Exquisitely Hidden: A Sin City Tale

by M. Jay Granberry

  He doesn’t sit as much as collapse on the edge of the bed, bending over the tops of his thickly muscled thighs to pull on his sneakers that oddly enough have the same camouflage as his shorts. I place the guitar on the floor and sit on the bed behind him, wrapping my arms around his chest and pulling him into my arms, my head coming to rest on his shoulder. His muscles are tensed under my touch, humming with poorly concealed annoyance.

  “Where is this hotel?” I say into his ear. Depending on the specifics, his little impromptu trip might work. He drops his head forward with resignation, chin landing on my hand as he forces his body to relax further into my hold.

  “I booked an Airbnb on the beach.”

  “So, it’ll just be you there?”

  “I don’t know who’s going to be on the beach, or in a car next to me on the street.” He tries to lean out of my hold, but I don’t let go.

  “An Airbnb is like a house, right? Not a hotel or some place that has people coming and going all the time.”

  “It’s a small, two-bedroom house, on the beach. Nothing like this, or what you’re used to . . .”

  “I’m not used to this. I’ve only had this for four years. When I stayed in the group homes, nine times out of ten I had a dirty mattress and I had to roll the sheets around my body to make it hard for the fucking predators in those homes to get to me while I slept.”

  It’s only when he turns his head toward me, his eyes searching mine, that I realize I used my outside voice. As a general rule of thumb, I don’t talk about my past with anyone. Very little of it is pretty. There are things I experienced, things I had to do to survive that no child should know, let alone act out. People like Seth can’t fathom that type of depravity. Seth is good, he comes from people that are good. In his mind the big bad is limited to enemies on foreign shores.

  “I’ll go,” I say in a rush.

  Hoping to replace the concern in that gaze with something lighter, he reaches up, placing his palm against my cheek and resting his thumb on my lips. His eyes don’t release mine when he dips his head down, replacing his thumb with a kiss so tender it spreads like balm across my mind. It’s a kiss so tender it pushes those memories back into the dark where they belong, replacing them with the here and now.

  Seth rented a red, open-top Jeep for the trip. Said it would handle better on the sand. I have no idea why we’d need to drive on the sand, but hey, what the hell.

  I’ve never done the whole get-away-for-a-weekend thing. I’ve seen two of the world’s seven wonders: Christ the Redeemer in Brazil and Chichen Itza in Mexico. I have pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum in Rome, but that was work. Sitting in the passenger seat beside Seth, fighting over who had a bigger impact on hip-hop, Jay-Z or Nas—totally Nas. Having the freedom to reach out and touch him without worrying about people watching or cameras flashing, and without being trapped under the scrutiny of the magnifying glass I lived under daily is nice. This trip is a kind of freedom I haven’t had in four years.

  I hold onto one of the black roll bars as Seth takes a tight corner. This thing drives like an ATV, nothing but bumps and bones rattling, and I can’t wait to get behind the wheel.

  The Pacific comes into view, and I enjoy the uninterrupted line of the horizon. I take in the cresting waves, the deserted beach, and the seemingly endless miles of blue sky unblemished by a single cloud. The asphalt disappears as Seth turns onto a gravel road almost hidden by overgrown trees. It takes another couple of minutes before we get to the small, brightly colored house.

  He pulls to a stop and cuts the engine. We both jump out of the truck and snatch our duffel bags off the back seat. Seth enters a code into the digital lock and the door swings open. Contrary to the simple stucco exterior, the inside is new and well adorned.

  The entry gives way to an open floor plan. In one glance I can see the kitchen with its copper tile backsplash and stainless-steel appliances, the living room with its bright white walls, the large flat-screen TV hanging on the wall, and the cream-colored sofa with an area rug underneath it.

  “Nice, right?” he asks. I turn, watching him close the door, dropping the bag at his feet.

  “Yeah, it’s super nice.”

  “I was able to talk to the owner before we left. The fridge should be stocked. You hungry?”

  “I could eat,” I say, but instead of moving into the kitchen I walk the two steps to Seth. He watches me under heavy lids, body relaxed, and lounging against the door. I stand well within his personal space and place a chaste kiss on his lips.

  “Thank you.”

  After seeing this place, how it’s off the beaten path and secluded from heavy traffic and wandering eyes, I know without a question he chose it with me in mind. The fact he asked the owner to purchase groceries, which I’m sure cost him a pretty penny, renting the house and Jeep in his name, all little things but what it makes me feel so much more than sexual attraction. I fee chosen.

  “At least let me reimburse you for the house.” This trip, although romantic, had to put a hefty dent in his bank account.

  “I got this, baby,” he grumbles.

  Seth makes me feel . . . adored. And not because I’m Adam Beckham, lead guitarist for Sin City. I’ve never had someone do this for me, make me feel chosen and special.

  “No, you don’t,” I say, wanting to reciprocate his kindness and adoration. “I’ll send the money in Zelle. Let me get my phone.”

  I go to move away from him, but he stops the retreat with a hand on the back of my neck. “You’re welcome, baby,” he says against my lips, drawing me forward in a kiss that is as quiet as it is stirring.

  My phone rings and I pull away on a moan.

  “Leave it.” Seth kisses the pulse point under my ear when I fish the device out of my pocket. I look at the screen; I don’t recognize the number, but based on the 702 area code it’s Vegas. Dread tightens my stomach. Only one person in Vegas would call me from an unknown number.

  My mom.

  Seth

  Adam freezes under my lips. I lean back and look at the phone. The screen flashes the word unknown and a number I’m not familiar with. He hits the green button, raising the device to his ear.

  “Hello?” he croaks.

  Listening for a moment. “Yes, this is Adam Beckham.” He nods at the voice coming through the speaker. I’m close enough to hear it’s a female, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. Instinct makes me stay close, so I wrap my arms around him, pulling him close.

  “I’m not in the valley but if she needs money or something, I can have it wired from . . .”

  He stops talking again, and I watch helplessly as he pales, eyes squeezing shut.

  “Did she . . . ?” He nods again and, in a voice so low I can barely hear it, he says, “Oh . . . okay.”

  The woman on the phone is still talking and when he starts to tremble, I rip the phone from his grasp.

  “I’m sorry . . . I have a what?” His eyes snap open to mine and the panic in their depth raises my hackles. What in the fuck is this phone call about? I can’t make heads or tails from his side of the conversation.

  “What’s her name?” He listens for another beat. “Victoria Taylor,” he repeats in staccato.

  “Where is she?”

  He listens to the answer, and I can tell the moment whatever she says sinks in because distress pours off him in waves. “No,” he whispers, white-knuckling the phone.

  She keeps talking and he sags into me with relief. “Of course.” He rattles off an email address and what I’m assuming is a home address. “Please do. Thank you,” he mutters before disconnecting the call.

  My God. His face is so vulnerable. He looks like the world just crumbled through his fingers, and I want to shoot whoever put that look on his face. I want to fix it. Make it better so I never have to see that look of heartbreak ever again.

  “Adam?” He doesn’t respond. He stares at me unseeing. His mind still on the conversation, or the news, or . . . I
look at that vacant stare and admit I have no idea where his mind is at the present, but I know it’s not here.

  “Baby? Who was that on the phone?” I ask, shaking him a little.

  He blinks at me once, then twice, and a third time, his throat working over the words that seem to be trapped behind the emotion clogging the air around us.

  “Diane Carter,” he says quietly. I try to place the name. I read file after file on the members of the band, and I can’t remember seeing that name.

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s a . . .” He clears his throat. “A social worker.”

  “A social worker?” Really? Why is a social worker calling him? None of this makes any sense.

  “Ah . . . yeah. She called to say . . . to let me know that my mom, she . . . um . . . died of an overdose about a week ago.”

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” I say immediately.

  He only says, “It’s okay.”

  This has to be shock. If I’d just found out my mom died unexpectedly . . . I can’t call it but it damn sure wouldn’t be fine.

  “Did you know the first time she OD’d I was six years old?” he says, his voice a little too matter of fact. “Even at six I knew better than to call 911. I went to the neighbor’s house instead. I knew she took the same medicine”—he raises his fingers in air quotes—“as my mom. So, I thought she’d know what to do, and I was right. She did. I watched her stab my mom in the heart with an EpiPen to restart her heart. I was so scared.” He wrings his hands with enough force I’m sure he’ll rub the skin off. “That was the first time she promised to get clean. That promise didn’t even last a week.”

  Jesus. That’s some awful shit. I have the image of a six-year-old Adam with a head of curly blond hair and crystalline blue eyes watching as one junkie revived another. I hurt for that boy and for the man in my arms still aching from those memories.

  “Do you have to go home to deal with the remains?” I ask gently.

  He shakes his head, turning it to the side, and taking a long inhale. “My mom’s been cremated. The social worker said that I have a . . .” He clears his throat a couple of times before he continues, “I have a sister named Victoria. She’s three and the state has been awarded temporary custody.” His voice breaks and his chest hitches with a sob.

  That sound breaks my heart. I don’t have all of his stories but based on the few things he’s let slip I can only imagine the horrible things his sister might be subjected to.

  I raise a hand to his cheek and try to turn his face back toward mine, but he struggles. He turns his body away, curling in on himself. I half drag, half pull him to the sectional where he collapses in the cushions, leaning his elbows on his knees, and throws his head in his hands.

  I kneel at his feet, placing my hands over the tops of his. “Baby, look at me,” I say quietly and raise his head so our faces are level.

  “Please . . .”

  He blinks, his eyes red-rimmed as they start to glass over. He tries to pull his face from my hands, but I don’t let go. I’m never letting go. He’s always there for everyone else. It’s time that someone was there for him.

  “Tell me what else she said.”

  His face is flushed from the effort to keep the tears at bay. I watch him struggle as he tries to choke this misery back down wherever he buried it.

  Let it go, baby. I’ll catch you when you fall.

  I guide his head to the crook of my neck, and he burrows into me, arms coming around my waist, and almost immediately I feel the hot wash of tears.

  “Shhh, baby. It’s okay. It’ll all be okay,” I murmur in his ear. I have no idea if there’s any truth to my words, but if I have anything to say about it there will be.

  The sun is low on the horizon. The last rays of the day creep between the open curtains, falling across the room onto the furniture casting long shadows by the time his tears dry and his body quiets. Without a word I thread my fingers with his and come to my feet. I lead him down the narrow hallway to what I hope is the master bedroom.

  If the king-sized bed in the middle of the room is any indication, I made the right choice.

  “You want the bed or a shower?” I ask.

  “Bed,” he says flatly as if the weight of emotion has drained his voice of inflection.

  Bed it is.

  I bend down to loosen the laces of the heavy motorcycle boots he insisted on wearing even when he knew we were coming to the beach. Taking off first one and then the other, followed by his socks. With inordinate care I peel off his red T-shirt, crinkling the picture of the Smashing Pumpkins over his head. I unsnap his jeans and pull both them and his underwear down his long legs. I make quick work of removing my clothes and together we get under the cool sheets.

  He comes to me willingly, accepting my embrace with ease. He rests his head over my heart and clamps his arms around my middle. He’s so still, so quiet that I’m a little surprised when his hoarse voice comes at me in the dark. “She said they prefer to place a child with a family member if possible. Since I’m Victoria’s only family it’s either me or the system.”

  Oh wow. They want Adam to take custody of his little sister. “When is the last time you saw Victoria?”

  “I’ve never met her. Me and my mom . . . we . . . our relationship, it was . . . complicated,” he finally says, sucking in a hard breath. Complicated is putting it nicely. I can come up with some better adjectives: dysfunctional, abusive, fucked all to hell all work better than complicated, but I don’t say that. He doesn’t need me to point out the messed-up dynamics of his relationship with his mother.

  Shit, that’s a lot. A lot of stress, a lot of damn responsibility for the man that already feels the need to shoulder the weight of the world, at least his world.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The only thing I can do. Convince Sin to take the residency in Vegas, and get my sister.” He quiets again and it doesn’t take long for his breaths to even out, but even in sleep he’s fitful. Struggling against the demons from his past.

  Adam

  “That’s right, Adam, tie it tight, real tight so you see the bump.” I wrap the flexible rubber tube around the fleshy part of her upper arm, making it as tight as I can.

  “Good job. Now hand Momma the spoon and her medicine.”

  The lighter flickers under the blackened spoon and the white powder dissolves into a dirty brown liquid. She drops a small piece of cotton into the fluid, waiting until the fiber is heavy and unable to absorb another drop. She pierces the cotton with a long needle, drawing the liquid into the empty cylinder. Carefully she depresses the plunger, pushing the poison to the tip, flicking the needle to remove the remaining air bubbles. She injects the weakly pulsing vein at her inner elbow.

  She untwines the wrap from her arm and her eyes roll to the back of her head and her jaw goes slack. I catch her as she falls forward off the toilet lid. I prop her up against the cracked and broken tiles of the dirty gas station bathroom wall, and I sit next to her, making sure her head is on my shoulder, and wait . . .

  I jerk awake to my pounding heart. It’s been years since I dreamed of my mother and the drugs.

  “You okay?” Seth asks, his voice strong and clear, unmarred by sleep.

  No, I’m not okay, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay again. After all this time the heroin finally did her in and a part of me feels relieved. I’ll never receive another phone call asking for a loan to start a new business or money to pay rent. I’ll never again have to hear the hateful speeches about how I should’ve been aborted when I don’t give her what she feels she has coming. I’m not surprised by her death, but I’m surprised by how much it hurts.

  For most of my life I hated her for choosing drugs over me, for not staying clean, and for putting me in compromising situations where I got hurt and violated. Apparently, I was still holding out hope that she’d get better. And now she never will.

  “What time is it? Did you sleep at all?” I croak
.

  He doesn’t challenge the new topic. He rolls with it and simply says, “Nah, wasn’t tired. Plus, it’s only nine.” His rough hand runs down the vertebrae of my spine before traveling back up into the hair at the nape of my neck.

  “Really?” It feels like the middle of the night. “How long was I asleep?” I twist my head under his hand, shirking off his touch and freeing my hair from his hands.

  “A couple of hours.”

  I push myself into a seated position and scoot up the bed to rest my back on the mound of pillows against the headboard. Seth rolls to his side and turns on the light next to the bed.

  He looks up at me from his prone position and his eyes sweep my body, moving from my covered toes to my naked chest and finally up to my eyes. His gaze is penetrating, excavating my deepest recesses. My immediate response is to pull back, look away, and hide all the places that hurt, but I can’t.

  Everything hurts. Breathing hurts. Blinking hurts.

  I hurt.

  My whole body feels like an open, throbbing wound. I don’t even know where to begin with the triage. My eyes once again well with tears, which I swipe at hastily.

  I can’t remember the last time I cried, and it seems like all I can do now.

  Why am I even crying? I can’t say if the roles were reversed, my mom would be doing the same for me. She was the worst kind of predator, the kind that took the purest love, the kind that exists between a mother and child, and twisted it for her own gain. She was an addict on her good days and an amoral predator who didn’t care who or what she used to get what she wanted on the bad ones.

  “Adam, it’s okay to be sad,” Seth says, gently propping himself on an elbow, concern written all over his face.

  “No, it’s not. Why should I mourn the woman who left me out in the cold?”

  “Because you only get one mother and regardless of what she may or may not have done, she’s gone. That’s got to hurt. I think even though you didn’t want to, somewhere deep down you were holding out that she’d get better, do better, and she took whatever hope you had left with her.”