“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.”
Nick looked her in the eye, and he smiled, and he said, “You have got to be so pumped that you did this. That you figured it out. I’ve never solved a puzzle anywhere near that cool. I literally sit under a sign that says INFORMATION, and I’ve never found information like this.”
“I wish I felt great. I actually feel terrible,” Laurie said, putting her hands behind her and leaning back. “I feel like a jerk.”
“What? Why?” He had such a good heart.
“Nick, it never even occurred to me. She had done everything, she had met everybody, she had gone everywhere except Mars, she had studied every craft short of butter-churning. And I still, when I found this thing, I still never thought…hey, maybe it was her. Maybe this was her work. Maybe it wasn’t something she bought, or something she collected, or something some man gave to her. Maybe this was her own work, her own time spent learning how to do it. I never included that on my list of possibilities until I literally saw paint on her hands.”
“I don’t think you can be blamed for not intuiting that Dot was an expert-level decoy carver,” he said.
“I loved her like crazy. She’s the only reason I survived having four brothers in a house that couldn’t hold us, and I didn’t know anything. I was completely clueless.”