What Teddy found reassuring about this occult possibility was that it meant he had company. Maybe he was losing his mind, but wasn’t Lincoln as well? A happily married man, his friend probably thought about Jacy less often than Teddy did, and when he did think of her it probably caused less distress. Yet he’d no sooner arrived on the island than he’d become obsessed with the mystery of her disappearance. Like Teddy, when he got close enough to receive her signal, he, too, had fallen under her spell. Why? Because he, too, had loved her. Love, timeless love, had opened a new frequency that allowed her to communicate even with someone as settled, squared away and unimaginative as Lincoln.
And Mickey? You only had to take one look to know that he, too, was haunted, maybe even more than Lincoln or Teddy himself. And didn’t it make perfect sense that he should be, given his geographical proximity. On the Cape, when the psychic wind was right, he was able to hear her siren call, whereas Teddy and Lincoln were too far away. Hadn’t the two women Mickey had married, then quickly divorced, both resembled Jacy? Had they at some point realized that they were mere stand-ins for the woman he was really in love with? Was that why the marriages had failed?
Damn, Teddy thought. What was in those drugs he’d been given? There had to be some psychedelic, mind-altering component, because he was suddenly seeing things that until now had been shrouded. He was having what amounted to a genuine Carlos Castaneda moment. What worried him was that any second now the anesthesia would kick in and that would be the end of it. Maybe he’d be able to convince his doctors to prescribe another dose for later. If not, he’d have to find a shaman who could return him to this place of magical clarity, because he felt close, really close, to understanding, well, in a word, everything.
Alas, the only thing he was unable to bring into meaningful focus was at the very center of it all: the singer with the purple hair back at Rockers. Even though he couldn’t get a good look at her from the other side of the crowded room, he’d been certain it was Jacy. Yeah, okay, he’d also thought that girl on the pier was Jacy, but this was different. The one on the pier had been dark haired and about Jacy’s size and in her early twenties, as Jacy had been when she disappeared. But he’d quickly recognized her for what she was: a wish. Or, as Lincoln had put it, a fever dream. Teddy had wanted her to be Jacy, wanted for Jacy to be alive, and so, for a second or two, she was. By contrast, the purple-haired singer hadn’t looked like Jacy, she’d been Jacy. Teddy would’ve known her anywhere. There hadn’t been a doubt in his mind. Except she also wasn’t Jacy for the simple reason that she couldn’t be. His reason might be under assault—sure, he might be having visions—but he wasn’t completely untethered from reality, and the facts were all wrong. The singer had been late thirties? Early forties? Jacy, if she were alive, would be a woman on the cusp of old age, just as he and Lincoln and Mickey were. So what if her voice was Jacy’s? So what if she was channeling Grace Slick, as Jacy had so often done back at Minerva? What difference did it make that she’d chosen to open her set with “Somebody to Love,” Jacy’s favorite, a song that asks what happens when the truth is found to be lies? None of that mattered. He recalled an essay he’d once written for Tom Ford, where he’d cleverly marshaled a mountain of evidence in support of a truly ingenious thesis. There’d been just one small, troublesome fact that unfortunately invalidated the whole thing. He’d tried his best to explain it away, but to no avail. What can’t be true, isn’t, Ford had written in his endnote, no matter how much you want it to be.
“Teddy?” said a voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said, or tried to say, assuming it was the anesthesiologist, reprimanding him for not counting backward from a hundred as instructed and drifting off into blissful, untroubled sleep, so they could get on with botching his surgery and shepherding him into the final stage of his life as a pathetic, general studies, limp-dicked, one-eyed man.
Except it was a nurse and she was wheeling him somewhere else on a gurney. “You’re going to be fine,” she assured him. “The operation was a success.”
When they got to where they were going and she came around to the foot of the contraption, he got a good look at her, a dark-haired woman his own age. “Jacy,” he said. “I love you.”
The old nurse grinned down at him. “Hey, I love you, too.”
Lincoln
It was nearly one o’clock by the time Lincoln got back to Rockers, which had emptied out, and not a single musician was in sight. At the far end of the long bar, a few stragglers were watching a West Coast baseball game. When the goateed, tattooed bartender who’d shouted “Rock and roll!” several hours earlier noticed Lincoln frowning at the stage, which was still crammed with sound equipment, he came down and told him that Big Mick on Pots was done for the night.
“I figured they’d play to closing,” Lincoln said, extending his hand across the bar. “I’m Lincoln, by the way.”
“Kevin,” the guy said as they shook. “Normally they do. How’s your friend?”
“Looks like he’s going to be okay.”
“Man, that was a lot of blood,” Kevin said, eyeing Lincoln’s polo shirt, patches of which were now rust colored, as were his chinos. He’d cleaned up as best he could at the hospital, but he was still a sight to behold.
“You know Mickey?”
Crossing his massive arms in front of his chest, the bartender snorted. “Everybody knows Big Mick.” Big guys, his body language seemed to say, all know one another. Guys Lincoln’s size wouldn’t necessarily be cognizant of that. “He’s a legend in these parts.”
That fact, Lincoln thought, could be added to all the other things he apparently didn’t know about his friend. In the hospital’s waiting room he’d revisited the questions Teddy had posed when they were driving here, questions that loomed larger now. Why had Mickey punched that SAE pledge all those years ago? Had this been the first real evidence of rage simmering just below his usually good-natured surface? And why had he continued to scrub pots in the steamy kitchen of the Theta House, his shirt drenched with sweat by the end of every shift, when he might have worked the cool, dry dining room serving some of the prettiest girls on campus? It couldn’t have been social awkwardness. Having grown up with all those sisters, he was pretty much at ease around even the sexiest Thetas, most of whom treated him like a big brother. And, finally, why had he gone to Canada instead of reporting for duty? A spur of the moment decision, or an intention he’d had from the start but hadn’t trusted his friends enough to confide in them?
If Lincoln was unable to answer such questions after four decades of friendship, how could he hope to fathom what Joe Coffin had told him on the phone just before Teddy fainted—that Mickey, for reasons Lincoln couldn’t begin to imagine, had beaten Jacy’s father, a man they’d all met for the first time at graduation, into a coma with his bare fists? What possible explanation could there be for that? Surely their meeting couldn’t have been coincidental. Had Mickey gone looking for him, and to what end? Did he have some reason to believe that Donald Calloway might know of his daughter’s whereabouts? If her father knew where she was, wouldn’t everybody? Unless it was the other way around and Calloway, hearing that Mickey was back in the States, had come looking for him. But again, to what possible purpose? Did he believe that Mickey was somehow involved in his daughter’s disappearance? That he’d gone to Canada not to dodge the draft but to escape interrogation and possible arrest? But that made no sense, either. If the man had been suspicious of Mickey, wouldn’t he, like Coffin, have suspected Lincoln and Teddy as well? Jacy had spent the weekend with all three of them. Why single Mickey out?
“Any idea where he might be?” Lincoln asked. “I was really hoping to talk to him.”
Kevin shrugged. “He’s staying someplace here on the island is my understanding. But he’s dealing with Delia now, so who knows? He might’ve hired a water taxi to take her back to the Cape.”
“Delia?
”
“The singer? Purple hair?”
“What’s her story?”
The bartender made a syringe with his thumb and forefinger and injected himself in the arm. “She was supposed to be in rehab, but apparently checked herself out.”
“She usually sings with the band?”
“When she’s clean. Great set of pipes.”
“Are she and Mickey together?”
“That I wouldn’t know.” For some reason Lincoln suspected otherwise, but the man’s tone made it clear that he was through answering questions. “Can I get you something?”
Not wanting to head back to Chilmark until he had a better sense of where things stood, he ordered a beer and checked his phone for messages. If Kevin was right and Mickey had taken this Delia person back to the mainland by water taxi, he’d probably call or text when he got there and return to the island by ferry in the morning. He had tried to reach Lincoln earlier, but the hospital had a strict no-cell-phone policy, so Lincoln’s had been switched off, and he didn’t see that Mickey had called until he went outside later and turned it back on. The background noise at Rockers had been so loud that he’d had to listen to his voicemail three times: Text me when there’s word on Teddy. Got a little problem here myself. I’ll explain later. Sorry about all this, Lincoln. Something about this message had felt off, so he listened to it again now. Was it the word all? If he was reading between the lines correctly, it wasn’t just what had happened to Teddy that Mick was feeling bad about, but also whatever had led up to it. In hindsight, he probably wished he hadn’t dragged them to Rockers to hear his band play in the first place. Since now the whole weekend was a clusterfuck. But maybe the regret was more specific—the purple-haired singer who’d shown up unexpectedly. Had Mickey known she’d be there, he maybe would’ve warned them that her voice was a dead ringer for Jacy’s—possibly why he had hired her—and that she’d be covering many of the same songs Jacy used to sing. Whatever. If Mickey had regrets, he could join the club, because Lincoln did, too. He never should’ve returned Coffin’s call. If he hadn’t been distracted by what the man was telling him, he might’ve truly registered Teddy’s distress and caught him before he passed out. Come to that, he wished he’d never gone to see Coffin in the first place. Really, had he done a single thing right since stepping off the ferry?
“Jesus,” said a familiar voice at his elbow. “What kind of shape is the other guy in?”
Lincoln had been so deep in thought that Joe Coffin, speak of the devil, had managed to slide unnoticed onto an adjacent barstool.
“He’s in the hospital, in fact,” Lincoln told him. “It’s my friend Teddy. He fell on a wineglass.”
Coffin studied him, blinking, his eyes red. He’d clearly been drinking, with purpose, unless Lincoln was mistaken. “Trouble does seem to follow you three guys,” he said, and then, before Lincoln could respond, he rotated on his stool and called down the bar, “Kevin! I hope you’re not pretending you didn’t see me come in, because we both know you did.”
The bartender regarded Coffin over his shoulder for a long, weary beat before heading in their direction.
“Tell me something, Lincoln,” Coffin said when Kevin arrived and assumed the iconic stance, both hands flat on the bar. “Do you have an opinion about guys with goatees and tats who wear their baseball caps backward? Is that a thing where you live?”
Kevin shook his head. “You gonna cause trouble, Joey?”
“No, I’m not,” Coffin replied matter-of-factly, which Lincoln was relieved to hear, the same possibility having occurred to him. “How about you, Lincoln?” Coffin nudged him with his elbow. “You gonna cause any trouble?”
Lincoln assured both men that he wasn’t.
“There you go,” Coffin said. “No trouble at all.” He eyed Lincoln’s beer, saw that he’d barely touched it, and ordered one for himself.
Kevin held a fresh glass under the tap. “One’s your limit tonight, Joey.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because you’re already shit-faced. Did you drive here?”
“I didn’t walk.”
“So, one beer. You get in an accident on the way home, your old friends will send me to jail for serving you.”
“Ah, but you could go to jail for any number of reasons, Kevin.”
“One beer,” he repeated, setting the draft down on a coaster.
“You can leave us alone now,” Coffin told him. “I doubt this conversation will turn to sports, but if it does we’ll let you know.”
When he was gone, Coffin clinked Lincoln’s glass. “The thing is,” he began, as if resuming an ongoing conversation, “we don’t do right by girls.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Us. You and me. Men in general. We close ranks, every one of us. Cops especially. We shouldn’t, but that’s what we do.”
“Are we talking about Jacy, Mr. Coffin?”
As if Lincoln hadn’t spoken, he said, “There isn’t much real crime here. You know why?”
Lincoln allowed that he didn’t.
“Stands to reason, when you think about it. Say you do some shitty thing. You shoot somebody. You rob a bank.”
Lincoln couldn’t help smiling. This morning Coffin had imagined him as a rapist and murderer; tonight he’d been demoted to a mere bank robber.
“So, what happens next?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Lincoln said. “I’m not a criminal. You run away?”
“Close. You drive away. At a high rate of speed. At least that’s what you do other places. Here you wait for the ferry. Islands just aren’t conducive to crime, Lincoln. That’s a fact. Especially ones that require flight. Or premeditation. Impulse crime, where you know better, but just can’t help yourself? Like domestic assault? Our strong suit, especially in the winter, after all the tourists leave and times are lean. No rich people around. Nobody hiring you to mow their lawn or clean their pool. Columbus Day to Memorial Day. Hell, you do your best. You budget for this and that—kid needs braces, vehicle needs a new transmission, all the shit that’s gonna happen. Waves of it, believe me. But every year? It’s the thing you don’t see coming that fucks you up. Somebody slips on the ice and breaks a hip. All of a sudden you got medical bills. You’re behind on your rent, payments on that snowmobile you never should’ve bought in the first place. You start getting calls from bill collectors. Are you familiar with these problems, Lincoln?”
“Not firsthand, no.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Coffin said unconvincingly. “But a lot of people who live here year round are. Anyhow, come January, a friend of yours somehow scores tickets to a Patriots playoff game, say, in Denver. Wants to know if you’re in. You’re not in, Lincoln. You wouldn’t be in if the game was in Foxborough and you could fly there using your own arms for wings. But man, you’d love to go to that game. You try to think of somebody who might loan you the money, who might think you’re good for it, but you’re kidding yourself. It’s an island, Lincoln, and everybody you know knows you right back. You look around for somebody else to blame. Your wife’s handy, so you explain the whole thing to her. How she’s a piece of shit. How it’s all her fault.”
Lincoln sighed and settled in. Like their conversation that morning, this one was clearly headed down a rabbit hole, and this time he was drunk to boot. “Why are you telling me all this, Mr. Coffin?”
His face immediately clouded over. “Shut up, Lincoln.”
“I’m sorry?” Because it was stunning. He tried to recall the last time someone had told him to shut up, and couldn’t.
“I’m explaining something here, so do me the courtesy. Besides, you heard me tell Kevin there wasn’t going to be any trouble. Don’t make a liar out of me.”
This, it occurred to Lincoln, was the sort of thing Anita had been worried about earlier—that left to his own devices h
e’d end up sitting next to a belligerent drunk at one in the morning. There were men who saw things coming and others who didn’t, and he belonged in the latter category. Wet Wipes weren’t the only thing he failed to anticipate the need for. He seriously considered just getting down off his stool and heading for the door, but he was pretty sure that if he did Coffin would lay a heavy paw on his shoulder and command him to sit. Seeing this, Kevin might come down the bar and intervene, but that wouldn’t be good, either. In the end, though, what kept Lincoln seated was that, in addition to menace, there was something almost plaintive in the man’s request that he not be made a liar of.
“Thank you,” he said once it was clear that Lincoln had settled in. “Where was I?”
“I was explaining to my wife how everything’s her fault,” Lincoln reminded him.
“Right. Which she already knew because you and she have had this conversation before and it’s always her fault. She also knows better than to give you any lip, because that never ends well. So instead she just stands there between you and the refrigerator, not giving you lip and waiting for what comes next. Someday, Lincoln, somebody’s gonna do a study and what they’re going to discover is the one place you absolutely do not want to be, if you’re a woman living with an abusive drunk, is between him and the fridge. Anyhow, you shove her the fuck out of the way, harder than you meant to, and down she goes. Lays there whimpering on the floor until you order her to get up. No fool, she does as she’s told. Stands there looking at you, blubbering, all what did I do? And do you know what you think, Lincoln?”
Chances Are . . . Page 21