by Eden Butler
“No shit,” I told the TV, throwing the remote onto the bed after I powered off the set. I sure as hell didn’t want to see anyone. Not Isaiah. Not my management team. Damn sure not the label suits who kept trying to get me to pick up my phone.
I fell back against the mattress, hands covering my face as the thoughts swarmed inside my head. Lager wanted a kidney. My label wanted me to pull an ace from my sleeve and I didn’t even have a fucking deck. My fans wanted to get a rise out me, going so far as to compare me to that pariah Gunnar Blood. That bastard made me look like some punk in a boy band for all the lewd and disgusting things he did on stage and off.
The reporter hadn’t been wrong. That leaked video was the last straw. It convinced me I had zero shot at getting Iris back. The world could see what I did to her. There was no coming back from that.
I lay on that mattress for almost a half-hour as the stupor I’d put myself in seemed to fade and an aching hunger took me over. My stomach rumbled, and my hands shook, so I eased off the mattress and made it into the kitchen, opening the fridge to pull out a two-day old burrito left over from when Landon, my assistant, came to check on me. I grabbed it from the microwave when the timer dinged and sat at the island, thumbing through the stack of mail Landon left while the burrito cooled.
I’d ignored every text and email, each call and sticky note left on my window, since the tussle in L.A. and the leak of the video. It was pure boredom that made me glance at the stack of letters and I guess some self-loathing part of my brain wanted me to see that Iris, once again, hadn’t bothered to respond to any of my letters or cards. But the manila envelope with the Stage Dive logo caught my attention, and I forgot the burrito and the stack of other shit that would take up my attention, and tore into it.
I vaguely remembered Landon mentioning it. Even fuzzier in my head was the call I’d gotten a few months back from the magazine. They wanted clarification, and I’d been too twisted to give them much. But here it was, right in my hands. Iris’s article about me. She’d finished it. Finally.
The spread was large—four full pages in the single most exclusive and respected industry magazine in the nation. They’d used a picture of me in silhouette, smoking a cigarette on an empty stage, for the cover. Nothing special. Nothing planned. Me in my jeans and boots, a black leather jacket with a thousand patches sewn on the sleeves and along the back. My hair pulled back, my beard scruffy. I looked like a roadie, not a rock star, not the man who donned heavy white paint and hid behind it every night, bringing ten thousand fans to simulated orgasm with lyric and melody.
The light threw shadows across my features, and my eyes and nose were almost visible. Iris had taken the picture in Atlanta, before the crew set up, before the fog machines were brought in and the sets were placed. The title was simple, but spoke a lot about what she thought and how she’d navigated the storm I’d made. But it had only been six months. No one could keep my florecita down for long.
Not even me.
My apartment was quiet, the snow falling over Willow Heights, making the night actually feel like Christmas Eve, like a fairytale snapshot of everything opposite of me. Perfect time for that magazine proof to land on my door. It’s not like I had anything else to do.
I opened the thick pages, coming to the piece I’d expected to be honest and biting. Nothing I hadn’t expected. Not a damn thing in it could be refuted.
“We’re sending you the rough draft of Iris Daine’s exclusive on you, per your contract. But, I’d like to verify some claims she made first.” The woman on the other end of the phone had a professional tone, but I’d heard the doubt laced within it. “If I could have a moment of your time.”
“Iris finished her article?” I’d waited three months, since the night of my disastrous Indy show to hear something, anything about her. Three long months where no one knew where she’d disappeared. This fact checker was the first I’d heard anyone say about her.
“She did. We just need to verify the things she wrote. See if there are any discrepancies.”
I didn’t need any explanations and didn’t want to waste perfectly good drinking time talking to anyone at all, especially people I didn’t know. “If Iris says it’s true, then it is. Every fucking word,” I’d told the girl on the phone, hanging up.
I didn’t care what Iris wrote about me. None of it, no matter how true or false, would ever be as bad as what I’d done to her.
They’d made her get head shots, or took a new picture of her to accompany the article. I flipped to the end of the four-page spread to find it. There she was, beautiful, expression blank, but sultry, long hair billowing over her shoulders, waving across her forehead. A pout that could tempt a saint without even the smallest effort. That perfection was natural. The bio was short, likely to prevent anyone from finding her, another reality resulting from my stupidity. Iris Daine is a writer from New York.
But she wasn’t. Not really. She was from here. Her roots ran deep, but her wings flew high. She didn’t want to be part of Willow Heights, just as much as she didn’t want to be part of my life now that I’d wrecked everything.
I got it.
I’m a pendejo.
Flipping back to the front of the spread, I glanced at the other pictures—a show shot, me and Isaiah in full makeup, fog billowing overhead, clouding the crowd. We both looked like idiots, and that was confirmed when I read the first line of the article.
The Unmasking of Dash Justice
By
Iris Daine
DASH Justice smokes two packs of Marlboro Reds a day, but that’s not his worst vice. There are plenty more.
I wasn’t sure if I could read the entire thing. It would hurt, knowing what she thought of me, knowing those thoughts formed opinions that weren’t likely to change. My cell chimed, and I glanced at it, seeing unknown caller flash on the screen. Likely just another reporter wanting a quote, wanting an interview or explanation for canceling the second leg of my tour. Blotter had a field day with the video, because its existence confirmed some of the bullshit stories they’d made up about me and Iris. None of that shit was true.
Half a minute later the cell rang again, same unknown number, and again I ignored it. I didn’t have the patience for talking to anyone about Iris unless they would tell me where she was. I needed her. I was lost, and nothing I did would lead me back on the straight and narrow. Nothing but her.
A third ring sounded, and I threw the magazine on the island, snatching up my phone with every intention of chucking it out into the snow. I flung the door open, arm pulled back for the toss, but stopped short, stepping back when I came face to face with my father.
“Jamie,” he said, leaning heavily on a cane. His eyes were intense, the curl of his mouth making him look older than he was.
I slipped the phone into my pocket, folding my arms over my chest as I glared back at the old man who’d once been the one person I idolized most in the world. “Sorry, gringo, I can’t help you,” I told him, grabbing the door to slam it shut. “I like my kidneys where they are.”
“I’m not here about that, you wee shite.” He stuck his boot against the door, pushing it further open when I tried to close it. “I’m here to knock some sense into you. Put on the kettle, arsehole.”
Chapter Two
I looked nothing like my father. He was white, Irish to the core, and I was a Boricua who was the spitting image of my mother. But Wills Lager wasn’t just the man who’d slept with a pretty groupie a few decades ago; he was the man who changed my life. He’d changed both Iris and my lives forever.
“Do you not have tea?”
Those life-changing details didn’t do a damn thing to cool my anger. That old fucker had ignored me for most of my life.
“I’m Puerto Rican, gringo. Our life’s blood is coffee. Dark. Rich. Alive.” I reached over his head, digging out two Keurig pods from the cabinet. “No tea.”
Lager muttered something that sounded like an insult under his breath, but didn’t
argue. He moved slow, dismissing me with a wave as he ambled to the table, cane in hand as he sat. He was an old man now, not the invincible legend I’d always looked up to. Wills Lager being old was something that the star-struck kid in me would have never thought of him. Once, he had been the mythical unicorn Iris and I always sought. The master of our imaginations. The writer of our childhood soundtrack.
He leaned back, sighing as he looked up at the chandelier over the table in my eat-in kitchen. There were more lines on his face, many more than had been there when I’d first met him ten years before. His hair was still thick, like mine, but only the temples and near the base of his neck was still dark. Everywhere else was nearing white, with some salt and pepper. His obvious aging stirred something in my gut I didn’t like feeling: worry.
When I was that star-struck kid meeting Wills Lager, unable to utter anything to him at all, I hadn’t known who he was, really. I hadn’t known what Iris found out before she tracked me down to do the interview: that Wills Lager, Grammy winner, the man I called my musical spirit guide all my life, was my father. Not only that, he knew he was and kept that information to himself. But he’d never done anything to clue me in, and he’d never once tried to find me; he’d known about me, known that I was his, and still hadn’t bothered to let me know.
“Sugar?” I asked, still annoyed that the man had barged into my place. More annoyed at myself that I’d let him. There was a hold he had on me that I didn’t understand. Maybe I kept civil because of who he’d been to me as a kid. Maybe it was because the music his band Hawthorne made had been some sort of chronicle of the childhood I had with Iris. Maybe it was because I’d always loved the musician—the genius—Lager had been. Deep down, though, I suspected the pleasantries came out of me, when they never did for anyone else, on the off chance that Wills Lager knew where I could find Iris. Even when I didn’t know I was doing it, I was still a calculating motherfucker.
Lager shook his head in an answer to my unspoken question, and I hurried to hand over the black mug, the steam from the coffee wafting near his mouth.
For several long seconds we faced each other like mildly civil men: both cautious, maybe a little curious. He wanted something from me; I got that from the admission Iris made about the man needing a kidney. The room filled up with silence, and I glanced at my father over the rim of my mug, feeling mierda I didn’t want to feel at all. Feeling all the anger I’d kept inside me for years; anger at whoever my father had been and the mother who never told me. Then, rage when the truth came out right on the backside of the first time in ten years I’d been with Iris again.
I never could take the silence for very long, and though I still seethed, and that anger kept me warm, I chose not to lay into Lager. Not when he looked as bad as he did—skin blotchy, red, flaky patches on the tops of his hands, eyes that looked sunken in and tired. Not until I could get something out of him about where Iris had disappeared to.
“You don’t like it?” I asked him, nodding toward the untouched mug in front of him on the table.
“It’ll do.”
We went on watching each other; him moving his eyes into small slits that made the bright blue hard to read, glaring at the large shades that covered most of my face. It was habit, hiding behind them, the only real comfort I got lately. While he stared, I drummed my free hand against the wood table as I kept sipping on my coffee. Unconsciously, I guessed, Lager mimicked me, and a rhythm formed just then, in time with the pattering of noise my nail made against the table. Wills followed with a backbeat, a slow strum of sound that echoed mine. We didn’t watch each other, didn’t acknowledge the simultaneous work of music; in fact, I only noticed the sound as an afterthought, one long muddle of noise that slipped through the ebb of my anger and worry that I’d never find Iris at all. We followed the same notes, tunes that weren’t identical, but were complements to one another. It was a strange sensation, playing off the silent collaboration he gave and having Wills Lager of all people following mine as well.
He managed a slip of his gaze, focus lingering on my face, then down to my hand, and he continued with the half song, the quick movement of sound until I remembered the way Iris spoke to the man himself that night months ago right in the next room. How she whispered into her cell because, I suspected, she didn’t want me to know the truth.
“Jamie is coming back to himself,” she’d said, her voice moving around the living room as I stood in the hallway, watching her pace. She couldn’t see me in the darkness, but my gaze moved over her fit frame to the long, muscular legs and the roundness of her ass. I’d spent that night touching every surface of her body, tasting every inch of her dark skin. She’d returned the favor, and as I’d watched her, I still felt the buzz of satisfaction in my limbs from how Iris had taken me. But the warmth in my chest just watching her caused grew dim and frigid as she continued with her explanation to Lager. “He’s being more open, and I’m not going to risk that by dropping the bomb that Wills Lager is his father, and that he needs a kidney. That would ruin everything.”
It had. I’d stepped away from her, gutted, shocked, my head swimming with suspicion, then doubt, then utter rage that she’d betrayed me yet again. I’d hustled into the bedroom, trying to drown out what she told my apparent birth father. All those months, all the time we’d spent together, had been a lie. She was doing Wills Lager a favor, and it had nothing to do with wanting me to make amends for humiliating her with that song.
Something had twisted inside me then. Something dark. Something wild, and all I’d wanted was revenge. Now, though, I wasn’t sure what I wanted from Lager. I only knew it sure as fuck wasn’t a thumb-drumming lesson at my kitchen table.
“Alright, gringo, tell me what you want. Is it just the kidney?”
It took him a minute, one filled with the small shift of disappointment I thought might be tightening his mouth when I balled my hand into a fist to keep from tapping a tune on the table again. But the disappointment didn’t last long, and Wills frowned, his jaw tightening as he moved his teeth together.
“I don’t want your damn kidney, do I?”
“You tell me, acho.”
“I have a cousin getting tested back in Ireland as we speak. I don’t need your kidney, and that’s not why I’m here.”
“Then tell me why you’re at my kitchen table on Christmas Eve night and coño, please don’t tell me it’s because you’ve gotten all sentimental about the bastard kid you made with some groupie back in the day.”
Wills had laid his hand flat against the surface of the table when I started to speak. Now, though, the relaxed hand tightened, and he squeezed his fingers against his palm as though he wanted to keep himself from strumming a tune again. Like father, like…No. Not going there.
It took him several seconds of quiet contemplation, of setting his features into something that shifted between quick anger to quicker offense, before his mouth relaxed and Lager moved one eyebrow up into an arch. “Don’t think a fat lot of me, do you then?”
“Dios mio, do you honestly care what I think?”
“I…I reckon I don’t. But for now…” Lager sat forward, linking his fingers together in a steeple. “For now,” he repeated, clearing his throat, “I reckon I owe you an apology, though not as big as the one you owe that poor sweet woman, but still one I should have made some time back.”
“How much time back?” I couldn’t help but ask, resentment obvious in my tone, deflecting the conversation I suspected Lager wanted to have about Iris. The producer at CNN had given me a few details in preparation for the interview I skipped out of, but no one had ever said how Lager found out about me or when.
Wills nodded once, a slight movement that almost didn’t register before he sat back, holding my gaze. “You were fifteen.” He didn’t blink at the small noise of surprise that left my mouth. His only reaction at all was the movement of his bottom lip bending behind his front teeth. “I hadn’t been in Indianapolis since that…time with your mother, and
she was the only person I knew there. We had three days. She found me. We spent time together.” He relaxed against the chair when I kept my features neutral, watching, probably wondering what my first thought was. “She looked so much older than I remembered. So damaged, and my heart hurt for her, if I’m honest. I pressed her about her life, how she’d been, and she told me then. About you. She…didn’t seem keen to mention you at all, but seemed destitute and needed…”
“Money?” I asked, knowing how my mother had been then. She hadn’t changed by the time I was fifteen. Or twenty or Twenty-five.
Lager nodded and a frown transformed his face, dimpling the long wrinkles along his eyes. “There were…complications.”
“With?”
He waved me off, silently asking for a second as he rubbed his neck, and I got the impression Wills Lager didn’t like admitting when he’d made a mistake. I wasn’t sure then which fuck-up he regretted most: making me or not doing a damn thing about it when he was told the truth.
“I was in love with someone else. Rita, my manager. Had been for ages. It’s no excuse a’tall, but I was scared what having a child with a…well…” He looked at me, frown deepening as though he didn’t know what I’d thought of my mother then or now.
“I know what she was.”
“Yes, well, having a child I didn’t know about, after so long, I reckon I was scared. I was a bloody coward, wasn’t I? I didn’t want Rita to know. I was scared she’d leave me, and so I offered your mother money. A lot of it. For you, mind. For your upkeep.”
I laughed then, head shaking. “The only thing mi mama ever kept up was the tab at the liquor store and amount of pills in her medicine cabinet. I never saw a dime of your money.”
Wills nodded again, rubbing the tips of his fingers into the grain of the wood surface. “I figured as much. I still sent Juanita a small monthly allowance to ease my guilt, but for you, there was a trust. Well, that is to say, there is a trust.”