proceeding according to plan, that he regretted nothing because there was nothing to regret. He wouldn’t even have admitted to the motorcycle accident if the evidence weren’t so gruesomely visible, the livid white scar at his hairline. If it had been just Lincoln, he might’ve taken his chances. One day back at Minerva, Lincoln had noticed his government professor limping and asked why. Because, the man informed him, his left leg was a prosthesis right up to the hip. He’d been clomping around like Captain Ahab all term, but Lincoln had only just noticed. In some ways his friend’s habit of not really taking things in made him the perfect college student, more interested in what things meant than that they existed in the first place, as if you could determine the significance of something without actually observing it. Teddy, however, had an eagle eye, especially for anything involving bodily injury. It was as if he expected whatever he came in contact with to maim him. No hope whatsoever he wasn’t going to notice the scar.
Had his father lived, things would’ve been different, Mickey thought, but maybe this was another lie. Strange, and yet somehow fitting, to be back here where the life of deception he hadn’t planned on had begun. This island. This house.
* * *
—
BY THE TIME the guys returned, Mickey had dozed off out on the deck. The crunch of tires on gravel woke him, and then he heard car doors open and close, his friends’ voices muted in the soft night. He was relieved. He’d told Lincoln that Teddy would be ready and waiting for him when he arrived at the hospital, but he hadn’t been at all sure that would happen. Teddy hadn’t been officially discharged, so it was possible the graveyard nurse might try to stop him. Or maybe when he tried to get out of bed and dress himself, Teddy would find he couldn’t. But no, here they were. A light came on inside and a moment later Lincoln appeared behind the glass door, his face a thundercloud. Sliding it open, he stepped aside for Teddy, who paused in the doorway, wobbling and woozy. A thick white bandage the size of a tennis ball was affixed over his right eye.
Mickey stood up. “Can I help?”
“I got him,” Lincoln said, his fury barely contained as he guided Teddy outside. When he was settled, Lincoln started to take a seat himself but noticed the whiskey bottle and went back into the kitchen.
“Well,” Mickey said, looking Teddy over, “you look better than you did at the club. How do you feel?”
“Weak. Not much pain at the moment.”
“What’d they give you?”
“I forget. Some next-gen pain pills. They’re working, is the main thing.”
“I hear the trick is to stop taking them when the pain goes away. You up to this?”
“Wake me up if I nod off. I think I’ve already figured out most of it.”
“Yeah?” Mickey didn’t see how that could conceivably be true.
“Not figured out, exactly,” Teddy said. “It’s more like…I just woke up knowing.”
Mickey chuckled. “Good, then you can tell it.”
When Teddy offered up the weakest of smiles, Mickey felt a wave of guilt wash over him. What he was doing—demanding that his friends listen to his story this very night—was both selfish and cruel, though the alternative would’ve been to sneak off the island with Delia and let them imagine the worst, which Lincoln, quite possibly, was already doing.
When the door slid open again, Lincoln reappeared with two glasses holding a few cubes of ice and set them in the middle of the table. “You probably shouldn’t,” he told Teddy, who took a glass anyway. Lincoln poured himself two fingers, gave Teddy a splash, then set the bottle down within Mickey’s reach. The message was clear: he could pour his own, which he did. “Okay,” he began. “I’m not sure where to start, but—”
“It was an accident,” Lincoln blurted. “Begin there.”
“I’m sorry?”
“How she died. Explain how it was an accident.”
“Lincoln,” Teddy said, his voice almost a whisper. “Let him tell his own story.”
“Yeah, Mick,” Lincoln agreed. “Tell us how Jacy died.”
“She died in my arms,” Mickey said. He could feel her there still, almost forty years later.
“An accident.”
“Yes,” he confessed, though he had no idea how Lincoln could’ve intuited this.
Lincoln swallowed hard. “Is she buried here?”
Stunned, Mickey shook his head. If the idea weren’t completely lunatic, he’d have sworn that by here his friend meant under this very sloping lawn. “I’m lost, man,”