHER. WAS THE OPPOSITE. That woman could settle anywhere. Not like these people nowadays. THESE PEOPLE,” she repeated, gesturing toward Quinn. “These people nowadays have no idea where they are. Wherever they are, it's the WRONG PLACE.”

Belle laughed softly; Quinn felt her cross over to somewhere he couldn't grasp and the day went irreversibly awry. He was a team of one, facing three inscrutable people who appeared to have sudden, passionate, possibly conflicting blueprints for how the next few moments—or hours—would go.

“If my mother took something of yours,” Larry said, “it would have gone up in the fire, along with everything else.”

“What fire?” Ona asked. For the first time she turned to Quinn—
Can you get this fellow to talk sense?
—but he couldn't help her. He stood there, suddenly freezing in his newish T-shirt, trying to puzzle out her purpose. One thing was clear: she hadn't come for a tearful reunion with the fruit of her womb. She'd come for her birth certificate and that was it. If only he'd listened more literally. But he'd have taken her to Vermont anyway; he knew this about himself, all of a sudden, and it surprised him.

Ona repeated, “WHAT FIRE?”

“
The
fire,” Larry said. “I was an infant, of course, but I think I remember it, she spoke of it so often. The family homestead, you see. Seven buildings and one of the orchards gone overnight.”

Quinn looked from one to the other, then to the window, as if Larry's bird might appear like a carrier pigeon with a code wrapped around its ankle. “He, uh, doesn't have it, Ona.”

“YOUR MOTHER WROTE TO ME FOR YEARS FROM THE SAME ADDRESS,” Ona said. She was squinting hard at her son, perhaps double-checking his identity.

“Her father built a new house over the burned one. Two, actually. One for himself and one for us.” Larry smiled dreamily. “Oh, my gracious me, I miss the place. We sold it, in the end, to an outfit that turned the whole works into a housing development. I'll answer to the Man Upstairs for that, but it pays for my upkeep.”

“Well,” Ona said, “isn't this a pickle.”

Larry looked up. “I'm afraid I've forgotten your name.”

The moment clanged. Quinn tried to catch eyes with Belle, but she was studying Larry, oblivious, someplace else entirely.

Ona leaned very near the furl of her son's ear. “Ona,” she said. “Vitkus.”

“What is that, Polish?”

“It's Lithuanian.”

“No fooling?” he said. “My natural mother was a Lithuanian.” He shook his head, looking pained. “How do I know you, dear?”

The arctic air conditioning had electrified Ona's ruined hair, which all but levitated from her skull. “Your mother and I were friends,” she said, too softly, really, for him to hear. She got up and extended her hand. “We'll be going now. Goodbye, Laurentas.”

Alerted by the motions of departure, Belle came to. “We're leaving?”

“Stay,” Larry offered. “The ladies here make spanking good coffee.”

Belle smiled. “That sounds wonderful.”

“We'll do no such thing,” Ona said. “I have urgent business elsewhere.”

Quinn was only too happy to get the show back on the road, but Belle had other plans. “I wouldn't mind seeing that bird,” she said to her new friend, meeting his eyes in a way that Quinn knew, from long experience, would melt the calcified cockles of the old geezer's heart. “That yellow-breasted whatsit.”

“Chat,” he said, offering his binoculars. It came to Quinn then that the man had lost the use of one arm.

“My son likes birds,” Belle told him.

Larry, who appeared to have no trouble at all understanding her, said, “The more the merrier.”

“We were leaving,” Ona said.

Belle stared out the window. “I'll stay here with Larry.”

“You look very fine, Laurentas. I'm glad to know you're well. Goodbye.” At this, Ona made for the day room door.

“Uh . . .” Quinn said.

Belle was already far away, in Ona's vacated chair, conversing with Ona's son about birds and children. Larry had four daughters and two sons and nine grandchildren and a platoon of greats and great-greats—Ona hadn't asked a single question on that score—but they were wanderers, it seemed, all his progeny had their eyes on the horizon. “My natural father was a circus man, you see,” he told Belle with rueful pride, bathed in the light of her attentions.

She's working you, brother,
Quinn thought. In an earlier time he'd have said this aloud, which would have amused Belle, made her laugh right out loud and confess to being an incurable flirt around old men and little children. This was different, he saw now, her raw, fractured self shining out at a moth-eaten old gaffer who connected her in some unknowable way to her lost child. How at home she seemed here. It was like seeing her from the inside out. Is this what she'd been asking of him all these years, to see her this way? Was he fulfilling her frankest desire, at last? With her profile blurred by the harsh light crashing through the window, her fair hair whitened by that same light, she might have been ninety herself, sickly and shaking and stripped of her powers. He imagined himself husbanding an elderly wife into her twilight, and the tableau woke in him yet one more way he would have failed Belle in the end.

He turned away, walking straight through the lobby and into the waning afternoon, where he found Ona standing at the entrance, all but melted into the pavement. Rattling with alarm, he eased her to the car with as much care as she'd accept, unrolled all the windows, then moved the car to the far end of the lot, under a large and sheltering tree that probably graced the cover of the Orchard Acres brochure. He rustled a bottle of water from his duffel. The car smelled a little off, the effluvia of the day room apparently having clung to their clothes. His friend (this is how he thought of her, holding the water while she adjusted her sticky clothes) had fallen into a black mood.

“Ona . . .” he began. “Do you want to go back in?”

“Why would I go back in that place?”

Quinn took this in. “It was kind of a short visit. That's all I'm saying.”

“The purpose of this trip was my business entirely. You offered to take me and I accepted.”

“Because you said you were after a big reunion.”

“If you'll review your own blinky memory, I told you I needed a ride to Vermont. You and your lady read the cards however you pleased. People usually do.”

He wondered if all good-deed-doers felt this insulted when they didn't get to pick the exact specifications of their charity. “I canceled a gig for this,” he said. He wished himself back in Maine, shielded by his guitar, giving chatty, dancing people exactly what they expected.