“Having a daughter.” He glanced at me, then away. “But I suppose that’s not meant to be. Not in the cards for me. Not part of my story.”
“Maybe not. But maybe?”
“You’ve read all my books. I never get married. I never have children.”
“Your series only covers about a year of your life. Look at you, though. There’s so much more to you than what’s between the pages of your books.”
“True. There’s so much left unsaid. Nancy Drew, after all, never goes to the toilet,” he said, holding upThe Secret of the Old Clock.“And she’s a tea drinker. She would go. Often.”
I took the book from him and opened it to a random page. I touched the white space around the black letters.
“The margins,” I said. “The places between scenes and chapters. Between the lines. What do you fictional characters get up to between the lines? Or after the final page? After THE END? Maybe getting married and having children?”
“The problem there, you see…the only girl I want to marry is you. And I don’t want you in the margins. I want you on every page in black and white and bold print with your face on the cover.”
My heart pounded so hard I was surprised Duke couldn’t hear it. “Why do you love me so much? You’re one of the most famous fictional detectives ever written, and I’m…not.”
Duke looked at me for a very long time.
“You want to know why I love you?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“I had a case once at an orphanage. Someone had kidnapped one of the orphans, which was very strange. Who would kidnap a child when that very same child was already available for adoption?”
I recognized the case he was talking about from book five in the Duke of Chicago series,The Devil’s Children.
He continued, “After we recovered the boy safely, the children at the orphanage didn’t want me to leave. So I stayed all evening reading them stories until they fell asleep.”
That was from the book. One paragraph, buried in a scene, easy to skim over but not for someone like me, who sought out and treasured every little personal detail Duke’s author gave us readers. His favorite tea—orange pekoe. His favorite song—“Ain’t Misbehavin’.” His ability to flirt with literally anyone if it would get him the answers he needed.
And this passage I remembered for its sweetness and the longing it inspired in me to be in that moment with him.
And since the children wouldn’t let him leave, Duke sat in a chair by the fire and read stories to them for hours. And even then, he found he could not make his feet find their way to the door until every last one of them had fallen asleep…
“One of the books I read to the children has stayed with me ever since,” Duke said. “The Velveteen Rabbit.Do you know it?”
“I do, but it’s been a long time since I read it.”
“There’s a little toy rabbit in the story, made of velveteen,” Duke said, “who is teased by the other toys in the nursery—the mechanical toys—for being too old-fashioned. The oldest toy in the nursery, the wise and shabby Skin Horse, comforts the rabbit by telling him that if he’s loved enough by the boy, he could become real. The rabbit asks the horse what this ‘real’ jazz means—my own words. And the horse replies…”
Duke took a breath and furrowed his brow. As a fictional detective, he had a phenomenal, almost supernatural memory.
“Real isn’t how you are made…It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.”
Duke met my eyes.
“That’s beautiful,” I whispered, because whispering is always the right response when in the presence of beauty.
“So that’s why,” Duke said.
“Why what?” I’d been so entranced by the story I’d forgotten the question I’d asked him.
“That’s why I love you, Rainy March. Because when I’m with you, I’m real.”
