Jacy said, gesturing toward the horizon. “The sun might set in the south tonight. It doesn’t usually, but who knows?”
“If you’re going inside,” Mickey said, when Teddy took a step in that direction, “grab me another cold one. And put some music on.”
Inside, Teddy could hear Lincoln’s voice, muted, through his closed bedroom door, but otherwise it was quiet. It came to him then that he could just walk out the front door, get into his piece-of-shit Nova and drive away. Onto the ferry in Vineyard Haven and off the island. After this weekend, what was the likelihood that he’d ever see any of these people again?
Instead, he put on some Crosby, Stills & Nash, something that under normal circumstances Mickey would never permit. If you went near the stereo, he’d say, “Get away from there before you hurt yourself.”
Grabbing three beers from the fridge, he returned to the deck, where Jacy was trying to get Mickey to let her look at his hand. “Git,” he told her, hiding it under his armpit. “Away. From me.”
“It’s broken, Mickey.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” she said. “Let’s go to the hospital and get an x-ray.”
“Jace,” he said. “It’s fine. Leave it alone, okay?”
“All right, be like that,” she told him. “I’m gonna go inside and write my postcard. Let me know when you men have decided how everything’s going to happen.”
When the door slid closed behind her, Mickey raised a questioning eyebrow. “What’s the matter with her?”
“Us is my impression,” Teddy said, recalling what she’d said earlier about everything being fucked up. “Men. We ignore women when they’re right and we start wars and generally screw things up.”
“We are as God made us,” Mickey replied, draining the last of his beer. “I’ll take one of those, unless you plan to drink all three.”
Teddy, who’d forgotten he was holding them, handed one over.
“Mind twisting off the cap?”
Teddy did, and Mickey took it. “You okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You look funny. You’re acting funny.”
“She’s right, you know,” Teddy said, anxious to change the subject. “You should get that x-rayed.”
“I will,” he said, flexing his fingers again and wincing, “but…”
“But what?”
Here he met and held Teddy’s eye. “But it’s my decision. Not hers. Not yours.”
“Are we still talking about your hand?”
“No, I guess we’re not,” he admitted. When they’d met his ferry on Friday evening, the first words out of his mouth had been, “We’re not going to talk about it, hear me? The fucking war isn’t going to ruin our last weekend together.”
They’d reluctantly agreed, but the war had put a damper on things anyway, or so it seemed to Teddy. Sure, they’d enjoyed one another’s company—gone to the beach and into Edgartown for lunch and strolled through the Camp Meeting Ground in Oak Bluffs, imagining a day when they might all invest in one of its gingerbread cottages. They’d studiously avoided the evening news and kept their conversations light, but Vietnam seemed to hover in every silence. Unless Teddy was mistaken, it had added velocity and torque to the blow that had lifted Mason Troyer off his feet. And if that was true, then what was Mickey’s grotesquely swollen hand but another manifestation of that misbegotten conflict? The injury, sustained in a minor hostility, in idyllic Chilmark, no less, brought into focus the specter of far greater, perhaps even fatal, injury in a genuine war zone. Though he hated to admit it, even to himself, it might also have been the war that drove Jacy out of the arms of her hawkish boyfriend and into Teddy’s that afternoon.
They sat quietly for a while, until Mickey said, “You and Jacy?”
Teddy immediately felt faint. But, If he asks, he thought, why not tell him? What difference could it possibly make now?
But no, Mickey’s mind was apparently elsewhere. “You both need to be more like Lincoln,” he said. “Whatever I decide, and whatever happens as a result of that decision, is on me, not you. He’s figured that out. You two haven’t.”
“Whatever happened to all for one and one for all?” The question, of course, was one Teddy might well have asked himself. At Gay Head, when it seemed that Jacy might be his and his alone, he’d forsworn all for one without blinking.
Mickey sighed. “There is no all. Just millions of ones.”
* * *
—
WORRIED THAT the crushing disappointment of Gay Head might trigger one of his spells, Teddy had decided on a brisk walk before dinner. The exercise wouldn’t prevent an episode, but it might delay