Chances Are . . .

by Richard Russo

  Mickey, surrounded by fans, came over to the edge of the stage when Lincoln called to him. “Jesus, Face Man. Don’t tell me you’re leaving?”

  “No,” Lincoln assured him. “I just need to return a call.” He waved his phone, which had vibrated during the set—no doubt Anita responding to the video he’d sent.

  “So what’d you think?”

  “You’re good. Great, actually.”

  Mickey shrugged. “After four decades, you’re supposed to be, right?” But Lincoln could see that the compliment pleased him.

  “What I don’t understand is why you aren’t deaf.”

  “What?”

  “I said…” Lincoln began, then got it. “Oh, right. So…how come you told Teddy what was up and not me?”

  “I didn’t. He figured it out. Seriously, is he going to be okay? He doesn’t look so hot.”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “I’m trying to get him to hang out on the Cape for a couple days, but he won’t.”

  “I know.” He consulted his watch. “How long’s your break?”

  “Half an hour. Give Anita my love.”

  Since he hadn’t told Mickey who he was phoning, he said, “I could be calling someone else, you know.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not.”

  Outside, night had fallen, and the chill in the air was autumnal. Half of Rockers’ audience was now smoking on the narrow sidewalk, so Lincoln headed into the Camp Meeting Grounds, which, this late in the season, felt abandoned. The silence, after the pounding music, felt preternatural.

  Anita answered on the first ring. “Lincoln.”

  “Pretty crazy, huh?” he said. “The band’s actually called Big Mick on Pots, just like back in Minerva.”

  “Lincoln.”

  This time he heard the urgency in her voice. “Wait, didn’t you get the video I sent?”

  “Something came through, but I haven’t looked at it. Your father’s in the hospital. It looks like he’s going to be okay, but it was scary.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were having dinner and all of a sudden he went rigid, like he’d stuck his finger in an electric socket. Then he slumped over and started speaking gibberish. Anyway, we got him to the hospital—”

  “We?”

  “Angela and I.”

  “Angela.”

  “His lady friend. At least that’s what I’m assuming she is. She doesn’t speak much English.”

  “What language does she speak?”

  “Spanish, of course.”

  “But Dad doesn’t speak Spanish.”

  “I know that. What’s important here? Your father’s health or his living arrangements?”

  Lincoln opened his mouth to respond, but his phone vibrated again. He half expected the caller to be Dub-Yay himself, determined to take over the narrative as always, but this was a local number.

  “Lincoln? Are you still there?”

  “Sorry. I had an incoming call.”

  “This one is more important.”

  “I know that. I’m sorry. I’m just feeling a bit blindsided.”

  “Should I continue?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “So the doctors are still running tests, but the initial diagnosis is a TIA, what they call a ministroke. Apparently he’s been having them for a while.”

  “You got this from a woman who doesn’t speak English?”

  “No, from your father. The language impairment from strokes like these doesn’t last long. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was making sense again. He might say bike when he means rake, but you can kind of figure it out.”

  “Put him on, then.”

  “He’s resting. The doctors say he’ll probably sleep through till morning. The strokes are exhausting, even the baby ones. But here’s the thing. Each one is like a valve that relieves pressure, but then the pressure builds back up again. There’s apparently a bigger one coming.”

  “When?”

  “Unknown.”

  Lincoln sighed. “I’m really sorry, babe. This should not have happened on your watch.”

  “I’m just glad I was here. Meanwhile, he’s comfortable and in no immediate danger. Angela and I are heading back to the house now.”

  “You and Angela.” His phone vibrated again. Whoever called earlier had apparently left a message. “The old bastard.”

  “Lincoln.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “I know what you’re saying, but you’re awfully hard on him. The only thing he’s ever really wanted is to be important.”

  “What he wants is his own way.”

  “Yeah, and there’s a lot of that going around.” When he didn’t respond to that, she said, “Sorry, that sounded like I meant you, and I didn’t.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Have I mentioned recently that I love you?”

  “I know you do. I never doubt that.”

  “I really wish you were here.”

  “Right this minute, so do I.”

  “That’s good. You prefer me to Angela, at least?”

  “I do, yes. Wait, you sent a video?”

  “Watch it. It’ll cheer you up.” He knew he should let her go, but he didn’t want to. “You should see Mickey on that stage. He’s like a kid.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Of all of us, he’s the one who seems to be living the life he was meant to.”

  “Are you saying you’ve lived the wrong life?”

  “No, only that I don’t feel about commercial real estate like Mick feels about rock and roll.”

  “He isn’t married. He doesn’t have kids. Kids whose educations your hard work paid for.”

  “Our hard work.”

  “We did what needed doing. Both of us.”

  “I know. Okay, I’ll shut up now.”

  “Finish your business on the island and come home. You are coming back, right?”

  “Of course I’m coming back.”

  “Good. I miss you. So does your father.”

  “You think?”

  “He loves you.”

  “Because he thinks I’m his clone. Loving me is just another form of self-love. And this Angela woman—”

  “What does it matter, if she makes him happy?”

  “Why should he be happy? Did my mother get to be happy?”

  “Do you know that she wasn’t?”

  “Not for a fact, no.”

  “Look, I know she’s on your mind. It’s natural. Just finish up and come home.”

  Rockers was even more jammed when he returned. It took him forever to elbow through to their table in the back of the room. For some reason Teddy was peering intently at the stage, as if it posed a riddle. “Everything okay?” he asked, before looking Lincoln in the face.

  “Dub-Yay’s in the hospital. He’s been having these ministrokes?”

  But Teddy was still only half listening. “Can you see what’s going on up there?”

  Lincoln couldn’t, at least not very well. The musicians had been joined onstage by a woman who looked too old to have spiky purple hair. She was holding a mic, and when Mickey reached for it she backed away, holding it out of reach. “There’s someone who seems to think it’s open-mic night.”

  Teddy shook his head. “I’m not believing this,” he said. Though Lincoln couldn’t imagine why, he seemed genuinely alarmed. Mickey and the woman with spiked hair did seem to be having some sort of disagreement, but the look on Teddy’s face suggested he was witnessing something far more serious. What was it he’d told Lincoln that morning? That sometimes his spells took the form of premonitions? Was he having one of those?

  Only when his phone vibr
ated in his pocket did Lincoln remember the other call that had come in while he was talking to Anita. Was there time to check his voice messages before the band roared back to life? The audience had already begun to clap in anticipation. Punching PLAY, Lincoln covered his right ear so he could hear the message playing in his left. It was Joe Coffin’s voice. “Lincoln. Call me when you get this message. I’ve been doing some snooping.”

  Teddy grabbed his shoulder. “You have to see this!”

  Expecting the argument between Mickey and the spiky-haired woman to have escalated, Lincoln was surprised to see that things had actually calmed down on the stage. Her back to the audience, the purple-haired woman was talking with the other band members. Apparently they were going to let her sing. Even more inexplicably the crowd seemed thrilled by this development. The clapping was even louder now.

  “Hang on a minute,” he told Teddy.

  Obviously, the thing to do was to go back outside and make the call from the street, but the place was heaving. It’d take him forever to make his way to the door, so he hit CALL BACK.

  Coffin must’ve been sitting with his hand on the phone because he answered immediately. “Where are you, Lincoln?”

  “Place called Rockers.”

  “That explains the noise. Let’s meet. Not there, though.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tonight would be better.”

  “Lincoln!” Teddy’s eyes were still on the stage, his grip on Lincoln’s shoulder viselike.

  “Why?”

  “So I can explain about your friend Mickey,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “Did you know he beat a guy half to death back in the eighties?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Wanna guess the man’s name?”

  Feeling a chill, he turned to face Teddy, who was now regarding him with an expression that Lincoln could only interpret as sorrow, as if he too had somehow been privy to the conversation and already knew what Coffin was about to reveal. “I have no idea,” Lincoln admitted.

  And yet he must have, or he would’ve been surprised when Coffin said it. If the name he spoke hadn’t already been in the back of his mind, he wouldn’t have thought to himself, Of course.

  Three clicks of the drummer’s sticks and the entire band came in on the fourth, a wall of sound. Lincoln recognized the singer’s voice immediately, evidence as undeniable as a fingerprint. “WHEN THE TRUTH IS FOUND,” it boomed. Though he hadn’t been willing to admit it, he’d sensed her presence the moment he stepped off the ferry and again, more powerfully, at the Vineyard Gazette. And now here she was. Of all the female singers Jacy had covered with Mickey’s band, it was Grace Slick she’d loved best, and this particular song—“Somebody to Love”—had been her signature. She’d sung it with complete conviction, as if she’d written the lyrics herself and knew their backstory, so Lincoln anticipated the next line before she sang it, “TO BEEEEEEEE…LIES.”

  The crash that accompanied the word lies sounded like a cymbal, except that it didn’t come from the stage but closer to hand—Teddy, losing consciousness and pitching sideways onto an adjacent table and then to the floor, where he lay twitching in a puddle of beer threaded with blood.

  Teddy

  Instead of heeding the anesthesiologist’s instructions to count backward from one hundred, Teddy decided his more urgent need was to make an inventory of what he knew to be true. It would be succinct, he suspected, the events of the weekend having turned the solid ground beneath his feet to sand. Best to be quick about it, too, because the drugs he’d been given by the EMTs were very good. They’d not only made short work of the breathtaking pain (Hooray!), but also routed his anxiety so completely that he could no longer say with certainty what he’d been so anxious about (Hooray again!). He doubted, however, that those same narcotics were bolstering his analytical faculties.

  So…what did he know for sure? Well, he was reasonably certain he’d passed out back at Rockers. He remembered feeling woozy when he rose to his feet, but then everything went dark, and there’d been a loud bang, the sound, he now speculated, of his own head ricocheting off a nearby table. He was also pretty sure—because he’d overheard the EMTs discussing the possibility—that he might lose his right eye, or maybe just the vision in it. Evidently he’d fallen on and shattered a wineglass, shards of which had burrowed deep into his cheekbone, one coming to rest dangerously close to his optic nerve. He should ask Lincoln, who was around somewhere. While being wheeled to the operating room he’d heard his friend telling him not to worry, that everything would be fine. Had Lincoln been acquainted with his history of falling, he wouldn’t have been so sanguine. Oh, by the way, that other long-ago doctor had told him after he’d landed on his tailbone, with spinal injuries there was one thing to keep an eye out for. (Whoa! Teddy thought. Keep an eye out! Now here was an expression poised to take on a whole new meaning.) Back then, at sixteen, the odds of a full recovery had been very much in his favor. (Chances were his chances were awfully good.) Whereas the results had been…well, awfully bad.

  And yet, to be fair, he had been lucky, right? Unlucky would’ve meant a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Like causality, luck could be further parsed into proximate and remote. Yes, he’d been lucky that day in the gym, but it would’ve been luckier still not to have fallen in the first place, and if you were talking about real luck, he might’ve begun life with a different father, one more like Mickey’s, who would’ve recognized his parental duty to teach his son that bullies and louts had to be met head-on, sometimes even with violence. At some point, surely, Michael Sr. must’ve sat Mick down and explained such things to him, even showed him how to deliver the kind of punch that had knocked Troyer clean off his feet.

  If Teddy himself had been blessed with such a parent, things couldn’t have helped turning out differently. The first time that vicious little shit Nelson had intentionally tripped him when he knifed through the lane, Teddy would’ve picked himself up off the hardwood floor, recognized the situation’s imperative and broken the kid’s nose for him. Then, later, when Teddy went up for that destiny-forging rebound, Nelson would’ve thought twice about undercutting him, and instead of coming down on his tailbone Teddy would’ve landed right on his feet and gone through life with a working dick. At Gay Head, when Jacy chose him, she would’ve been choosing the man she imagined him to be, instead of the one he was. They would’ve arrived back at the Chilmark house as a couple. And in the fullness of time they, like Lincoln and Anita, would’ve married and had a passel of kids and grandkids.

  Pretty though all this alternative reality was to contemplate, Teddy suspected it wouldn’t bear close scrutiny. For one thing, a kid fathered by a man like Michael Sr. wouldn’t have been Teddy at all, but rather a kid like Mickey. Moreover, would this new, improved Teddy have been guaranteed a better outcome? Not necessarily. If he’d been the kind of boy who could break another kid’s nose for tripping him, then mightn’t he also have discovered that he enjoyed doing so? Indeed, over time he himself might’ve evolved into an ignorant brute (Brom Bones!) not unlike Nelson. And later still, having developed a taste for risk and physical confrontation, he might’ve ignored his high draft number, enlisted, gone to Vietnam and gotten himself killed there. Or, had he survived, he might’ve become a Republican, a supporter of other dim-witted foreign adventures that got other young men killed. Squinted at in this fashion—when he awoke from surgery with only one eye, would squint still be an operable verb?—human destiny was both complex (it had a lot of working parts) and simple (in the end, you were who you were).

  Because was it not for this very reason—that Teddy was who he was and not some other hypothetical human—that he’d fallen again? Falling was apparently written in caps somewhere in his genetic code, and this time the chances of a good outcome were apparently not awfully good. Earlier, when he overheard one
of the doctors say, “Okay, let’s see if we can save that eye,” he’d taken it to mean, We might as well give it a whirl—maybe we’ll get lucky. An hour or two from now, when he regained consciousness and was again instructed by his doctors to be on the lookout for this or that, he could have just the one eye with which to look. If he had any kingly aspirations, he’d have to locate and travel to the Land of the Blind. This would be his new normal.

  So, was that it? The sum total of what could be said for sure? Well, he was pretty darn sure that in addition to an eye, he was also losing his mind. Indeed, his reason had been under siege from the moment he arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps even earlier. The first sign of his unraveling had been on the deck of the ferry, when he’d identified the young woman standing next to Lincoln on the pier as Jacy. The question was, why? What was going on in his head that he’d conjured her up like that? It wasn’t as if he’d been obsessing over her nonstop for the last four decades. Okay, sure, dark-haired young women of a particular type had invariably reminded him of her, and whenever there was a story in the newspaper or on TV or the Internet about a young woman going missing, he always felt compelled to read, watch or click. But such triggers were normal, weren’t they? Even if Jacy had been haunting him all these years, would that have been so strange? She was the first girl he’d ever fallen deeply in love with, and who ever forgets first love? Granted, he remembered her with profound sadness, but it wasn’t as if losing her had been the end of his life.

  Here on the island, though, every emotion he felt when he thought of her was somehow amplified, as if playing through Big Mick on Pots’ lethal sound system. This morning, riding out to Gay Head, he’d sensed the volume being turned up past HIGH all the way to STUN. Why had he kept pedaling toward its source? Had he been trying to conjure her, or was she demanding to be conjured? If she was a ghost, what was she born of? Even ghosts had motives. Did she blame him (or Lincoln or Mickey) for whatever horrible thing had befallen her all those years ago? Or did she want him to know that she still loved him (and Lincoln and Mickey)? Even more puzzling was her timing—why now, on this particular morning? Could it be that her ghostly power derived from the island itself? Had she, like Prospero, been waiting all these years for him/them to return? Could she really be buried here, as the old cop Lincoln had spoken to seemed to believe? In a ghost story that would explain why she was so much more present now than she’d been at any time in the last forty-four years, when her signal had been lost in the noise of the larger world. According to the eerie logic of such tales, she, a restless ghost, had contacted him as soon as he came within range. Had he sensed her reaching out to him there on the ferry? Was that why, instead of going out onto the deck, he’d remained inside? Had he sensed the danger even before it manifested?