Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  “He has a name. Andy. I heard you say it.”

  “Yes, his name is Andy, and we’ve said it for the last time in this house.”

  “Andy,” she repeats.

  Lightning quick, her mother reaches across the island and slaps her face. “You ungrateful little bitch. Do you have any idea what I saved you from?”

  She doesn’t. She has no idea about anything, except that it’s all a lie, that it’s never been anything but a lie.

  Outside, her father’s Mercedes pulls into the driveway. No, not her father. It’s Donald. That’s who he’ll be from now on. And her mother will be Vivian. Don and Viv. And one day soon—though not soon enough—she’ll be free of them.

  LIKE ON THAT LONG-AGO evening, their last together on the island, the temperature tonight had continued to drop, and despite their windbreakers and the whiskey bottle, all three friends were now shivering in the chill. When Lincoln went inside to search for blankets they could drape around their shoulders, Teddy said, “Look, Mick, you don’t have to do this.”

  “I do, though,” he said. “I should’ve come clean a long time ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “She made me swear.” Which was true, though not, he had to admit, the whole truth and nothing but. “Also, I was ashamed. When we left the island that morning and you guys dropped me off at the Falmouth parking lot? I convinced myself that not telling you how Jacy and I were planning to meet up back in Woods Hole wasn’t really a lie, or at least not the kind that keeps you out of heaven. But that’s the thing about lies, right? Individually they don’t amount to much, but you never know how many others you’ll need to tell in order to protect that first one, and damned if they don’t add up. Over time they get all tangled up until one day you realize it isn’t even the lies themselves that matter. It’s that somehow lying has become your default mode. And the person you lie to most is yourself.”

  The deck’s sliding door rumbled open, Lincoln returning with blankets and the flashlight Mickey’d requested. Was it his imagination or had Lincoln, just in the last hour, segued into old age? It seemed impossible this was the same man who’d so recently come flying out of his chair, his face burning with fury. Now that same face was a collapsed wreck, and despite his gruesome injury, Teddy appeared to be in better shape. Mickey’s own fault, all of this.

  “Okay,” Lincoln said, sitting back down, “what did I miss?”

  “Nothing much,” Mickey assured him. “Ted was just asking, in the nicest way possible, how I could’ve been a big-enough asshole to keep all this from you until now. Here’s your answer, or part of it.” Taking out the photo he’d brought with him to the island on the off chance he’d somehow locate the courage (Kuh-ridge!) to fess up, he slid it down the table. “I’ve never shown this to anybody.”

  When Lincoln switched the flashlight on, Mickey, not wanting to witness their reactions, purposely looked out at the dark Atlantic. That didn’t keep him from hearing Lincoln’s sharp intake of breath, though. He studied the photo for a good minute before passing it and the flashlight to Teddy, who examined it for at least that long before saying, “Dear God.” Switching the flashlight off, he said, “That afternoon when Andy came by? He wasn’t drunk, was he.”

  SHE LOOKED FOR HIM everywhere, Mickey told them. Especially on holidays and birthdays. Also at sporting events (tennis, field hockey) where she was a participant. It had come to her gradually that it wasn’t her mother that Andy had come to see that afternoon but herself. That he wanted to be part of his daughter’s life was the only explanation that made any sense. But didn’t that mean he would keep trying? Mostly she dreaded the possibility, because she always imagined him lurching toward her, bleating at her, unable even to say her name. Why, then, at other times, did she long to see him again? Because when he looked at her, there’d been love in his eyes; surely she hadn’t imagined that. And the fact that he’d been drunk that afternoon didn’t mean he always was, did it? That she could both dread and yearn for something confused and frightened her. Was she losing her mind? Andy, she kept thinking, his name just there in her head. Andy. The more she tried to banish it, the more insistent the voice became. At least that’s how it was in the beginning. Gradually, though, as she came to understand that he was probably gone for good, the voice receded, disappearing entirely for long stretches, until suddenly it would be there again, a whisper now: Andy. And when this happened, all she wanted to do was to crawl into bed and pull the covers up over her head as she’d done when that boy Todd brought all this into question.

  She thought about trying to find him, but how? All she knew was his first name. She couldn’t very well ask her mother or fucking Donald. Looking for clues, she once again returned to the family photo albums, searching them for some younger version of the man she’d seen on the front lawn. There were a few pages where photos had been removed, and she stared at these absences as if she could conjure up the missing images by sheer force of will. The summer between her high-school graduation and her freshman year at Minerva, when her mother and father had attended a weeklong conference in Hawaii, she used the time alone to toss the house. It took her all of two minutes to locate the metal box that contained her birth certificate, but its other contents—passports, mortgage documents, her parents’ marriage license, various insurance policies, the titles to their two cars—were of no interest. The box yielded neither letters nor additional photos. Frustrated but determined, she went through every room and closet in the house, examining the contents of every shoebox and plastic bin. The desk in Donald’s office was always locked, which suggested it might contain the treasure she was seeking, so she jimmied the lock with a letter opener, scarring both. She went through each drawer methodically, including the large one that contained Donald’s clients’ file folders, though none of these bore the name Andy or Andrew. But of course that made sense. Why would her real father hire Donald, the man who’d stolen his daughter, to manage his portfolio? Would a drunk even have a portfolio?

  On the opposite wall, behind the Renoir, she discovered a small safe that she never suspected was there. She tried various numerical sequences related to Donald’s and her mother’s birthdays, their anniversary, even her own birthday, but no luck. Thinking the combination might be written down somewhere, she went through the desk again, this time looking for numbers in three sequences of two, and again came up empty. She was about to give up when she noticed that the desk’s center drawer was slightly cockeyed, as if it had been removed and returned to its runners inexpertly. Pulling the drawer completely out, she used a flashlight to peer into the cavity, thinking the combination might be scratched onto one of the interior walls. She was about to slide the drawer back onto its runners when she noticed a yellowed piece of masking tape affixed to its back panel. The numbers written on it were badly faded but legible. The first two digits were preceded by the letter L, the next two by an R, the third by another L. She dialed these carefully, but the safe didn’t open. She tried twice more, even more carefully, with the same result. She was about to concede defeat when she remembered the padlock on her school locker. You couldn’t go directly from the first number to the second. You had to pass the first number in the opposite direction. Only then could you proceed to the second and third. This time, bingo! The tumblers clicked into place and the door thunked open. Inside were stacks of bills, mostly twenties and fifties, totaling at least a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe twice that. But there were no documents, no letters or postcards, no photos. No Andy.

  Face it, she told herself, he was gone. Donald’s volcanic anger had driven him away, and he was too frightened to return. And, really, she asked herself, why should that be such a big deal? For most of her life Andy hadn’t existed, then for a very few minutes he had. Why should she feel more bereft and alone now than she had when his existence was undreamed of? If he could live without her, she could live without him. And, for the most part, this strategy had worked, right? Minerva—being out of Don and Viv�
��s orbit nine months out of the year—had helped. So had her burgeoning friendship with Mickey and Teddy and Lincoln. Gradually Andy’s ambient presence faded, like a Polaroid left out in the sun.

  Why, then, as graduation approached—not to mention her June wedding—did she find herself backsliding, once again imagining that for these events her father would materialize? Sometimes she pictured him in the auditorium’s front row, beaming up at her with fatherly pride. More often, genuflecting before reason (because, really, how would Andy score a front-row seat?), she located him in the back of the hall where distant relatives, family friends and college staff congregated. The problem with this scenario (speaking of realism) was: how could she recognize him at such a distance? She’d only seen the man once, six years earlier, and then only briefly. Would she even be able to pick him out of a police lineup? Would she know who he was if she passed him on the street? If he wasn’t drunk and bleating, how would she recognize him? If he was sober, a model father, wouldn’t that amount to a disguise? Somehow, she told herself. She would know him somehow. Her logic? She would know him because otherwise his presence there would serve no purpose.

  The rational part of her brain identified all this as magical thinking, so she gave herself a stern talking-to. After all, who graduates from college still believing that wishing will make anything come true? Six years without so much as a Christmas card, and her father would turn up now? How would he even know where she’d gone to college? For all she knew he lived in California. Or Switzerland. Or Australia. Worse, inherent in her magical thinking was an implied pact, an unenforceable if-then contract. If her father showed up for her graduation, then it would be a sign that she was meant to jettison the central falsehood of her life—that she was Jacy Calloway, daughter of Donald Calloway, of Greenwich, Connecticut. If Andy came to her graduation, then she would somehow (always somehow) find the strength to disavow not only Don and Viv but their entire universe, which of course included her fiancé, who not only wanted them to live in Greenwich but actually saw their parents’ lives as a template. (“Our folks didn’t get where they are by luck,” he liked to say, and invariably got pissed off when she asked what being born into wealth and privilege was if not pure fucking luck.) Anyway, screw Vance. The way Jacy saw it, if Andy came to her graduation, he wouldn’t just be claiming her as his daughter but also giving her permission to break off her engagement to a man who had little beyond material comfort to offer. If Andy, not Donald, was her father, then she got to be a whole new person. Armed with her new identity she would (again, somehow) become a girl (no, a woman) capable of charting her own course. Okay, she didn’t really need Andy’s permission for any of this. She was twenty-one and could do as she pleased, but there was comfort to be taken from genetic validation, wasn’t there?

  Even so, as bargains went, she had to admit this one was piss-poor. If Andy’s showing up meant that she could be a whole new person, then his failure to show up, which was far more likely, must mean that she was Jacy Calloway after all and was therefore meant to do what was expected of her. Worse, it would mean that she’d just spent the last four years at Minerva playing at rebellion—drinking beer from kegs and smoking weed and burning (metaphorically) her bra and protesting the stupid war, when at the end of the day, because she lacked the courage to fight for a truer life, she’d meekly marry Vance and breed little Republicans.

  Over graduation weekend Jacy learned something about loneliness that she hadn’t suspected before: that its most terrifying and virulent form could only be experienced in a crowd. Naturally, the campus was a mob scene of parents and siblings and alums, every single minute accounted for. In addition to a wide array of scheduled events, there were her sorority sisters and favorite professors to bid farewell to, all of which had to be done with Don and Viv, as well as Vance and his parents, in tow. Had she been able to hang out with Mickey and Teddy and Lincoln, she might’ve gotten through it unscathed, maybe even enjoyed some of it, but of course they had their own bizarre families to deal with (What a squirrelly little man Lincoln’s father was!) and they had no idea she was in crisis. Her own fault, of course. How many times had she considered confiding in one of them that Donald Calloway wasn’t really her father? But which one? Teddy would’ve been easiest because he was such a good, sympathetic listener, and of the three he was also the most obviously smitten with her. But so was Mickey, who would also have listened. The problem here was that he’d lost his own father the year before, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to share with him a tale of woe that involved her having a pair of them. Lincoln? Lately he’d seemed determined to tamp down any feelings he had for her, pivoting toward Anita, her sorority sister, a girl Jacy admired and was secretly jealous of, without knowing exactly why. More to the point, all three were best friends. If she confided in one, she would in effect be confiding in all three—all for one and one for all—and she wasn’t sure she could bear to have three people knowing this terrible truth. And of course there was that even-darker shame that she’d made up her mind never to tell anyone. What if she got started telling the truth and was unable to stop? So she’d let their final semester together slip away, and the window of opportunity to share her burden had shut. Face it, she told herself. She was alone.

  Graduation itself was a blur. The whole weekend felt like a ride on a merry-go-round, where all her jubilant classmates straddled colorful horses that went up and down, while she alone was consigned to a stationary bench that resembled a church pew—on the same ride as everybody else but somehow not sharing the same experience. Would the circular motion, the hideous calliope music, never stop? Halfway through the commencement speaker’s address, the girl seated next to Jacy asked if she was okay, and only then did she realize she was crying. What a fool she’d been to hold out hope. Four years of college classes, some of them taught by feminist professors, yet here she was on graduation day waiting to be rescued by a man. Preposterous. Ridiculous. Time to pull herself together, to see things as they were. And not tomorrow, right fucking now. Wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her gown, she resolved that when it was her turn to cross the stage and receive her diploma, she would make a point of not scanning the audience for Andy, the father who had so clearly abandoned her.

  Yet here, too, she was thwarted. An hour earlier, when they’d all paraded down the hill from the chapel, across the quad and into the auditorium, it’d been cloudy, gray and humid, but by the time the commencement speaker finally took his seat, the clouds were breaking up and a fresh breeze was blowing in through the hall’s wide-open doors. And wouldn’t you know it? Right when her row lined up at the foot of the stage, the sun broke through, shooting bright shafts of light down through the hall’s high windows, spotlighting the people standing along the back wall, exactly where, in her mind’s eye, Jacy had so often pictured her father. It was as if God was telling her right where to look. In that moment all her fears of not recognizing her father were dispelled. Of course she’d be able to pick him out! How could she fail to recognize her own father? He would be smiling, for one thing, and looking straight at her. And he would wave. Not wildly, mind you, nothing that would attract the attention of bellicose Donald. Just a subtle gesture to reveal who he was, what they were to each other, that he was there for her and always would be.

  Later, when it was all over and they were making their way toward Donald’s Mercedes, she was still looking for Andy, scanning the crowd as it dispersed, panicked now, her fears redoubling just that quickly. Had he been there? Had she missed him? Until her mother grabbed her by the elbow and whispered, “Stop it. This instant. He’s gone.”

  “I hate him,” Jacy whispered back, not sure if it was Andy she was referring to or Donald, who the night of the incident with Andy on the front lawn had come into her room. He was dressed, as always when he visited her, in his bathrobe, fresh from the shower, his hair glistening wet. “You see?” he said, sitting at the edge of her bed and taking her hand. “It’s like I’ve been telling you.” What he w
anted her to understand was that what they’d done wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t like he was her real father. It wasn’t as if he was Andy.

  THOUGH SHE’D TRIED to prepare herself for it, Andy’s nonappearance at graduation left Jacy empty of everything but the desire to drown Viv and Don, and, yes, Vance too, in a sea of sarcasm. She would become, she decided, a perfect bitch, a goal that struck her as both reasonable and attainable. The only thing slowing her progress was that something strange, something she wasn’t privy to, was going on at home. Donald, claiming to be working on a special project, hadn’t gone into the New York office all week. A new, dedicated phone line had been set up to his home office and it rang all hours of the day and night. Twice, men from the New York headquarters had driven out to see him, and earlier in the week Jacy had come upon her mother listening outside his office door. (“Wipe that smirk off your face, young lady.”) Then yesterday Viv announced that she and Don were going to an important meeting in Hartford that afternoon and that Jacy should wish them luck. “Why?” she said. “When have you ever been unlucky?”

  At this, her mother closed her eyes and just stood there, refusing to open them for so long that Jacy wondered if she’d had a stroke. She really hoped not, because that would mean she’d have to stop tormenting her, at least until she recovered. Finally, eyes still shut, her mother said, “Okay, be like that.”

  “I will. I am.”

  “Maybe Vance will be able to do something with you.” They were flying him up from Durham for the weekend in the hopes of cheering her up. “Something your father and I can’t seem to.”

  “By my father do you mean Donald?”

  At last she opened her eyes. “You know what I’d like to do right now?” she said. “I’d like to slap you silly. You stupid, stupid, stupid girl.”

  When they left for Hartford, Jacy took the opportunity to break into Donald’s office. When she opened the door to the safe, it was so full of money that several stacks of banded, large-denomination bills tumbled out onto the floor. Try as she might, she was unable to cram them all back in again. No matter. There was plenty of room under her mattress for the ones that didn’t fit and a few extras as well.