Chances Are . . .

by Richard Russo

  “So what you’re actually saying is that we can rule your scenario out?” After all that grim, granular realism? Really?

  “No, but it’s got problems. Close to insurmountable, seems to me.”

  “So…she’s alive?”

  Coffin shook his head sadly. “Problems there, too, Lincoln. If she’s alive, you have to wonder why in all these years she never once called her folks or her fiancé or any of her friends. If she’s out there in the world, didn’t she ever run into anybody she knew? How come she never applied for credit cards or a passport or a home loan? How come she didn’t fall in love and get married, have some kids, or get divorced. Enter the public record like living people do.”

  Lincoln sighed deeply. “First you say she can’t be dead, now you say she can’t be alive.”

  “I’m not saying she can’t be either one. I’m saying that no matter what, something doesn’t add up. I don’t know what happened to her, Lincoln. But I do know this: you guys lucked out.”

  “We lucked out?”

  “Motive. Means. Opportunity. Except for when that neighbor stopped by, she was alone with you and your friends that whole weekend. Back then? If I’m leading the investigation, I’m thinking it’s one of you. One of you did it, and the other two are helping cover it up. Or all three of you did it. If it’s me, I’m thinking you spent the weekend trying to talk her out of marrying her fiancé—and getting nowhere. Could be she explains the facts of life, the stuff they didn’t teach you at Minerva College in Connecticut. This guy she’s gonna marry has money and prospects. You don’t. Which isn’t what you want to hear. It’s not at all how you figured things would go, which was more along the lines of any girl who goes off for a long weekend with three guys must be looking to have a little fun before she gets hitched. Or maybe your friend Mickey decides he deserves a reward for rescuing her in the kitchen. Or it could be he plays the pity card, reminding her he’s going off to war and could come home dead. She should at least send him off happy, right? What kind of girl says no to such a request? But no is what she says, and there’s that quick temper of his.”

  “Except that’s not what happened,” Lincoln said.

  Coffin ignored this as if Lincoln hadn’t spoken. “At first you panic, because…dead girl. But gradually you calm down and start thinking straight. You all decide to stick together. You wait till dark to bury her. You talk through what you’ll tell the cops. You’ve got some time before she’s reported missing. You? You head west like you planned to with some other girl. Your friends—”

  Lincoln had to stop him. “Mr. Coffin,” he said. “Please, listen. None of that happened.”

  “I’m not saying it did, Lincoln. I’m saying that’s what I would’ve been thinking in 1971. And I’ll tell you something else. I’d’ve rented a backhoe and dug up every square inch of that place of yours out in Chilmark. I’d’ve dug until I knew for a fact that it was the one place on the planet that girl wasn’t at.”

  He finally tossed the folder back on the coffee table, as if he’d been using it as a prop this whole time, and for a minute they both sat there staring at it. Finally Lincoln ventured, “You sound like maybe you still believe that’s what happened.”

  “No, Lincoln, I don’t.”

  Though relieved to hear this, he said, “How come?”

  “Because if you did have something to do with that girl’s disappearance forty-four years ago, you wouldn’t be snooping around the Gazette this afternoon. You wouldn’t have told Beverly that story. And you sure wouldn’t have come out here asking a retired cop questions you already knew the answers to. No, I’d say you’re mostly in the clear.”

  Mostly. Lincoln took a deep breath and got stiffly to his feet, feeling like he’d been interrogated with a rubber hose. No wonder people confessed to crimes they didn’t commit.

  At the door, when they shook hands, it occurred to Lincoln to ask one final thing. “So, did Troyer say anything else when you interviewed him?”

  “In fact, he suggested I arrest your friend Mickey for assault. At least that’s what I think he was trying to say. With his jaw wired shut, he was kind of hard to understand.”

  “That was the first time you met him? I ask because I know he’s had some run-ins with the law over the years.”

  “No, Mason and I go way back. We won the Island Cup together, actually.”

  “The Island Cup?”

  “Football. The Vineyard versus Nantucket.”

  “You were teammates?”

  He nodded.

  “But…the Troyers were summer people.”

  “True. They lived in Wellesley, I think. Mason got into some kind of trouble junior year. Got a girl pregnant was the rumor. Anyhow, senior year his parents sent him to live with a family here on the island.” Now Coffin was the one who looked uncomfortable. “Mason’s what kids these days call a real douchebag. But he’s no murderer, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Coffin, but you sound a little like the woman who worked the snack bar on the ferry. None too sure.”

  The other man’s face darkened again. “Oh, I’m pretty sure, Lincoln. I’m pretty damn sure.”

  Lincoln had a thought. “You wouldn’t happen to remember the name of that island family he lived with that year, would you?”

  “I’m not likely to forget,” he said. “Their name was Coffin.”

  Teddy

  Theresa answered on the first ring. “Teddy Novak,” she said. “As I live and breathe. Hold on while I go outside. The movers are here.”

  When she came back on the line, he admitted, “I wasn’t sure you’d pick up.”

  “Are you disappointed?” Could it be mirth he detected in her voice? Bitterness? “Were you hoping to just leave a message?”

  Bitterness, then. When he didn’t immediately respond, she said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t very nice. It’s possible I’ve been nursing a grievance or two.”

  “That’s why I called, as it happens. To apologize.”

  “Okay, but what for?” More challenge than curiosity in the question.

  He chuckled. “Now that is sort of unkind.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, how long have we known each other? I’ve probably messed up any number of times. If I guess wrong about why you’re mad at me, I get to keep apologizing.”

  “Then you better think hard. This is Double Jeopardy, where the questions are harder, the dollar values are doubled and scores can really change.”

  This was why he’d called her, actually. Not to apologize, though he knew he’d have to. They’d always communicated obliquely, their statements wry codes, and rich with cultural references. She was fun, in other words. “I’ll take relationships for two hundred, Alex.”

  “Art.”

  “Nah, I know very little about art.”

  “Art Fleming,” she clarified. “The original host of Jeopardy! Nobody remembers him anymore.” She sounded genuinely rueful about this, as if to concede that being forgotten was a destiny shared by most human beings. “What’s that sound?”

  “The wind.” It had picked up enough to blow an empty plastic cup left behind by the Christians off the picnic table and up against the chain-link fence. His shirt, drenched with sweat earlier, was now dry as a bone. He angled himself differently, against the breeze. “Is this any better?”

  “A little. Are you still on Nantucket?”

  “Martha’s Vineyard,” he corrected. “Bad idea, as it turns out. This trip.”

  “How so?”

  “Memory lane is vastly overrated. I should’ve stayed in Syracuse. I could’ve given you a hand with your move.”

  She made a loud, rasping noise. “That was Beulah the Buzzer signaling an incorrect response. The movers are doing everything. I’m not lifting a finger. So if that’s what you called to apolo
gize for, I’ll have to dock you.”

  “Objection, Your Honor. The fact that you don’t need me doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have offered.”

  “Point taken, but objection overruled. How are your friends? Washington? Mackey?”

  “Lincoln and Mickey.” He smiled. Clearly she was making these mistakes on purpose; small acts of retribution. “Different. The same.”

  “Well…”

  “I wish you weren’t leaving,” he told her, expecting to hear Beulah the Buzzer again, but instead there was only silence. “I guess what I really called to say is that you deserved more than I was able to give.”

  “Why, I wonder. I’ve been wondering, actually.”

  “I can’t really explain, except to say that it had nothing to do with you.”

  “You mean that I’m black?”

  “No!” Teddy told her. “Of course not.”

  “Oh, please. A simple no I could accept, but spare me the of course not.”

  “You really think that of me?”

  “Well, in the absence of data, imagination has to work overtime,” she said. “So if it wasn’t me, then what? I mean, I heard the rumors, so—”

  “I’m not gay, Theresa.”

  “I kind of hoped you were, to tell you the truth, because then it really wouldn’t have been about me.”

  “No, it was more…I don’t know…call it the habit of a lifetime. I guess I’m risk averse.”

  “Okay, fine. But when did that start? And where? And why?”

  “When? Nineteen seventy-one. Where? Right here. This island.” This exact spot, though he wasn’t about to go into that.

  “Which leaves only why.”

  “You could probably guess.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve worn myself out guessing. How about you just tell me?”

  He took a deep breath. This, of course, was why he’d really called her.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER HE AND JACY RETURNED to Chilmark, Teddy turned off the ignition and they just sat for a minute, listening to the ticking engine cool. When he closed his eyes, he could still feel the strong undertow of the waves, their come-hither pull coaxing him out to sea. Why hadn’t he just let them?

  Finally Jacy said, “Do the guys know?”

  Teddy shook his head. He thought she’d cried herself out on the beach, but he saw now that her eyes were full again.

  “Well,” she said, “they won’t hear it from me.”

  “No?”

  She took his hand. “Of course not.”

  “I’m not sure I can go in there,” he admitted.

  “But you can’t very well stay out here.”

  That much was true. “What should I say about…”

  “About what?”

  About us, he wanted to say, but of course that would be wrong. There was no us and there never would be. “They’ll want to know where we’ve been.”

  She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and put on a game face. “How about I do the talking?”

  They found Mickey out on the deck, drinking a beer left-handed and flexing the fingers of his swollen right hand.

  “Where’ve you two been?” he said.

  “Gay Head,” Jacy informed him.

  “You went without us?” It was the first time all weekend that they weren’t a foursome.

  “You were asleep,” she reminded him. “Lincoln was on the phone.”

  “What’d you do there?”

  Could he tell they’d been swimming? Teddy wondered. They’d driven back to Chilmark with the windows down. Jacy’s hair had been windblown dry. After dressing they’d brushed the sand off their legs and ankles.

  “I bought a postcard,” she said, taking it out of the back pocket of her cutoffs and showing him. As if it were proof of something. “We had ice cream.”

  “Did you bring us any?”

  “Cones,” she explained. “They would’ve melted.”

  As Jacy responded to Mickey’s questions, Teddy found himself regarding her with new eyes. She wasn’t lying, exactly, but her poise was unsettling. Where had she learned to dissemble so convincingly? Had she ever used this talent on him? Back at Minerva, had she slipped off with Mickey at some point? Or Lincoln? Was Teddy not first but last to feel her naked body against his? That he should entertain such a possibility, even in passing, filled him with shame and disgust. These, then, were the so-called wages of sin. Having betrayed his friends’ trust, he now suspected them of having already betrayed him, the people he knew and loved best suddenly strangers, the old familiar world grown strange, uncertain. He’d written a paper on the effects of sin in one of Tom Ford’s classes. At the time it hadn’t occurred to him that one day he would know firsthand whereof he spoke.

  “Where’s Lincoln?” Jacy was saying.

  Mickey made a you have to ask? face.

  Jacy sighed. “Again?”

  Mickey shrugged. “Yeah, but seriously. Show of hands. Who here really expects him to end up anything except pussy-whipped?”

  Jacy glanced at her watch. “Assuming we’re still going to Menemsha, we need to get a move on.” For their last evening, they’d planned a cookout. Burgers and brats on the grill, cold potato salad, even some deli-bought cheesecake for after. Schlep it all down to west-facing Menemsha Beach, where they could watch the sun go down.

  “I think there’s been a change of plan,” Mickey told her. “We’ve only got the one vehicle, and there’s no way we get the four of us plus the grill and the charcoal and the beer and the food in that little piece-of-shit Nova.”

  “We could make two trips,” offered Teddy, whose piece of shit the Nova was.

  Mickey shrugged again. “Talk to Lincoln.”

  “I thought the whole idea was to watch the sunset,” Jacy said.

  “Watch it from here,” Mickey said.

  “Right,” Jacy said, gesturing toward the horizon. “The sun might set in the south tonight. It doesn’t usually, but who knows?”

  “If you’re going inside,” Mickey said, when Teddy took a step in that direction, “grab me another cold one. And put some music on.”

  Inside, Teddy could hear Lincoln’s voice, muted, through his closed bedroom door, but otherwise it was quiet. It came to him then that he could just walk out the front door, get into his piece-of-shit Nova and drive away. Onto the ferry in Vineyard Haven and off the island. After this weekend, what was the likelihood that he’d ever see any of these people again?

  Instead, he put on some Crosby, Stills & Nash, something that under normal circumstances Mickey would never permit. If you went near the stereo, he’d say, “Get away from there before you hurt yourself.”

  Grabbing three beers from the fridge, he returned to the deck, where Jacy was trying to get Mickey to let her look at his hand. “Git,” he told her, hiding it under his armpit. “Away. From me.”

  “It’s broken, Mickey.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine,” she said. “Let’s go to the hospital and get an x-ray.”

  “Jace,” he said. “It’s fine. Leave it alone, okay?”

  “All right, be like that,” she told him. “I’m gonna go inside and write my postcard. Let me know when you men have decided how everything’s going to happen.”

  When the door slid closed behind her, Mickey raised a questioning eyebrow. “What’s the matter with her?”

  “Us is my impression,” Teddy said, recalling what she’d said earlier about everything being fucked up. “Men. We ignore women when they’re right and we start wars and generally screw things up.”

  “We are as God made us,” Mickey replied, draining the last of his beer. “I’ll take one of those, unless you plan to drink all three.”

  Teddy, who’d forgotten he was holding them, handed one over.


  “Mind twisting off the cap?”

  Teddy did, and Mickey took it. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You look funny. You’re acting funny.”

  “She’s right, you know,” Teddy said, anxious to change the subject. “You should get that x-rayed.”

  “I will,” he said, flexing his fingers again and wincing, “but…”

  “But what?”

  Here he met and held Teddy’s eye. “But it’s my decision. Not hers. Not yours.”

  “Are we still talking about your hand?”

  “No, I guess we’re not,” he admitted. When they’d met his ferry on Friday evening, the first words out of his mouth had been, “We’re not going to talk about it, hear me? The fucking war isn’t going to ruin our last weekend together.”

  They’d reluctantly agreed, but the war had put a damper on things anyway, or so it seemed to Teddy. Sure, they’d enjoyed one another’s company—gone to the beach and into Edgartown for lunch and strolled through the Camp Meeting Ground in Oak Bluffs, imagining a day when they might all invest in one of its gingerbread cottages. They’d studiously avoided the evening news and kept their conversations light, but Vietnam seemed to hover in every silence. Unless Teddy was mistaken, it had added velocity and torque to the blow that had lifted Mason Troyer off his feet. And if that was true, then what was Mickey’s grotesquely swollen hand but another manifestation of that misbegotten conflict? The injury, sustained in a minor hostility, in idyllic Chilmark, no less, brought into focus the specter of far greater, perhaps even fatal, injury in a genuine war zone. Though he hated to admit it, even to himself, it might also have been the war that drove Jacy out of the arms of her hawkish boyfriend and into Teddy’s that afternoon.

  They sat quietly for a while, until Mickey said, “You and Jacy?”