were meant to live our lives together, and now here she was, which proved I was right.
“Except I wasn’t. I’d barely walked in when the station manager came into the recording booth and told me I needed to get home right away. I think her plan must’ve been to make her way down the stairs by hanging on to the banister, then ask that old couple to call her a taxi. They heard her fall—a terrible crash, they said—and found her crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Naturally they wanted to call an ambulance, but she was alert and coherent, and somehow she convinced them she wasn’t badly hurt. All she needed was for them to fetch her wheelchair, which was still up there on the landing, and call her a cab. That if they could just do those two things, she’d be fine. It’s also possible her speech was slurred and they thought she was drunk. Anyway, while her husband wrestled the chair down the steep staircase—no easy task for a man his age—the wife went inside and called the taxi. Hanging up, though, she had second thoughts. She knew where I worked and decided to call me, too. By the time I got there Jacy had lost consciousness and they’d called the ambulance they should’ve called earlier, but by then she’d stopped breathing. The EMTs tried to revive her, but she was gone. Our Jacy.”
* * *
—
AT SOME POINT during the evening the breeze had shifted, and the waves could now be heard pounding the beach below, seemingly proximate but in reality remote.
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