Chances Are . . .

by Richard Russo

  Her mother stood up and took the ashtray over to the sink, where she held her last cigarette under the running faucet until she was sure it was out, then dumped all of them into the trash.

  When she sat down again, Jacy said, “So when did Andy find out about me?”

  “When you won that junior tennis tournament. Your picture was in the paper.”

  “You’re lying again. If he went away, how could he have seen my picture?”

  “He subscribed to Greenwich Time.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Think about it.”

  She did. “He was still in love with you. Even after the horrible things you said to him.”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Even though you’d married my…married Don.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “He knew you had a child?”

  Another shrug.

  “But not that I was his?”

  “Not until he saw your picture.”

  “God, you’re so fucked up.”

  “You’re not to use that word in this house.”

  “Oh, right. You get to fuck my father and toss him out with the trash, but I don’t get to say a dirty word?”

  “I didn’t…,” Viv began, then stopped. Wiping her eyes on a napkin, she said, “I made a choice.”

  “And now the man you chose is going to jail. Well done.”

  “We don’t know that for sure. It’s only a possibility.”

  “It would serve you right.”

  “Also a possibility.” She rose again, this time setting her cup and saucer next to the sink before returning.

  “Who knows that Donald’s under investigation?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Vance’s parents?”

  “No.”

  “How long before they do? How long before everybody knows?”

  “Feds don’t talk. Besides, it’s his boss they’re after. And his boss’s boss.”

  “Tell me something, Viv. Do you even know about the safe behind the Renoir?”

  At this her mother started. “You vicious little snoop.”

  “Mmmm,” she agreed, then, “How do I get in touch with my father?”

  “He’s down the hall. Just knock on the door.”

  “How do I get in touch with Andy?”

  “You don’t. He’s gone. How many times do I have to say it?”

  That made it twice that she’d used the word gone to describe him. Jacy swallowed hard. “I want to see him.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “He died.”

  “Stop…fucking…lying.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Finally her mother said, “How about we make a deal? I give you what you want. You give me what I want.” And when Jacy hesitated, “What’s the matter, little girl? You don’t like being the one who has to choose?” Her mother wore a different expression now, and when Jacy recognized it as triumph, she realized she’d somehow misplayed her hand. Her mother knew what Jacy wanted, but she had no idea what Viv wanted in return. “Your call, little girl. Do we have a deal?”

  * * *

  —

  THE OBITUARY PAGE from the Danbury News-Times, which her mother produced as her part of the bargain, contained half a dozen death notices, some running to several columns. Her father’s was by far the shortest. It stated that Andres Demopoulos had passed away at the age of forty-five at Holloway House, a nursing facility in nearby Bethel. He’d originally come to America via Canada with his older brother Dimitri. They’d grown up in New York City, but after his brother’s untimely death he’d moved to Connecticut, where he’d worked in the food-service industry before falling ill. He had—his daughter read—no surviving relatives. Which meant that somehow the grinning young man from the Time Machine photo was gone again. What little Jacy had of her father—a few terrifying minutes on the front lawn of their home, a glimpse of an old photograph and the few thin facts of the obituary—was all she’d ever have.

  Finally, after Jacy’d read the obit several times, her mother spoke. “I’m sorry.”

  Which sent Jacy into a warp-drive fury, though she kept her voice down. “Really, Viv? You’re sorry? About what? Are you sorry he died? That he loved you? That you loved him? That he loved me? That you kept him from me and me from him?”

  “That he had such a hard life.”

  “You’re the one that made it hard. You and Donald.”

  “For your sake.”

  “Don’t…you dare say that. You chose. You said so yourself. You didn’t even know you were pregnant when you made that choice.”

  “You don’t know the whole story.”

  “I don’t know any of the story. You weren’t even going to tell me that he existed.”

  “That’s right, and I’m sorry you found out. Look what knowing has done to you. Your ignorance was bliss. Don’t you remember how happy you used to be?”

  Was this true? Had she been happy? If so, that happiness was so long ago that it now felt like someone else’s. “How do we even know that any of this is true? How would a newspaper in Danbury know that my father had a brother named Dimitri? It says he had no living relatives, so who would’ve told them?” Her mother just looked at her, waiting for her to understand. Finally, she did. “You.”

  “There was no one else.”

  “You wrote my father’s obituary.”

  “I answered their questions. They wrote it.”

  “You told them he fell ill?”

  “He did.”

  “Alcoholics don’t ‘fall ill.’ ”

  “He wasn’t an alcoholic.”

  “Stop lying, Viv. You can’t even keep your story straight. That day on the lawn you told me yourself he was a falling-down drunk. Just now you said he got fired from the club for drinking on the job.”

  “That’s what he was fired for, yes.”

  Jacy rubbed her temples, trying to force the few facts she knew into alignment. Clearly, her mother was choosing her words carefully. Rhetorical hairs were being split. But to what end? “Did he or did he not drink himself to death?”

  The smile her mother offered then—an odd mix of wonder and shame—was one Jacy knew would stay with her for a long, long time. “Strange you should put it that way,” she said, “because in a sense that’s exactly what happened. He choked to death drinking a glass of water.”

  “You are so full of—”

  “Cerebellar ataxia is what it’s called. A degenerative disease of the nervous system, like MS. Over time you lose motor function. Your speech slurs. Your limbs flail. You look and sound drunk. That’s what you were seeing on the lawn that afternoon.”

  “But you told me—”

  “I know what I told you. It seemed best.”

  “For you.”

  “For me, for everyone. He didn’t want you to see him like that.”

  “That’s a lie. I’m the one he came here to see, not you.”

  “He wanted you to know he existed, that’s all. Okay, it’s true he wanted to see you, to…take you in. But when he saw how terrified you were, he knew the whole thing was a mistake. I knew where he was living, so I went to see him there, and he made me promise never to tell you the truth. He said it would be easiest for you if you believed he was a drunk. In time you’d forget he ever existed.”

  “Except I didn’t.”

  “No, you certainly didn’t.”

  “You stole him from me.”

  “For your own good.”

  “I could’ve helped him.”

  “No. No one could help him.”

  “I could’ve been with him. Comforted him.”

  “Don’t lie
to yourself, little girl. It’s a bad habit. Take it from one who knows.”

  Jacy ignored this. “How did you even learn that he died? Am I supposed to believe you read the Danbury News-Times?”

  “Of course not. We hired someone to keep tabs on him, your father and I. Don and I. We didn’t want a repetition of that day on the lawn.”

  “Right. God forbid that I should ever see my father again.”

  “Also, he had expenses. His condition…deteriorated. He was unable to work. By the end he needed…well, almost everything.”

  “You’re saying you paid?”

  “We paid. Your father…Don and I. We paid.”

  “Why would Don pay? He hated Andy. I could see the hatred in his eyes that afternoon.”

  “He didn’t want to. I made him.”

  “How?”

  “Simple. I told him I knew.”

  Suddenly there was no air in the room. “Knew what?”

  Her mother just looked at her.

  Jacy felt her stomach rise. “How long have you known?”

  “I can’t answer that. One day I didn’t and then I did. That day on the lawn, maybe. I saw the hope in your eyes. The hope that Andy would come and take you away. From me, was my first thought, because I knew you despised me. Then I thought again.”

  “But you did nothing.”

  “Well, I didn’t really know, did I.”

  “You just said you did.”

  “I told myself it couldn’t be true. Made myself believe it wasn’t.”

  “Ignorance is bliss.”

  “That it is, little girl, and don’t ever let anybody tell you different. The truth will set you free? Don’t make me laugh.”

  Down the hall there was a rustling, the sound of chairs sliding back, men getting to their feet.

  Jacy felt hot tears welling up, but she refused to cry. Instead, she said, “You know what, Viv? I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I want to be just like you. I want to be selfish. I want to not give the tiniest little shit about anyone but myself. I want to be able to do the kinds of things you do and never suffer the consequences.”

  “You think I don’t suffer?”

  “Not enough.”

  They heard the office door open and men emerge into the hall.

  “Your turn, little girl.” She was smiling now.

  Suddenly Jacy knew something that until now had managed to elude her, though she’d been staring right at it for years. “My God,” she said. “You hate him, too, don’t you.”

  “You’ll never know how much.”

  “Do you want to get a pen and paper?”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  In the hallway the front door opened, then shut again, and now Donald’s footsteps were coming in their direction. She told her mother the combination to the safe.

  * * *

  —

  THAT SAME NIGHT she awoke in the darkness of her childhood bedroom to the knowledge that she’d decided something in her sleep: she would end her life. The decision felt both momentous and oddly anticlimactic. Her mother’s medicine cabinet was full of sleeping pills, and she couldn’t think of any reason not to take them. That evening she’d watched the news and seen the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia burst into flame, and she knew boys her age were being incinerated there. Against all reason Mickey would be heading toward that conflagration in a matter of weeks, and by next year Lincoln might well follow. They would both die there; she was certain of it. Death was everywhere, universal, a joke in bad taste. If you could die drinking a glass of water, as her father had, what was the point of living? In fact, Jacy thought sleepily, there was no reason to not do the deed right now. Nothing to prevent her from just climbing out of bed, walking across the hall and grabbing a bottle of pills. Easy. Fill a large glass with water and just start swallowing, the very thing her father hadn’t been able to do, and thereby achieve the identical, symmetrical result. There’d be both beauty and justice in that, wouldn’t there? Her poor father. Brokenhearted, he’d given her the gift of his absence. Now that he was gone and beyond further injury, she would absent herself. That was her last thought before drifting into a heavy, black sleep.

  The next thing she knew it was morning, the sun streaming in her window, the phone on her bedside table jangling. Since there was no one she wanted to talk to, she waited for Viv to pick up down in the kitchen, answering only when the ringing continued. Groggy, she didn’t immediately recognize Teddy’s voice. It seemed so long ago that they’d all been friends. If she understood him correctly, he was suggesting they all spend one last weekend together before going their separate ways. He and Lincoln had already talked Mickey into joining them on Martha’s Vineyard, he said, so how about it? All for one? One for all?

  Only after hearing herself agree to join them and hanging up did she remember her dark-of-the-night resolution to end her life. How could she have forgotten something so profound? The clock on her bedside table said it was nearly ten-thirty. Was that possible? After deciding to commit suicide, she’d fucking slept in? And then agreed to celebrate the beginning of summer with friends on the Vineyard, as if nothing of significance had changed since graduation? Was this any way to repay poor Andres Demopoulos, who in order to ensure his daughter a normal life had exiled himself from it and died alone? No. Fuck no. Living would mean that Don and Viv had won, that the whole shit-eating world, with its innumerable falsehoods and treacheries, had won. So, no. This simply wouldn’t stand. Don and Viv were apparently off somewhere. She had the house to herself. The time was now.

  Still muzzy from too much sleep, she went into her mother’s bathroom and found, as expected, an unopened bottle of sleeping pills. Not wanting to die in Viv’s bathroom, she returned with the pills and a large glass of cold water to her own room. The bottle had one of those newfangled caps, so she set the glass down on top of Andres Demopoulos’s obituary so she could line up the tiny arrows and push up on the cap with both thumbs. When it finally popped off, she poured a handful of pills into her palm and sat down on the edge of the bed. It felt lumpy. Feeling between the box spring and mattress, she found the stacks of bills she’d stashed there earlier. What had she meant to do with the money? She couldn’t imagine. For money to be of use you had to want something money could buy, and she didn’t. Not anymore. She had a single need: to not exist. When she put the whole handful of pills in her mouth at once, her gag reflex kicked in, but she got herself under control and picked up the glass of water. As she went to drink, though, she saw that her father’s obituary had stuck to the bottom of the glass. The date of his death—May 2, 1971—was magnified, like the key words you’re intended to pick out of a printed text on a movie screen. She gagged again, this time spitting the pills back into her hand.

  May 2nd. How many times had she read the obituary without noticing the date, its significance? She’d graduated from Minerva on May 9th. On the drive back to Greenwich with Don and Viv she’d given herself another good talking-to. Let him go. If her father didn’t come to her graduation, if he didn’t care even that much, if he could live without her, then she was done with him as well. Except that by the time she’d climbed onto that stage to receive her diploma, Andres Demopoulos was already dead. It was as if he was now trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave, like he’d somehow directed her to set the glass of water down on the obituary so that the date of his death would be highlighted. As if he was begging her not to do it. Nonsense, she told herself. More magical thinking. But maybe not. What if Andy was trying to tell her that living, not dying, was the best revenge on Don and Viv and the whole shit-eating world? She remembered the haunted, pleading look in her father’s eyes that terrible afternoon, remembered how desperately he’d tried to say her name, that he’d tried to reach out and touch her. It was as if, years earlier, he’d foreseen this day, this exact moment.


  In the bathroom, she flushed the pills down the toilet. And even before the last one disappeared, a new plan began taking shape.

  * * *

  —

  AND LESS THAN a month later, sitting in the dark out behind the crappy motel a few short miles from the Canadian border, that plan was about to bear fruit. She would live, and so would Mickey. That would be Andres Demopoulos’s legacy. That it also happened to be a giant fuck you to Don and Viv was the icing on the cake. Taking the stacks of bills from her backpack, she handed them to Mickey, who counted the money in the light of a waning moon that had just that moment come out from behind the scudding clouds. When he finished—there was enough there for twenty Stratocasters, maybe a hundred—he said, “Okay. Tomorrow we’ll find someplace to rent on the Canadian side, but then I need to head back to Connecticut.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I’m going to find your old man and beat him bloody.”

  “Don, you mean?”

  “Yes, Don. After I’ve done that, I’ll rejoin you.”

  “What if you get arrested?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I do,” she said, getting to her feet. “And your life is mine now.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I’m saving it. Therefore.”

  “Yeah?”

  She pulled her shirt over her head then and stood still in the darkness while Mickey, stubborn, pretended he had some choice in the matter. Was this how her mother had seduced Andres Demopoulos? she wondered. Had the poor guy even known what hit him? She found herself wondering if Viv had cleaned out the safe yet. Probably not. She would wait to see how things played out. If they took her husband away in handcuffs, she’d do it then. There would be no record of the freshly laundered bills. With Donald safely behind bars, she’d sell the house and go somewhere else, maybe back to California. She’d have plenty of money to live on until she could find herself a new Donald. You almost had to admire her, Jacy thought, waiting for Mickey, who still believed that his mind was his own, to make it up.

  “Well?” she said finally.

  “Yeah,” he said, getting to his feet, and they both heard the surrender in his voice. “Yeah. Okay.”