Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  There was also the possibility that, despite promising not to, she was telling them everything. She wouldn’t do it to hurt him, he knew, but rather because they were all friends who, if they knew, maybe could help. They couldn’t, of course. Nobody could.

  By the time he returned to the deck—how long had he been gone?—the temperature had dropped and Lincoln had ducked inside for sweaters and sweatshirts. They paid Teddy no special attention, which he assumed meant Jacy had kept her promise. The music had stopped playing, but she and Mickey were slow dancing in the middle of the deck. “Chances are,” Mickey crooned, “ ’cause I wear a silly grin, the moment you come into view. Chances are you think that I’m in love with you.”

  “Fine,” Lincoln chuckled good-naturedly. “Have fun at my expense.”

  Jacy evidently took this as permission to join in. “Just because,” she warbled drunkenly, “my composure sort of slips the moment that your lips meet mine. Chances are you think my heart’s your valentine.”

  As Teddy passed by, Jacy grabbed him by the elbow, determined, despite his protests that he didn’t know the words, that he would sing along with them, leaving Lincoln with little choice but to join in as well. How many verses did they sing? Teddy lost track, but at some point it occurred to him that Mickey no longer was making fun of Johnny Mathis. Indeed, he was singing the song as if he’d penned the schmaltzy lyrics himself and couldn’t be prouder of them. As they all grew more confident of the lyrics, they turned, arm in arm, and serenaded the night itself, the moonlight rippling on the distant ocean. They sang as if they were still all for one and one for all and would be so forever. To his astonishment, Teddy felt his own heavy burden begin to lift, at least a little. Maybe, he thought, if they just sang loud enough, everything would be okay after all. Mickey would somehow return from Vietnam unharmed. Lincoln’s service would not be required. Jacy would marry her fiancé or she wouldn’t, but she would remain always their fourth Musketeer. And Teddy himself? For no good reason, he suddenly felt hopeful. Because there was magic in the world. Just that afternoon a girl he’d been in love with throughout college had chosen him. Him. And what was that if not magic? Why abandon hope in the face of possibility?

  There on the deck, pleasantly drunk, they seemed to have found something they each could agree on: that chances were their chances were … awfully good. Whether the sentiment was true or—like the world they were taking possession of—a bright, shining lie seemed, right then, beside the point.

  THE NEXT MORNING the sun was barely up when Teddy, lying awake on the living room couch, heard Jacy stirring in her bedroom. When her door squeaked open and she emerged on tiptoe, fully dressed, her pack slung over her shoulder, he realized that she meant to slip away without saying goodbye. This was confirmed when she placed a note in the center of the dining room table where they couldn’t fail to see it.

  Only when the front door closed behind her did he stand and go over to the window to watch her make her way up the gravel drive. How brave she looked under her backpack. How beautiful.

  Poor girl. She’d cried her heart out yesterday when he talked about the afternoon in the gym when he’d gone up for that rebound and Nelson, his burly teammate, had undercut him. How his tailbone had been the first thing to hit the hardwood court, the impact paralyzing him so completely that at first he’d felt no pain, only shock. How he’d been taken to the emergency room in an ambulance, unable to feel his legs, though by the time they arrived there some sensation had returned and he could wiggle his toes. According to the ER doctors, this was a good sign, as was the nauseating pain, which led to vomiting and later, long after his stomach was empty, dry heaves. He’d been kept overnight for observation but sent home the next morning in a brace, told that he was young and strong and all he needed was rest for the hairline fracture to heal. In no time he’d be good as new. Though there was one thing to keep an eye out for, a doctor had warned, almost as an afterthought. While it was unlikely, spinal injuries could be tricky. Teddy, at sixteen, hadn’t really known what erectile dysfunction meant, but he’d instinctively grasped what he was “to keep an eye out for,” and that this oh-by-the-way afterthought was anything but.

  Yesterday, with Jacy sobbing in his arms, he’d wanted more than anything to comfort her, to convince her that even though his chances weren’t awfully good, neither were his circumstances hopeless. Normal function, he told her, was sometimes restored even years after the injury. No need to mention that with each passing year that possibility became less likely, not more. Nor did he tell her that right from the start he’d somehow known that he wouldn’t be one of the lucky ones, that how he was at present—able to ejaculate but not to engage in intercourse, able to fall deeply in love but not to express it—was how he would remain.

  “I’ve gotten used to it, actually,” he assured her. “It was a mistake to get my hopes up. I just thought that, with you, maybe …”

  Which made her cry even harder. “Anyway, it could be worse, right?” he continued, knowing full well that he was about to say something truly horrible, something that would haunt him forever. “I could be headed for Vietnam.”

  Forty-four years later, high above the beach where he’d spoken those words, sharing the whole sad story with Theresa, he still couldn’t fully fathom what had possessed him, or even what he’d meant to say. There were days when he could almost absolve himself for uttering the words. Surely he’d meant only that, on the night of the lottery, he’d been fortunate to draw a number that would spare him from that danger. And really, that was about all the good fortune boys of his generation had any right to expect. Yet it sometimes felt as if he’d made an unwitting bargain with God: Give me a high number tonight and I’ll never ask you for anything else. Because that would explain the trade-off he was now being asked to accept—his happiness for his life. Things could always be worse. He could be headed to Vietnam.

  But by asserting that things could’ve been worse for himself, wasn’t he also saying that they definitely were worse for his friends? For Mickey and, yes, possibly for Lincoln? Had Jacy heard in the statement some bitter satisfaction? That if he couldn’t be a man, there was comfort to be taken from knowing that his friends—men who could not only love but also express love—might have to pay an even-bigger price? That if he couldn’t have Jacy, then at least they wouldn’t, either? Was that what she’d heard? Was that what he’d meant?

  As he watched her make her way up the drive, he couldn’t help feeling that it wasn’t so much Jacy departing as life itself, and that he had it coming.

  He was still staring out the window when Lincoln appeared in his bedroom doorway, wearing gym shorts and an old Minerva College T-shirt, scratching his chin thoughtfully. “She’s gone?” he said.

  Teddy nodded. “There’s a note.”

  Lincoln read it, first to himself, then out loud: No goodbyes. I couldn’t bear it. “Well,” he said. “That’s that, then.”

  Why had they let her go like that? he wondered after saying goodbye to Theresa, another woman he’d managed to disappoint profoundly. Why hadn’t they rousted Mickey and gone after her. There was a breakfast place near the ferry terminal where they could’ve dispatched their hangovers with scrambled eggs and home fries and coffee, then put her on the ferry and waved goodbye as the boat departed. Wasn’t that what good friends would do?

  Except that, as her fiancé would later allege, they weren’t good friends, or weren’t just good friends. Her note made clear that she was leaving them collectively, three young men on the cusp of adulthood. The reason they hadn’t gone after her was that they saw it differently. They’d begun seeing things differently back in 1969, in the Theta house’s hasher room, where on a small TV they’d learned just how alone they really were in the world. They’d entered that room all in the same loud, raucous boat only to drift away silent and solitary, envy and fear making it impossible for them to look one another in the eye. No, the love they bore Jacy was not communal but individual. She wasn�
�t leaving her Musketeers collectively, but rather individually—Athos, Porthos, Aramis.

  Forever, as it turned out.

  Lincoln

  There was a Wi-Fi router at the house, but Lincoln wouldn’t be able to discover the password until Monday morning, when the management company opened. Out in Chilmark he’d have one bar of reception at best, so he decided to check his e-mail in the Tisbury Village parking lot before heading back. In addition to the usual crap—relentless appeals for funds from organizations he’d already unsubscribed from multiple times, inducements to travel (Secret prices, Lincoln, just for you!), the usual clickbait (You Won’t Believe What Happens Next)—a couple agents in his office were looking for advice on transactions. Nothing that Andrea, his office manager, couldn’t have dealt with, except that the agents in question, both men, had coveted her position and were now showing their displeasure by doing end runs around her. While he was tapping out curt responses, a text message from Anita came in: Arrived Dunbar. Guess who’s still full of beans? You owe me, buster. He texted back: I know. I know. The guys say hey. When he pressed SEND, the phone vibrated in his hand, an incoming call this time, another local number.

  “Lincoln? It’s Marty calling.” Ah, his realtor. “Look, I was doing some research on your place and came across something interesting. Are you in Chilmark?”

  “Vineyard Haven. Just about to drive out there, though.”

  “Want to swing by before you do?”

  “Why not?”

  Before he turned his key in the ignition, Joe Coffin emerged from his apartment, went down the stairs and made his way across the parking lot to a battered old gray pickup, the vehicular equivalent of its apparent owner. “You don’t drive anymore, Joe,” Lincoln said out loud to himself as the other man unlocked the door and climbed in. “You told me so yourself.” Which suggested that he was either going someplace urgently or to a place he didn’t want Beverly, his usual chauffeur, to take him. Lincoln watched as the truck shuddered to life and backed out of its space. When Coffin hung a left onto the Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road, Lincoln started up his rental car and put it in gear. Leaving the lot, he also turned left, telling himself that he was just heading into Edgartown as promised, not following anybody, though he took care to remain several car lengths back. Up ahead was a convenience market and Lincoln half expected the pickup to turn in. Having offered his unexpected guest coffee, maybe Coffin had run out of milk or something. Maybe he didn’t consider running a quick errand as driving. But no, the pickup sailed right on by. Katama, then? To see if his favorite hawk in that photo was perched on its accustomed telephone wire? Had he somehow gotten it into his head that he might not make it off the operating table, and wanted to see the bird one last time before his surname proved prophetic? Coffin hadn’t seemed all that concerned about his upcoming surgery, but neither did he come across as the sort of man to let on if he was.

  As they approached the Barnes Road rotary, Lincoln slowed, grateful for the two cars between him and Coffin. The last thing he wanted was to get spotted in the guy’s rearview. What would his suspicious cop’s brain make of that? Lincoln figured the man would go halfway around the circle and stay on the Edgartown Road, or else take the next turn into Oak Bluffs. But again Coffin surprised him by taking the first exit off the rotary, the route you’d take to the airport.

  Or to Chilmark. Lincoln suppressed a shiver. Was he headed up island to warn Troyer that someone was sniffing around about Jacy’s disappearance? Strange, now that he thought about it, that Coffin hadn’t come clean about their relationship—that they’d nearly grown up together—until Lincoln pressed him.

  There was another reason he might be going to Chilmark, though, and it was even more unsettling. Did Coffin, like his imaginary rapist, have a shovel in the back of the truck? Was he headed not to Troyer’s place but to Lincoln’s, intent on excavating the yard? Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself. An old man with a shovel and no idea where on Lincoln’s two acres to dig? But the more important question was why Lincoln’s thoughts were racing toward such bizarre conclusions. After all, it was a big island with plenty of places Coffin could be heading. Still, entering the rotary himself, it was all Lincoln could do not to blow off his meeting with Marty, follow the old cop and know where he was going.

  Because admit it, ever since setting foot on the Vineyard, guilt or something akin to it had been his more or less constant companion. He’d assumed its source was the decision to put his mother’s house on the market, but what if it was something else? Earlier, in the dark microfilm room at the Vineyard Gazette, when Jacy’s face appeared on the screen this ambient sense of guilt had morphed into something more like dread; and later, after he’d explained the disappearance and Beverly concluded that Jacy was still on the island, his stomach had done a somersault. Whatever this was about, it was more than real estate. He’d gone to Coffin’s apartment hoping he might alleviate his growing apprehensions, and in a way the old cop’s vivid scenario of Jacy being stalked, raped, killed and buried somewhere on the mainland had been strangely comforting, because if she’d died after leaving the island, then he and his friends were off the hook. Whereas if something happened to her here, they were, in a sense, complicit. Okay, sure, it was beyond ridiculous to imagine that Jacy lay buried in the backyard of the house he was now, over forty years later, putting up for sale. Why, then, was its symmetry so compelling?

  Halfway to Edgartown, he pulled off to the side of the road. He was able to hold off until several other vehicles were safely past before vomiting his Bloody Mary into the ditch.

  “MINT?” Lincoln offered.

  Instead of going directly to Marty’s office, he’d stopped to buy a large roll of them and a package of Wet Wipes, having managed to splash his loafers. Had Anita been along, this errand would’ve been unnecessary. Being a woman, she always carried both mints and wipes in her purse. Not being a woman, he had no idea why they would imagine that at some point during the day you just might, for example, vomit onto your shoes and need them.

  “You okay?” Marty said, studying him thoughtfully as he crunched his mint. “You look a little pale.”

  “I’m fine,” Lincoln said to him. “What’s up?”

  “Come around the desk and take a gander at this tax map. This is you here,” he explained, running his finger over Lincoln’s property. “And this is our friend Troyer. These other two lots”—he penciled Xs onto them—“also belong to him. Probably to keep anybody from ruining his water view. And at some point either his parents or the previous owners also owned this lot.” He marked another X there as well. “But they sold it.”

  “So he owns all this now?”

  “Correct.”

  “Lucky him.”

  “Except for one thing.” Here Marty indicated the dirt road that led to Lincoln’s house, then snaked down the hill to Troyer’s, where it dead-ended. “This is the only way for him to get home from the main road.”

  “Does he need another?”

  “He wouldn’t if he had an easement, but guess what? He doesn’t.”

  Lincoln shook his head. “How can that be?”

  “I don’t know, but I just came from the Dukes County Registry and there’s no mention of one on either your deed or his.”

  “Again, how could that happen?”

  Marty leaned back in his chair, hands laced behind his head. “Hard to say. Possibly an unspoken neighborly agreement going back as far as anybody can remember, and the issue’s never come up because neither property ever went on the market. It happens. You say your place was in your mother’s family for some time?”

  “I don’t know exactly how long, but yeah.”

  “The other possibility is that the lot they sold off was where the easement used to be, and at the time of the sale nobody caught it. Whatever the reason, he certainly doesn’t have one now.”

  “And you think he knows this?”

  “It could explain why he’s been so keen to buy your prope
rty.”

  Lincoln nodded. “But not why he keeps coming at us with low-ball offers.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to tip his hand?”

  “I don’t know, Marty. Are you positive about all this?”

  “Nope, but I can go back down to the registry of deeds and poke around some more. Though there’s a chance he may get wind of it if I do.”

  “Are you saying we shouldn’t?”

  “On the contrary, I think we have to. Due diligence and all that. I only mention it because I gather you’re not terribly fond of each other.”

  “I’ll only be on island another four or five days.”

  “How about I hold off until you’re safely back in Vegas?”

  “That might be best,” Lincoln said, although now that his curiosity was roused, he wanted clarity.

  “But you catch my drift?” Marty asked, rolling up the map. “Whether you like him or not, Mason Troyer’s your ideal buyer. He doesn’t just want to buy your place. He needs to.”

  Teddy

  Teddy returned from Gay Head both physically exhausted from the long bike ride and emotionally spent from his conversation with Theresa. Unburdening himself to her was painful, though not as devastating as it had been with Jacy a lifetime ago, perhaps because he wasn’t that kid anymore, but also because Theresa hadn’t reacted as he’d anticipated. With kindness, yes, because that was her nature, but he’d also expected intrusive curiosity (When was the last time you saw a specialist? Have you tried Viagra?) and maybe even pushback (But there were things we could’ve …). Instead she’d waited patiently until he was finished and then said only that she wished he’d somehow found it in himself to trust her. By behaving as if the only way for souls to touch was through muscle and tissue and blood, he’d denied them both the intimacy of sharing, honesty and understanding. When he began explaining that he’d been trying to protect her from profound disappointment, she said, “Sorry. Too late.”