“So can we go take a bath in the lake?” Mitchell dances in place, which makes Abigail laugh.
“I guess we could. We need to go see if Wilbur is there, anyway.” I raise my brows at Abigail. “Do you have a swimsuit, Ms. Marshall?” I waggle said brows. “Care to join us?”
“I actually do not have a swimsuit here. But I’ll walk down with you.” She looks me in the eye. “I’m kind of worried about Wilbur, if you want to know the truth. I know you love that little duck.”
I do love that little duck, but he needs to have a happy life of his own, one where he can be a duck. “I feel confident that the new lady duck in his life is going to fall madly in love with him right away, and they’re going to be a little ducky family.” I set my hand on top of Mitchell’s head, and he immediately tips it back to stare up at me. He grins.
“So can we go?” he asks.
“We’ll need to change clothes.”
He dashes toward the tent and begins to pull things—everything—from his bag. He tosses it piece by piece behind him. When he finds his swimsuit, he holds it up. “Got it!”
“You change first,” I tell him. “Then I’ll go.”
He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “I doubt you’ve got anything I don’t got.” He shrugs. “But whatever.”
My jaw drops. I look over and find Abigail standing with her hand over her mouth, holding back her laughter.
“You think this is funny, huh?” I advance toward her, but she doesn’t move. She stands her ground, even going so far as to lift her hands to lay them on my chest when I grab her and pull her against me.
“You got anything he don’t got?” she asks me.
“I got all sorts of stuff, and if you don’t stop talking about it, you’ll find out exactly what I got.”
She laughs. “Don’t make promises that you don’t intend to keep,” she taunts.
I stare into her eyes. “Oh, I don’t. Not ever.”
She has to be the one who breaks the stare. She looks up when Mitchell comes out in his swimsuit. His scrawny chest is bare. He has little rabbit muscles and I can see his ribs. He looks just like I did at his age, so active that it’s impossible to put any bulk on him.
“Nice trunks,” Abigail says. She gives him a thumbs-up.
“You had better hurry, Dad,” Mitchell warns. He looks up toward the sun. “It’ll be dark soon.”
I go and change, walking back out the same way Mitchell did, with no shirt on. Abigail licks her lips. Her eyes dance across my chest, and I feel them move over me like a physical caress.
“Let’s go, Dad,” Mitchell says. I grab the cake of soap and the shampoo, and I pull two towels off the clothesline.
When we get down to the lake, which is not much more than a short walk, Abigail shields her eyes with her hand to keep the setting sun out of them and looks around the still surface of the water. “I don’t see Wilbur,” she says. She looks at me like she’s worried. “If he comes back, you should get one of those little tracker things so you can keep up with where he is.”
I think it might be better if I don’t know where he is, or I’ll worry about him non-stop. I’ll think he’s clamped tightly in the jaws of a red fox, if I can’t find him. At least if he goes and does his own thing, I can let myself believe he’s fine.
And besides, after my recent incarceration, I’m loath to impose any sort of restriction of freedom on any other living creature. Even a duck that thinks he’s human.
Suddenly, Abigail points up toward the skyline where a small flock of ducks are coming in to land on the lake. “Can Wilbur fly?” She looks at me, expectation on her face.
“He couldn’t this morning. But by now he could have learned all sorts of things.”
“Can I go in the water, Dad?” Mitchell asks.
Suddenly I freeze with uncertainty. “Can you swim?”
He punches his hands onto his hips, tips his head to the side, and glares at me with one eye open and one eye closed. “Of course, I can swim,” he says, and he looks so much like old pictures of me in that moment that I do a double take. I can see his mother in him, too. That smile is all hers.
“Then go for it,” I say, and I motion toward the lake.
Mitchell grimaces as he walks gingerly into the water, holding his breath, because the water can get really cool this time of the year.
“Are you coming, Dad?”
“I am,” I say. And then I do something that I know ahead of time may very well get me slapped. I bend, shove my shoulder into Abigail’s midsection, and haul her out there with us. She screams and pounds on my back as I walk deeper and deeper into the lake. “Better hold your nose!”
Then I flip her off my shoulder, into the water. Her eyes aren’t even open yet when she comes back up and says, “I can’t believe you did that.” Water runs down over her face, and she blows her lips to clear them.
“Sorry, not sorry,” I say flippantly.
Then she suddenly launches herself at me. She hits me so hard that I fall backwards into the water, with her on top of me. I reach to wrap my arms around her and hold her close. “Sorry, not sorry,” she says, repeating the words I just used on her.
She laughs and shoves herself back, as she swims toward Mitchell. She goes over to him, cups her hand around his ear, and whispers something to him. He whispers back to her, and they both grin. Then they start advancing toward me. I pretend to swim away but, in reality, I don’t want to swim away. I want to get caught.
I scoop Mitchell up when he gets close to me and I toss him into the air. He lands right next to me in the water, close enough that I could reach him if I needed to. But he pops up just like Abigail did, and he says, “Do it again!”
So I do. I spend almost a half hour scooping him up and throwing him away from me over and over, and I’ve never been happier.
“Fatherhood suits you,” Abigail says as Mitchell hits the water again.
I look at her, my soul absolutely filled with joy. “You think so?”
“Yeah,” she says softly. “I do think so.” Then she splashes me right in the face and takes off in the other direction.
I swim after her and catch her foot, drawing her back to me. She’s so pretty, with little wet smears of mascara under her eyes and her hair a big riotous mass of wet curls. “I’m still in like,” I say quietly, right next to her ear.
“Me too,” she replies. She sobers. “But I do still want to know more about you.”
I nod. “It’s coming.”
Suddenly, Mitchell turns around and shakes his booty at both of us. He sings out, “Now you will feel the wrath of my butt.” His face scrunches up like he’s trying to let out a fart, but before he can do it, we all hear a ruckus of quacking and squawking from behind. Flying through the air toward us is not just Wilbur and his girlfriend. It’s Wilbur, the girlfriend, and two other ducks. They land with precision on the water just a few yards away from us. Wilbur’s not as graceful as the others, but he did just learn today.
Abigail looks in my direction. “Wilbur can fly.”
I shrug. “Apparently so.”
The other ducks keep their distance, but Wilbur paddles over. He’s not the least bit wary of the three of us, and the fact that he’s not wary of strangers is a little bit concerning. I’m not sure if he’s not wary of strangers or if he’s not wary since I’m here.