Beneath the Stain - Part 2 (5 page)

He shuddered.

He could still hear Mackey croaking out “Cocaine,” making fun of himself while he felt like death. He still remembered Mackey’s scrawny body in the shower, the annoyed way he’d batted at Trav’s hands, and the totally helpless way he’d snuggled into Trav’s arms when Trav had wrapped him in a towel.

As Trav sat at the desk and wrote in one of the few unused spiral notebooks Mackey had stacked in the room, he tried really hard not to let himself wonder how long Mackey could have kept going like that, from gig to gig and fix to fix, before he just stopped.

Years
, he thought with a surprised snort. Kid was fucking tough.

The phone at his ear clicked, pulling Trav out of his weird obsession with the lead singer of what was now, admittedly,
his
band.

“Yeah, Daphne? Yeah. Trav—I’m with Tailpipe again. What do you got for me in a modest mansion?”

Daphne purred happily and started listing various properties up along the canyon, and Trav mulled on the length of the drive to the recording studio in Burbank and rethought that.

“Maybe not,” he muttered. “Okay, maybe North Hollywood—it needs to be closer?”

Daphne always sounded like she was in high school, but she must have been in her thirties at the very least. “Oh, absolutely, Trav. We’ve got some nice houses in North Hollywood. Like twenty minutes from downtown Burbank—or, you know, before six in the morning and after eight, because otherwise….”

Yeah, in LA, there was only one way to finish that sentence. “Traffic,” Trav muttered. “Okay. Let’s go with one of those. Which one can I have in a week?” he said. In a month, when Mackey was out, they could have it all set up, and he could pin up some posters or buy his own goddamned duvet or something. “Yeah, two weeks at the mo—” He broke off when he heard a disturbance in the front room. “Daphne, you have my info—Heath Fowler is taking the expenses for at least the first six months—but I’ve got to bail.”

He hung up without even a good-bye and strode into the living room.

And almost plowed over Mackey Sanders.

“Oh my God you’re short,” he said reflexively. “And what in the hell are you doing here?”

Mackey had seemed small before when he’d been jonesing and sick, but now that he was walking on his own power, clean, with his hair pulled back in a ponytail out of luminous, overlarge gray eyes, he was
still
only five foot six.

“Looking for my spot,” he muttered. “I’m fucking tired. Man, they tell you that you have to recover, but you just don’t buy it, you know?
I
didn’t buy it.
I
thought it was a crock of shit, but no. I’m fucking wiped out. I need to fucking sleep. Where’s my spot?”

His voice was singsong and sarcastic, and for a moment, all Trav could do was stare at him. “Are you
high
?” he asked in outrage.

Mackey shot him a look of pure disgust out from under sandy-blond eyebrows. “After the last four days, are you
shitting
me? I don’t ever wanna be fucking high again. Fucking
Jesus
, do you know what that detoxing thing is like?” He looked at his brothers and bandmates and Shelia (an odd, indefinable quantity Trav was not ready to discuss). “It’s
horrible.
Jefferson, you and Stevie, don’t never start doing the pills, guys, ’cause I know you don’t touch them, but they’re
seriously
bad for you.” He nodded gravely. “Blake, man, give up the fuckin’ blow.” He yawned then and turned around to Trav. “Now where’s my spot? I need to sleep.”

Trav had to remember to close his mouth. “Mackey, I thought you’d be in rehab for a while. I sort of took over your room.”

Mackey shrugged. “I just need to sleep next to the bed,” he said through another yawn. “I’ll be out of your way.” And with that he brushed past Trav into the room, the little knapsack of goods Trav had packed for him hanging on his back like a high school student’s.

Trav watched the door swing shut and tried to remember how his life had gotten completely out of hand.

“He’s not staying,” he said to the mildly surprised band.

Kell snorted. “That’s what you think,” he muttered and then turned back to his own room. He had a girl in there, but Kell and Blake didn’t really talk about their girls. Living with the band was like living in a frat house, except with maid service. And except for the fact that Shelia stayed with Stevie and Jefferson, in their room. Hell, she had her own dresser.

Blake snickered. “Was he fucking serious about the blow? Jesus, what a fuckin’ moron.” And with that he turned to the kitchen, probably to make himself a drink so he could couch. They had an Xbox and a Wii, and Blake was reigning champion.

He was going to get fat, Trav thought meanly, watching as Jefferson, Stevie, and Shelia made plans for Shelia to take them shopping.

God, that was almost normal. Trav sighed and reached into his pocket. “Here,” he said, pulling out his corporate card. “Get some shit for Mackey—shit that fits. Go to the kids’ department if you have to, but try to make him
not
look twelve years old, okay?” He paused. “And
don’t
get any more of those damned crackers!” Every time somebody went out—Kell, Blake, Jefferson/Stevie/Shelia—they came back with a giant box of those Chicken in a Biskit crackers. It was like this weird obsession—they had six boxes of them, and as of yet, nobody had opened
one
of them.

Shelia smiled sunnily. “Yeah, sure.” She took the card and handed it to Stevie, who seemed to handle day-to-day matters for the three of them. “Here, hon. You sign for stuff. Me and Jeff’ll pick it out.”

Stevie smiled at her, his average brown eyes lighting up. He kissed her forehead tenderly. “You guys are real good at that,” he said sweetly, and together, the three of them trooped out, like magical elves or fairies or wizards or something.

Trav sighed. Mackey, he thought, almost with relief. He needed to talk to Mackey.

M
ACKEY
WAS
asleep. Mackey was asleep for the next two days.

True to his word, he’d walked into the bedroom, found a space between the wall and the bed, taken off his pants, and curled up with the comforter. Trav had ordered another comforter from housekeeping and slept in the bed. Mackey barely breathed hard, much less snored—he hadn’t been kidding about it being like no one being there.

Trav did his work around that huddled, sleeping form in the corner—and his first order of business was to talk to the guy Mackey was
supposed
to be “touring” rehab with.

“You just let him walk out?” Trav said after he got the guy on the phone. “All that money to have him bussed there and he just
walked out
?”

“Rehabilitation is a voluntary thing,” Dr. Cambridge said unapologetically. “Mr. Sanders was going to attend all of his classes, all of his programs—we had a deal—and then, the second day, he was sitting in my office for a single session. I asked him a few personal questions and he got up and walked out. And apparently caught a cab to the hotel.”

Trav grunted. Mackey had paid with his corporate card. It had been a $200 cab ride.

“But… he’s not cured!” Trav sputtered. “He’s an
addict
. They need
treatment
, not just detox!” God, everybody knew that!

“I agree,” Dr. Cambridge said mildly. “No. He may not be high, but he’s definitely not clean and sober yet. The first trigger, the first sign of stress, he’ll be using something as a crutch, even if it’s just a beer. The very little I know about him tells me that, and everything I know about rehab confirms it. Mr. Sanders is going to have to come back here. But unless he’s court ordered, we can’t make him stay.”

Trav grunted. “Can we sort of reserve a place for him?” he asked, wondering if Heath would recover from the bills the boys were racking up. “I mean, I know you need to fill his spot with people—”

“I give it two weeks,” the doctor said, his voice dry. “I’ll keep a space open for him for the next two months, but he’ll be back here in two weeks. I’m sure of it. You only need to pay for the time he spends here.” The doctor’s voice grew growly. “I am going to get another crack at this kid’s head if I have to crank his music at top volume for the whole two weeks.”

Against everything Trav knew about himself, he found he was laughing. “Oh God,” he muttered, trying not to just lay his face in his arms. “He got to you too.”

“He’s a very original young man,” Dr. Cambridge said defensively. Trav couldn’t really gainsay him. Damn
it, Mackey, could you just make things easy?

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be seeing him soon,” Trav muttered. He’d live to regret those words.

T
HE
THIRD
day after Mackey came back, Trav found a house—six bedrooms, attached baths, and a music studio, because LA was where musicians came to party. Heath okayed the lease for a year, and they’d be able to move in the next week. Mackey at rehab or Mackey with them, the band was getting a home, and a studio, and hopefully a little closer to getting their shit together.

Trav remembered managing Pineapple Express. The guys had spent ten years working clubs before Heath signed them on. They’d had their own homes, they knew how to live on the road, and sure, they’d gone out and partied plenty. Trav had even kicked back a few drinks with them.  They knew how to stop and they knew how to work, and they knew how to treat it like the world’s greatest job but a job just the same. He’d decided to go into consulting because he wanted a chance for a relationship, for a home, not because managing for that group had been too intense, or too painful, or too much of a pain in the ass.

They’d thrown him a going-away party, with a cake and a silly plaque that had been one of the few things he kept after the breakup. He’d felt needed and competent and like he’d done a good job—but he hadn’t been too closely intertwined with their lives. Sure, he knew who was dating and who broke up and if someone needed some chicken soup and some cold meds. He’d canceled a week’s worth of concerts once because the lead singer and the lead guitarist had picked up the flu and he hadn’t wanted them to perform when they could barely stand. He’d flown in a girlfriend and a wife from across the country to care for them and even hired a babysitter, because the guitarist’s wife kept squirting out babies like a fish and she didn’t want to haul them all cross-country.

But he’d never been their family.
His
family was in a nice house upstate, where he visited his perfectly normal, repressed, WASP parents, and his brother and sister, who got him off the hook for the childbearing thing and generally dealt with the world in a sane, rational manner.

He did
not
room with five balls of testosterone and angst in a hotel room in Burbank, dammit!

Somehow, rooming in a house in North Hollywood sounded better.

The second night after Mackey returned, Trav woke up to the sound of music. The light was on at the desk, and Mackey sat there in a new white T-shirt and a pair of the briefs Trav had ordered, playing the guitar gently and making notations in the last clean spiral notebook. He’d obviously been up for a while, because a few empty cans of soda sat on the desk, and a once-full box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers. Trav stared at the box for a minute and felt an absurd little punch near his spleen.

All those people he didn’t understand, buying those stupid fucking crackers. Even Kell, whom Trav wanted to blame for half of Mackey’s problems, had bought the stupid fucking crackers.

For Mackey. Even when they thought he was going to be gone.

Mackey was picking out a melody, something harsh and astringent interspersed with something seductive and sweet.

Trav listened to it for a moment and waited until Mackey put the next bit on paper.

“The harsh part,” he said, propping his head on his hand and squinting into the light. “That’s the part where you do the primal screaming and the guitar cacophony, right?”

Mackey looked up at him and smiled, and Trav realized that he had a fox’s face. His cheekbones were supposed to be sharp, and so was his chin. But with his hair scraped back from his face in a queue, his eyes were huge, probably because he weighed less than mouse shit and there was so little flesh in his thin face.

Even in the lamplight, Trav could tell he had freckles, fading with adulthood, but still faint.

And his smile was like a little boy’s.

“Yeah,” Mackey said with deep satisfaction. “Gonna be a good song. If I’d known rehab would gimme such good shit to write about, I would have done it months ago.”

Trav was no longer sleepy. He sat up, crossing his legs under the sheets. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, but suddenly Mackey’s youth and vulnerability made Trav feel… inappropriate.

“Well, yeah,” he said, hating to bring this up. “But you’ve only been through detox. Rehab’s a different fish, Mackey.”

Mackey stopped making the notations for a minute, then frowned and kept working. Trav wanted to argue with him—he did. But he’d lived with Terry for three years. Terry made a living with his paintings, and Trav had seen it firsthand. Interrupting that kind of concentration was cruel. Trav could wait.

Mackey kept working for a few moments, then set the guitar down and turned toward Trav like he’d just asked the question.

“Why?” Mackey asked, pulling his mouth up. “I don’t want the shit anymore. My body don’t need it. I just need some sleep and I’ll be—”

“Addicted,” Trav said flatly. He’d seen guys get addicted in the Army. The boredom, the stress—it’d do it to you every time. Tracking those guys down had sucked. They’d been absolutely sure that if they explained why they
needed
the drugs, all would be forgiven. “Just because your body doesn’t need it doesn’t mean there’s not stuff in your
mind
that needs it, Mackey. You were open to it. It’s not like you took one pill and got hooked. Not even one hit of coke. It’s that it happened again and again.”