Chances Are . . .

by Richard Russo

  “Look,” Teddy told him, “I did lie before. I wasn’t half in love with Jacy. I was head over heels. We all were. We never would’ve hurt her.”

  “Yeah, well, I lied, too,” Vance admitted, pulling a napkin out of the dispenser to dry his eyes. “There’s no girl here in Boston. There’s just Jacy and she’s fucking gone.”

  “I’m sorry, Vance,” he said, surprised to discover it was true.

  “Well, fuck you anyway,” he said, tossing the wadded napkin onto the table and sliding out of the booth. “Somebody said you got a high draft number.”

  Teddy nodded.

  “Just so you know, dipshit, I’ll be serving my country,” he said. “JAG Corps. The minute I finish law school. And you know what? I hope they send me to Vietnam. I hope I get killed.”

  Teddy, who’d been feeling sorry for him a moment earlier, was incredulous in the face of such obviously bogus emotion. “You actually believe lawyers are dying in Vietnam?”

  Vance didn’t seem to hear this, which was probably just as well. “Tell me something,” he said, standing at faux military attention, chin jutting out, in full-sneer mode. “Guys like you and your friends? What right would you even have to fall in love with a girl like Jacy?” Planting both hands onto the table, he leaned forward aggressively, right in Teddy’s face. “You were fucking hashers.”

  And then he was gone, the tinkling bell above the front door signaling his departure. A moment later, their waitress arrived with the check.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS AFTER MEETING Jacy’s fiancé, Teddy had another of his chronic spells, this one a paralyzing panic attack. Unable to sleep, his tortured mind on a loop, he checked himself into Mass General, cutting short by a couple weeks his Globe internship. Had this been brought on by the meeting with Vance, or by the mental switch that got tripped earlier, his brain finally acknowledging that Jacy might be gone for good? All summer he’d been haunted by the same questions that were clearly tormenting Jacy’s fiancé. What could have happened to her after she left the island? Instead of taking the bus back home, had she decided to hitchhike? Had she been picked up by some predator? Teddy didn’t want to believe that she’d met with such a fate, but if she was alive, where was she? Why couldn’t the police find her? Why hadn’t she contacted her parents or any of her Theta friends? Or, for that matter, himself at the Globe?

  In the hospital he received the usual antianxiety medications, which allowed him to sleep, though whenever he woke up he had the impression that his dreams had been struggling to address the same unanswerable questions. Worse, he could feel himself slipping into a kind of narcotics-induced solipsism. As if Jacy’s fate wasn’t really so much about her as about himself. It had been a summer of losses. Lincoln had gone back West, which probably meant the end of their friendship. Mickey was also gone, though not to Vietnam as they’d feared. A few days before he was to report for duty, he’d apparently changed his mind and fled to Canada, just as he and Jacy had been begging him to do for so long. Yet another loss, though this one was an ongoing feature of his life, was the unrelenting aloofness of his parents. Teddy had let them know when he checked himself into the hospital, and his mother had come to visit him there. She’d stayed only a couple days, however, claiming that the fall semester was bearing down and she had classes to prepare. Though he vowed to refuse, he’d expected her to invite him to come stay with them in Madison until he managed to get back on his feet, but the invitation never came, and that had wounded him more deeply than he would’ve predicted. Maybe the time had come to stop expecting things to change. He was clearly destined to live a solitary life. Wasn’t this what his infatuation with Merton had been signaling? Hadn’t Tom Ford, who also lived alone, intimated as much at Minerva? What had happened with Jacy at Gay Head, coupled with her subsequent disappearance, now made a kind of bitter sense. Because her continued existence was at odds with his own solitary destiny, Jacy had to disappear. In a sense, he’d killed her.

  Something else occurred to him, too. What if he was going about everything all wrong? In the past, whenever he went down this now-familiar rabbit hole, his first order of business had been to somehow gather himself and climb back up into the light, gradually restore his mental health, get his routine back to normal, or anyway what was normal for him. But was normal—his normal—a state worth preserving? Was he, normally, a person worth much effort? Replaying his encounter with Jacy’s fiancé, he was surprised by how little real empathy he’d shown. Okay, sure, Vance was an asshole, but that was hardly the point. The guy had obviously been suffering, and it had been within Teddy’s power to set his mind at ease. Not completely, of course. He couldn’t very well tell Vance about Gay Head, but other than that the weekend had been innocent, hadn’t it? Why hadn’t he taken the trouble to paint Vance a narrative picture of how they all had spent their time together? He’d assured Jacy’s fiancé that none of them would have ever harmed her, but why hadn’t it occurred to him to tell Vance how they—or at least Mickey—had actually protected her from harm that afternoon when Troyer came by and tried to grope her in the kitchen?

  But on second thought, no. This wasn’t a comforting story to share with Vance. In order to tell it honestly, he’d have had to explain how they’d all been sitting out on the deck, Creedence on the stereo, drinking beer, lazily passing a joint around. Okay, sure, the story would illustrate that, far from harming her, they’d served as her protectors. But it certainly wouldn’t have put straight-arrow Vance’s mind at ease to picture his fiancée out on that deck, drinking beer and listening to protest music and smoking weed with a pack of fucking hippies. Plus, if she hadn’t gone with them to the island in the first place, she wouldn’t have needed them to defend her against the ghastly neighbor.

  Probably better to have explained why Jacy had decided to join them for the weekend. She wasn’t looking to party before the wedding, far from it. Teddy had talked her into coming along in hopes of tag-teaming Mickey over those three long days, convincing him to head to Canada instead of reporting for duty. She’d been pleading with him pretty much nonstop since the night they all got their draft numbers. (You wouldn’t actually go, though, right? Tell me you wouldn’t be that stupid.) In the months leading up to graduation, Teddy had also been pressuring Mickey to rethink his options, for all the good that had done. How could you argue with somebody who conceded the validity of every single point you made? Yes, Mickey agreed, the war was both stupid and immoral. No, he had no desire to either kill or be killed, certainly not in a steaming jungle on the far side of the world in a cause no one had bothered to really articulate. Yes, heading to Canada would be the smart move. No, he didn’t worry about people calling him a coward.

  “Then why, Mick?” Teddy had implored him. “Explain why you’d do the wrong, dumb thing when you could do the right, smart one?”

  “Because I said I would.”

  That’s what it came down to. His father, Michael Sr., a veteran of the Second World War, had hated every minute he’d spent in the service, but was proud, as he put it to Mickey, to have done his bit. When they call, you answer. You don’t get to ask why. That’s not how it works. Not how it’s ever worked. Your country calls, you answer. A pipefitter by trade, he was by all accounts a squared-away, no-bullshit kind of guy. Gruff and uneducated to be sure, but salt of the earth, too. He worked his forty-hour-a-week union job and then, most weekends, worked off the books to make his large family’s ends meet. Growing up, Mickey had been raised as much by his older sisters as their worn-out parents, so it was only later, after he went off to Minerva, that he and his old man had become close, which was strange, if you thought about it. At a time when so many fathers and sons were increasingly at odds, the two of them had forged a bond so deep and durable that it took them both by surprise.

  Which was why his father’s sudden death the summer of Mickey’s junior year had hit him like a sledg
ehammer to the base of the skull. A big guy like his son, Michael Sr. had been eating with his crew at a local lunch counter, and when it came time to go back to work, the other guys all rose from their stools and he didn’t, his heart having detonated five seconds earlier. Turned out he’d known for some time that something like this would likely happen, but never said a word. Not to his wife, not to his grown daughters, not to his son. No, the last thing he’d said to Mickey was Your country calls, you answer.

  But again, nope. None of this would’ve impressed gung-ho, love-it-or-leave-it Vance. He couldn’t imagine, much less approve of, his fiancée going to the island to turn Mickey into a draft dodger. Nor would Teddy’s portrait of Michael Sr. have moved Vance to admiration. If anything, it would’ve provided further evidence, were any needed, that this working stiff’s son had no business falling in love with a girl like Jacy.

  At the diner, when Vance came unglued and asked if Teddy and his friends had murdered his fiancée, he’d been shocked that anybody could dream up such a ludicrous possibility. And that he might’ve done so simply because they were hashers made the suggestion even more offensive. Yet as Teddy lay in his hospital bed pondering how little he’d done to alleviate the suffering of a fellow human being, he had to admit that some of Vance’s other suspicions hit closer to home. Because when it came right down to it—when the opportunity presented itself—Teddy hadn’t cared that Jacy was engaged, that she was somebody else’s girl. The fact that she’d chosen him, that she conceivably might end up his girl, had readily vanquished all ethical considerations. Had Mickey been given the same opportunity, would he have acted any differently? Or Lincoln? Even more disconcerting than his own moral failings was that his justification, had he been asked for one, wouldn’t have been dissimilar from Vance’s own. At Gay Head, when Jacy said that being there with him meant that maybe she wouldn’t be marrying her fiancé after all, what Teddy had felt was not just joy but also—why not admit it?—triumph. By choosing him, Jacy was rejecting not just Vance but others of his ilk. Teddy wasn’t so much stealing another guy’s girl as saving her from somebody who didn’t deserve her. It was actually a noble thing he was doing, because Vance was a privileged, prep-school, Greenwich Connecticut asshole, who, on account of all that, deserved to suffer.

  So, yes, a summer of losses. Minerva. Lincoln. Mickey. Jacy. His ever-more-aloof parents. And had those losses ended there, Teddy might’ve still felt the urge to claw his way back out of the dark rabbit hole. But it came to him that he’d suffered another loss as well, this one even more profound. The Teddy Novak who’d followed Jacy out into the freezing waves had been an innocent, propelled not only by love and almost unbearable desire but also by a desperate need to know. That person had been a boy, really, a boy Teddy couldn’t find it in his heart to blame too much. How quickly everything had pivoted, though, innocence morphing into pride, and pride into crushing disappointment, into despair, into bitterness and finally into resignation and self-loathing. If he, like Vance, was suffering, it was because they both deserved to be.

  Lincoln

  Lincoln was halfway back to Chilmark when his cell buzzed, probably Teddy or Mickey wondering what had become of him. Except the number was local, and when he answered, it was a woman’s voice on the line.

  “Mr. Moser? It’s Beverly. Listen, after you left, I got to thinking. You should talk to Joe Coffin.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “My father-in-law, actually, but also the former chief of police in Oak Bluffs. Back in the seventies, though, he worked up island. Anyway, I phoned him, and he said he’d be willing to speak to you.”

  “He remembers Jacy going missing?”

  “I don’t know, but after he retired, he kept a lot of old files. I’ve been after him to put them in order. They could be the basis for a pretty interesting memoir. You know, the silly things people who live here do? Or maybe a cozy detective series? Like Alexander McCall Smith?”

  She seemed to be waiting for him to weigh in on this idea. Apparently this McCall Smith guy was somebody he was supposed to recognize. What on earth was a cozy detective series?

  “Anyway, if nothing else, he might be able to provide some insight. He’s been a policeman here his whole life. He’s got some great stories.”

  Lincoln couldn’t help smiling. Perhaps because she worked for a paper, the woman couldn’t seem to get it out of her head that it was a story he’d told her: beautiful young woman disappears without a trace and is never heard from again.

  “He lives in a senior-housing complex in Vineyard Haven, if you’d like to drop by.”

  “Maybe I will tomorrow,” he said, though he had no such intention. Despite arriving at the Vineyard Gazette as a man on a mission, he’d left feeling unexpectedly relieved not to have found anything. Telling Beverly about Jacy actually made him feel a bit silly, like at age sixty-six he was still carrying a torch for a girl he’d never even dated. Him. Lincoln Moser. A happily married man with six children and a growing passel of grandkids. Also chronic lower-back pain. He needed to stick to the original plan. Figure out what needed to be done to the Chilmark house and get the place listed. Enjoy his friends. Return home.

  “That’s the thing,” Beverly said. “He’s going off island tomorrow for major surgery in Boston. You’re only here for a few days, right?”

  “You really think he might have some information?”

  “It’s possible?”

  Hanging up, Lincoln wondered why so many women did that—turned statements into questions. He’d have to remember to ask Anita. She, like their daughters, always enjoyed explaining how what was wrong with women was really men’s fault.

  * * *

  —

  LIKE MOST OTHER BUILDINGS on the island, the ones that constituted Tisbury Village were gray shingled. Set back from the road and nestled among some scrub pines, the complex looked nicer and better maintained than most low-income, government-subsidized housing Lincoln had run across, but there was no disguising the function of such places. You didn’t end up here if things had gone like you’d hoped.

  Joe Coffin’s apartment was on the second floor, and he must’ve seen him pull into the lot below, because he answered the door before Lincoln could complete his three-rap knock. A big barrel-chested man, he had a full head of gunmetal-gray hair that he kept extremely short on the sides. White sidewalls, Lincoln thought, recalling an old Dunbar expression. But did those tires even exist anymore? He and Coffin had to be roughly the same age, but the old cop’s face was an unhealthy gray and deeply lined from what Lincoln suspected was a lifetime of smoking and drinking, so he looked easily a decade older. Despite the season, he was dressed in a long-sleeved flannel shirt. “You must be Mr. Moser,” he said, stepping aside so Lincoln could come in. His obvious ill health notwithstanding, he looked like a man who could still hold his own in a bar fight, provided it didn’t go more than one round.

  His apartment—a small, generic one-bedroom—wasn’t what Lincoln had been expecting. When it came time to downsize, most elderly people had a difficult time surrendering their hard-won possessions. They shoehorned everything from their larger, former home into a new much-smaller crib, making it impossible to navigate without banging into stuff. Whereas Coffin’s apartment was more like a monk’s cell, as if he’d taken a vow of poverty early in life and stuck to it. An off-brand flat-screen TV sat in the far corner of the room on a cheap fiberboard stand that also contained a DVD player, but no cable box for movie channels or on-demand. Nor were any other electronic gizmos in evidence. A rickety four-shelf bookcase contained a couple dozen volumes, most of which looked like he checked them out of the library. Forming an L in front of the TV was a sofa, end table and recliner. The walls were decorated with black-and-white photos of island wildlife: plovers on the beach, a gull roosting atop a wood piling, a gaggle of wild turkeys crossing the bike path, an elongated V of black geese against a gray sky
.

  “My daughter-in-law Beverly’s the photographer,” he said when he saw Lincoln studying them.

  “She’s good.”

  “That fella there’s out in Katama,” he said, pointing to a picture of a hawk perched majestically on a telephone line that drooped visibly under its weight. “I’ve seen as many as two hundred birds crowd onto that same telephone line, sitting there wing to wing like birds do. But when he’s there? Not another bird as far as the eye can see.”

  “You’re an animal lover?”

  He nodded. “Like most cops, I prefer them to people. I’ve never known one to lie to me. Please, have a seat while I look for that file.”

  Sit where, exactly? Clearly the recliner was Coffin’s usual spot, so not there. On the other hand, the couch—a sleeper sofa, by the look of it—bore the shape of a heavy man, and a pillow, not a decorative one, resting on one arm. Unable to resolve the conundrum, Lincoln perched on the sofa’s other arm, from which he had an unobstructed view of the bedroom, which his host had converted into an office. Against the far wall was a metal desk, on top of which sat an ancient computer that had, unless Lincoln was mistaken, an external disk drive. Did they even make floppy disks anymore? Along another wall stood a row of filing cabinets, beneath framed photographs of uniformed policemen. Not a single civilian.

  “Nineteen seventy-one, you said?” Coffin called over his shoulder.

  “Right,” Lincoln told him, though of course he hadn’t ever said anything to him.

  “May of nineteen and seventy-one,” he heard the man mutter. “Here we go.” Leaving the file drawer open, he returned to the front room and tossed a manila folder onto the coffee table. Its tab read MISSING GIRL. No other information, not even Jacy’s name, which struck Lincoln as odd until he thought about it. In big cities, girls went missing every week. For all he knew, Jacy might be one of only a handful to disappear from here in the last century.