Mickey put his hands flat on the table. “I should let you guys go to bed,” he said, “but before you do there’s one more thing you need to understand. Not about her. About me. A couple years ago I finally broke down and went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which I’d been putting off. Anyway, I’m standing there scanning down the rows of names, section after section, and I realize I’m looking for the guy who died in my place. And just like that I’m back in the Acropolis Diner with my old man, and he’s pointing out all the guys my age and wanting to know which one of them should go if I didn’t. See, it’s no use arguing whether going would’ve been the right thing. The point is I’d promised my father I would, and instead of keeping my word, I went with Jacy up to Maine and then I did what the guy you used to know never would’ve done. I hid in the trunk of the car while Jacy drove us across the border. That’s what you need to understand. The guy you remember is gone, just like Jacy.”
Teddy glanced over at Lincoln, who was shaking his head. “Sorry, but that’s bullshit,” he said. “When you pulled in yesterday, my first thought was There’s Mick. You were older, sure, and a bit more banged up. But I recognized you. That you were still the same.”
“Also tonight,” Teddy added, “when you sang.”
But he could tell Mickey was having none of it. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, drumming his fingers on the table. “I’m glad you feel that way. And part of what you say is true. Sometimes, when I’m on the Harley, I do feel like the guy I used to be, and yeah, I can channel him through certain songs.” He turned to Teddy now. “It’s the reason I hate most of today’s music. I know it’s good, a lot of it. But I can’t find myself in it. And it’s the guy I used to be, before Canada, that I’m always looking for and not finding.”
“You’re being too damn hard on yourself,” Lincoln said.
“Sweet of you to say, but—”
“You just happened to be the one she chose,” Teddy said, surprising himself in the process. In the end, how easy it was to surrender the thing you cherished most. All these years, Jacy’s choosing him over Mickey or Lincoln had been a source of pride. He’d clutched that knowledge to his heart. “I would’ve climbed into that trunk, too.”
“So would I,” Lincoln said, an admission that couldn’t have been easy to make, Teddy knew. A life as blessed as Lincoln’s would be painful to forswear, even as an imaginative, nonbinding exercise.
“Well, you’re good friends to say so,” Mickey said. “And you,” he told Lincoln, “are a particularly fine man.”
Lincoln, who just then clearly had his doubts on that score, arched an eyebrow. “How so?”
“I’ve been waiting patiently for you to point out the moral of my story, but you’re too decent to do it.”
“There was a moral?”
“More of an irony, I guess. After all the grief I used to give you about being pussy-whipped, I ended up even worse.”
Obviously an attempt at humor, but if Mickey was still Mickey, then Lincoln was still Lincoln, and so, true to form, he took it seriously. “I guess my own irony would be that all three of us were head over heels in love with a girl we didn’t know.”
“Aw, hell, Face Man,” Mickey said. “We didn’t even know ourselves.” Then he kicked Teddy gently under the table. “What do you think, Tedwicki?”
What Teddy thought was that maybe knowledge was overrated. Sure, after hearing Mickey’s story, they all knew Jacy better than they had when they were young, but the added information made no difference, at least not to him. He’d loved her then and loved her still…regardless…in spite of everything. Mickey and Lincoln, the friends of his youth? He loved them, too. Still. Anyway. In spite of. Exactly how he himself had always hoped to be loved. The way everyone hopes to be.
Lincoln
Groggy after getting only four hours’ sleep, Lincoln was rinsing glasses in the sink when Mickey emerged from the bath, freshly showered, wearing gym shorts and a faded Bob Seger tour T-shirt. “Who’s Bob Seger?” Lincoln asked.
Mickey just shook his head. “You’d think by now I could tell when you’re pullin’ my chain.”
“I know who Bob Seger is,” Lincoln assured him, though the irony of the assertion wasn’t lost on him. If you couldn’t fully know your best friends, how in the world could you claim to know Bob Seger?
Mickey took one of the glasses Lincoln had just rinsed, filled it from the tap and drained half of it standing there at the sink. From where they stood, through the kitchen window, Teddy and Delia could be seen strolling along the stone wall that marked the boundary between Lincoln’s property and Troyer’s. In the last half hour they’d made several laps around the perimeter of the yard. “You gotta wonder what that’s about,” Mickey said.
“He’s probably telling her stories about her mom.”
“He does seem to be doing most of the talking.”
“None of my business,” Lincoln said, “but has Delia exhibited any symptoms?”
“Nope,” Mickey said, “and she probably would’ve by now if she was going to. There don’t seem to be any hard-and-fast rules, though. Andres’s symptoms showed up early but progressed slowly. Jacy became a cripple in a matter of months. All that pot smoking probably contributed, or so they’re saying now.”
“Yeah, but nobody could’ve known that at the time.”
Mickey shrugged, apparently disinterested in his weak attempt at absolution.
“Mind my asking how you found each other? When Jacy said she’d taken care of the baby, you must’ve concluded that she’d had an abortion, right?”
Mickey set the empty glass back on the drainboard. “Delia found me. Not that long ago, actually. Couple years? The band had a gig out in Truro. We’re doing our sound check, and this woman comes up behind me and says, ‘How you doin’, Pop?’ ” He massaged his forehead at the memory.
“How did she locate you?”
“How do you find anybody these days? Google. When Jacy put her up for adoption, she listed me as the father. Under nationality, she put American; under occupation, musician. Delia did the math and assumed I went back to the States after the amnesty. My name got her to the Big Mick on Pots website. I guess I looked enough like her to maybe be her father, and of course I was the right age…”
Lincoln tried to fathom it—having a child and not knowing about her for forty years. “And you recognized her as your daughter?”
“No, but I sure as hell recognized her as Jacy’s. In fact, I just about keeled over.”
“What’d you say to her?”
He chortled. “I said I hope you’re not here for money, because I don’t have a lot of that.”
“And she said?”
He grinned. “You’ll love this. She said, ‘I don’t want your damn money. I’m here to try out for your band.’ I said, ‘Can you do Tina Turner?’ and she said, ‘What the fuck use would I be otherwise?’ I’m guessing your own daughters don’t talk like that to you?”
“They speak their minds pretty freely,” Lincoln allowed, “but no.”
They lapsed into silence then, just stood there at the window watching Teddy and Delia slowly circumnavigate the sloping lawn that Lincoln had only yesterday feared her mother lay buried beneath.
“I’m ashamed, Mick,” he said finally, feeling his throat constrict with these three words.
Mickey waved this away as you would a dangling thread of spiderweb. “Forget it.”
“I wish I could,” Lincoln told him.
“You really thought I might’ve hurt her?”
Lincoln nodded. “I made the mistake of going to see this retired ex-cop, thinking he might have some information about Jacy’s disappearance that never made it into the papers. Like, if anybody had been questioned or suspected. If you can believe it, I’d gotten it into my head that Troyer might’ve been involved. Except it turned out he a
nd this cop are old friends, and rather than being suspicious of him, he got suspicious about you. When he started digging, he found out about you and Jacy’s father.”
“I always dreaded the day you or Ted would find out about that,” Mickey said. “No way to explain it without fessing up to everything.”
“It knocked me pretty much sideways,” Lincoln admitted. “Made me wonder”—here he had to pause and swallow hard before continuing—“if I really knew you.”
“Well, there’s no hard feelings, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”
“No, I know that. I’m just disappointed in myself, I guess.” This was an understatement, actually. For reasons he didn’t fully comprehend even now, he’d allowed himself to be seduced by Coffin’s narrative, its trash-vortex worldview. Instead of using the lens of his own experience, he’d genuflected before Coffin’s. The other man’s brutal, ugly stories of bad men and bad marriages had somehow undermined the validity of his own good one. Instead of seeing the idea of Jacy being buried beneath the sloping lawn of the Chilmark house as too horrible to be true, he’d accepted it as too horrible not to be. But why would he do that? Had something about the possibility appealed to him for some reason? Maybe awakened dormant vestiges of the unforgiving, oppressive religion he’d been raised in? Or was there some other darkness he was unaware of, something far more primitive than religious doctrine? Had he first glimpsed it the night of the draft lottery when Mickey’s number was drawn ahead of his own? Hadn’t something whispered to him then that all for one and one for all was just a lie they’d convinced themselves to believe in? Was this how wars happened, the seeds of conflict, large and small, growing in the gap between what people wanted to believe and what they feared must be true?
“Well,” Mickey said, “if it’s yourself you’re disappointed in, I can show you where the line forms. Last night, I told you I kept what happened to Jacy a secret because I’d promised her I would. And that’s true, as far as it goes. But it was also an easy promise to keep, because, deep down, I didn’t want to share her. Not the girl we were all in love with back in college. Not even the one you saw in the photo. Especially not her.” As he spoke, he rubbed his sternum, as if all the food he’d consumed last night at Rockers was having its belated revenge. “Delia changed all that. When I made Jacy that promise, I didn’t know I had a daughter. And as messed up as she is, I wanted you and Teddy to know about her. She had the drug problem before we met, but I blame myself for the shape she’s in. She needs better treatment than I can afford.”
“I’ll speak to Anita—”
He shot Lincoln a warning glance. “No, you won’t. I mean it.”
After a moment, Lincoln said, “I will have to tell her about all this, you know.”
“What?” Mickey said, his mock outrage momentarily convincing. “Just because you’ve been married to the woman for four decades, you have to tell her stuff?”
“I know. Pussy-whipped to the bitter end.”
“Yeah, but you’d have ended up pussy-whipped no matter who you married. At least Anita’s a class act.”
“I’ll tell her you said so,” Lincoln smiled. Somehow their conversation, painful though it was, had cleared the air, and for that he was profoundly grateful. Maybe they weren’t all for one and one for all. Maybe they never had been. But they’d been friends, really good ones, and apparently they still were. “How about a cup of coffee?”
“Nah, I’ll gather my shit and then we’ll be off. It’s not going to be easy talking Delia back into her program. The longer she’s AWOL, the tougher it’ll be.”
She and Teddy were heading up the center of the lawn now, their conversation, whatever it had been about, apparently concluded. “Tedlowski better not be telling her about Jacy jumping on tables when she sang, because that would definitely appeal to her.” He looked around now. “You’re really gonna sell this place?”
“You think I shouldn’t?”
Mickey shrugged. “How would I know?”
“Most people have opinions.”
“Not me,” Mickey said.
It had always been one of the most endearing things about him, Lincoln thought—this ability to say perfectly ridiculous things and make them sound absolutely true.
* * *
—
“LOOKED LIKE YOU and Delia had quite the conversation this morning,” Lincoln ventured. He was driving Teddy to the hospital, where he’d have his eye checked and the bandage replaced. The damaged side of his face seemed even more swollen than it had that morning, the bruising more vivid, but the nap he’d taken after Mickey and his daughter left seemed to have done him good, and Lincoln marveled at his recuperative powers. “What do you make of her?”
“I’m not sure,” Teddy replied, as if this were the very question he’d just been pondering. “It’s like one minute Jacy’s in there, looking out through those eyes, and the next she’s completely gone and there’s just this stranger.”
Lincoln nodded. Though he himself had barely spoken to the woman, he’d come away with the same impression.
“She’s definitely a coarser version of her mother,” Teddy continued, “but I guess that’s to be expected. Take away Greenwich, Connecticut, and good private schools, and replace those with shitty public ones, and Delia’s what you get. But I found myself liking her. Quite a lot, actually. She’s defensive and stubborn, like anyone would be after bouncing around foster homes. She can’t quite figure Mickey out, but she seems to like him well enough.”
“Like him?”
Teddy shrugged. “I read somewhere that babies in Russian orphanages stop crying after they learn it doesn’t do them any good. Which of course ruins them emotionally for the rest of their lives. I think something like that might be happening with Delia. If she let herself really love her father, she’d be vulnerable. She’d rather be tough, even if that means being resigned to bad outcomes. On the other hand, she wouldn’t have come looking for him if she hadn’t been hoping for something. Having found him, though, she doesn’t seem to know what comes next. Could be she just needs a friend who isn’t her father.”
“Yeah?”
Teddy must’ve heard the skepticism in his voice, because he gave him a one-eyed look of disapproval. “You don’t feel any obligation? She’s Jacy’s daughter.”
In truth Lincoln wasn’t sure. Earlier he’d offered to help pay for a better treatment facility than Mickey could afford, but the obligation he’d felt then was to him, not her. Anita factored into it, too. What would she think if he allowed himself an emotional attachment to the daughter of a girl they both knew he’d once been in love with? Didn’t she deserve to be shut of her rival at last? He’d hoped that finding out what happened to Jacy would at long last settle his own mind, but now, thanks to Delia, that might never happen. Although she was a couple thousand miles away and still knew nothing of Delia’s existence, Anita nevertheless seemed to sense her presence when she’d phoned earlier. “What’s wrong?” she wanted to know as soon as she heard his voice. Instead of giving her a complete accounting, he’d told her only about Teddy, how he’d passed out, fallen on a shattered wineglass and nearly lost an eye as a result. “Actually, there’s more,” he admitted, “but I can’t really talk now. I’ll tell you all about it as soon as the guys are gone, I promise.” When she didn’t say anything to that, he took the opportunity to change the subject. “How’s everything where you are?”
“Your father says hello.”
“Yeah? How is the old reprobate?”
“Okay, except he keeps calling this new woman Trudy. When she reminds him that she’s not your mother, he says”—and here she mimicked his high, squeaky voice—“ ‘I can tell that just by looking at you.’ ”
Lincoln laughed out loud, as he always did when his wife allowed herself to mimic his father. She’d had Dub-Yay down about ten minutes after meeting the man
, but she was usually too kind to mock him.
“And here’s the part you’ll love,” she continued. “She’s Catholic.”
“Roman Catholic?”
“She took him to Mass last Sunday.”
Lincoln felt the earth wobble. “Wolfgang Amadeus Moser went to Mass?”
“Yep.”
“The end times approach.”
“I don’t know, Lincoln,” she said, sounding exhausted, as if this were an ongoing argument she’d given up winning long ago. “People change.”
Why, he wondered, was he so resistant to that possibility? Just last night Mickey had tried to convince them he was no longer the same person they’d known back in the seventies, but wasn’t he really just talking about disillusionment? Okay, sure, the night he and Jacy became lovers, he’d discovered something about himself that surprised and frightened him. He’d always thought of himself as a chip off the old block, the sort of man who, like his father, always knew what was right and did it. Certainly not someone who hid in the trunk of a car to avoid military service. And after following Jacy into that motel room, he no doubt felt changed, and from that point forward everything he did—from using money Jacy had stolen from her father to buy instruments and sound equipment, to drinking too much and smoking too much weed—had strengthened his conviction that he was no longer the same person. But wasn’t that the point? If he was feeling shame, it was himself he was ashamed of, not some new person born of moral weakness. Adam didn’t become a different man after eating the apple. He was who he’d always been, except miserable.
And yet. W. A. Moser attending Mass? That did feel like a sea change. Was it possible the old man was actually admitting, albeit obliquely, to being wrong about something? Not Catholicism, of course. That wouldn’t happen in a hundred lifetimes. But wasn’t his attending Mass with this new woman tantamount to confessing he’d been wrong to insist on his wife’s conversion? And therefore wrong to oppose his son’s marrying a Catholic? Wrong to taunt him for the better part of four decades for a betrayal that existed only in his own imagination?
Chances Are . . . Page 30