word again,” Vance said. “Okay, let’s go back to you. Tell me again that there was nothing going on between you and my fiancée.” Teddy, noting the accusation was phrased differently this time, said nothing. For his part, Vance didn’t seem to care whether he answered or not. “I mean, you would’ve, right? If you had the chance? Sure, she was fucking engaged. But you were in love with her, right? So, what was the problem? Didn’t she like you?”
“She did, actually.” Chose him, in fact. Over Mickey and Lincoln. Also over this aggrieved rich kid sitting across the table from him now. And the rapture of that simple fact was every bit as powerful now as it had been in the surf off Gay Head, so powerful, indeed, that Teddy was seriously tempted to tell Vance everything. Paint him a picture he’d never forget.
“Why not, then?” Vance continued. “Are you a queer, Teddy? I heard you might be.”
“You heard wrong.”
Vance ignored this. “Girls like fags, right? Tell ’em things they wouldn’t even confide to their best girlfriends. Did Jacy confide in you, Teddy? Like which one of your asshole friends she preferred to me?”
Somehow Teddy managed to keep his voice under control. “Judging by how things turned out,” he said, “she preferred all of us to you.”
Vance had eaten only a few bites of his pie, his professed appetite another part of an elaborate ruse that he couldn’t quite pull off. Picking up his fork, he pointed it at Teddy. “You know what I ought to do?”
This whole time Teddy had been racking his brain, trying to remember who Vance reminded him of, and now, threatened with serious bodily harm, it came to him: it was Nelson, the high-school kid that Coach instructed to bang Teddy around, to “toughen the pansy up.”
“Yeah,” Teddy said, feeling strangely calm. Usually when violence was imminent he felt physically ill. “I do know. You ought to believe everything I’m telling you, because except for the fact that you want me to be lying, there’s no reason not to. Because my friends and I have no more idea than you do where Jacy went or why. When she comes back, you can ask her, and then you’ll know.”
Vance, still clutching his fork, leaned toward him across the table. “Except she’s not coming back, is she, Teddy?”
And just that quickly Teddy’s righteous anger leaked away. Looking down at his barely touched coffee, he was suddenly unable to meet his companion’s eye. All summer long he’d waited for the phone to ring with the news that Jacy had returned, safe and sound. Lincoln, also expecting such news, had called from Arizona twice to see if he’d heard anything. At some point, though, and Teddy didn’t know exactly when, a switch had flipped in his brain: if Jacy was coming back, by now she would’ve.
When he finally forced himself to look up from his coffee, Teddy saw that tears were streaming down his companion’s face. A moment earlier he’d expected him to come flying across the table and stab him with his fork, but now he realized that Vance had also been on an emotional roller coaster these last two months, hope giving way to despair, despair to grief, grief to rage, and all of it over again. “Did you kill her, Teddy? You and your pals? Did you kill my girl? Did you get her drunk and force yourselves on her? Did you bury her on that island? Or take her out on a boat and toss her over the side? Did you guys do that?”
“No, Vance,” Teddy told him, feeling his own eyes fill now. “Of course we didn’t.”
“Ah…fuck,” he said, dropping his fork and pounding his broad forehead violently with the heels of both hands. “I thought if I talked to you, I’d be able to tell if you were lying, but I can’t.”
“Look,” Teddy told him, “I did lie before. I wasn’t half in love with Jacy. I was head over heels. We all were. We never would’ve hurt her.”
“Yeah, well, I lied, too,” Vance admitted, pulling a napkin out of the dispenser to dry his eyes. “There’s no girl here in Boston. There’s just Jacy and she’s fucking gone.”
“I’m sorry, Vance,” he said, surprised to discover it was true.
“Well, fuck you anyway,” he said, tossing the wadded napkin onto the table and sliding out of the booth. “Somebody said you got a high draft number.”
Teddy nodded.
“Just so you know, dipshit,