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.”
Teddy
In the bathroom Teddy, who’d asked for a short break so he could take another painkiller, did so, then stood staring at the wreck of the man in the mirror and marveling, as he always did in the aftermath of his spells, just how much they resembled tropical storms. As they approached, he often could sense the change in barometric pressure, as he had done on the ferry, even though the storm was still far out at sea, churning away, gathering force, bearing down. When it finally came ashore there wasn’t much to do but