Chances Are Read online

  “Like?”

  “Well, one reason that investigation didn’t yield any results is that it took so long to get going. Once the cops heard Jacy was getting married, they figured she’d gotten cold feet and run off. We did, too, that first month or so, right? All along we’d taken it for granted that she and Vance were getting married. They were engaged, after all. But after she disappeared, all that changed. Suddenly her marrying Vance didn’t compute. She never talked about the guy or seemed to miss him when they were apart. They disagreed about everything—where they’d live, whether to have kids or not, you name it.”

  “The war, too.”

  “Right. But if Troyer’s involved, that’s all irrelevant.”

  “Except there’s a problem. Troyer claims Mickey broke his jaw with that punch and he had to go to Boston to get it wired shut.”

  Lincoln nodded. “Coffin interviewed him a week or so after we all left the island, and it was wired shut then.”

  “Which means he might not’ve even been on the island that Tuesday.”

  “I know. Today, the whole thing feels like a fever dream. Basically I wanted him to be a murderer because he’s an asshole, and it doesn’t work that way.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Tell me something,” Lincoln said, his mind zigzagging. “Anita says our coming out here was my idea. Is that how you remember it?”

  “More or less. You and I talked about it first, and Mickey wasn’t hard to convince. We didn’t think Jacy would come, not with the wedding just a few weeks off.”

  “I don’t even remember inviting her.”

  “That’s because I did.”

  “Really? You’re sure?”

  Teddy winced, as if the memory were painful. “Yeah, I have a pretty clear recollection, actually. She answered the phone there at her parents’ place, and her voice sounded strange, like I’d woken her up. Then she asked me to repeat my name, as if she’d already forgotten who I was. But when I said again who it was, she was really happy, like I was the answer to a prayer. Neither response felt right, somehow. Anyway, my plan was to pitch the weekend as one last attempt to convince Mickey not to report for duty, but she said she’d come even before I got the chance.”

  “I guess I was thinking along those same lines. Maybe her agreeing to come didn’t have anything to do with us. What if she was just looking for an excuse to escape Greenwich for a few days?”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe the cops were right about her having second thoughts about getting married. Still, I just can’t help feeling we’re missing something.”

  Teddy started to speak, then changed his mind.

  “What?”

  “Well, actually, the day she and I went out to Gay Head? She did hint about having misgivings.”

  His eyes, Lincoln noticed, were brimming. “You never told us that.”

  Teddy shrugged. “I guess it felt like she’d spoken in confidence. She didn’t say she wasn’t going to get married. Just that she wasn’t sure anymore.”

  Getting to his feet again, Lincoln went back over to the screen door and stared outside. In the late-afternoon shadows the elongated outline of his mother’s house stretched all the way down to Troyer’s place. Weakening sunlight still sparkled on the ocean in the distance.

  “Anyway,” Teddy said, “now it makes sense. Why you were talking earlier about that history class we took with Tom Ford. He was forever harping on remote and proximate causes. How attractive the proximate ones can be, even though the real truth’s usually buried deeper.”

  “I have to say,” Lincoln admitted, “that if Troyer wasn’t involved, it would be a relief.”

  “How so?”

  “That’s another thing Coffin said. That if he’d been in charge, he’d have had a backhoe dig up every inch of this property.” Lincoln shook his head now. “The one thing I don’t think I could bear would be to find out she’s been lying dead out here all these years. Under this very ground.”

  They were silent, then, until Teddy finally voiced what they both were thinking. “We never should’ve let her slip away that morning. We could’ve rousted Mick and gone after her. Given her a lift to the ferry instead of letting her hitch. Why didn’t we do that?”

  “I wouldn’t say this to anybody except you,” Lincoln said, “but the truth is, I was relieved she was gone.”

  If this surprised Teddy, he didn’t show it. “I remember what you said that morning.”

  Lincoln didn’t, and wasn’t sure he wanted Teddy to remind him.

  “You said, ‘That’s that, then.’ ”

  It was true, too. That’s exactly what he’d said, Lincoln recalled now. Almost as if he’d known even back then that they’d never see Jacy again.

  Down the hill, a screen door banged. Troyer had come out onto his deck and was now standing there, shirtless, with both hands on the railing, gazing up in their direction.

  “DO YOU EVER WONDER about Mickey?” Teddy said.

  They were on their way to a club in Oak Bluffs where they’d meet up with Mickey, who’d e-mailed Lincoln earlier: Face Man. Be at Rockers at 7. Bring Tedioski. Don’t let him weasel out, either. Predictably, the message had lifted Lincoln’s spirits. From their freshman year at Minerva, Mickey’s ability to put things in perspective had always been his greatest gift. Lincoln and Teddy were both prone to taking life too seriously, so Mickey provided a natural antidote to their brooding. And how bad could the world be if he was in it? Nor had he lost this knack over time. His insistence that Lincoln was still Face Man and Teddy still Tedioski demonstrated his conviction that four decades had neither damaged nor corrupted them. Somehow, in Mickey’s presence everything seemed less threatening, as if life had taken his measure and decided not to fuck with him. It didn’t really matter whether Troyer was the villain of Lincoln’s earlier fever dream or just a garden-variety dickhead. Mickey had made short work of him before and would do so again should the need arise.

  Teddy, for some reason, looked like he was on a different wavelength. Their earlier conversation seemed to have plunged him into a reverie, and Lincoln now regretted sharing Coffin’s dark speculations about what might’ve happened to Jacy. He hadn’t had much choice though, not after Troyer’s visit.

  “Wonder about him how?” Lincoln said, the question coming at him out of left field.

  Teddy shrugged. “What his life’s like? I mean, you and I know a lot more about each other than we do about him.”

  “Yeah, but with him there’s less to know.”

  Teddy raised an eyebrow at this.

  “Okay, that didn’t come out right,” Lincoln admitted. “What I mean is, Mickey’s always been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy.”

  Teddy didn’t disagree, but something was clearly troubling him. “Why do you think he punched that pledge at the SAE house?”

  “He was drunk.”

  “Even drunks have reasons.”

  “True, but most of the time they make sense only to them.” He couldn’t help chuckling at this memory. “He claimed at the time those stone lions out front pissed him off, remember?”

  “Okay, but why?”

  “I’m supposed to explain why statuary would piss off a drunk?”

  Teddy shrugged again. “Okay, so how about this. Why do you think he stayed in the kitchen scrubbing pots when he could’ve been out front with us?”

  “I just assumed he was being Mickey.”

  “That’s a tautology, not an explanation.”

  “I’d look up the word, but I’m driving.”

  “Well, the door-prize question is why he changed his mind and went to Canada.”

  At least this one made sense to Lincoln. “I’ve always wondered. In the end I suppose I thought you and Jacy convinced him. You’d both been riding him since December. Maybe when the time came to actually report, he saw the light. Like Paul on the road to Damascus? Anyway, where are you going with all this?”

  “I don’t know,” Teddy c
onfessed, “but back in college I used to think you could change people’s minds. You’d reason with them, and if you knew more and you were clever and persistent, you’d eventually win them over.”

  Now Lincoln couldn’t help smiling. “In addition to yourself, you’re describing our current president.” Of the many bones he had to pick with Obama, this one topped the list; the man seemed to believe the world was a rational place in which everyone proceeded from goodwill.

  “Isn’t that the whole idea of serious debate? We forget that even under Nixon, most people supported the war. Eventually, though, there was just too much evidence.”

  “There’s your answer, then. Mickey was like the rest of the country. He reached a tipping point.”

  “Except in his case, it was never about the evidence, and reason never came into it. He promised his father he’d go. Nothing else mattered.”

  Lincoln nodded, beginning to understand. “So what you’re saying is—”

  “If we didn’t change his mind, what did?”

  “Okay, I guess that’s fair enough, but why is this suddenly so important?”

  “I guess what I’m getting at is there’s a lot we don’t know about people, even the ones we love best. There are things I’ve never told you about myself, and there are probably things that are none of my business that you haven’t told me. But the things we keep secret tend to be right at the center of who we are. Tom Ford never let on that he was gay, for instance.”

  “True,” Lincoln said, “but we knew.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Really?” Though now that he thought about it, Lincoln wasn’t sure he did, either, not when they were at Minerva. A decade later, though, when he read of Ford’s death in the alumni magazine he hadn’t been surprised; at some point, subconsciously, he must’ve put two and two together.

  “What’s interesting,” Teddy was saying, “is that people aren’t more curious about each other.”

  “Don’t we all have a right to privacy?”

  “Absolutely. But that’s not what I’m talking about. We let people keep their secrets but then convince ourselves we know them anyway. Take Jacy. We all were in love with her, but what did we really know about her? I’d never met anybody like her before, so I had no frame of reference. And if you think about it, she was in the same boat. We must’ve been as mysterious to her as she was to us.”

  “Except there’s nothing very mysterious about us.” But as soon as Lincoln said this, he realized it was bogus. Because there had been times when she seemed to be studying them and puzzling over their entire non-Greenwich existence. Public schools. Split-levels with Ford Galaxies in the driveways. Mortgages. Neighborhoods full of first-and second-generation immigrants. Two-week summer vacations someplace nearby. People for whom summer wasn’t a verb. She appeared to be drinking it all in. Had she been wondering if maybe it was as good as or maybe even better than what she knew? “Did I ever tell you my mother’s take on her?”

  “Your mother met her?”

  “No, but I talked about her. How wild she was. I even gave her a slightly sanitized version of the night at the dog track in Bridgeport and our barhopping back to the Theta house. Then about Jacy giving us big wet kisses in front of the house president. When I finished, my mother had this strange look on her face, like she couldn’t figure out how a son of hers could be so dim-witted. She wanted to know if it hadn’t occurred to me that Jacy might be waiting for one of us—okay, I guess me—to work up the courage to declare his true feelings.”

  “She really said that?”

  “It gets better,” Lincoln told him. “When I explained how unlikely this was, that Jacy was engaged to a law student from a rich family, Mom said that maybe she wanted to be unengaged both to him and them.”

  Teddy was smiling broadly. “Kind of makes you wonder what your mom was like as a girl.”

  “My exact thought at the time. When I asked about that, she just gave this rueful laugh and said she’d had this friend that Jacy reminded her of. Then she told me the world wasn’t always kind to fiery girls who didn’t have strong men to protect them. I think she was hinting that I might’ve been that man for Jacy, and that her biggest fear was that I’d end up being somebody who played things safe.”

  Nobody said anything until Teddy broke the silence. “I’m envious, actually. Your parents both cared about you enough to give you bad advice.”

  Lincoln chuckled yet again. “What’s that poem you’re always quoting? About parents?”

  Teddy nodded. “Larkin. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do …’ ”

  “The original proximate causes.”

  They were coming into Oak Bluffs now, the Atlantic on their right, Teddy staring out across its expanse as if he could see whatever lay on the far side.

  “Hey,” Lincoln said. “You gonna be okay?”

  “Yep,” his friend replied. “I’m ready. Put me in, Coach.”

  When they turned onto Circuit Avenue, Mickey’s Harley was parked right in front of the neon ROCKERS sign.

  Teddy took a deep breath, his hand already on the door handle. “Here we go,” he said. “Rock and roll, played at a very high volume.”

  Teddy

  They selected one of the tables farthest from the stage. Though their first set wasn’t until nine, over an hour away, the band Mickey had dragged them into Oak Bluffs to hear had already set up, and their sound system, given the size of the room, was truly terrifying to behold. In addition to several enormous guitar amps, there were four column speakers on adjustable stands that almost reached the acoustic-tiled ceiling, as well as several smaller stage-mounted amps pointing back where the musicians would stand, presumably so they, too, could hear the deafness-inducing sound. Even more disconcerting were the three microphones arranged on the floor around the drum kit. In a room this small, why would drums need further amplification?

  At Mickey’s insistence they’d all ordered ribs, the best on the island, he claimed, no point in even glancing at the menu. Each order came with coleslaw, baked beans, cornbread, pickles, a mountain of fries and, incredibly, two deviled eggs. Teddy, who hadn’t had anything to eat since that clam roll at Gay Head, should’ve been hungry but wasn’t, a possible sign that the episode he’d hoped had been forestalled might still be lurking. If so, he’d just have to deal with it, like always. Meanwhile, his goal would be to get through the threatened evening of beer drinking and very loud music. When they arrived, Mickey made them promise to stay for at least one full set, after which they were free to head back to Chilmark and be fucking dweebs if they wanted to. Copy that. And in the morning, if Teddy was still feeling iffy, he’d catch an early ferry off the island, then decide whether to visit Brother John or just head back to Syracuse. A Marx Brothers marathon and some long walks in the Vermont woods would be a pleasant distraction but little more unless he took his old friend up on his standing offer to move in. The idea of a cloistered religious setting wasn’t wholly without appeal. Possibly this was what had attracted him to Merton so long ago. Nor would not having any attractive women around be a bad idea, either. Now that Theresa was all but gone, he could admit to being more than a little in love with her. Why risk that happening again? Unfortunately, present company excepted, he generally liked women better than men and was happier in their less competitive proximity. Maybe there was a convent somewhere that would take him in.

  At the moment Lincoln was watching with undisguised amazement as Mickey devoured a full rack of ribs; Lincoln and Teddy ordered the half. “Tell me you don’t eat like this all the time,” he said.

  “Like what?” Mickey replied, a tiny spot of barbecue sauce on the tip of his nose.

  “Like this,” Lincoln said, gesturing widely at what was an astonishing amount of food, even for three grown men.

  Mickey pointed a gnawed rib bone at him, and he leaned back away from it. “This is food. So yeah, I do eat like this all the time. What do you eat, tofu?”
/>   “Occasionally,” Lincoln confessed. “Pasta. Vegetables.”

  “Hey, I eat vegetables. Just this morning I ate a stalk of celery with my Bloody Mary. You want my coleslaw? Because that I probably won’t eat.”

  “Of course not. It’s the one mostly healthy thing on the plate.”

  Mickey considered this, his eyes narrowing. “Why mostly?”

  “Well, I assume it’s dressed with mayonnaise.”

  “I should fucking hope so,” an indignant Mickey said before turning his attention to Teddy. “How about you, Teduski? What are you ingesting these days?”

  Having anticipated this question, Teddy was prepared. “Lately, I’m really into crudo,” he said.

  “Crudo,” Mickey repeated, glancing at Lincoln for enlightenment. When Lincoln shrugged, he fixed Teddy suspiciously. “The fuck is crudo.”

  “Raw fish,” Teddy explained. “Tuna. Salmon. Scallops.”

  The look of outrage on his friend’s face was deeply satisfying. “That’s bait.”

  Teddy nodded. “Yum.”

  “See?” Mickey said, this time pointing the rib bone at him. “This is what comes of listening to fucking Belle and Sebastian. You’re not going to finish those?”

  Teddy handed over what remained of his half rack. At least a quarter.

  Ever since they’d arrived at Rockers, he’d been studying his friend, trying to imagine whatever could’ve possessed Troyer to suggest it was Mickey they should be talking to if they wanted to find out what happened to Jacy. Probably he’d meant only to divert attention from himself. When Teddy pointed out that Mickey had been in love with her, Troyer had scoffed, but why? Was he just projecting his own hatred of women onto someone against whom he already held a grudge, or did he actually have a reason to believe Mickey might be one of those men capable of harming a woman he loved? That afternoon they all spent drinking beer on the deck, had Mickey said or done anything Troyer could have misinterpreted? Teddy racked his brain but came up empty.

  “Also,” Mickey was saying, “I’m guessing you guys eat three meals a day, right? While I have one.”