been at any time in the last forty-four years, when her signal had been lost in the noise of the larger world. According to the eerie logic of such tales, she, a restless ghost, had contacted him as soon as he came within range. Had he sensed her reaching out to him there on the ferry? Was that why, instead of going out onto the deck, he’d remained inside? Had he sensed the danger even before it manifested?
What Teddy found reassuring about this occult possibility was that it meant he had company. Maybe he was losing his mind, but wasn’t Lincoln as well? A happily married man, his friend probably thought about Jacy less often than Teddy did, and when he did think of her it probably caused less distress. Yet he’d no sooner arrived on the island than he’d become obsessed with the mystery of her disappearance. Like Teddy, when he got close enough to receive her signal, he, too, had fallen under her spell. Why? Because he, too, had loved her. Love, timeless love, had opened a new frequency that allowed her to communicate even with someone as settled, squared away and unimaginative as Lincoln.
And Mickey? You only had to take one look to know that he, too, was haunted, maybe even more than Lincoln or Teddy himself. And didn’t it make perfect sense that he should be, given his geographical proximity. On the Cape, when the psychic wind was right, he was able to hear her siren call, whereas Teddy and Lincoln were too far away. Hadn’t the two women Mickey had married, then quickly divorced, both resembled Jacy? Had they at some point realized that they were mere stand-ins for the woman he was really in love with? Was that why the marriages had failed?
Damn, Teddy thought. What was in those drugs he’d been given? There had to be some psychedelic, mind-altering component, because he was suddenly seeing things that until now had been shrouded. He was having what amounted to a genuine Carlos Castaneda moment. What worried him was that any second now the anesthesia would kick in and that would be the end of it. Maybe he’d be able to convince his doctors to prescribe another dose for later. If not, he’d have to find a shaman who could return him to this place of magical clarity, because he felt close, really close, to understanding, well, in a word, everything.
Alas, the only thing he was unable to bring into meaningful focus was at the very center of it all: the singer with the purple hair back at Rockers. Even though he couldn’t get a good look at her from the other side of the crowded room, he’d been certain it was Jacy. Yeah, okay, he’d also thought that girl on the pier was Jacy, but this was different. The one on the pier had been dark haired and about Jacy’s size and in her early twenties, as Jacy had been when she disappeared. But he’d quickly recognized her for what she was: a wish. Or, as Lincoln had put it, a fever dream. Teddy had wanted her to be Jacy, wanted for Jacy to be alive, and so, for a second or two, she was. By contrast, the purple-haired singer hadn’t looked like Jacy, she’d been Jacy. Teddy would’ve known her anywhere. There hadn’t been a doubt in his mind. Except she also wasn’t Jacy for the simple reason that she couldn’t be. His reason might be under assault—sure, he might be having visions—but he wasn’t completely untethered from reality, and the facts were all wrong. The singer had been late thirties? Early forties? Jacy, if she were alive, would be a woman on the cusp of old age, just as he and Lincoln and Mickey were. So what if her voice was Jacy’s? So what if she was channeling Grace Slick, as Jacy had so often done back at Minerva? What difference did it make that she’d chosen to open her set with “Somebody to Love,” Jacy’s favorite, a song that asks what happens when the truth is found to be lies? None of that mattered. He recalled an essay he’d once written for Tom Ford, where he’d cleverly marshaled a mountain of evidence in support of a truly ingenious thesis. There’d been just one small, troublesome fact that unfortunately invalidated the whole thing. He’d tried his best to explain it away, but to no avail. What can’t be true, isn’t, Ford