“Shut up!” I shouted, and just as Duncan and Helen and the girls came jogging back, now much slower, I said, “You’re Jake Archer?”
Jake just smiled, so I turned to Duncan, who had collapsed on his knees in the sand nearby, and I pointed at Jake. “Is this Jake Archer from Everything’s Invisible?”
Duncan frowned at me like I was funny. “Yes,” he said.
“Wait—you’re friends with Jake Archer?”
Duncan gave Helen a little smile. “I can hardly believe it, myself.”
“Hardly friends,” Jake said. “He’s more like an obsessive and troubled fan.”
Duncan kept his eyes on me, but called over to Jake. “Don’t make me hurt you.” Then, to me, he said, “I named that podcast, in fact.”
“You named it?”
Duncan nodded. “Jake over there wanted to call it, ‘What’s Essential Is Invisible to the Eye’—you know, that line from The Little Prince about how ‘it is only with the heart that one can see rightly.’ But that was way too long. So I shortened it.”
I turned to Jake. I was freaking out. I was fangirling.
“I knew I knew that voice! I’ve heard every episode—multiple times. I’m in the library all the time, stamping books and cataloging and restocking and doing inventory. I listen to a ton of podcasts and audiobooks—and yours is in my top three. It’s actually my favorite. Sometimes I get to the end of a show, and just go back and start it again. But I’m not going to say that out loud for fear of sounding like a…”
“An obsessive and troubled fan?” Duncan suggested.
I shrugged. “Too late?”
“Let’s treat that like a rhetorical question,” Jake said, but now he was teasing me, too.
I turned to Duncan, and said, almost like I was giving him some great news: “Your brother-in-law is Jake Archer!”
“Does that make you like me better?”
“It doesn’t make me like you less, that’s for sure.”
“This is why you pay me the big bucks,” Jake said to Duncan.
Then I turned back to Jake, and as I did, I remembered an article in Variety, or Vanity Fair, or Vogue—something with a V—about America’s new favorite podcast host, and how he always insisted he was so good at interviewing people, at reading their voices and asking the perfect questions, because he was blind.
Duncan saw me looking at Jake and seemed to know what I was thinking. He took a few steps closer to Jake and wrapped him up in a bear hug. “Love ya, buddy,” I heard Duncan say, just as Helen, who had been brushing sand off of Jake this whole time, said to the guys, “I’m calling a moratorium on wrestling.”
Then she turned to the girls. “I think it’s time for hot chocolate.”
The girls cheered and jumped around, but Duncan charged toward them. “Ugh! Hot chocolate is the worst!” He swooped down, scooped them up, and spun around, one in each arm, until centrifugal force pulled their feet out sideways.
I had never—not once, in all the days since he’d come to Kempner—seen him goof around with kids like that. Mostly, he ignored all children. But here he was, playing. Here he was, looking and acting so much like Old Duncan that it made me sad. I felt my smile fade, even as the girls kept squealing and giggling in palpable delight.
* * *
After they’d gone, I regretted not getting Jake’s autograph. Maybe I should have gotten all their autographs, for good measure.
I couldn’t stop thinking about them as I walked back up the beach. Thinking how radically different Duncan was in their presence. Was he faking? Or did they open up some part of his psyche that he normally kept bolted shut?
It was so thrilling—and heartbreaking—to see Duncan happy, given how rarely that ever happened. It was like this glimpse into a parallel universe where he was okay. Maybe not exactly as exuberant as he had been all those years ago at Andrews … but close.
Where was that Duncan when we were at school?
When they’d left in search of hot chocolate, I’d wanted to go with them so badly—and they had tried to convince me to go. I don’t know why I said no. Maybe I didn’t want to interrupt their family time together. Maybe their easy camaraderie was intimidating in a way.
But as I walked home, I had to admit: The more glimpses of the old Duncan I got, the more I wanted. I hadn’t gone with them, in part, because I’d wanted to go with them so badly. The version of him on the beach today was