“What happened?”
“Too much weed? Too much mescal? The ataxia? Maybe she just got tangled up in the mic cord. But when she landed …”
He paused, remembering. Vividly, Teddy could tell.
“Anyway, end result? Concussion, broken elbow, busted kneecap and two cracked ribs. She was in the hospital for a week, which was where most of her remaining money went. Not being Canadian citizens, we didn’t qualify for the public health care. Anyhow, we paid the bill, or most of it, and we were sent home with two different prescriptions, one for a painkiller, the other for depression, because it was clear from the beginning that it wasn’t just bones she’d broken. Overnight, she became a whole different person. Bitter. Morose. For her, it was all over. She’d never return to the States in triumph. We’d never play that gig in Greenwich. Andy would never have his revenge and neither would she.
“I tried my best to cheer her up. Told her she’d be back with the band in no time, but she’d just look at me like I was somebody she’d known a long time ago and couldn’t quite place. Her right leg was in a cast from calf to midthigh. She’d raise it up off the sofa and say, ‘That’s what you think, Mick? You really believe I’ll be back leaping on tables anytime soon?’ When I pointed out that some people did manage to sing without jumping onto tables, she told me to go fuck myself. Because for her, that’s what singing was about.
“Anyhow, it all unraveled. I kept hoping that once the cast came off and she was mobile again, her spirits would improve. Most nights we had gigs, which meant leaving her alone in the apartment because she wouldn’t dream of letting anybody see her in a wheelchair. We weren’t nearly as good without her, of course. We had to go back to playing smaller, crappier venues. It was just music again, no show at all. I told myself we needed the money, but I was just glad, really, to get away for a few hours, to lose myself in the music. Mostly I went home as soon as we finished the gig, but this one night I went out with the guys instead. Got pretty hammered. Did some coke. By the time I got back to the apartment, the sun was coming up. I figured she’d be asleep. Her meds made her sleepy, and most days she was out till noon, but no, that morning she was wide awake, watching an old movie. ‘It occurs to me now what I should’ve done,’ she said when I came in, not taking her eyes off the TV. ‘I should’ve fucking let you go to Vietnam.’ I remember standing there looking at her, thinking that eventually she’d say she was sorry, but that was the thing about Jacy. You couldn’t shame her. She wouldn’t say she was sorry until she was fucking sorry.
“Anyhow, that afternoon the cast came off, so heading home from the hospital I suggested we go get a beer to celebrate, kind of a no-hard-feelings gesture. ‘Do you realize,’ she said, in the same voice she’d used that morning, ‘there isn’t a single fucking thing in the whole apartment to eat?’ So instead of having that beer, I dropped her off and went to get us something for dinner.” After a heavy pause. “By the time I got back she was gone. I didn’t see her again for over a year. Didn’t get so much as a postcard that whole time.”
Lincoln shook his head. “Where did she go?”
“No clue. After a few weeks, I figured she must’ve gone back to the States. Someplace I couldn’t follow her. For all I knew she’d patched things up with Vance and got married. Mostly I tried not to think about it. In fact, that whole year’s a blur. Every single way a man can be messed up, I was. When the band fell apart, I moved to Vancouver and formed another one there, but we never really clicked, and my heart wasn’t in it. I got a couple part-time gigs as a sound engineer. Made ends meet, somehow. I was living in this tiny second-floor walk-up, above a nice elderly couple. I have no idea how Jacy found me, but one evening I came home and there she was, outside my door, with a backpack in her lap, fast asleep in her wheelchair. Somebody must’ve helped her up there, because the stairs were really steep and there obviously wasn’t a ramp.
“I’ll tell you the truth. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was skin and bones and you know what? I was scared to wake her up, afraid she’d start in yelling at me again. But then she twitched awake and smiled at me, and I saw she was the old Jacy. She said, ‘Did you hear the news?’ and it took me a moment to understand what she was asking because her speech was slurred and the effort to speak caused the elbow she’d broken to spasm. But I finally said, ‘What news is that?’ since I’d been in a sound booth all day. ‘The amnesty. Gerald Ford says all’s forgiven.’ I said, ‘You came to tell me that?’ She said, ‘No, I came to give you …’ The rest was so garbled I couldn’t make it out, so she tried again, and I finally understood that she’d come to give me my life back. I was holding a bag of groceries, so I said, ‘In that case, stay for dinner’ and wheeled her inside.”
Teddy thought he heard Lincoln let out a low moan, but he purposely didn’t look over at him.
“I offered to sleep on the couch, because the bath was off the bedroom, but she said no, it was okay. Her balance was for shit and she didn’t have much strength in her legs, but she could walk short distances when she needed to. Which apparently was true, because when I woke up in the middle of the night she was sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘I just want you to know I never hated you,’ she said. ‘I left because I didn’t want you looking at me the way I looked at my father that day on the lawn.’ Just like I was looking at her right then, she didn’t have to say it. Anyhow, I told her I didn’t care about the damn ataxia or anything else, so long as she was back. She started to cry then, so I scooted over so she could lie down next to me. When she stopped crying, I asked, ‘What about the baby,’ because not long after she left something came in the mail for her. The hospital reminding her of her first prenatal-care appointment. She told me not to worry, that she’d taken care of it.
“The next morning I had to go to work, but I told her when I got back we’d talk about the future. I said whatever she wanted was fine with me. We’d get married if she wanted—or not, if she didn’t. We could go back home to the States, or find a bigger apartment right there in Vancouver. Whatever suited her. She said okay, we’d talk about all that when I got back. Something about how she said it made me wonder if maybe I’d pushed too hard, but really, I was too happy to be worried. During that year she was gone and I was so messed up, I’d gotten it into my head that she and I were meant to live our lives together, and now here she was, which proved I was right.
“Except I wasn’t. I’d barely walked in when the station manager came into the recording booth and told me I needed to get home right away. I think her plan must’ve been to make her way down the stairs by hanging on to the banister, then ask that old couple to call her a taxi. They heard her fall—a terrible crash, they said—and found her crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Naturally they wanted to call an ambulance, but she was alert and coherent, and somehow she convinced them she wasn’t badly hurt. All she needed was for them to fetch her wheelchair, which was still up there on the landing, and call her a cab. That if they could just do those two things, she’d be fine. It’s also possible her speech was slurred and they thought she was drunk. Anyway, while her husband wrestled the chair down the steep staircase—no easy task for a man his age—the wife went inside and called the taxi. Hanging up, though, she had second thoughts. She knew where I worked and decided to call me, too. By the time I got there Jacy had lost consciousness and they’d called the ambulance they should’ve called earlier, but by then she’d stopped breathing. The EMTs tried to revive her, but she was gone. Our Jacy.”
_________
AT SOME POINT during the evening the breeze had shifted, and the waves could now be heard pounding the beach below, seemingly proximate but in reality remote.
Mickey put his hands flat on the table. “I should let you guys go to bed,” he said, “but before you do there’s one more thing you need to understand. Not about her. About me. A couple years ago I finally broke down and went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which I’d been putting off. Anyway, I’m standing there scanning down
the rows of names, section after section, and I realize I’m looking for the guy who died in my place. And just like that I’m back in the Acropolis Diner with my old man, and he’s pointing out all the guys my age and wanting to know which one of them should go if I didn’t. See, it’s no use arguing whether going would’ve been the right thing. The point is I’d promised my father I would, and instead of keeping my word, I went with Jacy up to Maine and then I did what the guy you used to know never would’ve done. I hid in the trunk of the car while Jacy drove us across the border. That’s what you need to understand. The guy you remember is gone, just like Jacy.”
Teddy glanced over at Lincoln, who was shaking his head. “Sorry, but that’s bullshit,” he said. “When you pulled in yesterday, my first thought was There’s Mick. You were older, sure, and a bit more banged up. But I recognized you. That you were still the same.”
“Also tonight,” Teddy added, “when you sang.”
But he could tell Mickey was having none of it. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, drumming his fingers on the table. “I’m glad you feel that way. And part of what you say is true. Sometimes, when I’m on the Harley, I do feel like the guy I used to be, and yeah, I can channel him through certain songs.” He turned to Teddy now. “It’s the reason I hate most of today’s music. I know it’s good, a lot of it. But I can’t find myself in it. And it’s the guy I used to be, before Canada, that I’m always looking for and not finding.”
“You’re being too damn hard on yourself,” Lincoln said.
“Sweet of you to say, but—”
“You just happened to be the one she chose,” Teddy said, surprising himself in the process. In the end, how easy it was to surrender the thing you cherished most. All these years, Jacy’s choosing him over Mickey or Lincoln had been a source of pride. He’d clutched that knowledge to his heart. “I would’ve climbed into that trunk, too.”
“So would I,” Lincoln said, an admission that couldn’t have been easy to make, Teddy knew. A life as blessed as Lincoln’s would be painful to forswear, even as an imaginative, nonbinding exercise.
“Well, you’re good friends to say so,” Mickey said. “And you,” he told Lincoln, “are a particularly fine man.”
Lincoln, who just then clearly had his doubts on that score, arched an eyebrow. “How so?”
“I’ve been waiting patiently for you to point out the moral of my story, but you’re too decent to do it.”
“There was a moral?”
“More of an irony, I guess. After all the grief I used to give you about being pussy-whipped, I ended up even worse.”
Obviously an attempt at humor, but if Mickey was still Mickey, then Lincoln was still Lincoln, and so, true to form, he took it seriously. “I guess my own irony would be that all three of us were head over heels in love with a girl we didn’t know.”
“Aw, hell, Face Man,” Mickey said. “We didn’t even know ourselves.” Then he kicked Teddy gently under the table. “What do you think, Tedwicki?”
What Teddy thought was that maybe knowledge was overrated. Sure, after hearing Mickey’s story, they all knew Jacy better than they had when they were young, but the added information made no difference, at least not to him. He’d loved her then and loved her still … regardless … in spite of everything. Mickey and Lincoln, the friends of his youth? He loved them, too. Still. Anyway. In spite of. Exactly how he himself had always hoped to be loved. The way everyone hopes to be.
Lincoln
Groggy after getting only four hours’ sleep, Lincoln was rinsing glasses in the sink when Mickey emerged from the bath, freshly showered, wearing gym shorts and a faded Bob Seger tour T-shirt. “Who’s Bob Seger?” Lincoln asked.
Mickey just shook his head. “You’d think by now I could tell when you’re pullin’ my chain.”
“I know who Bob Seger is,” Lincoln assured him, though the irony of the assertion wasn’t lost on him. If you couldn’t fully know your best friends, how in the world could you claim to know Bob Seger?
Mickey took one of the glasses Lincoln had just rinsed, filled it from the tap and drained half of it standing there at the sink. From where they stood, through the kitchen window, Teddy and Delia could be seen strolling along the stone wall that marked the boundary between Lincoln’s property and Troyer’s. In the last half hour they’d made several laps around the perimeter of the yard. “You gotta wonder what that’s about,” Mickey said.
“He’s probably telling her stories about her mom.”
“He does seem to be doing most of the talking.”
“None of my business,” Lincoln said, “but has Delia exhibited any symptoms?”
“Nope,” Mickey said, “and she probably would’ve by now if she was going to. There don’t seem to be any hard-and-fast rules, though. Andres’s symptoms showed up early but progressed slowly. Jacy became a cripple in a matter of months. All that pot smoking probably contributed, or so they’re saying now.”
“Yeah, but nobody could’ve known that at the time.”
Mickey shrugged, apparently disinterested in his weak attempt at absolution.
“Mind my asking how you found each other? When Jacy said she’d taken care of the baby, you must’ve concluded that she’d had an abortion, right?”
Mickey set the empty glass back on the drainboard. “Delia found me. Not that long ago, actually. Couple years? The band had a gig out in Truro. We’re doing our sound check, and this woman comes up behind me and says, ‘How you doin’, Pop?’ ” He massaged his forehead at the memory.
“How did she locate you?”
“How do you find anybody these days? Google. When Jacy put her up for adoption, she listed me as the father. Under nationality, she put American; under occupation, musician. Delia did the math and assumed I went back to the States after the amnesty. My name got her to the Big Mick on Pots website. I guess I looked enough like her to maybe be her father, and of course I was the right age …”
Lincoln tried to fathom it—having a child and not knowing about her for forty years. “And you recognized her as your daughter?”
“No, but I sure as hell recognized her as Jacy’s. In fact, I just about keeled over.”
“What’d you say to her?”
He chortled. “I said I hope you’re not here for money, because I don’t have a lot of that.”
“And she said?”
He grinned. “You’ll love this. She said, ‘I don’t want your damn money. I’m here to try out for your band.’ I said, ‘Can you do Tina Turner?’ and she said, ‘What the fuck use would I be otherwise?’ I’m guessing your own daughters don’t talk like that to you?”
“They speak their minds pretty freely,” Lincoln allowed, “but no.”
They lapsed into silence then, just stood there at the window watching Teddy and Delia slowly circumnavigate the sloping lawn that Lincoln had only yesterday feared her mother lay buried beneath.
“I’m ashamed, Mick,” he said finally, feeling his throat constrict with these three words.
Mickey waved this away as you would a dangling thread of spiderweb. “Forget it.”
“I wish I could,” Lincoln told him.
“You really thought I might’ve hurt her?”
Lincoln nodded. “I made the mistake of going to see this retired ex-cop, thinking he might have some information about Jacy’s disappearance that never made it into the papers. Like, if anybody had been questioned or suspected. If you can believe it, I’d gotten it into my head that Troyer might’ve been involved. Except it turned out he and this cop are old friends, and rather than being suspicious of him, he got suspicious about you. When he started digging, he found out about you and Jacy’s father.”
“I always dreaded the day you or Ted would find out about that,” Mickey said. “No way to explain it without fessing up to everything.”
“It knocked me pretty much sideways,” Lincoln admitted. “Made me wonder”—here he had to pause and swallow hard before continuing—“i
f I really knew you.”
“Well, there’s no hard feelings, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”
“No, I know that. I’m just disappointed in myself, I guess.” This was an understatement, actually. For reasons he didn’t fully comprehend even now, he’d allowed himself to be seduced by Coffin’s narrative, its trash-vortex worldview. Instead of using the lens of his own experience, he’d genuflected before Coffin’s. The other man’s brutal, ugly stories of bad men and bad marriages had somehow undermined the validity of his own good one. Instead of seeing the idea of Jacy being buried beneath the sloping lawn of the Chilmark house as too horrible to be true, he’d accepted it as too horrible not to be. But why would he do that? Had something about the possibility appealed to him for some reason? Maybe awakened dormant vestiges of the unforgiving, oppressive religion he’d been raised in? Or was there some other darkness he was unaware of, something far more primitive than religious doctrine? Had he first glimpsed it the night of the draft lottery when Mickey’s number was drawn ahead of his own? Hadn’t something whispered to him then that all for one and one for all was just a lie they’d convinced themselves to believe in? Was this how wars happened, the seeds of conflict, large and small, growing in the gap between what people wanted to believe and what they feared must be true?
“Well,” Mickey said, “if it’s yourself you’re disappointed in, I can show you where the line forms. Last night, I told you I kept what happened to Jacy a secret because I’d promised her I would. And that’s true, as far as it goes. But it was also an easy promise to keep, because, deep down, I didn’t want to share her. Not the girl we were all in love with back in college. Not even the one you saw in the photo. Especially not her.” As he spoke, he rubbed his sternum, as if all the food he’d consumed last night at Rockers was having its belated revenge. “Delia changed all that. When I made Jacy that promise, I didn’t know I had a daughter. And as messed up as she is, I wanted you and Teddy to know about her. She had the drug problem before we met, but I blame myself for the shape she’s in. She needs better treatment than I can afford.”
Chances Are Page 29
