Lincoln and Anita, would’ve married and had a passel of kids and grandkids.
Pretty though all this alternative reality was to contemplate, Teddy suspected it wouldn’t bear close scrutiny. For one thing, a kid fathered by a man like Michael Sr. wouldn’t have been Teddy at all, but rather a kid like Mickey. Moreover, would this new, improved Teddy have been guaranteed a better outcome? Not necessarily. If he’d been the kind of boy who could break another kid’s nose for tripping him, then mightn’t he also have discovered that he enjoyed doing so? Indeed, over time he himself might’ve evolved into an ignorant brute (Brom Bones!) not unlike Nelson. And later still, having developed a taste for risk and physical confrontation, he might’ve ignored his high draft number, enlisted, gone to Vietnam and gotten himself killed there. Or, had he survived, he might’ve become a Republican, a supporter of other dim-witted foreign adventures that got other young men killed. Squinted at in this fashion—when he awoke from surgery with only one eye, would squint still be an operable verb?—human destiny was both complex (it had a lot of working parts) and simple (in the end, you were who you were).
Because was it not for this very reason—that Teddy was who he was and not some other hypothetical human—that he’d fallen again? Falling was apparently written in caps somewhere in his genetic code, and this time the chances of a good outcome were apparently not awfully good. Earlier, when he overheard one of the doctors say, “Okay, let’s see if we can save that eye,” he’d taken it to mean, We might as well give it a whirl—maybe we’ll get lucky. An hour or two from now, when he regained consciousness and was again instructed by his doctors to be on the lookout for this or that, he could have just the one eye with which to look. If he had any kingly aspirations, he’d have to locate and travel to the Land of the Blind. This would be his new normal.
So, was that it? The sum total of what could be said for sure? Well, he was pretty darn sure that in addition to an eye, he was also losing his mind. Indeed, his reason had been under siege from the moment he arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps even earlier. The first sign of his unraveling had been on the deck of the ferry, when he’d identified the young woman standing next to Lincoln on the pier as Jacy. The question was, why? What was going on in his head that he’d conjured her up like that? It wasn’t as if he’d been obsessing over her nonstop for the last four decades. Okay, sure, dark-haired young women of a particular type had invariably reminded him of her, and whenever there was a story in the newspaper or on TV or the Internet about a young woman going missing, he always felt compelled to read, watch or click. But such triggers were normal, weren’t they? Even if Jacy had been haunting him all these years, would that have been so strange? She was the first girl he’d ever fallen deeply in love with, and who ever forgets first love? Granted, he remembered her with profound sadness, but it wasn’t as if losing her had been the end of his life.
Here on the island, though, every emotion he felt when he thought of her was somehow amplified, as if playing through Big Mick on Pots’ lethal sound system. This morning, riding out to Gay Head, he’d sensed the volume being turned up past HIGH all the way to STUN. Why had he kept pedaling toward its source? Had he been trying to conjure her, or was she demanding to be conjured? If she was a ghost, what was she born of? Even ghosts had motives. Did she blame him (or Lincoln or Mickey) for whatever horrible thing had befallen her all those years ago? Or did she want him to know that she still loved him (and Lincoln and Mickey)? Even more puzzling was her timing—why now, on this particular morning? Could it be that her ghostly power derived from the island itself? Had she, like Prospero, been waiting all these years for him/them to return? Could she really be buried here, as the old cop Lincoln had spoken to seemed to believe? In a ghost story that would explain why she was so much more present now than she’d