Chapter Ten. Duncan
That night, Mal stayed well after everyone else was gone. They sat side by side in the deep Adirondack chairs on the cabin porch. Moonlight was a spill of glossy white ink on the surface of the lake. The air was humid and heavy, resonant with the eerie vibrato of night creatures.
“You going to talk to me about Temperance, or do I need to make it weird with a bunch of questions first?” Mal said.
Duncan put his elbows on his thighs and leaned forward. Palms up, his hands were a blue-collar canvas of calluses, rough skin, and fingertips darkened with engine grease. It didn’t seem to matter that he scrubbed them a dozen times a day.
He’d learned pretty young that he was good at two things without really needing to try: building things and being funny. Humor was an important social lubricant for him now—his tattoos and dark beard paired with his sheer size tended to be intimidating for folks who didn’t know him, so a well-timed one-liner or a self-effacing quip went a long way toward putting people at ease. Since he was a kid, humor was also what set him apart in his family of big brains and big personalities. His siblings would get novels and science stuff for birthdays, while Duncan got whoopee cushions and books like 500 Knock-Knock Jokes for Kids. Literal clown shit. He’d committed to the persona and built it all on his own, though, and nobody had ever intentionally made him feel small.
He did a fine enough job of that himself.
“Harry and Temperance—” Duncan began. He cut himself off with a frustrated sigh. Christ, he was an idiot.
“Harry and Temperance…” Mal prompted.
“Forget it.”
“I won’t be doing that,” said Mal.
Duncan was born a builder. A fixer. Hell, sometimes he broke things just to figure out how to fix them or put them back together in a better way. The thing with Temperance was the one thing he’d never figured out how to fix.
“Look. Imagine you’re one of six siblings, and everyone but you is so accomplished. Med school. Pharmacy school, MBA. Goddamned bestseller lists, Mal. Literary awards.” Duncan’s laugh was dark and a little desperate. “And you’re the only blue-collar one in the bunch. You couldn’t even make it through your first semester of community college. But nobody ever expected anything more of you because you’re funny and uncomplicated, and why did it fucking matter anyway, because you were good at swinging sledgehammers and resurrecting old engines, and you were going to take over the family business someday. Imagine constantly thinking you’re less than the people you love most in the world. And then the goddamned guilt on top of it, because you envy them for it.”
Mal was quiet for a long time. Eventually, he said, “You’re not uncomplicated.”
“That’s your takeaway.” Duncan narrowed his eyes. “Out of everything I just said.”
“You’re also not that funny—”
“This is really helping, thanks.”
“We didn’t come from a limited supply of genetic resources, Ducky. Ma didn’t allocate more brainpower and talent to us at the expense of giving it to you.”
Mal picked up a copy of a book from the moving box. Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Duncan had been eleven years old when Mal had gifted it to him at Christmas, along with a copy of Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. When he’d unwrapped the books, he’d assumed they were mislabeled. Meant for Dad, or Nate or Patrick—literally anyone in the family other than him. “Just read them,” Mal had said, and Duncan tried—he really did—but the wordy prose had only reinforced his assumption that they hadn’t actually been meant for him.
He picked Walden up a few years later, and he devoured it. Nature soon after. Both texts had introduced him to the nature-centric ideals of transcendentalism that had inspired Frank Lloyd Wright’s own design philosophy, further fueling Duncan’s own fascination with organic architecture.
Mal knew him. Truly saw him. Years before Duncan knew much about himself.
Still did.
Duncan flipped through one of the tattered drafting sketchbooks from the box Nate had pulled his makeshift first-aid kit from earlier that day. There were a few dozen, layered like a fossil record in bedrock. The oldest ones were jam-packed with his shitty juvenile attempts at mimicking Frank Lloyd Wright and Marion Mahony Griffin. Later—Peter Muller, Ken Yeang. Duncan’s renderings of texture and light and three-dimensional perspective grew progressively more sophisticated in each sketchbook, as did his handling of proportion and scale. Eventually, he’d experimented with his own designs of new buildings in harmony with their surrounding ecology, and he’d reimagine existing structures using more sustainable materials. Retrofitting with green roofs and conceptualizing adaptive reuse options, like turning an abandoned shopping mall into an indoor farmers’ market entirely powered by solar. Old barns became art galleries, old churches became libraries. During a few months of his senior year of high school, he’d filled an entire sketchbook with ideas of what it would look like to rebuild in the ruins of an apocalyptic event.
Admittedly, those were pretty fucking weird.
“I can’t believe a person capable of the things you’re capable of, a person who looks like you do, carries themselves like you do”—Mal used one of the sketchbooks to gesture from Duncan’s head to his feet—“can feel like they’re not enough.”
Duncan gave him a sardonic sideways smile. “Are you saying I’m just too damned pretty to be sad?”
“Fuck off.” Mal chuckled. “What I’m saying is—if someone like you is truly ‘not enough,’ what the hell hope is there for the rest of us?”
Duncan stared at the wood floor between his feet for a long time. He’d used planks reclaimed from the crumbling gambrel barn in his folks’ northeast pasture to fix up the rotted places on the porch. The result was a mosaic of old and new that made him feel even more connected to the place.
His own.
“You think nobody notices how hard you drive yourself,” Mal said. “How you stack a mountain of responsibilities and tasks and bullshit sky-high on your back so you can barely breathe. Why do you do it?”
Duncan rolled his shoulders. “I have a lot of people who count on me—”
“Why do you do it?” Mal repeated.
“If I don’t do it, it’s not going to get done.”
“You want to know what I think?” said Mal.
“No.”
Mal watched him in profile for a few long seconds, then he nodded and sat back, silent. He flipped through Duncan’s dog-eared copy of Silent Spring.
“What?” Duncan sat forward. “You’re really not going to tell me what you think?”
“You’re smart, Ducky. You’ll figure it out.” Mal put the book aside.
Duncan grumbled and popped his knuckles.
“This thing with Temperance, though—you need to rip it open at the seams and figure out how to fix what’s inside.”
“My history with her isn’t a broken plot you can workshop.”
“I’m not talking about writing.”
“Ah, okay. You’re talking about the way you fixed your healthy and thriving relationship with Charlotte’s mom, then.”
Mal sat back and linked his fingers across his waist. “Sometimes, you break a thing open and find there’s nothing actually there. That’s equally useful information.”
Hell with it.
From one of the smaller moving boxes in an empty chair, Duncan set aside old CDs and books, a grass-stained Westfall High football jersey. Another stack of softcover sketchbooks strapped together with an oversized rubber band. From the deepest, darkest corner, he pulled out the wooden cigar box he’d gotten from Dad when he was eighteen.
It felt like an excavation of a long-buried skeleton.
The first thing Duncan handed to Mal from inside the box was a raggedy photo booth strip with four faded images. The only pictures of him and Temperance that existed from the summer they’d been inseparable. The summer when years of pining and horny infatuation had burst into full-blown, devastating first love.
In the photos, Temperance had a sunburned nose and cheeks that had started to peel, her hair bleached so pale from the sun that it appeared almost white in the glare of the booth’s flash. Even fourteen years later, Duncan could remember the taste of her strawberry lip balm, and how she’d looked that night in the passenger seat of his shitty rust-bucket pickup truck, belting out the lyrics to “Everlong,” wondering aloud if anything could ever be that good again.
In the first square at the top of the strip, they both wore awkward expressions of confusion, their lips parted in mid-speech as they tried to figure out how to initiate the booth’s camera. Their heads were thrown back in laughter in the second image, and the third showed him cradling her face in both hands as they kissed, looking wide-eyed at each other. In the final image, she’d wrapped both arms around his head and pressed his cheek against her chest. Her head rested sideways on the top of his. They both wore serene, serious expressions. Eyes solemn, mouths soft, lips gently quirked up at the corners as if to say: We are each other’s. Don’t you wish you had this, too?
Four hours after the photos were taken, he’d rushed her to the Capewell-Talbot hospital in Linden with a nose that wouldn’t stop bleeding and softball-sized bruises on her thighs that he’d been terrified he’d given her.
Mal handed the photo strip back to Duncan. “You’ve been pining for Temperance Madigan half your life because of a summer thing when you were eighteen?”
Duncan took a small velvet pouch out of the box. He split his fingernail picking apart the tightly knotted drawstring. It had been tied tight for fourteen years.
He tipped the contents into his hand. Two rings.
Duncan slipped one of them on, and it barely fit to the first knuckle of his pinkie. The finish was dulled to a grayish-brown, and in the center was a tiny turtle with a round blue plastic stone in the center. “I bought her this from the beach gift shop. She wore it the rest of the summer. Left a green mark on her finger, but she didn’t care.” He tucked the ring back into the bag.
The other ring was a little diamond with a sapphire halo, with smaller diamonds on the shoulders. Vintage. Art deco, according to the antiques shop owner. The center stone was petite, but in the low light of the porch lamps, it sparkled like it had been carved right off the edge of a star. It looked absurd against the backdrop of his callused palm, but the weight of it was profound. Like he’d taken his soul from his body and infused it into metal and stone.
Duncan didn’t really believe in supernatural bullshit, but in that moment, he was convinced that this must be what it felt like to see a ghost.
He held it out to show Mal.
Mal looked slowly from the ring to Duncan’s face. “I don’t think that’s my size.”
Duncan snatched the ring back and gave him a sour look. “I thought I was supposed to be the funny one.”
He rubbed his thumb against the old platinum. It was cool to the touch, and utterly meaningless unless it was on her finger. A prism without light was just cold, empty glass.
“And I thought I was the one who told fictional stories.” Mal gave him a thin smile. “Seriously, I’m impressed with the narrative you’ve sold yourself here.”
“Well, you know me. I’m nothing if not fucking entertaining, yeah?”
Duncan tucked the ring away in the velvet. The drawstrings were shredded from the messy way he’d opened it, and they wouldn’t pull closed. Impatiently, he folded it over on itself and stuffed it back into the cigar box, then tucked the whole thing back into its bottom-corner hiding place. He stacked all his other nostalgic garbage on top again.
“What does this have to do with Harry and Temperance, anyway?” Mal said.
Duncan stood and gripped the porch railing until the wood creaked in his hands. “I thought she’d end up with him.” Until he’d spilled his guts to Rowan last September, it was a thing he’d never told anyone else. After he’d uttered the words out loud to her that night, he’d been overcome with such a sensation of simultaneous shame and relief, he felt like he’d be sick.
Now, confessing it to Malcolm—he just felt like an asshole.
Mal was quiet for a while, and when he eventually spoke, the words came slowly. “You were at a point in a relationship with Temperance where you bought an engagement ring”—he paused—“and you thought she wanted to be with Harry.”
“I didn’t think that while we were together.” Duncan hesitated. “Well. I kind of did, that first summer. It was the first year Harry didn’t come home from college—”
Mal did a low whistle. “These are Olympics-level mental gymnastics.”
“She lived with him the summer after we broke up. And then at family gatherings those years after, she’d cling to him like a little orbiting moon—”
“Reasonable, if you two had a messy breakup. He was a safe space for her.”
Duncan shoved his fingers through his hair. He realized how ridiculous he sounded, but he couldn’t stop. “They had that—that—marriage pact thing, where they said they’d marry each other if they were single by the time they were thirty—”
“That’s a classic romantic comedy trope,” Mal said. “The characters always end up together.”
“Yeah, no shit, Nora Ephron.”
Mal blinked at him, expressionless. “I’m sorry—are you intentionally missing the point, or are you that clueless?”
Duncan didn’t respond.
Mal sat forward with his elbows on his knees. He steepled his fingers together. “Those are movies. This is real life.”
“Then Harry and Nicola split, and he came home—”
“And you thought he’d come for Temperance,” Mal finished for him. He dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his temples. His voice was muffled. “This is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”
Mal armored up with cynicism the same way Duncan did with humor, so he usually got a free pass. He never pushed back, always took Mal’s misanthropic teasing at face value. But tonight, his patience was fractured.
He swung around and got loud. “Why do you even want to talk about this, Malcolm? For the fucking schadenfreude?”
Mal looked up slowly. His face darkened, and his brows crammed together on his forehead. A vein in his neck throbbed, and his jaw worked, like he was trying to chew down the words. The corners of his mouth twitched a millimeter upward.
Duncan jabbed a finger at his face. “You’re dying to make a shitty quip about me knowing a word like schadenfreude. Admit it.”
One of Mal’s rare laughs came out on an explosion of breath. “Guilty.”
Duncan wanted to cling to that fortifying anger, but he couldn’t. He laughed, too, and the tension was broken.
When Mal spoke again, there was a quiet reprimand in his tone. “I think you’ve told yourself this story as an excuse to not have to try with her, and your stubbornness and insecurity have kept it alive with a self-sustaining circle jerk inside your head. But the truth is staring you in the face now, and you can’t use it anymore as an excuse to not go after her.”
God, he was tired. “You know how, in any relationship, there’s one person who settled and one who reached?” Duncan said. “Everywhere we go, people would see that with Temperance and me. It’s obvious.”
“That’s ridiculous. And reductive. And who cares?”
Duncan didn’t have an answer for that.
Mal wasn’t done yet. “You must have thought so little of her to have believed this bullshit for so long.”
“I thought so little of myself.”
“You ever consider therapy?” Mal said. “Seriously.”
“You first.” Duncan cracked his knuckles again.
“Way ahead of you, brother.” Mal grunted. “Does she know?”
“About the Harry thing? God, no.” Duncan sank his hand into his hair. “Well, hell—maybe? I spilled my guts to Rowan about it last September. Maybe she told her.”
“Harry is Temperance’s home base, man. Warmth isn’t the same thing as fire.”
“Fire’s pointless without the warmth, though.” Duncan lobbed a dart at the board. It hit sideways and fell to the deck. “Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.”
“Ah, we’ve gotten to the quoting-Thoreau part of the evening,” said Mal. “It’s questionable whether that quote is actually his, you know. Some say he was an insufferable misanthropic bastard.”
“I can see why you were such a fan.”
Mal sat forward in his chair. “People can be multiple things at once, Ducky.”
“Yeah, well. I guess I’ve been tilting at waterfalls.”
“Windmills.”
“What?”
“Tilting at windmills. You just mashed up Don Quixote with a TLC song.”
“Ah. My bad.”
Mal looked at him for a long time. With an analytical narrowing of his eyes, he finally sat back and said, “I’ll be damned. You do it on purpose.”
Duncan kept his expression neutral. “People can be multiple things at once, Malcolm.”
“Touché.”
They sat in silence for a long time after that, listening to the muddy song of bullfrogs and the lap of tiny waves in the cattails. Little brown moths danced around the glow of the porch lamp, charmed by the light in a way they couldn’t understand or resist.
Duncan could relate.
“Don’t say anything to anyone about this,” he said after a while. “Okay?”
“What, the fact that you’ve been trolling us your whole life with your bullshit mixed idioms and malapropisms?”
Duncan breathed out a helpless laugh. “Harry and Temperance, asshole. And I don’t even know what that last word means.”
“That won’t be a problem.” Mal got to his feet with a faint grimace and a sigh. “I’m not exactly Harry’s first choice for a heart-to-heart.”
“You want me to drive you back up?”
“Nah. I need to walk.” Mal made his way down the steps and headed toward the vineyard path that led back to Cloud Tide.
“Watch out for crawdad holes,” Duncan said to Mal’s back. “It’s a minefield of ’em.”
Mal stopped and turned around. “Duncan.” In his dark clothes, he was almost invisible, if not for the glint of moonlight on his cane and the white of his teeth. “Look—don’t use your past as an excuse to not have a future. The main difference between a mess and a masterpiece is time.”