Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  “You think I don’t suffer?”

  “Not enough.”

  They heard the office door open and men emerge into the hall.

  “Your turn, little girl.” She was smiling now.

  Suddenly Jacy knew something that until now had managed to elude her, though she’d been staring right at it for years. “My God,” she said. “You hate him, too, don’t you.”

  “You’ll never know how much.”

  “Do you want to get a pen and paper?”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  In the hallway the front door opened, then shut again, and now Donald’s footsteps were coming in their direction. She told her mother the combination to the safe.

  THAT SAME NIGHT she awoke in the darkness of her childhood bedroom to the knowledge that she’d decided something in her sleep: she would end her life. The decision felt both momentous and oddly anticlimactic. Her mother’s medicine cabinet was full of sleeping pills, and she couldn’t think of any reason not to take them. That evening she’d watched the news and seen the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia burst into flame, and she knew boys her age were being incinerated there. Against all reason Mickey would be heading toward that conflagration in a matter of weeks, and by next year Lincoln might well follow. They would both die there; she was certain of it. Death was everywhere, universal, a joke in bad taste. If you could die drinking a glass of water, as her father had, what was the point of living? In fact, Jacy thought sleepily, there was no reason to not do the deed right now. Nothing to prevent her from just climbing out of bed, walking across the hall and grabbing a bottle of pills. Easy. Fill a large glass with water and just start swallowing, the very thing her father hadn’t been able to do, and thereby achieve the identical, symmetrical result. There’d be both beauty and justice in that, wouldn’t there? Her poor father. Brokenhearted, he’d given her the gift of his absence. Now that he was gone and beyond further injury, she would absent herself. That was her last thought before drifting into a heavy, black sleep.

  The next thing she knew it was morning, the sun streaming in her window, the phone on her bedside table jangling. Since there was no one she wanted to talk to, she waited for Viv to pick up down in the kitchen, answering only when the ringing continued. Groggy, she didn’t immediately recognize Teddy’s voice. It seemed so long ago that they’d all been friends. If she understood him correctly, he was suggesting they all spend one last weekend together before going their separate ways. He and Lincoln had already talked Mickey into joining them on Martha’s Vineyard, he said, so how about it? All for one? One for all?

  Only after hearing herself agree to join them and hanging up did she remember her dark-of-the-night resolution to end her life. How could she have forgotten something so profound? The clock on her bedside table said it was nearly ten-thirty. Was that possible? After deciding to commit suicide, she’d fucking slept in? And then agreed to celebrate the beginning of summer with friends on the Vineyard, as if nothing of significance had changed since graduation? Was this any way to repay poor Andres Demopoulos, who in order to ensure his daughter a normal life had exiled himself from it and died alone? No. Fuck no. Living would mean that Don and Viv had won, that the whole shit-eating world, with its innumerable falsehoods and treacheries, had won. So, no. This simply wouldn’t stand. Don and Viv were apparently off somewhere. She had the house to herself. The time was now.

  Still muzzy from too much sleep, she went into her mother’s bathroom and found, as expected, an unopened bottle of sleeping pills. Not wanting to die in Viv’s bathroom, she returned with the pills and a large glass of cold water to her own room. The bottle had one of those newfangled caps, so she set the glass down on top of Andres Demopoulos’s obituary so she could line up the tiny arrows and push up on the cap with both thumbs. When it finally popped off, she poured a handful of pills into her palm and sat down on the edge of the bed. It felt lumpy. Feeling between the box spring and mattress, she found the stacks of bills she’d stashed there earlier. What had she meant to do with the money? She couldn’t imagine. For money to be of use you had to want something money could buy, and she didn’t. Not anymore. She had a single need: to not exist. When she put the whole handful of pills in her mouth at once, her gag reflex kicked in, but she got herself under control and picked up the glass of water. As she went to drink, though, she saw that her father’s obituary had stuck to the bottom of the glass. The date of his death—May 2, 1971—was magnified, like the key words you’re intended to pick out of a printed text on a movie screen. She gagged again, this time spitting the pills back into her hand.

  May 2nd. How many times had she read the obituary without noticing the date, its significance? She’d graduated from Minerva on May 9th. On the drive back to Greenwich with Don and Viv she’d given herself another good talking-to. Let him go. If her father didn’t come to her graduation, if he didn’t care even that much, if he could live without her, then she was done with him as well. Except that by the time she’d climbed onto that stage to receive her diploma, Andres Demopoulos was already dead. It was as if he was now trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave, like he’d somehow directed her to set the glass of water down on the obituary so that the date of his death would be highlighted. As if he was begging her not to do it. Nonsense, she told herself. More magical thinking. But maybe not. What if Andy was trying to tell her that living, not dying, was the best revenge on Don and Viv and the whole shit-eating world? She remembered the haunted, pleading look in her father’s eyes that terrible afternoon, remembered how desperately he’d tried to say her name, that he’d tried to reach out and touch her. It was as if, years earlier, he’d foreseen this day, this exact moment.

  In the bathroom, she flushed the pills down the toilet. And even before the last one disappeared, a new plan began taking shape.

  AND LESS THAN a month later, sitting in the dark out behind the crappy motel a few short miles from the Canadian border, that plan was about to bear fruit. She would live, and so would Mickey. That would be Andres Demopoulos’s legacy. That it also happened to be a giant fuck you to Don and Viv was the icing on the cake. Taking the stacks of bills from her backpack, she handed them to Mickey, who counted the money in the light of a waning moon that had just that moment come out from behind the scudding clouds. When he finished—there was enough there for twenty Stratocasters, maybe a hundred—he said, “Okay. Tomorrow we’ll find someplace to rent on the Canadian side, but then I need to head back to Connecticut.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I’m going to find your old man and beat him bloody.”

  “Don, you mean?”

  “Yes, Don. After I’ve done that, I’ll rejoin you.”

  “What if you get arrested?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I do,” she said, getting to her feet. “And your life is mine now.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I’m saving it. Therefore.”

  “Yeah?”

  She pulled her shirt over her head then and stood still in the darkness while Mickey, stubborn, pretended he had some choice in the matter. Was this how her mother had seduced Andres Demopoulos? she wondered. Had the poor guy even known what hit him? She found herself wondering if Viv had cleaned out the safe yet. Probably not. She would wait to see how things played out. If they took her husband away in handcuffs, she’d do it then. There would be no record of the freshly laundered bills. With Donald safely behind bars, she’d sell the house and go somewhere else, maybe back to California. She’d have plenty of money to live on until she could find herself a new Donald. You almost had to admire her, Jacy thought, waiting for Mickey, who still believed that his mind was his own, to make it up.

  “Well?” she said finally.

  “Yeah,” he said, getting to his feet, and they both heard the surrender in his voice. “Yeah. Okay.”

  Teddy

  In the bathroom Teddy, who’d asked for a short break so he could take anothe
r painkiller, did so, then stood staring at the wreck of the man in the mirror and marveling, as he always did in the aftermath of his spells, just how much they resembled tropical storms. As they approached, he often could sense the change in barometric pressure, as he had done on the ferry, even though the storm was still far out at sea, churning away, gathering force, bearing down. When it finally came ashore there wasn’t much to do but ride it out, just let it howl and rage and do its worst. At some point his buffeted, terrified psyche simply gave way to a profound sense of calm, there in the storm’s gentle eye. It wasn’t unlike what people coming down from acid trips often described—the self simply dissipating. To Teddy, a breathtaking moment of splendid, weightless drifting away. In another second or two the world and its cares would cease to matter. In their place, blessed oblivion. But then the winds returned, the shard pierced flesh, and he would know the truth—that escape was yet another false narrative. Later, bloodied and chastened and exhausted, he would do what he always did—claw up into the light, blinking, and survey the damage. Make an inventory of what was irretrievably lost, what was merely damaged and in need of mending, and then, most vitally, somehow locate and reestablish that charmless but necessary even keel that allowed for smooth, if unadventurous, sailing. What he called his life.

  Making matters even worse was the fact that the world he returned to was, of course, unaffected by the storm. Given the blows he himself had sustained, he half expected to see trees uprooted, roofs blown off of houses and corrugated metal in the streets, whereas, naturally, the physical world was unscathed. In this one respect, however, tonight seemed different. Returning to the deck, Teddy couldn’t help feeling that his personal tempest had somehow broken containment, wreaking its havoc on not just himself but also his friends.

  Lincoln had gone over to the railing, where he leaned staring out into the distance, perhaps at the dark outline of Troyer’s house, but more likely beyond that, to where moonlight was glittering on the waves. A blanket draped over his shoulders, he reminded Teddy of the forlorn Syrian refugees who for months now had been washing up on Greek islands. Earlier, looking out across this same expanse of lawn, he’d confided his fear that Jacy lay buried beneath it, as well as his own sense of culpability should that prove true: whatever befell her wouldn’t have if he hadn’t invited her to the island. Whereas now they knew the opposite to be true. Their invitation had actually saved her life, at least in the sense that it postponed her death. Instead of swallowing that handful of sleeping pills in Greenwich, Jacy had lived a few years longer, much of that as the girl in the photo Mickey’d showed them: wheelchair-bound, emaciated, unable to control her gnarled, flailing limbs. Thanks to her friends, she was able to fulfill her destiny of genetic misfortune. Was that what Lincoln was thinking now as he peered out into the darkness: be careful what you wish for?

  Mickey, too, appeared gutted. Leaning back in his chair, he stared straight up at the night sky. To Teddy he looked emptied out, a hollow shell of the man who’d performed at Rockers just a few short hours earlier, as if for him the music had perhaps stopped playing permanently. He was determined to finish, though, and when Teddy was seated again, his blanket once more draped around his shoulders, Mickey said, “Home stretch. You think you can make it?”

  Teddy assured him he would.

  “Lincoln?”

  “Coming,” Lincoln said, straightening up, or trying to.

  When all three were settled, Teddy asked the question that was foremost in his mind. “How long was it before her own symptoms began to manifest?”

  Mickey ran his hands through his hair. “Not long. A month or two? We’d be walking along and she’d suddenly wobble, like she’d felt a tremor in the earth, and when she got tired she developed this hitch in her gait. Other times she’d reach for something on the table—the saltshaker, a juice glass—and send it flying. Problem was, in addition to smoking weed, we were also drinking a fair amount, so she wasn’t the only one stumbling around, knocking things over. Still, I was pretty sure something wasn’t right. One day I snuck off to the library and did a little research. Even back then they were pretty sure ataxia was genetic. Sometimes it skipped a generation, though, and I remember holding on to that hope.”

  “Do you think she knew anything was wrong when we were here on the island?” Teddy wondered, recalling what she’d said—How come everything has to be so fucked up?—when they were out at Gay Head. Captive to his own desolation, he hadn’t questioned what that everything might mean.

  “That occurred to me, too,” Mickey admitted. “Probably not, though, or she wouldn’t have let herself get pregnant. But it’s true she was in flight mode. Desperate to escape her dickhead fiancé. Greenwich. Don and Viv. Her father’s horrible death. So, yeah, she might have imagined the disease was one more thing she could run away from.”

  “You didn’t talk about it?”

  He shook his head. “That was the worst part. Every time I showed concern, she’d fly into a rage. And I mean a real rage. We all saw her get angry at Minerva, but this was different. She’d scream at me that if she wanted a fucking mother she’d have stayed in fucking Greenwich. That I should mind my own fucking business. Which would piss me off, but then the symptoms would disappear for weeks at a stretch and I’d think maybe she was right and I was acting paranoid.

  “Also, there was the band. Man, you wouldn’t believe how good we were. Like, ten times better than what you heard tonight. Tight? Jesus, we could read each other’s minds.” Despite himself, he was smiling. Joy, Teddy thought. The one thing his own even keel did not permit. For him such bliss led to euphoria, which inevitably pivoted, plunging headlong into depression and despair. Was this, like Jacy’s ataxia, also genetic? Had his parents ever experienced real joy? Or had they, too, had to guard themselves against emotional extremes? They seemed to want nothing more than they had. Each other. The Sunday New York Times. Each autumn, a fresh batch of high-school students to mold. Their own version of that even keel of his.

  “We were a hot ticket all over Montreal,” Mickey was saying. “Throughout Quebec, really. We also made some serious dough, which was good because I never could reconcile myself to living off the money Jacy took from her old man’s safe. We blew a good chunk of it on amps and mics and a sound system. Plus an old hearse we repurposed to schlep all the equipment around in. I told myself I’d pay back every cent once we were famous, which it actually looked like we might be for a while. When Jacy sang, man, people just lost it. Her evolution was amazing. When we started out, she was doing maybe one song per set, but before long she was singing lead on, like, every other song and backup harmonies on most of the others. In the beginning we had to coax her up onstage. By the end, you couldn’t get her off it. And with every performance she got more bold, more free. It was the part of our lives she loved the most. Like I said, she was in escape mode, and performing, for her, was the best escape of all.”

  His expression darkened now. “At gigs she liked to wear these miniskirts and she had this deal where she’d leap, microphone in hand, from the stage onto a table in the front row. As you can imagine, that gave anybody sitting there a pretty good view. She always wore black panties, so when the assholes looked up her skirt, for that split second, they wouldn’t be sure what they were seeing.”

  Lincoln shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “She admitted this?”

  Mickey sighed. “Okay, look, I wasn’t going to go into this, but if I don’t, you’re never going to understand. Jacy’s relationship to sex was complicated. She loved it, but it had to be on her terms, and it always, always had to be her idea.”

  Which was certainly how it had been at Gay Head, Teddy remembered. Jacy, merrily shucking her clothes as he looked on, paralyzed, in wonder and fear and gratitude. Shouting “Come on, Teddy!” when he didn’t follow her into the icy waves quickly enough. Then pulling him into her embrace, her surprising strength overruling his moral qualms. Had her power over him been what excited her most?

>   “You always got the impression that sex itself was somehow secondary, as if she was driven by something even more powerful than desire, or maybe apart from desire. Like that night at the Theta house. I’m not saying she didn’t enjoy kissing us, but those kisses weren’t really about us.”

  Of course they weren’t, Teddy thought. Given what had been going on in her home for so long, how could she be anything but confused by sex? Why wouldn’t she be tempted to weaponize it?

  “Anyway,” Mickey continued, “it was like that with music, too. She loved to sing, don’t get me wrong. But it wasn’t really about singing. Audiences? They couldn’t get enough. People weren’t coming to hear us, they were coming to see her. She wanted us to start writing and performing our own material, so after we caught our big break, we wouldn’t just be doing covers. She couldn’t wait for the war to be over, not because it was stupid and immoral anymore—that was the old Jacy—but because when it ended we could go back home and show Vance and Don and Viv and all of Greenwich what she’d become. She made me promise we’d change the name of the band from Big Mick on Pots to Andy’s Revenge.”

  Lincoln still looked uncomfortable. “It must’ve worried you, how she was changing.”

  “I guess I should’ve been,” Mickey acknowledged. “I mean, her need to drive men nuts? The guys in the band were all talking about it. But it was the early seventies, you know? Janice Joplin was drinking a quart of Southern Comfort at every show. The Who were smashing their guitars onstage. Jim Morrison was whipping it out in front of live audiences. It was all about freedom, remember? Richie Havens at Woodstock?”

  Teddy couldn’t help smiling. The decade Mickey was trying so hard to explain through its iconic cultural moments was one Lincoln had basically opted out of. Richie Havens?

  “Anyway,” he continued, “one night she missed the table and that was that.”