The One-in-a-Million Boy (28 page)

She'd sneaked a peek at Laurentas's hands, folded on his chair-bound lap. Her poor, foggy boy with his dissolving life. His hands were still beautiful.

If time did what we wished, Ona could have breasted the crashing waves, dragged herself to that distant shore, and shaken that goosy girl senseless.
You take all this for love?
Maud-Lucy's image burned with foreboding, a hint of betrayal, as if she were already leaving on the train with Laurentas in her arms. To whose memory did this image belong, the young Ona, or the old? Can memory be revisited to allow us to see now what we didn't see then? Old Ona, exhausted from her trip and searching her cupboards for a vase, yearned to tell young Ona,
Can you see the iceberg coming? No one will love you more than they love themselves.
But the young Ona can't see.

Shaking off the memory, Ona arranged Mr. Ledbetter's flowers in a glass vase, a present from Louise. The lilies gushed like the forward burst of fireworks. She closed her eyes, her head pattering, faintly confused. Memories of Kimball over ninety years past: an unfailing sign of heartsickness in the present. But she had not thought herself heartsick.

“Okay, Ona, gotta go,” Quinn said, sticking his head inside the door. Oh. She saw it now: world's oldest goosy girl, left behind once again.

“Where are you spreading the Good News this time?” she asked.

“Actually, the God Squad got their guy back.”

“The drugged fellow? He came back?”

“Sprung himself early.”

“And you're out on your ear,
ding-bang,
just like that?”

“Like the beggar at the rich man's table. The boys called while you were sleeping. Phone kept breaking up, but I got the gist.” He checked his watch.

“I most
certainly
was not sleeping,” she said. “I may have closed my eyes for a minute.”

“Anyway, I scored myself a happy hour that starts in forty-five minutes.”

“Well,” she said, “aren't you the worker bee.”

“That's what they tell me,” he said, checking his watch again. “So, listen. Take care.”

“You're a good driver, Quinn,” she said, “despite what I was led to believe.”

He laughed. “Surprise.” He put out his hand. “I'll call you.”

“That would be splendid.” Whether he would or would not call, she did not know. Something was ending, though; that much was certain. “Mr. Ledbetter will be bringing a new boy before long,” she said. “I hope it's not that whiny one.”

“Whoever it is, Ona, try not to scare him silly.”

“Good luck with your music.”

“Good luck with your record books.”

She watched him trot down the street toward the bus stop and thought:
Laurentas would have loved me.

By six she was ready for bed, nearly weepy with fatigue. She got into her own nightie and unpacked her unworn clothes, including a cotton-knit Sunday dress in glass green that would have been perfect for the wedding. She shoved it onto a hanger in disgust.

At six thirty she had tea and toast and listened to the news. At seven she brushed her teeth. At seven ten she turned down her bed, adjusted the bedroom shades, and opened her book:
Nicholas Nickleby
by Mr. Charles Dickens, a novel she'd last read in 1921. At seven fifteen, she fell asleep with the book on her chest.

Sometime later—full darkness—she snapped awake, a single word tapping against the inside of her skull:
pavojus, pavojus, pavojus.

Danger.

She bolted up, the book crashing to her lap, the word fading as her quickening pulse apprised her of—what? Something. She cocked her head. A perception of movement. A wrongness in her house.

Thus alerted, rooted in place, she let her eyes adjust to the dark. Gradually, the darkness sculpted itself into air and object, the appointments of her room materializing as smoky shapes: a skyline of perfume bottles on her dresser; the skeletal rocker and its equidistant rails; a dark rectangle where the door opened into the deeper dark of the hall.

Listening above her breath, she sensed an alteration in the quality of the silence she'd grown used to. She understood, with a thudding dread, that she was not alone.

“Who's there?” she called out to her darkened room. Her voice crackled timidly; she might not have spoken at all. She rued her bad hearing and scolded herself, wishing she still had Louise to tell this to.
Likely a mouse. I'll have to get another cat, Lou.

She slipped out of bed on trembling feet and approached the door. Again: something. For a brief, brimming moment, she thought:
It's the boy.
She cleared her throat, adrenaline rinsing through her, and called into the emptiness: “Is it you?”

All at once: a thundering on her stairs and deeply male barks of alarm—“Move out! Move out! Move out!”—in a calamity of smashed glass and slamming doors. Then, just as abruptly: a profound, sepulchral silence.

“Go away, go away,” she whispered, snapping her bedroom lock and flinching toward the window. Her heart made a froglike pumping in her throat. She clutched the sill and peered into the street where a fleet human silhouette, then a second one, ducked into a dented car. They made a three-point turn that shredded a chunk of grass, and sped away.

Ona pressed a hand to her throat, alone in her shrinking universe, trying to stay the aftereffects of fright. The streetlight brightened the edge of her yard along the fence, leaving the rest in shadow. A neighborhood flyer, still stuck to a fence picket, resembled an arrow shot from an enemy encampment. Everything looked like something else: the streetlamp like a tall angry man; the night-quiet houses like markers in a Monopoly game. She fixed on the houses; their nearness calmed her. She did not cry.

Instead, she worked out what she'd done wrong. The trip to Granyard had wound her up: when had she last lived so full a forty hours? Her head too full of heartache and surprise, she'd forgotten the porch light, her nightly precaution since the break-in down the street back in May—a lifetime ago, just as the boy exited her life and his father entered.

Breathing open-mouthed in the dark, she let her pulse relax. Only then did she dare switch on her bedside lamp; it was a little after three. She'd slept for eight hours. She put on her slippers and robe, unlocked her door, and peeked into the dark. In the empty hall she perceived nothing but the renewed skittering of her own breath.

One foot in front of the other,
she told herself, quoting Louise in her final days. The memory calmed her. She flicked the switch for the stairwell and inched down the stairs. In the foyer she snapped on another light. Louise's vase lay shattered on the soaked floor, the flowers spilled and trampled. She bent to gather the pieces, thinking again of the boy and his miniature recorder. It was out there someplace, a whirring tape with her life affixed. Her paltry shards. She straightened up with a groan.

Then a man walked out of her parlor.

“Drop that, Granny,” he said. His voice: even, relaxed.

The glass fell with an innocent-sounding
plink.
Not a man, quite. A big, greasy-haired teenager in a black mask of the sort used by Zorro in the old TV show. The mask was cheap and cracked across the nose. Through the holes in the mask his eyes showed pale and hazy and pink-rimmed. In his hand glinted a small and terrifying gun. He looked her over and laughed.

“You alone?”

She nodded, too scared to speak. He slipped the pistol down the pocket of pants so big they looked like a skirt. Behind him, in the parlor, she glimpsed Randall's sideboard, all its handsome drawers tipped out. Linens tossed into heaps. Chair cushions flipped over. She'd slept straight through the damage.

Awaiting instruction, she stood still.

“Where's the cash, Granny?” Calm as a very old cat.

“I have nothing but what's in there,” she said, meaning her purse, splat on the floor with the wrecked flowers, wallet dismantled, everything soaked: a credit card, her expired license, her insurance cards, a picture of the boy in his Scout uniform, an ancient coupon for Meow Mix. She burned with shame to see her spilled things, exactly what a burglar would expect from an old lady's wallet. Her useless docs.

“Come on,” he said. He beckoned with all his fingers. “Cookie jar? Flowerpot? Come on, Granny, give it up.”

“I'm not one of those old people you see in the movies,” she said, suddenly quaking with rage. “I keep my money in the bank, like everybody else.”
I won't go out this way,
she told herself,
I won't.

He pinched her shoulder and urged her up the stairs, where he dropped her, breathless and shivering, into Louise's rocker. Her hip twinged but she sealed her lips against the pain. “What're you, a hundred?” he asked, showing his awful teeth. His hair was wet-looking and dandruffy, and he had a peculiar smell, swampy and medicinal. His bone-white arm had been blackened with letters she couldn't resolve into a word. As he looked her over, her fear returned and all but melted her legs.

“There's nothing here,” she said, gripping the chair rails. The floor felt movable.

“Stay,” he ordered, jabbing her chest. The aftershock jangled in her breastbone. He hunted through her dresser and nightstand, pitching everything more or less bedward. The Guinness World Records pack slipped to the floor in a fanning sheaf. He found her beehive case and the emergency five that had lived in the silk pocket since she'd carried it out of the Woodford Street house in 1948. “See?” he said, waving the bill under her nose.

As her intruder pillaged her bedroom, Ona considered the lifeline button hanging from her neck, hidden beneath her nightgown and robe. She'd been told to test it periodically but had done so only once. After the initial bell and ninety seconds of silence, a woman's voice had come through the box in the parlor, calling her “honey” and asking if she was “A-OK.” For all she knew, the batteries had run down.

“You got nothing,” her intruder said. “Not a motherfuckin' thing.” He pursed his lips as if deciding whether or not to blame her.

“Your friends left without you,” she quavered.

He showed his teeth again. “They won't get far. Car's a piece of shit.”

“Funny you didn't go with them,” she said hopefully.

“I like a challenge. Not that you fuckin' count.” He unzipped a makeup bag she hadn't used in forty years and dumped out a half-used lipstick. Her hip hurt from sitting so still but she feared the slightest shift might set him off. People like this either killed you dead when startled, or fled like bees, if she remembered correctly from the cop shows she used to watch before they got so violent. She fished the button from her bodice, made her decision, and gave the thing a squeeze.

Downstairs, the buzzer engaged, a high-pitched double blast. Amazingly, he barely flinched, and she realized he was in another world altogether. “Who's that, your boyfriend calling?” he asked, as she silently began to count. He got up, tossed the last of her doodads and pocketed the five, and leered at her through his sweating mask. “One thing, Granny,” he said.

She made an involuntary peep, like a baby chicken, then sucked in all the air she had and roared it back out, loud and guttural: “
No!
”

He laughed. “Aw, you think I'm gonna what?” he said. “You think I'm gonna what?” He laughed again. “You waaay too ugly.”

As she swallowed back a rising bile, he raised his hand, let it float a moment in midair, and then, almost gently, slapped her cheek. “Be good,” he said, then sauntered down the stairs and left the house with a quiet click as a voice came over the intercom, ninety seconds on the dot: “Hey there, Miss Vitkus, you A-OK?” Ona rubbed the memory from her cheek and tottered toward the window, where she saw her intruder sprint into the night like a frightened squirrel. She had at least that satisfaction.

Minutes later, paramedics arrived; after that, two patrolmen. Then a detective showed up, followed by a loose knot of neighbors, shy and timorous, excepting Shirley Clayton, who looked maddeningly put together at three in the morning.

“Oh, my Lord,” Shirley crooned. She forced a handshake on one of the patrolmen, who looked too young to drive. “I'm the neighbor. Mrs. Vitkus, who can I call?”

“Nobody. Go away.”

“She has a grandson,” Shirley said. “They just got back from a trip.”

“What's your grandson's name, ma'am?” asked the detective, a young woman in a gray blazer. Ona had once had skin like hers.

“Please,” she said. “I don't need anybody.”

The pretty detective wanted a description of the intruders, but Ona remembered her tormentor not in physical form but rather as an embodiment of mockery.
Granny.
He'd made her see through his eyes: her age, her fright, her balding head, her piddly size. The only possible revenge would be not to mind.

But she did mind. She felt slight and ugly and gawked at: a trifling nobody. Just yesterday—Or was it this morning? Time had gone gluey and soft—Quinn had seen her in this light when he'd caught sight of her skinny, accordioned, eyeball-white legs. The greasy-haired intruder had confirmed her as a dusty, frightful, genderless shell, and she hated him for it.

“Bad case of the pinkeye,” she said, remembering now. “And letters tattooed on his arm. The other two got away before I could get a look.”

The detective asked her age, and as she proclaimed it a shock of sympathy rippled through a trio of neighbors who had inched into the house with Shirley. They were unrecognizable in their pillow-marked faces and thrown-on clothes. She was afraid of them, she realized; afraid of their goodwill, their outrage on her behalf, afraid she might have been wrong in her judgments; and she felt unaccountably stranded when the older patrolman urged them out of her house.

Out on the porch a middle-aged man in a bathrobe was waving a flyer at the younger patrolman, snatches of their conversation carrying inside. There had been a string of break-ins, she gathered—discussed at the neighborhood meeting she'd scorned. She was the first one caught at home.