The One-in-a-Million Boy (36 page)

. . .

Hah! I'm afraid you'll have to settle for a
little
finale.

. . .

I saw Louise again.

. . .

Yes, I did! Many years later.

. . .

On this very street, in fact, two days after I moved in here. Randall bought a new house out in Cumberland—his lady at the time hated this one—so he moved me in here.

. . .

I love this house! Let's see somebody try to pry me out! So, here I was, cutting roses, minding my own business, when the oddest sensation took me over. I looked up to see what hit me, and there was Louise Grady, three doors down on the opposite side, clacketing up the steps of that white house. See that house?

. . .

Back then it was white. Louise had on this billowy white skirt and it looked as if she'd appeared from thin air, like a ghost stepping out to go a-haunting. This was twenty years after she asked for my Judas kiss.

. . .

Oh, you just can't imagine! She was seventy-three years old, but there was no mistaking that hip-twitchy walk. You could hear her grocery bags crackling, and after that, all other sound in the known universe ceased to be.

. . .

I waved my clippers over my head and yelled like a fishwife!

. . .

Like this: “Louise! Louise Grady!” I was afraid she'd vanish back into the air. Did you ever see
The Incredible Journey
?

. . .

That last scene where the dog finally—

. . .

Same thing: Louise sets down her grocery bags and then,
kaboom kabang,
she takes up running straight toward me like that dog, home again after logging thousands of miles on her raggedy paws.

. . .

Well, I know. We'd parted on sorrowful terms indeed. But Louise could move reality around the way some people move furniture. There she was, standing right out here in Randall's yard, thrilled to see me, oh, how she'd missed me, on and on.

. . .

It was as if she'd forgotten about my Judas kiss. She made it disappear:
poof.
Gone. When I think of the tears I wasted.

. . .

I can only guess, because we never discussed it, but I suspect the intervening years had made her more like me.

. . .

A woman alone. And she was in poor health. Maybe she needed an ally.

. . .

Think of that. She chose me twice. I missed her so much after she went.

. . .

To wherever people go. To live with the Lord Almighty.

. . .

I meant—I meant to say she died. I missed her so much after she
died.

. . .

Well, let's see, we went to movies a lot, sometimes with other ladies. Louise liked Robert Redford, especially in his shirtless roles. Sometimes we stayed up late to rewrite the endings, Louise grabbing a broom or a mitten or a saucepan and off she'd go. It was the exact same way she used to teach Shakespeare.

. . .

Excellent indeed. And in all my years at Lester, Louise was the only one who believed I was educable. Oh, and birds!

. . .

One time we drove to Texas for the spring migration. I paid for the trip but Louise did the driving, and when we got there we hired a handsome guide who showed us birds in dizzying numbers, and on the last day . . . My goodness, I haven't thought of this in years.

. . .

The guide stopped his car on a dusty roadside. Louise sat in front, fairly put out that this handsome fellow was treating us like old ladies. “But we
are
old ladies, Lou,” I told her, to which she informed me, “Speak for yourself. I think this young man is quite smitten.”

. . .

She
hated
getting old. She was sick already but we didn't know. She creaked along, cranky and stiff-legged and out of charm and yet she expected to be treated like the reincarnation of Cleopatra.

. . .

Well, the guide helped us out of the car and we couldn't guess what he was up to. This was the dullest piece of roadside you ever saw.

. . .

Post-and-wire fence and a pasture beyond, same view you see all over Texas, except that here you could see the Gulf of Mexico a few hundred yards away, behind a clutter of wind-beaten houses just begging to be flooded out. Our guide whispered something, but Louise's ears were gone by then and she couldn't make him out.

. . .

“Fallout.” I thought it was a religious incantation. You never know in Texas. But then we looked where he was looking. We stood there with our mouths open. It was a fallout, all right.

. . .

When birds come back all at once, completely tuckered, so spent and parched and hungry they quite literally fall out of the sky. Not many people ever see this, but we did, right there on a dusty Texas roadside.

. . .

Hummingbirds! Hummingbirds everywhere! Panting on fence wires. Resting in the grass. Sitting in the dust. One of them lighted on the bill of the guide's cap and sat there like a jewel. The fellow froze there, hardly breathing, while more hummingbirds appeared, having cleared the perils of the Gulf and spotted their first dry land in five hundred miles. Out of the hundreds of wildflowers on that weedy roadside, not a
one
was missing a bird, drinking to its heart's content.

. . .

This is the sort of thing Louise invited into my life.

. . .

I don't know how long we stood there. It was like watching the creation of the world, it really was.

. . .

Not a miracle—just nature at work. The miracle is that I wasn't home in my parlor watching
The Price Is Right,
which is exactly what I would have been doing if the Almighty hadn't put Louise Grady in a house on Sibley Street in Portland, Maine, a good twenty-plus years after I thought she was gone forever.

. . .

They disappeared. As hummingbirds do. Here and gone, like a magic trick. Picture it: one thousand hummingbirds with ruby throats fell out of the blue and straight to us, two old ladies who couldn't believe their eyes.

. . .

Louise was the one who counted. She grabbed my hand and squeezed once for every bird that fell. My hand hurt for days afterward.

. . .

No, I liked it. Those hummingbirds seemed like something I dreamed, and the pain helped me remember it was real.

. . .

Two years later.

. . .

Bone cancer. She moved in with me after a real-estate woman made a bad deal for her house.

. . .

I did. I took care of her to the end. Right here in this house. And you know the funny thing?

. . .

I had to be quite stern with doctors and insurance men and official wet blankets of all stripes, some of them a hundred times meaner than Mr. Shiny Shoes.

. . .

I stood my ground! Then one day it struck me that I'd borrowed Louise's personality in order to care for her properly. I was the one saying, “No,
you
listen!” or “That won't do at all!” I'd waited all my life to stand my ground, and here I was, finally, doing just that.

. . .

Exactly
like a Eurasian eagle-owl.

. . .

In January, just before my eighty-seventh birthday. A lovely snowfall outside, I remember. The kind of day when you'd want to go, if you were ready.

. . .

She most certainly wasn't. Louise kicked and scratched at life until the very end.

. . .

I gave her morphine.

. . .

It's a terrible thing, to control the comfort of another human being. She calmed right down, though. I was sitting on the bed next to her, watching her perform a pantomime, which is the effect morphine had on her.

. . .

She mimed opening a bottle, pouring wine into an invisible glass, swirling the wine, sipping it. So graceful and precise I could almost taste it.

. . .

It was sad, yes, I suppose, but it made me remember how enthralling Louise could be, how unlike this bone-thin creature lying against her pillows, sipping imaginary Chardonnay. Her eyes shone with the morphine, but also, I hope, with the light of her whole life. I was proud to be the one she chose to care for her.

. . .

She didn't say anything. But I said . . .

. . .

I said, “Lou, what do you suppose ever became of the Hawkins boy?”

. . .

It just popped out. I don't know why. The snow, I suppose, had put me in mind of Lester Academy, all those dark winter afternoons at my desk.

. . .

Nothing. She just lay there in her bed, looking around the room, preparing to go, I suppose. Memorizing the last moments of life. I was deeply moved by this, because she was memorizing a room in my house, where I had cared for her. And loved her.

. . .

I did. Very softly.

. . .

“I love you, Lou.” Like that.

. . .

Her eyes cleared, as keen and haunting as I'd ever seen them.

. . .

She said, “Miss Vitkus, that boy was delicious.”

. . .

I don't know exactly. It might have meant nothing. Could have been the morphine talking.

. . .

I thought about the boy who'd started the rumor. The cannery boy expelled for lying. I couldn't even remember his name.

. . .

She died that evening and left me, in Louise fashion, sitting in ten kinds of dark. I'd suffered mightily over my Judas kiss, as you know, for years and years.

. . .

I thought I'd betrayed a person who had given me so much. For
years
I mourned. It was hard to make friends because of that. But who was the betrayer?

. . .

We'll never know. I was eighty-seven years old, but I didn't feel like an old lady until Louise died. She beautified my life, and that's the truth. In time, I forgot the rest and remembered only that.

. . .

Forgiveness is a handsome thing indeed. Eventually I turned her back into Louise of the one thousand hummingbirds.

. . .

You?

. . .

You'll be the lovely boy who told my stories.

Every enviable detail of the Mills family compound flared inside a chamber of Quinn's brain that stored untreatable desire, and he needed a moment, simmering in the rich sunlight of Sylvie's circular driveway, to absorb its complicated ache.

Sylvie flung open the door. “Good, you're here.” She squinted far down the pink-tinged drive. Sylvie was fussy about parking.

“I hitched a ride,” Quinn told her. “You're three miles from the bus stop.”

She looked briefly muddled, as if he'd spoken in tongues. “Come in,” she said, leading him through the house. “The kids are rehearsing.” Her bracelets rattled as she opened a set of French doors on a lurid garden and paved walkway that connected the house to the studio. “I suppose you know it's been a snark-fest around here,” she said. “Honestly, I'm so mad at those kids I'm spitting nails.” She flashed him an enigmatic grin. “But I had a talk with them last night, and thank God there's one thing we can agree on.” She pushed open the silently hinged studio door. “You can probably guess.”

Relief warmed through him like lamplight, soft and golden, for he'd been guessing and second-guessing all day. He followed her into the studio, which was pristinely appointed and smelled of fresh plastic. Large equipment had been intelligently stacked, smaller gear tidied into open cabinets, miles of cable coiled onto color-coded hooks. Scanning this bounty, Quinn's entire history of gear—beginning with the lacquered Marvel amp from his mother—whooshed through his memory in the kind of cinematic flash reported by people snatched just in time from the jaws of death.

Sylvie gusted into the performance space, empty but for a few chairs gathered on the floor and a fifties-era, butterscotch-blond Telecaster resting in a guitar stand. The boys were gathered at the piano with their backs to him, discussing a marked-up music sheet.

“Everybody, listen up,” Sylvie said.

Brandon whirled around. “Hey, it's Pops!”

“Hey, Pops! Listen to this!”

Over Sylvie's objections, he was being herded to the piano, the boys urging him to listen, listen to this, Pops, you're gonna love this, Pops, do you think we should record this, Pops, whereupon a quartet of jeweled notes from the boys' kissed throats ascended a sweet and percolating tide of sound, Brandon and the Jays singing with eyes shut, shoulders thrown back, fingers snapping, Adam's apples aquiver, Tyler bent over the keys like a monk at prayer.

Eight bars in, Quinn understood what he was hearing. Howard Stanhope's unpublished song sluiced down the decades and landed in a flood of harmony, a hybrid of Tin Pan Alley and hallelujah that sounded freshly made, the lilting lament of an unworthy man begging the Lord for a break.

“Whoa,” Quinn said, genuinely impressed. “You guys have turned into first-class arrangers. When the hell did that happen?”

As the boys laughed—their faces peach-ripe in the glow of Quinn's approval—Sylvie zipped the sheet off the piano. “Who wrote this?”

“The husband of a friend of mine.”

Ona had called Howard a dreadful songwriter, and she'd been wrong. If the man had lived another few decades—not so long, not really—he could have stood in Quinn's place and listened to his song and blubbered like a grateful fool.

“Says here, nineteen nineteen?”

“She's a hundred and four. He's been dead for decades.”

“Pops thought we'd like it.”

“It's old enough to be public domain,” said Sylvie the businesswoman. She glanced at Quinn. “But of course we'll pay. We'll draw something up.”

“We could be, like, conservators,” said one of the Jays. “Like Paul Simon when he brought that music back from Africa.”

“You've got a friend who's a hundred and four?” Sylvie said.