The One-in-a-Million Boy (29 page)

The detective glanced around the kitchen. Did she assume the house always looked like this—turned inside out and smattered with glass?

“I'm an immaculate housekeeper,” Ona said.

The first patrolman was back. “When we find these guys, Mrs. Vitkus,” he said, “we're gonna kick their sorry butts from here to the moon.” He put a hand on her shoulder, which ached from the intruder's grabbing fingers; she'd have a doozy of a bruise for sure. But the officer had a consoling face and her eyes filled without warning.

The remaining protocol required Ona to inspect the wreckage, now blighted with boot prints, and determine what had been taken. Nothing, as it turned out. Only Louise's vase was gone, in its way. “Money and drugs,” the lady detective said, and Ona hadn't much of either. Her medicine chest contained nothing more alluring than aspirin and Metamucil, which the thieves had left behind.

“Can you keep this out of the news?” Ona asked. “I feel like a sitting duck.”

They said they'd try and she had to believe them.

When at last the police left her in peace, Shirley came back to reassemble the furniture and wash up the fingerprinting dust and clear the front hall. “I saved a few lilies,” she said to Ona. “Most of them got stepped on.”

Another neighbor, a very young woman, returned with a generic frosted vase of the sort found in households accustomed to flower deliveries. Another woman—possibly Shirley's daughter, same pink roundness—put Ona's purse back together and offered her a cup of tea, which she meekly took. They were like Louise, these women, multiplied many times over: energetic people who enjoyed a crisis, who easily rose to righteous outrage, who revealed stores of affection at the least expected times. How had she lived here so long without knowing this?

By daybreak everyone had gone and there was no more night to get through. Ona decided to spend the day washing everything the intruders had touched, including her blankets and nightgown. The young patrolman, who had a great-grandmother still living, had parked outside until his shift change, when another drove up to relieve him.

Once the day fully lightened—she'd been thinking of Laurentas wheeling through the jaundiced light of the day room—Ona turned on the radio for company and heard her story leading the commuter news, a brisk, affronted voice making much of the presumed frailty of the “victim” and the corresponding rottenness of the home invaders.

She suspected Shirley as the snitch. The phone began to ring and ring with local media wanting her “own words.” But she had no words for these recent, dizzying hours, which had felt like the midway, filled with hubbub and confusion and homesickness and shame and conflicting desires.

How, she wondered, had an eleven-year-old boy talked her into wanting eighteen more years of this? Fatigue assaulted her from the inside out, slowing her blood and jellying her bones. She unhooked the phone and sat with her thoughts, replaying in her head the long, discouraging interview by the lady detective. Except for the bills lifted from her wallet and the five from her beehive case, the intruders—hard as they may have tried—had found nothing here of value.

 

COMPETITION

1. Jeanne Louise Calment. 122 years and 164 days. Country of France.
   

2. Shigechiyo Izumi. 120 years and 237 days. Country of Japan.
   

3. Sarah Knauss. 119 years and 97 days. Country of USA.
   

4. Lucy Hannah. 117 years and 248 days. Country of USA.
   

5. Marie Louise Meilleur. 117 years and 230 days. Country of Canada.
   

6. Maria Capovilla. 116 years and 347 days. Country of Ecuador.
   

7. Tane Ikai. 116 years and 175 days. Country of Japan.
   

8. Elizabeth Bolden. 116 years and 118 days. Country of USA.
   

9. Carrie White. 116 years and 88 days. Country of USA.
   

10. Kamato Hongo. 116 years and 45 days. Country of Japan.
    

Her voice arrowed through the crackle of his cell phone, piercing the shroud of sleep from which she'd roused him. Seven o'clock: an hour for deer hunters and bird watchers.

“A speck of emergency,” she said.

He sat up. “What kind of emergency?”

She said, “It's nothing.” She said, “Would you come over, please, right now.” She sounded like herself: solid and self-possessed. He figured: busted faucet, a bird-hit window.

He'd done his job, fulfilled his duty, dispatched his obligation, and then some. Perhaps it had never been possible to complete the sworn duty of an uncompleted boy. Seven charity visits—what could be easier?—had somehow led him into a fronded jungle of human entanglement.

Then she said, in a different voice altogether, “I've no one else to call,” and he pulled on a shirt as he clicked off the phone.

He found her on the porch, inspecting the door.

“I was burgled last night,” she told him. “I need to get this house buttoned up.”

She looked small and translucent, like a baby turtle from a nature documentary. He fought an impulse to pick her up and carry her to safer ground. As she stood there, fading before his eyes, he extracted the details as if through an old telegraph, dots and dashes that he gathered into a story. When Ona trotted off to the bathroom—
The neighbors poured tea down my throat all night
—he called Belle from Ona's ten-pound rotary.

“I just found out,” she said. “Ted heard it on the radio. Is she all right?”

“She says she is.”

“Give her my best,” Belle said. “Will you give her my best?”

“Right, I will, but I was thinking, this looks like more of a female thing to me.” He should have changed the locks; they were ass-crap locks, he knew they were ass-crap locks, and he should have changed them.

“Ted's bringing over a lasagna.”

“Right, but I thought you could maybe come over here. Seems like you two hit it off pretty well. She's acting like nothing happened but she's so white she looks invisible.”

“I'm going back to work today, Quinn.” She paused. “I won't take this burden from you.”

“I didn't ask that.”

“You did, though.”

“She's not my burden anyway. I mean, she's not mine
.
”

“Then whose?”

He glanced out the window at a cruiser parked at the gate. The grass was overdue for cutting; the new kid was in for a sweat. “The cops are watching the house,” he said. “She's not alone.”

“I have to go, Quinn. I can't be late on my first day back.”

“Good luck,” he said. “You can do it, Belle.”

She paused again. “So can you.”

He checked Ona's windows and put a fresh bulb in the porch light and changed her locks and, just because, replaced the batteries in her smoke alarms and paid for everything himself. Late afternoon, returning from Lowe's with a sign that said
ROTTWEILER
, he found her in the kitchen with Ted Ledbetter. They were eating lasagna on plates he hadn't seen—filigreed with tiny gold birds.

“Mr. Ledbetter brought me a big treat,” she said.

How Ted had managed to teach a full day of summer-school math, bake a lasagna, and deliver it was another of his many mysteries. Quinn gave Ona the
ROTTWEILER
sign. “My,” she said. “That ought to do it.”

“The locks look great,” Ted said. “Super job.”

“Quinn's quite handy,” Ona said. “You wouldn't think that about a musician.”

He owed his father for teaching him the manly arts.
Your mother spoiled you boys rotten.
Brutal as the lessons were, poisoned by his father's disgust, Quinn had managed to learn a thing or two.

“I've got a gig, Ona,” he told her. “Will you be okay?”

“I talked to her patrolman,” Ted said. “They'll be watching the house for a few days.”

Quinn had never been good at feeling two things at once. Knowing that the patrolman—and Ted—were on the job came as a relief, but he felt relieved in an entirely different way when Ona followed him out of the kitchen and stopped him at the front door. “He put
spinach
in it,” she whispered. “If I had a real rottweiler I'd feed it under the table.”

“
Bon appétit,
” he said, and she laughed.

He checked his watch. “Damn, I missed my bus.”

“Why on earth is a man with your ridiculous musical schedule relying on the city bus to get around?”

“I'll get a car eventually. Right now I'm in savings mode.”

“I took the bus for months after failing my road test. I didn't care for it. Too many ne'er-do-wells.”

“I'm a ne'er-do-well.”

“You're the opposite of a ne'er-do-well, Quinn. And you may borrow my car, is what I'm getting at. It's a good car. You said so yourself.”

If he took the car he'd have to bring it back.

“I can't drive it for another week anyway,” she said. “The police are watching me.” She folded her scrawny arms. “You took me to Vermont, Quinn. It's the least I can do to repay you.” Before he could answer, she added, “Please, Quinn. Take it.”

So he accepted, promising to return the car the following week, after his shift at GUMS. She dropped the key into his palm, then laid her hand over his, as if she'd just conferred the key to her heart.

A week later, the cops nabbed the thieves—three hopeless junkies caught in someone else's house. “Straight to the clink,” Ona said, undoing her shiny new lock. “That lady detective's a
ticket
.”

Quinn thought she looked a little shopworn, but she pronounced herself fiddle-fit and in need of nothing. “They filched five dollars and broke a vase,” she reminded him. “You'd think I'd been hauled off by the Russians.”

A slight swelling in her consonants—reminiscent of the accent he'd detected when they first met—was her only residual hint of distress. Otherwise, she appeared unflapped, standing in her tidy kitchen, a pot of tea steeping on the sideboard.

“Your real-estate lady waved me down just now,” he said. “She wants you to know she's praying for you. They're all asking God to take away your quote-unquote trials and tribulations.”

“Well, I found an earring I thought I'd lost.” She was wearing the matched set, ice-green droplets that made her eyes jump. “The burglars must've shaken it loose from a chair cushion.”

Either despite or because of Ona's bravado, Quinn felt knee-weak. It was the weakness he'd felt as a teenager hearing his brother howl the news that Dad just called from the “place” and Mom was dead, the news tearing a hole in the day, exposing Quinn in his bedroom where he stood before a mirror practicing guitar poses. The news had been coming for months, and yet it toppled him, literally; he hit the floor, a six-foot fourteen-year-old dropping like a shot goose.

He was here to return the car. To close a door, gently. But he couldn't quite find his balance. The thought of those fuckers in Ona's house—putting their filthy hands on her things, on
her
—filled him with a sticky rage. “You must have been scared, Ona,” he said. “Were you scared?”

“I'd like to have Louise's vase back. That's one thing.” She opened a cupboard. “I've got supper if you're hungry.” It was four thirty in the afternoon. She rustled two plates to the table—mismatched ones, he noted, and well used. “You might as well keep the car for now.”

Quinn couldn't think, not while she was looking at him this way.

“The patrolmen have been so nice,” she added. “I don't want to put them in the awkward position of pulling me over. I figure I'll lay low for another couple of weeks.” She crooked her finger, remembering something. “Look here.” She opened her microwave, an old-fashioned type with a dial. Inside was a stash of mail. “Strangers are sending me checks.”

Quinn sorted through a dozen envelopes of different types—some printed with business logos, others smaller and flowery and handwritten. The checks ranged in amount, though fifty bucks seemed to be the going rate.

“Holy shit,” Quinn muttered. “How much total?”

“Five hundred plus. Is this pity money?”

“At least they're not camped in the yard with candles.” After the boy's death and a hysterical Sunday feature on Long QT Syndrome, Belle had returned over thirty checks with the same frigid note and typewritten signature.

“It's because I'm old. That's all it is.” She scanned one of the letters. “It'll take me a good week to write my bread-and-butter notes.”

“You're keeping the money?”

“I need a new roof.” She inspected one of the checks. “You know, it was just my word, but people believed me anyway. My age, I'm talking about. They went on my word.” She looked up. “I've something else to show you.” She reached into the pocket of her sweater and handed over a “doc.”

Quinn looked it over. “You got a learner's permit?”

“One of the church ladies gave me a ride to the DMV. Killed me to ask, but I passed the eye test in four seconds. I got ninety percent on the written test, too, and I'll have you know I studied my head off. I'm two-thirds back to legal.” She tucked the permit back into her pocket. “What do you say to a couple of driving lessons in exchange for the use of my car?”

It would be so easy to give it back, just return the damn thing and beat a path out of this house, haunted as it was with his son, with the weight of obligation, with his huge and pointless regrets. Six weeks ago, five, and he would have: out like a man shot from a cannon. But that was before Ona thought him a gentleman and made him want to be one. “No time like the present,” he said, and ushered her out the door.

“It's the parallel parking that gets me,” she said, hands on hips, glaring at the innocent Reliant. “All the docs in the Western Hemisphere won't park that car for me.”