Flying Solo(75)

I have never been so proud. —C



Laurie frowned at it. Proud? Oh God, not another clue. She wasn’t even sure she wanted another clue. She wasn’t sure she wanted the clues she already had. But she had come this far, and now she had to go a little further with this ghost: He had given this to Dot to mark some kind of an accomplishment. She thought back across what she knew and came up empty. What was he so proud of her for?

And while she was squinting at it, what was that on Dot’s hands? She picked up the magnifying glass on the coffee table. Dot had something on her hands. Something…green? It was like makeup or—

It was paint. Dot had green paint on her hands. Laurie slid the magnifying glass across the duck Dot was holding, over to its vibrant green head. She looked across the living room in which she was sitting, to the duck that was on the mantel. To its vibrant green head.

I have never been so proud.

She looked at the paint, at the duck, at the paint, at the duck.

And then, Laurie put down the picture and the magnifying glass and almost tripped over her own shoes running down the hall to Dot’s bedroom, where she threw open the closet doors and took down boxes of paints and markers and beaded bracelets until she got to the big blue plastic bin with the permanent marker writing on the side: IN PROGRESS/UNFINISHED. She’d never even opened it. She pried off the lid.

The top layer was seven or eight rough carvings of ducks. They looked half expertly done and half not, precisely as they might look if one person started one and the other person finished it, maybe one demonstrating and one practicing. The ones near the bottom were small, crude, done on cheap wood blocks, not much more than roughed-out silhouettes. Toward the top of the bin, they got better, sharper, with less of a clear distinction between the more perfect and less perfect sections. In the bottom of the bin, there were pictures of ducks that looked like they were cut out of magazines. One was a big full-page shot of a majestic wood duck, with its green head held precisely at the angle Laurie had spent so much time admiring.

A few of the unfinished carvings were painted—several nice-looking examples. Laurie turned one of the nicer ones over and looked at the flat bottom, where a mark would belong, and in what looked like it was probably just black Sharpie, it said, DOT B. Another also said DOT B., but someone had drawn a heart around it.

“Oh my God,” Laurie said, as she sat down on Dot’s bed, running her hands over and over this one, this one with Dot’s name inside a heart. She lay back on the bed and threw her right arm across her eyes. She was completely out of breath, and she heard herself yell “HOLY SHIT!,” and then she sat up and pulled out her phone.

“Hey, Laur,” he answered on the first ring.

“Nick, I know what happened. I know who made the duck.”

“I thought Kittery made the duck.”

“He didn’t.”

“Wait, after all this, it’s not real?”

Now she was laughing. “Oh, it’s completely real. It could not be more real.”

“Who made it, then?”

“Dot did,” Laurie said. “Dot made it.”

There was a long pause, then he said, “I’ll be there in half an hour.”



* * *



—

They sat on the floor in the living room facing each other with their legs crossed, their knees almost touching. Laurie bent over the duck and pointed to a painted pattern on the wing, overlapping rows of markings for feathers, little black outlines of drop shapes, like tiny spaceships. “This was his thing, right here, this kind of wing,” she said. “But the ones I’ve looked at, they’re more pointed, and Dot’s are a little bit more rounded. You can see he taught it to her, but she did it her own way.”

Nick’s hair brushed against hers as he leaned down to look. “It’s amazing. That’s so much work, and that doesn’t even count carving the thing in the first place.”

“Yeah,” Laurie said. “The ones I told you about in the bedroom, some of them aren’t that much better than you or I could do with a week of practice. But then they keep getting better. She must have worked on them for years. He must have started teaching her, I don’t know, five years before she made this? Ten years? There are probably thirty of them in that bin. Some of them are almost as good as this.”

“Do you think this is the only one she ever finished?” he asked.

Laurie shook her head. “I just don’t know. She never said anything to anybody about it as far as I know. She had this whole thing she knew how to do, this beautiful thing, and she just learned it and kept it to herself. Or I guess between the two of them. She must have told the one boyfriend, John, the scientist, though. It makes sense now, what he wrote in the letter—‘there are always ducks, darling,’ you know? He didn’t mean she could sell it. He meant she could make them. If she was ever desperate, she could make ducks. He wrote that a year after she made this. She must have told him.”

Nick ran his fingers over the bird’s tail. “I can’t imagine knowing how to do this. I can’t imagine knowing how to start with a block of wood and end up with this.” Then he looked up into Laurie’s eyes. “Do you think he’s still alive? The boyfriend?”

“I hadn’t even thought about it,” she said. “I haven’t chased boyfriends, friends, really anybody. I mean, I’ve seen a couple of pictures of him, and they look like they were pretty close in age, so he would be getting up there. I doubt he’s around.”