Chapter 28
CARTER
Justin issued the summons on a Saturday morning in December, over the phone, before I’d finished my first cup of coffee.
“Carter. You never met Barry.”
“…That’s true.”
“You know about him. But you never met him.” A pause, freighted with the full moral weight of a first-grader who has caught an adult in something. “He’s been there since October, Carter.”
He had me. He’d been telling me about that duck on the phone for weeks, ever since the night he called to report the news — Gerald has a friend — and I had said no kidding and what’s he like and tell me everything every single time it came up, and not once in all of that had I actually gone and looked at him.
I heard Jess say something in the background that sounded a lot like oh, he’s in trouble now, and my Saturday was decided for me.
The thing about Justin is that he says exactly what he means. He wanted me to meet Barry, so he called and told me to come meet Barry. There was no code in it.
But it got to me anyway, standing in that kitchen with my coffee, because a couple months back I’d said things to that kid on the phone and then not shown up. Four days of it. He’d folded my jersey onto a shelf over it.
And here he was calling me again. Wanting to show me a duck. Acting like the four days had never happened, the way kids do — handing me a clean slate I hadn’t done a thing to deserve.
So I was going to deserve it. Starting with a duck.
So at eleven o’clock we drove to Forest Park with a thermos and a bag of cracked corn, because Justin had done research and informed me with great severity that bread is bad for ducks and he had told the internet lady he would spread the word.
It was properly cold. That flat pale gray sky that’s thinking about snow and hasn’t committed. The paths were empty. Justin ran ahead in a puffy coat like a small determined balloon and Jess walked next to me with her hands jammed in her pockets.
“You’re freezing,” she said.
“I’m from Iowa.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I am deeply freezing,” I said. “Being from Iowa doesn’t make you warmer. It just makes you lie about it.”
Then Justin stopped dead at the top of the rise and flung an arm out like a general presenting a battlefield.
“THERE.”
The pond was skinned with ice around the edges, open black water in the middle. And there was Gerald, exactly where we’d left him back in the fall — one bent wing feather sticking straight up at a permanent ridiculous angle, patrolling his stretch of water like a man who owns a bar.
And beside him, smaller, plainer, entirely unbothered, a duck I had heard about over the phone numerous times and never once laid eyes on.
I got down on my heels next to Justin at the edge of that freezing pond, and I’ll be honest with you, I had to clear my throat before I could say anything at all.
Because I knew what Barry meant to him. Jess had told me, a few weeks back, in the dark.
After I stopped calling, she’d brought Justin out here to feed the ducks, and he’d gone quiet and studied the two of them for a long while.
Gerald, with his one crooked feather sticking up, easy to spot, the one everybody notices.
And then this second duck — smaller, plainer, not a thing about him to make you look twice.
And Justin had pointed at the plain one and said, That’s Barry. He’s not special like Gerald. But he still gets to live here.
He just liked that Barry got to stay. That was the whole of it, as far as Justin was concerned — a plain little duck, nothing special about him, and he still got a spot on the pond. Justin thought that was great. He’d told Jess so, and then he’d told me so on the phone more than once.
But I was the one who couldn’t let it go. Because I heard it and thought of a kid who wasn’t the flashy one either, and I stood there at the edge of that pond turning a duck over in my head like it was a sermon.
And now he’d brought me here to meet him.
“Barry,” I said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“He’s not special like Gerald.”
“Sure he is,” I said. “Every duck’s special in its own way. Gerald’s got his feather. Barry’s got —” I looked at the plain little duck paddling in circles. “Barry’s got a real good attitude about it.”
Justin considered this and found it acceptable.
“But he still gets to stay,” he said.
“Of course he does,” I said. “He’s just as important as any other duck out there. Same as Gerald. Same as all of them.”
He threw a handful of corn out over the ice and watched them come waddling. Then he went quiet. Justin is never quiet, so I waited.
“Do they leave?”
“What’s that?”
“In the winter.” Another handful, very casual. Too casual. “Birds go away in the winter, Mrs. Alvarez said. They fly south. So do they go? Does Gerald go?”
It was a completely ordinary question. He was six and worried about his duck freezing in a pond, and he wanted to know if it was going to fly off somewhere warmer. Nothing more than that.
But it landed on me sideways, the way things do when you’re the one who left. I crouched there next to him, because a couple months back I was the thing that flew off, and here was this kid asking me, in total innocence, whether the ones you like stick around for winter.
He didn’t mean it that way. I just heard it that way.
Name it, don’t aim it. I was scared. I stayed in it. I stayed at that pond.
“Nope,” I said.
He looked up.
“Some ducks go,” I said. “Not these guys. These are city ducks. There’s open water, and there’s people like you showing up with corn — so they’ve got no reason to leave. They stay right here. All winter. Same pond.”
He thought about that.
“Even when it’s cold?”
“Especially when it’s cold. You could come out here in the middle of February, everything frozen solid, and there’d be Gerald. And there’d be Barry, right next to him. Same as always.”
He was quiet for a second, working something over. Then he looked up at me — not at the ducks anymore, right at me — and asked it straight out, the way only a kid can.
“Are you gonna stay too?”
And there it was. No dressing on it. He hadn’t been asking about ducks at all, or maybe he had, and the ducks had just walked him up to the thing he actually needed to know.
I did not look away from him. Whatever else I got wrong in my life, I was not going to flinch on this one.
“Yeah, bud,” I said. “I’m gonna stay.”
He held my eyes a second longer, checking it the way he checks everything. Then something in his face settled, and he nodded, and turned back to the water like the matter was closed.
“I knew you would,” he said, to the ducks, with the easy certainty of a kid who had needed to hear it exactly once.
His shoulders came down about an inch. So did mine.
Behind us, Jess made a small sound and covered it with her scarf.
Afterward we walked up to the shops on the far side, because his fingers had gone red and he had begun arguing for hot chocolate with the relentlessness of a trial lawyer.
He got hot chocolate. Jess got a peppermint tea and warmed both hands on it like she’d been cold since November.
I got a coffee, and Justin appointed himself in charge of the whipped cream on top of it, spooning it off with the intense focus of a boy performing delicate surgery, and handing me back the cup like he’d done me a favor.
We stood under a bakery awning with steam on the window beside us and our hands around warm cups, and nothing whatsoever happened, and I want it on the record that it was one of the best hours of my life.
Then Justin grabbed my sleeve and yanked me down and whispered, with hot-chocolate breath, directly into my ear:
“We have to get Mom a present.”
I straightened up. I looked at Jess. I looked back down at him.
“Mom,” Justin said, with the transparent innocence of a child about to commit a crime. “You should stay here.”
“Should I.”
“Yes. Right here. Don’t come.”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere.”
“He’s going nowhere,” I confirmed. “We’ll be right back.”
“You are both being extremely obvious.”
“We are being incredibly subtle,” I said, and shot Jess a wink over the top of his head, and let him drag me by two fingers down to the gift shop three doors along, where we conducted a long and serious search for the perfect present for his mom.
He rejected a candle. He rejected a scarf on the grounds that she has one. He picked up a snow globe, considered it with his whole body, and put it back down. And then he went very still in front of a rack of little painted ceramic ornaments, and reached up, and took down a duck.
It was about the size of a plum. It had one wing feather sticking up at a slightly wrong angle.
“This one,” he said.
I crouched down. “You sure?”
“It’s Gerald.” He looked at me like I was slow. “For the tree. So now he gets to live at our house too.”
Our house.
He said it without stopping. He wasn’t making a point; he didn’t even hear himself do it. He’d just put me in the same sentence as his mother and his tree and his home, the way you’d mention the weather.
I stood up fast and found a shelf of coasters to be extremely interested in.
I’ve been in a lot of houses. Four of them before I was twelve. I have never once, in my entire life, been part of anybody’s our — and a first-grader had just handed me one in a gift shop, for free, without noticing.
I bought the duck. I have made a great deal of money in my life and spent almost none of it on anything that mattered, and I paid for that ornament while Justin supervised the transaction with his chin on the counter and told the woman at the register, unprompted and at length, that bread is bad for ducks.
We came out with a small paper bag and matching expressions of criminal accomplishment.
“Was the mission a success?” Jess asked, keeping her eyes carefully forward, playing along.
“There was no mission,” said Justin, holding the bag.
“And yet you have a bag.”
“It’s empty.”
“He is not going to hold up under questioning,” I said. “I want it noted that I told him to leave it in the car.”