Flying Solo(74)
“She kept it for, what, almost fifty years?” Laurie thought about what this meant, that Dot had been keeping this safe for ten years by the time she herself was born. “I think it’s safe to say it meant a lot to her. Maybe the fact that she never told anybody about it or gave anybody any idea she had it or knew him, at least as far as I know, tells you how important it was. And what do I know? Maybe she told her friends. Maybe she told her sister. But they’re all gone. The people she knew then, the people in her Polaroids from that year, they’re gone, or at least I’m not going to find them.”
“I wonder who took the picture,” Rosalie said. “The picture of the two of them together with the duck. They looked comfortable together. I’m sorry I don’t have it to show you, but they really did. They looked happy. So they knew someone. Someone knew them. They had a friend together.”
Laurie nodded, and she suddenly had a thought that landed on her like a weighted blanket: heavy, but almost comforting. “I’m never going to know,” she said. “I’m never going to know this whole story. He’s gone and she’s gone, and most of the story is gone. The story is over. He gave it to her, but I’m not going to figure it out beyond that.”
She smiled. “It wouldn’t even matter if they weren’t gone, though. The default is forgetting, not remembering, isn’t it? You’ve forgotten more about your own life than you remember. I have, too. I look at those pots in the front hall sometimes, those pots that some wonderful kid I love put in my hands and wanted me to have. And every one of them, I wrapped up and brought home and put there myself. I am certain I thought about that kid when I put that pot or that ashtray or that vase on my table. But now? I don’t remember exactly who made what anymore.”
“Why do you keep them, then?”
She shrugged. “Oh, even if I don’t know which is which, they’re my only hard proof that there’s any reason for me to have been overworked and underpaid for the last thirty years. I don’t have to know which pot came from which kid, you know? All the pots came from all the kids.”
Laurie nodded. “I’m a reporter. I have a hard time leaving things unresolved.”
“I’m an artist,” Rosalie said. “I do, too.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
When Laurie got back to Dot’s, she drew a bath—you can do anything in the middle of the day when you work for yourself—and she climbed in with a big glass of white wine. She filled the tub until the suds were threatening to spill over the sides, and she lay back and let her neck rest on the cold porcelain.
It was an affair, maybe. It was a tragedy, maybe. It was lovely, maybe. There was nothing to know. He made Dot a duck, and he gave it to her, and she put it in the bottom of a wooden chest, and it was still there when she went to China, when she saw Avenue Q, when she traveled to Patrick’s wedding, and when she lay dying in the hospital. It was still there when Laurie said she would see to the house, and it was still there when Laurie started on that bedroom and opened the chest and wondered what was under all those blankets.
She must have told her boyfriend John, the one from the “ducks, darling” letter, what had happened. She must have confided in him, and so he had made a joke about selling it if she ever got desperate. But she didn’t sell it; she kept it. It would only have gotten more valuable over the years, but she kept it.
When Laurie’s fingers wrinkled and her face started to sweat, she stood up in the tub and was suddenly hit with the chill of being wet and naked in an air-conditioned house. She wrapped a big bath towel around herself. “Talk about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” she muttered, briefly pleased at her dumb joke and disappointed that no one was there to hear it, since she was, after all, a sort of a spy, and—
Laurie stopped drying her hair and froze. She remembered a ticket falling out of a book, money falling out of a book, a clipped newspaper article falling out of a book. She pulled on the stretchy joggers and the clean T-shirt she’d folded on the clothes hamper. Out in the living room, she ran her finger down several of Dot’s towers of books until she found it: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. She’d picked up Persuasion from right next to it only a few days ago. She’d been right next door.
It was a beat-up paperback that looked like it had probably been read a lot, maybe lent to reluctant friends and reread during terrible moments. And ultimately, it was a beat-up paperback that bonded her to someone she loved. Laurie thumbed the pages, letting them flutter past, until something floated to the floor. She put the book down.
She carried the picture to the couch and sat down. In the photo, Dot was in a long print dress. Sunglasses. Mirrored lenses. Big blue frames. She was exactly as Ryan had described her in the photo that Rocky showed him. But in this photo, Dot was alone. It had to have been taken at the same time, because in her hands, she was holding the duck. The entire time Laurie had been here, there was a photo of Dot holding this duck, right in this book. Right under her nose. It would have told her that given Dot’s age, the duck could not be a contemporary reproduction that was sold in airports. It would have told her that Dot had this duck so long ago that she cradled it in her arms while she still had dark hair.
And as she peered at the photo, she realized there was something written on the back. Something peeking through just a little. So she turned it over. On the back, in what she now knew must be Carl Kittery’s handwriting, it said: