The One-in-a-Million Boy (11 page)

“You liked me once, Amy.”

“I did.” She wiped her eyes with one bunched fist. “But not as a husband for my sister.” He could barely hear her. “I admired you. The artistic life always appealed to me, but I didn't have the guts to go for it.”

“Going for it is easy,” he said. He'd always liked her throaty singing voice; she'd sat in with the Benders a few times in their loose and headlong youth. “Sticking with it . . .”

“High price.”

“I guess.”

She crossed her arms and held herself. “I was counting up the number of days I spent with him,” she murmured. “What does that say about me as an aunt, that I can count the number of days I spent with a child who was on earth for eleven years?”

Quinn was beginning to see that Amy was here not because her sister needed her, but quite the opposite. It was Amy who'd bought the red bike he'd been riding on the clear, sweet morning of his death.

“How many?” he asked.

“What?”

“How many days?”

“Sixty-one,” she said, then her voice dropped as if from a great height. “Sixty-two if you count the funeral.” She was forty years old, with a married boyfriend and a craving for children. It struck him then that she was vying with him not for Belle, but for the boy.

“You live in LA,” he said. “Sixty-one days is a hell of a lot of days, considering.” She was weeping now. “Amy. Remember that mini tape recorder you sent to him a couple of years ago?”

She mopped her eyes with her sleeve. “Uh-huh.”

“He carried it around like a pet.”

“He did, I know.”

“It's the only material object that he didn't own ten of. He adored you, Amy. You have nothing to regret.”

“I—” she began, then he followed her gaze through the knife-clean windows. The breezy day had died, in its place a paralyzing sunlight, beneath which he received the numbing sight of a pajama-clad Belle moving methodically along the edge of the backyard with a pair of clippers, snapping fully bloomed heads from a vibrant bed of flowers.

“What is she doing?” he asked.

“I thought she was in bed.”

“I'll go,” he said.

“Quinn?”

He turned. She was still crying a little.

“Thank you,” she said, then resumed her drubbing, leaving him to head outside, slightly disoriented, thankful that Amy hadn't asked him for his own shameful number of days.

He trudged down the long slope of the backyard, which was famously difficult to mow. The boy had been too scrawny to control the electric mower, though he'd mastered the push mower, a relic from Eric Chapman, Belle's besotted neighbor. Today the lawn looked pooltable smooth, the work of an adult—Ted Ledbetter, no doubt—with impeccable organizational skills.

Belle had moved to a stand of daisies that hemmed the prefab toolshed—a father-son project that had languished for months until Quinn arrived for a custody visit and found it fully assembled, painted a stolid shade of green. Ted and his sons had turned the thing into a Scouting project, a happy endeavor that earned all the boys a dual badge in something like woodworking and teamwork. She clipped a blossom and watched it float to the ground.

“That one looked okay,” he said.

“I find their sunshiny faces unendurable.” She offed its neighbor.

“You, uh, probably don't want to decapitate all of them.”

“How would you know what I want?” she said, but allowed him to take the clippers and lay them on the grass.

“Is the lawsuit your father's idea?”

“People have to fill their lives with something. I told him I'd sign the complaint if it'd make everybody happy.”

“You don't have to do what your father says.” Mac Cosgrove was an ex-titan of industry who wore wingtips on weekends, a hard guy to say no to, especially if you were a Cosgrove girl. “These things can take years, Belle.”

“I don't care who gets sued, or how long it takes. I just want to be left alone.” She looked up. “How's the Scouting?”

She always began here, wanting to know everything: how many scoops the feeders had required; which of the porch steps—which one exactly—he'd repaired.

“She gave me cake.”

“What kind?”

“It tasted like chocolate but she made it with tomato soup.”

“Your hearing must be getting worse.”

“No, really. Secret ingredient. She wouldn't give it up the first time she made it, but today I shook her down.” He paused. “I've got only a couple more weeks.”

“Then your fatherly duties will officially be over.” She didn't look to see how her words had landed. Instead, she squinted at the sky, asking, “What else have you got?”

“Did I tell you she gets three papers?”

“Which ones?”

“You mean which actual papers?”

“Yes. Which actual papers?”

“
Press Herald.
Times.
Globe.
”

She nodded, three quick snaps of the head. Counting, he realized. She looked alarmingly unhinged: much-sweated-in pajamas, sleep-slitted eyes, hair mashed on one side.

“She keeps up, is what I'm saying. She's in ridiculous shape, considering.”

A trace of her old smile. “Better than you, I bet.”

“
Touché.
”

Belle ran her fingers over the remaining blooms, ruffling the petals as if in apology. He waited until she finally looked at him.

“I didn't know about the drugs,” Quinn said, ashamed.

“Don't second-guess me,” she said. “I can do that perfectly well myself.”

“I'd never second-guess you.” He gazed at her helplessly. “Belle, you were a beautiful mother.”

“He thought so. He wrote it down.” She closed her eyes. “Quinn, just tell me. Did you get yourself tested for Long QT?”

“No.”

“Because if you did—”

“I didn't.”

“Were you afraid to find out you have it?”

He hesitated, then told her: “I was afraid to find out I don't have it.”

He watched her as it sank in. “Remember the time I borrowed my father's car,” she said, “and then rear-ended the house with it? He still thinks it was you.”

He laughed, in spite of everything. “That's okay. He never liked me to begin with.”

“You took one for the team is what I mean,” she said. She sat down on the grass and he knelt beside her. She asked, “How are you, Quinn?”

His eyes stung: that she asked; that she meant it.

“I'm going on the road with the God Squad.”

“I always liked those kids. Cousin Zack back in rehab?”

“Bingo.”

She picked at the grass. “The thing is, Quinn, even if we both have Long QT, let's say we both have it, there's no point in knowing. We're home free, our chance to die young long past.” She shook her head. “His chance, too, would have passed him by, except for the pills I gave him. I've read all the literature, Quinn. It's the pill that did the job, either all by itself or as an ‘enhancer' to his preexisting condition.” She laughed a low, sad not-laugh. “What a word,
enhancer.
That extra pill, that harmless-looking salmon-pink pill I gave him every day for two months with a chaser of apple juice.”

“Belle, why are you doing this?”

“I wish I'd died young.” Her face looked whipped by branches. “But then I never could have brought that lovely child into this world.”

“Belle. Sweetheart.”

“Thing is?” she said. “The damn things
worked.
” Her mouth quivered. “He wouldn't come out of his room without counting everything in it. I mean everything. He was sleeping
under
his bed.”

“You could have told me.”

“Oh, Quinn,” she said. “When would the subject have come up?”

“I guess it wouldn't have.” His custody visits had dwindled to pitiful, twice-monthly suppers in theme restaurants, the boy answering Quinn's predictable questions in complete, often numbered sentences—the verbal equivalent of a chain-link fence.
Does he bore you?
Belle had asked him, incredulous, after that final canceled visit.

“He was better,” she said now. “Couldn't you see it? Wasn't he better?”

“It's not your fault, Belle. It's nobody's fault. The odds were astronomical.”

She closed her eyes. “Our one-in-a-million boy.”

“Who had a beautiful mother.” Beneath her horrible pajamas her shoulders were oddly canted, as if her body had decided to collapse without her full permission. Such immense effort, it seemed, just to hold yourself upright.

“There's something you should know,” she said. “I didn't tell you before because my father thought you might interfere.” Quinn waited uneasily; any mention of the old man usually heralded bad news.

“You probably know the PA,” Belle said finally. “He introduced himself to me as Richard, but it turns out everybody calls him Juke.”

“Juke Blakely? He's a PA? The one you're suing?”

“He was new to the practice. I should have known. If only I'd asked more questions. If he'd introduced himself as Juke, I might have. I might've shown more prudence when it came to my son. My own unforgettable child.”

Quinn, whose own acquaintance with prudence hardly warranted a mention, experienced an acute, electrical dread on behalf of Juke Blakely, who had stood next to Quinn at the rail of a ferry to Ransom Island on the day before the boy was born. They'd been met at the dock by three guys driving candy-red pickups, who loaded their gear and took them to a summer house perched atop a grassy cliff. The island's owner had instructed the band—a party band called Fly by Night—to wear white shirts and black jeans, an expenditure Quinn intended to recoup at the end of the night in the form of quality alcohol from the outdoor bar. The gig coincided with his final tumble off the wagon before sobering up for good.

Juke Blakely had a good ear and quick fingers, and Quinn sought out his company during the first break. They sat on a flattened boulder and watched the sea and shared their envy for the tiered house with its tennis courts and bandstand and ludicrous view. They were both thirty-one, both married, both liberal-arts dropouts with a two-year tech certificate in electronics repair. Juke had savings, though, and a five-year-old kid. He was looking to go back to school for something practical, possibly in the medical field.

The status quo reigned until sundown—set lists heavy on Van Morrison, lame jokes from Freddy the bandleader, endless introductions of people in remarkable clothes, several rounds of “Happy Birthday” for the half-drunk birthday girl. Quinn went a little tipsy himself on the sea air, the smiling guests connected vaguely to the movie biz, the sensation that he himself was part of a movie. Around nine thirty, the birthday girl's stepdad presented—
ta-da!
—the surprise guest, his old family friend, David Crosby.

David freakin' Crosby, of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Quinn went light in the head, sensing everything around him as suddenly hand-colored and fattened up and deep and rich and ownable. Even the quality of dark began to change as stars emerged from the blue-black sky, first faint and slow, then bright and fast. David Crosby strapped on a borrowed guitar and asked, “What'll it be?” They played the ones they knew, the ones everyone knew, Quinn and Juke and David Crosby—
Dave,
he called him,
Dave
—trading lead lines for a while, then Juke seemed to understand Quinn's urgency and backed into the rhythm role. For this one favor, Quinn never forgot him.

A brotherly cohesion overspread the bandstand that night, subtle as the progress of the moon. Quinn and Juke exchanged looks of awe, fully receiving this memory in the making that ended softly, so softly and sweetly, with “Teach Your Children,” the throwback song Quinn had listened to a thousand times as a lonely teenager in his room at home, bent over his guitar, eyes half-masted, shutting out his father's anger and his brother's obsessive goal setting, pretending his mother was still alive and humming along and tapping her hip in that way she had.
Dave
took the melody, Juke the harmony, and Quinn simulated Jerry Garcia's steel guitar by treadling his volume pedal exactly the way he had in high school. Threaded voices lifted and flew, shawling over the guests who drew nearer and linked arms out of nostalgia or maybe even love, a gathering of woven souls marooned high above a green and thrashing sea.

As the song rolled out to the stars, Quinn could hear his friend Dave laughing between lyrics, drunk on the exquisite setting, the music, the adoring crowd in their swaying bliss.
Look at this guy!
he chortled into the mic.
This guy's amazing!
Quinn laughed, too, acknowledging the shout-out as his fingers moved between frets, and the song went on, and wound down, and faded beautifully away, and then it was gone forever. Applause, applause, then the juiced-up birthday girl climbed the bandstand steps in her rackety heels, commanded the guest of honor to say something more, so he said,
I love this beautiful place!
Quinn heard “place” as “place in time,” and he loved it too. He loved this beautiful place.

Sometime during that long, enchanted night, Quinn bade farewell to ol' Dave; he recollected a sturdy handshake, an insider's chuckle. At dawn Quinn turned up at the ferry landing, squinting into a crimson sky and suffused with the ardent, mistaken, hungover belief that David Crosby wanted to play with him again sometime, maybe take him on the road. Deeper down in his consciousness swam a watery recollection of phone numbers being exchanged, though he could not find such evidence on his person after rampaging the same six pockets for days.

He'd been telling the shined-up version of this story for eleven years, leaving out the ending. After he burst through the door with his new and shapeless plans, he found on the table a note from Amy:
Get your ass to the hospital. You're a dad.
It was Juke Blakely, helping to unload gear, who'd offered to drive him there.