The One-In-A-Million Boy

Ona continues her daily exercises to stay healthy, as the boy advised. Belle comes to visit one day, having finally retrieved Ona’s records. Ona looks through them and is shocked to learn that she once had a brother. Suddenly, memories of his mischievous face in a cherry tree come back to her, along with his death on the sea. Ona’s father had to drop his son into the ocean, just as Frankie did for his fellow soldiers. With this memory, many Lithuanian words start coming back to Ona’s mind, and she finds this to be an extraordinary but overwhelming experience.

The narrative shifts to the boy’s interviews, with Ona revealing that when she and Louise were both much older, Louise came back into her life. Ona saw her across the street one day, and it was as if there had never been any hard feelings between them. They traveled together, and at one point, they saw hundreds of hummingbirds falling out of the sky in Texas. Louise had bone cancer, and as she became increasingly ill, she moved in with Ona, who took care of her until she died.