you realize,’ she said, in the same voice she’d used that morning, ‘there isn’t a single fucking thing in the whole apartment to eat?’ So instead of having that beer, I dropped her off and went to get us something for dinner.” After a heavy pause. “By the time I got back she was gone. I didn’t see her again for over a year. Didn’t get so much as a postcard that whole time.”
Lincoln shook his head. “Where did she go?”
“No clue. After a few weeks, I figured she must’ve gone back to the States. Someplace I couldn’t follow her. For all I knew she’d patched things up with Vance and got married. Mostly I tried not to think about it. In fact, that whole year’s a blur. Every single way a man can be messed up, I was. When the band fell apart, I moved to Vancouver and formed another one there, but we never really clicked, and my heart wasn’t in it. I got a couple part-time gigs as a sound engineer. Made ends meet, somehow. I was living in this tiny second-floor walk-up, above a nice elderly couple. I have no idea how Jacy found me, but one evening I came home and there she was, outside my door, with a backpack in her lap, fast asleep in her wheelchair. Somebody must’ve helped her up there, because the stairs were really steep and there obviously wasn’t a ramp.
“I’ll tell you the truth. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was skin and bones and you know what? I was scared to wake her up, afraid she’d start in yelling at me again. But then she twitched awake and smiled at me, and I saw she was the old Jacy. She said, ‘Did you hear the news?’ and it took me a moment to understand what she was asking because her speech was slurred and the effort to speak caused the elbow she’d broken to spasm. But I finally said, ‘What news is that?’ since I’d been in a sound booth all day. ‘The amnesty. Gerald Ford says all’s forgiven.’ I said, ‘You came to tell me that?’ She said, ‘No, I came to give you…’ The rest was so garbled I couldn’t make it out, so she tried again, and I finally understood that she’d come to give me my life back. I was holding a bag of groceries, so I said, ‘In that case, stay for dinner’ and wheeled her inside.”
Teddy thought he heard Lincoln let out a low moan, but he purposely didn’t look over at him.
“I offered to sleep on the couch, because the bath was off the bedroom, but she said no, it was okay. Her balance was for shit and she didn’t have much strength in her legs, but she could walk short distances when she needed to. Which apparently was true, because when I woke up in the middle of the night she was sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘I just want you to know I never hated you,’ she said. ‘I left because I didn’t want you looking at me the way I looked at my father that day on the lawn.’ Just like I was looking at her right then, she didn’t have to say it. Anyhow, I told her I didn’t care about the damn ataxia or anything else, so long as she was back. She started to cry then, so I scooted over so she could lie down next to me. When she stopped crying, I asked, ‘What about the baby,’ because not long after she left something came in the mail for her. The hospital reminding her of her first prenatal-care appointment. She told me not to worry, that she’d taken care of it.
“The next morning I had to go to work, but I told her when I got back we’d talk about the future. I said whatever she wanted was fine with me. We’d get married if she wanted—or not, if she didn’t. We could go back home to the States, or find a bigger apartment right there in Vancouver. Whatever suited her. She said okay, we’d talk about all that when I got back. Something about how she said it made me wonder if maybe I’d pushed too hard, but really, I was too happy to be worried. During that year she was gone and I was so messed up, I’d gotten it into my head that she and I