Always Box Set

by Ward, Susan

  “Only you would think giving a woman a key is a romantic gesture.”

  She just pivoted in conversation—damn—but I let her.

  “It was, at the time,” I reminded her. “I think of that night every time I look at the key to your apartment you gave me.”

  “Oh, Jack, it’s ridiculous what I let you think is romantic and can get away with. I was expecting a ring in the box or some kind of jewelry. Something a little romance-like.”

  “I want to give you things other than money can buy. You’ve got jewelry. That key was me giving you my heart. When you say you’ll marry me, you’ll get a ring. File for divorce, Linda. Pack your bags. Come here and see what’s in your box for Christmas.”

  “Probably you in my box,” she said suggestively. I laughed because I hadn’t said that well, and she had a delightfully dirty mind.

  “Would that be so bad if I were the only thing in your box?”

  She laughed, husky and exasperated. “Stop flirting with me. I’m not changing my mind.” She exhaled heavily. “Jack, I can’t come for Christmas. The time isn’t right.”

  “The time was right for me six years ago.”

  “Can we not have that conversation today, Jack? I don’t need to be included in every part of your life.”

  “I need you included, baby. You know that. Fine, I’ll let it go for today and settle for what you can give me. When can you carve out some time to meet me somewhere? A few days. Don’t make me beg.”

  “I’d loved to, Jack, but things are kind of crazy here right now.”

  She sounded grim and worried—and I didn’t want her dragging me back into the Alan Manzone conversation again, but I could tell she needed to talk about it with me.

  “I’ve been keeping track in the papers. Not good. Any new news?”

  “Nothing you haven’t read. I wish there was something I could do. I feel so useless waiting in New York while Len tries to deal with Alan. I don’t know how I let things get so out of hand with him. It’s like something just snapped and he went crazy. I’ve never seen Alan like this. I’m so afraid, Jack.”

  I sat up in bed. “Your job stopped being handling Alan Manzone for the label six years ago, Linda, and whatever he does, that’s about him and not you. The kid is an addict, baby. He doesn’t need a reason to start shooting up again. And there is nothing you could have done to stop him. If he’s determined to blow up his career, he’s going to do it. It’s not your failure if he does. You need to take care of you and stay out of it. He needs to climb out, to want to on his own.”

  She was sniffing back tears. “I love Alan, Jack. He’s like a brother to me. I don’t care about his career. I care about him. I want him to be OK. And I really think this time he’s not going to make it.”

  I sighed. “I know, baby. But that’s not in your hands. It’s in his.”

  “I need to do something. It’s driving me crazy not being able to help. Maybe you could go to Chicago, see Len, put together a plan or something. Nothing more. I wouldn’t ask if there was anything else left to do—”

  “I can’t, Linda,” I said before she could finish. “Don’t ask me to. I can’t.”

  “I know, Jack,” she said softly and she sounded so damn sad.

  I felt like a bastard, but even for her, I couldn’t step in and try to stop the train wreck that was Alan Manzone. That part of her life was no go, bad memories for me, just like Chrissie was for her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I understand, and it was wrong for me to ask you to. You accept the things I can’t do and I don’t want from you anything you can’t do.”

  “Think about spending some time with me. I think that’s something we need to do. Someone needs to take care of you, Linda. Let me take care of you. That’s what’s important to me.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she whispered. “I should let you go. We’ve been on the phone for hours. I shouldn’t eat up all your time while Chrissie is home from school.”

  “Don’t you ever let me go, baby,” I said, suddenly emotional.

  “Talk to you tomorrow, Jack.”

  “I’ll call you first thing in the morning. Try not to worry. Take care of yourself. Remember, there’s a guy in California who needs you to be OK and loves you.”

  I clicked off the phone before she answered me.

  I stared at it in my hand.

  I hated disappointing Linda.

  My impulse was to give her anything she asked for, but the problem was I couldn’t. Not this. Part of maintaining sobriety was avoiding emotional triggers, and Alan Manzone was that for me.

  I tossed down the cordless and left the bedroom.

  Rene and Chrissie were still slouched down on a couch in the family room, legs propped on the coffee table, talking to each other with music TV blasting in the background, exactly as I’d left them two hours ago.

  “Why are you still in here?” I asked them. “Why don’t you go outside? Go to the beach or something. Staying indoors all day, Chrissie, is not good. You know the house rule. Two hours of TV. No more.”

  I went to switch it off and both girls rallied in alarm.

  “Don’t turn it off, Daddy. How can you expect us to stop watching? This is important.”

  I frowned. “Important?”

  “Like the most important thing ever,” Rene said fiercely, and they both nodded.

  I looked at the screen. Oh Christ, the Alan Manzone marathon was still on. They’d been running nonstop Blackpoll videos for two days, the tickertape on the bottom running endless trivia about his life and news updates since Alan had ridden that motorcycle off stage into the crowd, injuring two fans and being arrested.

  I sat down on the arm of the couch and stared down at the girls. Jesus Christ, it felt like he’d sucked the oxygen out of my life and I didn’t even know the kid.

  “Can you explain something to me? What’s his appeal to you two?”

  “Are you joking?” Rene asked, her expression exactly something I would have seen on Patty’s face.

  “No, not joking,” I told her.

  “Well, he’s like the most beautiful guy ever, for one thing,” Rene said intently.

  “That’s it? That’s the entire fascination? You think he’s hot?”

  Chrissie made a face at me for using the word hot, and then her bright blue eyes went wide, serious and heated. “Jeez, Daddy, if anyone should understand how important he is to music I would have thought it was you. What his music is. What he is to my generation.”

  I didn’t get it.

  I’d only met Alan once, before he was star, when Linda had first started working for him and he had been trying to seduce her. I knew the broad strokes of his career, but nothing improved my opinion of him.

  He was part of what fucked up my life with Linda eight years ago. Nope, didn’t need to know more about him than that. And both Linda’s affection and fierce loyalty to him definitely bothered me. The kid was brilliant, no doubt about that, he was fast becoming an indelible mark on the history of music, but—nope, Linda’s relationship with him would never make sense to me.

  Neither would these girls’ infatuation with him.

  “Explain it to me, Chrissie. What do you think makes him so extraordinary?”

  She turned to face me. “Well, he’s like the voice of my generation. He feels everything we feel. Like there isn’t a point because there isn’t anything to love in the world anymore, but he’s hopeful in a dark way, because all he wants is someone to love him.”

  Keeping my expression carefully stripped of reaction, I studied her face. Jesus, she was serious, but then Chrissie was immature for her age and complicated and, fuck, a whole lot of things I didn’t understand. She was so intense about this it made me uncomfortable.

  I shifted my gaze to Rene. “Why don’t you try to explain it to me?”

  She bounced to sit on her knees.

  “You’ve read Anne Rice, hav
en’t you? He’s like the vampire Lestat, only you want him to bite you. You want him to drag you into the darkness because he’ll fill you so completely there won’t be emptiness in you ever again. You want to love him and for him to love you.”

  I wanted the fuck out of this conversation.

  I sprang to my feet and looked around for the remote—it was clutched fiercely in Rene’s hand in a way that said I wouldn’t get it without a fight—so I moved to shut off the TV.

  “That’s it. No more videos today. You can tell your mother to thank me later, Rene.”

  “Daddy!” Chrissie said like I was torturing her or something.

  “Jack!” Rene said, equally in pain.

  I hit the button on the cable box.

  “You can’t do that,” Chrissie said fiercely.

  “Ah, I can. Get out of here. You are not spending the entire winter break glued to the set to get the latest breaking news on Alan Manzone.”

  “I can’t believe you did that,” Rene exclaimed. “It’s like you’ve become a fascist or something.”

  I narrowed my eyes and shook my head at her. “Nice try. Turning off the TV after ten hours doesn’t make you a fascist. Go to the mall. Go shopping. Just go be normal teenage girls for a change.”

  Chrissie gave me a heavily exasperated look. “We are being normal girls, Daddy.”

  Rene crossed her arms instantly. “Would you insist on censoring the news if it were Dylan?”

  Just like her father. I dropped a silly kiss on her head. “I would if you wanted Dylan to bite you on the neck, drag you into the darkness, and love you.”

  “Gross, Daddy. That’s not the least bit funny.”

  “Sort of funny.” I grinned at Chrissie before I walked from the room. I called back at them, “I don’t want to hear that TV again. Not today. Maybe not ever.”

  Groaning came from the family room followed by stomping feet, jingling car keys, and the front door slamming.

  Perfect.

  I was lying in my bed, reading, waiting for the girls to get home. It was after ten before I heard the front door slam, a knock on my door and a fast “Night, Daddy,” then Chrissie’s door shut.

  I tossed my book on the nightstand, turned out my light, and stretched out in bed. It was well past 2:00 a.m. and nothing was going to get me sleeping this night. Whether I wanted to or not, the news of the day dragged me through things I didn’t want to relive.

  My failings with my son.

  My regrets.

  I was staring at the ceiling when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Jack. Sorry to call so late.”

  It was my manager.

  “No, that’s fine. What’s going on?”

  “I didn’t know who else to call,” he said, and then I knew why he’d called. My manager was Alan Manzone’s, too.

  I switched on the light. Brian Craig sounded distraught.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Alan Manzone OD’d tonight. Len Rowan was with him. A suicide attempt. It hasn’t hit print and I’ve got him tucked away in a hospital in Chicago. Some place no one can get at him until I can do something—”

  “Is he going to make it?” I asked.

  “This time. But I don’t know how to pull him back from the edge. He just can’t accept that his daughter is dead.”

  “Daughter? What are you taking about?”

  “He had a little girl. Molly. He was crazy about that little girl. She was everything to him. She died a year ago, and he’s been out of his mind ever since.”

  Fuck.

  For the first time there was something about Alan Manzone I understood. I knew what it felt like to lose a child.

  “Where is he, Brian?”

  “Mercy Hospital. On a seventy-two-hour psych hold. He’s checked in under his real name. Alan Wells.”

  “Don’t tell anyone, Brian. Not even Linda. I’m flying to Chicago. Maybe there is something I can do.”

  Click.

  I cut out on the girls the next morning after telling them I had a thing out of town that I needed to take care of for a few days.

  Thing.

  Chrissie hated that term.

  But thing was a euphemism for stuff she resented—the demands of my career. And stuff she didn’t know—Linda.

  I found Alan Manzone, unconscious, restrained, and handcuffed to the bed when I got to Mercy Hospital, but all I could see when he finally opened his eyes was grief. He was angry and ungrateful when he noticed me sitting next to his bed, but the hostility made me more certain than ever that I wasn’t going to give up on him.

  He had too much fight and anger in him. This kid didn’t want to die. He just wanted help finding his way out of the darkness.

  I chased Alan down when he bolted from the hospital.

  I took him back to detox.

  I flew with him to California and checked him into rehab.

  Chrissie was back at school, so after Alan’s thirty-day program I brought him home for one of my four-month recovering-addict stays in my pool house.

  All the things I’d done for Vincent Delmo and a dozen others before Alan.

  I didn’t tell Chrissie or Linda what I was doing, not at the time. In hindsight, with how it worked out, I’m still not sure if the smarter move would have been to tell them or whether I was right that I hadn’t.

  Forty-Six

  After four months with Alan Manzone, my opinion of the kid was—somewhat—altered. There was a lot more to this young man than I first suspected or had ever bothered to get to know. Some things I learned surprised me and others didn’t.

  Not a surprise—he came by being fucked up honestly. Life had taught me most people did. His background, for different reasons, was like Linda’s. Everyone he’d ever known had been pretty much a disappointment and using him for something.

  A pleasant surprise—he all but idolized Linda. Not because of how beautiful she was. Not in a romantic, sexual or otherwise prowling kind of way. He was a man who could spot the remarkable in other people and respected it.

  He was also more than just brilliant musically; he was the first real genius I’d ever met. He knew every minute detail about everything, down to how things worked, in that every-fact-about-everything way Georgie had, except from Alan it wasn’t annoying.

  Both his mind and his heart he hid behind his powerful dark looks and his at times posh manners—the kind you don’t see anywhere else but from an upper-crust Brit—that could disappear in a blink of an eye into someone you’d think was a criminal or a gangbanger.

  Some afternoons with him were liked being trapped in the family room with Rene having the TV control. Switching channels. Over and over again. Flashes of one show and then another. Yep, that’s what being with Alan was like. A never-ending shift into the different men he wanted to be in any given moment.

  I could see why Linda cared about him, the similarities between them, even if—as Rene said—he was the most beautiful guy ever. Seeing him in real life instead of in print, you couldn’t deny that, in spite of the fact he had turned his body into practically an ink factory.

  Even the endless tattoos were both camouflage and revealing of who Alan was. They weren’t part of a hard rock image he was trying to sell, though they didn’t hurt, but were in fact a mural of things significant to him. Like the star surrounded by turbulent waves I’d spotted on his lower left abdomen while he was sunning by the pool.

  Lena liked researching baby names, their history, and meaning. A star surrounded by a sea was the Irish meaning for the name Molly. And it rested above the coiled snakes that ran down his hip, their heads pointing to his groin.

  Hate for himself; unending love for his child.

  At least that’s what I thought it meant.

  I didn’t ask.

  Fuck, what did it matter? The guy was a mess. A remarkable, complex, and—yes—interesting mess. A little steadier than he’d b
een when I first brought him home, but a long way from being in control and ready to go it alone in the New York circus again.

  His mysteries, the many I hadn’t figured out yet, would leave with him because it was his last day in Santa Barbara, and I was sending him away.

  Just like I’d done to Vincent Delmo after four months.

  But I wasn’t quite sure it was the right move for Alan.

  It didn’t matter.

  He wanted to leave, get back to New York and finish the album he’d started here with me, and that was how this worked. The guys in recovery called their own shots and one by one I watched musician after musician leave Hope Ranch to return back to their lives.

  Some made it.

  Some didn’t.

  I wasn’t sure which Alan Manzone would be, but I wouldn’t have bet money on him being in the first category.

  It was dusk. I was sitting alone with Alan by the pool. Liam and the band had come up a few weeks ago, and we’d all just hung out, my twelvers club, jamming in the studio with the kid when the kid wasn’t working on the album he’d started after his thirty-day program.

  Everyone had taken off for dinner but us. I was scheduled at Chrissie’s school to watch her spring recital, and Alan was still shaky about being with people without me.

  “You’re going to be all right, Alan,” I said, clutching my coffee and staring out at the ocean. “Keep working the steps. It never goes away. Remember that. And that I’m here for you. Any time you need to call, pick up the phone.”

  “Thanks, Jack,” he said quietly. “I truly appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

  I studied him covertly—nope, he wasn’t ready to leave.

  I checked my watch, set down my coffee, and stood up. “I’ve got to hit it. I don’t want to be late to the school tonight. My daughter hates it when I’m late.”

  He laughed in a sad, remembering kind of way.

  Then he stood up. “I have something for you. Or rather Chrissie. I thought she might like it tonight. Performing and all.”

  I frowned but followed him to the pool house anyway.