Public Secrets

demerit. “Come over at ten, and I’ll give you the notes. Then you can do it.”
“Fine.”
Teresa put her hands on her earlobes. “I can’t wait.”
“Neither can I.” She waited until the door closed. “Little shit,” she muttered, then moved over to drape an arm around Emma’s shoulders. “You okay?”

“It never goes away.” She stared at the picture. It was a good one, she thought dispassionately, well focused, well lit. The faces weren’t blurred, the expressions quite clear. It was easy, all too easy to see the hate in her mother’s eyes. “Do you think I could be like her?”
“Like who?”
“My mother.”
“Come on, Emma. You haven’t even seen her since you were a baby.”
“There’s genes, heredity and all that.”
“All that’s bull.”
“Sometimes I’m mean. Sometimes I want to be mean, the way she was.”
“So what?” She rose to take Springsteen off. Sister Immaculata might come along any minute and confiscate it. “Everybody’s mean sometimes. That’s because our flesh is weak and we’re loaded with sin.”
“I hate her.” It was a relief to say it, a terrible, terrible relief. “I hate her. And I hate Bev for not wanting me, and Da for putting me here. I hate the men who killed Darren. I hate them all. She hates everyone, too. You can see it in her eyes.”
“It’s okay. Sometimes I hate everyone. And I don’t even know your mother.”
That made her laugh. She couldn’t say why, but it made her laugh. “Neither do I, I guess.” She sniffled, sighed. “I hardly remember her.”
“There, you see.” Satisfied, Marianne plopped down again. “If you don’t remember her, you can’t be like her.”
It sounded logical, and she needed to believe it. “I don’t look like her.”
Wanting to judge fairly, Marianne took up the article and studied the pictures. “Not a bit. You’ve got your father’s bone structure and coloring. Take it from an artist.”
Emma lifted a hand to her tender lobes. “Are you really going to pierce Teresa’s ears?”
“You bet—with the dullest needle I can find. Want to do one?”
Emma grinned.

Chapter Sixteen

S TEVIE HAD NEVER been so scared. There were bars all around and the steady drip, drip, drip, of a faucet somewhere down the hall. Voices were raised occasionally and echoed. There was the shuffling of feet, then the godawful silence.
He needed a fix. His body was trembling, sweating. His stomach was knotted, refusing to let him release the nausea in the scarred porcelain John in the corner. His nose and eyes were running. It was the flu, he told himself. He had the freaking flu and they’d locked him up. He needed a bloody doctor, and they’d shut him up and left him to rot. Sitting on the cot, he brought his knees up to his chest, pushing his back into the wall.
He was Stevie Nimmons. He was the greatest guitarist of his generation. He was somebody. But they had put him in a cage like an animal. They had locked him up and walked away. Didn’t they know who he was? What he’d made himself?
He needed a fix. Oh Jesus, just one sweet fix. Then he’d be able to laugh this off.
It was cold. It was so goddamn cold. He yanked the blanket from the cot and huddled under it. And he was thirsty. His mouth was so dry he couldn’t even work up enough spit to swallow.
Someone would come, he thought as his eyes began to fill. Someone would come and make it all right again. Someone would fix it. Oh God, he needed a fix. His mother would come and tell him everything had been taken care of.

It hurt. He began to weep against his knees as the pain wracked through him. Every breath he took seemed to hold tiny slivers of glass. His muscles were on fire, his skin like ice.
Just one. Just one toke, one hit, one line, and he’d be all right again.
Didn’t they know who the fuck he was?
“Stevie.”
He heard his name. With eyes bleary with tears, he looked toward the cell door. Dragging the back of his hand over his mouth, he struggled to focus. He tried to laugh, but the sound came out in a whooping sob as he struggled up. Pete. Pete could fix it.
He tripped over the blanket, and lay sprawled on the floor a moment as Pete watched him. Stevie’s body was stick-thin. His legs angled awkwardly out from it and ended in five-hundred-pound snakeskin boots. His face as he pushed himself up was gray and pasty with lines dug deep and dug hard. The whites of his eyes were streaked fiery red. There was a trickle of blood from his lip where he