The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

Because the story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don’t they teach you anything in school?

playing guitar was the single occasion in his slight and baffling life when he had the power to deliver exactly the thing another human being wanted.

They worked till they retired, lived a little longer, then died. Same thing that happens to everybody.”

“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.”

“Let’s hope.” “Hope is a perilous thing, Quinn.” “So I hear.” He’d thought himself finished with hope, but here it was again, that urgent, nearly spiritual ache, an open wound looking for a balm.

The sculpture was still breathing, or appearing to. Quinn felt suddenly stone-heavy himself, a caged body packed with rocks, a stone man hiding under the trees. Get up, he whispered, but the stone man remained where he was, suspended, poised to rise up despite his burden, or to give in at last to the force of its staggering weight.

The night drained away. Quinn played softly, head bent close to the soundboard, and entered a state of grace that could be called—loosely, generously—prayer. At dawn he lay back against his pillow and fell asleep with the guitar in his arms.

For a lot of people war isn’t a topic, it’s a stone on their heart.

Because I could. That’s why. I was a married woman who owned nothing. Not even my clothes. But I owned my vote, didn’t I?

When he sauntered into the house and took a brownie without asking, she realized how long it had been since someone paid her the compliment of presumption.

“Quinn told me about your son,” Belle said. “I hope you don’t mind.” “I suppose it doesn’t matter whether I do or I don’t.” To her surprise, though, she didn’t mind. Her secret had been released into the air, harmless as a butterfly. She couldn’t quite remember why she’d kept it so hard pressed to her chest. For ninety years.

Was it possible to remember a land she had left at the age of four? Was anything truly retrievable after a hundred years?

Why, she wondered, at this late date, had the Almighty deigned to drag her back into the fray? She’d been doing fine on her own. Just jim-dandy. Then he sent that boy, setting into motion a fireworks of possibility—that long-dead sensation of possibility—that she was simply too old to accommodate. And now this: where in her dwindling, circumscribed life was she to store this sweet, pitiful little draggletail who reminded her of things she’d rather forget? “My

Perhaps she expected Ona to blurt something along the lines of wishing she’d died in the boy’s place. She wanted to believe she’d have agreed, had God asked, but in her secret heart she knew otherwise. It wasn’t that she was selfish, or indifferent. Just too full of her own wants. She wanted to see her hydrangeas bloom come fall. To vote in another presidential election. To see the end of this war. And to find her name in a record book. She preferred life to death, that’s all. Most people did.

How could it be that Ona Vitkus, after so many years alone, had been netted by the maneuverings of lovers and interlopers, tangled into their grief and envy and clumsy efforts at peace? And oh, weren’t they a show: their puzzling wants, their cross-purposes, their own mundane, ticking-down minutes.

“People don’t write their own endings,” he said. “Well, I’m planning to write mine.”

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.

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.

He silently thanked the God he didn’t believe in for the near misses in his own life, the ones he would never know about because the one in a million was never him.

Something about their jumpy faces, their halted breath, it made him sick all of a sudden, because he understood it. He understood yearning. Walking into auditions with his shined-up guitar thinking, This time, this is it, he’d looked like them a thousand times over. Exactly like them. Wanting in. Thinking he deserved it just because he wanted it so badly.

If there’s a God, he prayed, please let him be a guitar player.

But even talented people, sooner or later, cracked their heads against their own personal ceilings, as Quinn did now, and he nearly cried out against the seismic blow.

“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.

I’d waited all my life to stand my ground, and here I was, finally, doing just that.

Quinn felt—there was no other word that came to him—loved.

Upstairs, gaining strength by the second, lay Quinn’s inheritance, left to the father from the son: an old woman suddenly missing home. The bequest felt both heavy and light, welcome and not. It came with ten conditions and ten more after that.