up back in Woods Hole wasn’t really a lie, or at least not the kind that keeps you out of heaven. But that’s the thing about lies, right? Individually they don’t amount to much, but you never know how many others you’ll need to tell in order to protect that first one, and damned if they don’t add up. Over time they get all tangled up until one day you realize it isn’t even the lies themselves that matter. It’s that somehow lying has become your default mode. And the person you lie to most is yourself.”
The deck’s sliding door rumbled open, Lincoln returning with blankets and the flashlight Mickey’d requested. Was it his imagination or had Lincoln, just in the last hour, segued into old age? It seemed impossible this was the same man who’d so recently come flying out of his chair, his face burning with fury. Now that same face was a collapsed wreck, and despite his gruesome injury, Teddy appeared to be in better shape. Mickey’s own fault, all of this.
“Okay,” Lincoln said, sitting back down, “what did I miss?”
“Nothing much,” Mickey assured him. “Ted was just asking, in the nicest way possible, how I could’ve been a big-enough asshole to keep all this from you until now. Here’s your answer, or part of it.” Taking out the photo he’d brought with him to the island on the off chance he’d somehow locate the courage (Kuh-ridge!) to fess up, he slid it down the table. “I’ve never shown this to anybody.”
When Lincoln switched the flashlight on, Mickey, not wanting to witness their reactions, purposely looked out at the dark Atlantic. That didn’t keep him from hearing Lincoln’s sharp intake of breath, though. He studied the photo for a good minute before passing it and the flashlight to Teddy, who examined it for at least that long before saying, “Dear God.” Switching the flashlight off, he said, “That afternoon when Andy came by? He wasn’t drunk, was he.”
* * *
—
SHE LOOKED FOR HIM everywhere, Mickey told them. Especially on holidays and birthdays. Also at sporting events (tennis, field hockey) where she was a participant. It had come to her gradually that it wasn’t her mother that Andy had come to see that afternoon but herself. That he wanted to be part of his daughter’s life was the only explanation that made any sense. But didn’t that mean he would keep trying? Mostly she dreaded the possibility, because she always imagined him lurching toward her, bleating at her, unable even to say her name. Why, then, at other times, did she long to see him again? Because when he looked at her, there’d been love in his eyes; surely she hadn’t imagined that. And the fact that he’d been drunk that afternoon didn’t mean he always was, did it? That she could both dread and yearn for something confused and frightened her. Was she losing her mind? Andy, she kept thinking, his name just there in her head. Andy. The more she tried to banish it, the more insistent the voice became. At least that’s how it was in the beginning. Gradually, though, as she came to understand that he was probably gone for good, the voice receded, disappearing entirely for long stretches, until suddenly it would be there again, a whisper now: Andy. And when this happened, all she wanted to do was to crawl into bed and pull the covers up over her head as she’d done when that boy Todd brought all this into question.
She thought about trying to find him, but how? All she knew was his first name. She couldn’t very well ask her mother or fucking Donald. Looking for clues, she once again returned to the family photo albums, searching them for some younger version of the man she’d seen on the front lawn. There were a few pages where photos had been removed, and she stared at these absences as if she could conjure up the missing images by sheer force of will. The summer between her high-school graduation and her freshman year at Minerva, when her mother and father had attended a weeklong conference in Hawaii, she used the time alone to toss the house. It took her all of two minutes to locate the metal box that contained her birth certificate, but its other contents—passports, mortgage documents, her parents’ marriage license, various insurance policies, the titles to their two cars—were of no interest. The box yielded neither