I started my second act feeling numb. That lasted three songs. The anger came back on “What Have You Done.” I blasted straight into “No More Cowards,” taking no prisoners. I poured it all through the microphone. Take that, Uncle Chester, and take that, Baz! I hoped they could hear me.
Max was hitting the drums harder than necessary.
I noticed Jimmy giving me funny looks.
All sounds were too loud tonight—was it my ears doing the oversensitive thing again? I was definitely tired. Then my eye caught the audience monitor stage right.
People in the orchestra rows were yelling at each other. A fistfight broke out in the front row. Then another.
My sound man cranked us up to cover the noise.
That brought me up short.
I was passing my horrible mood along to everybody.
I signalled for another lightning change in the playlist and asked Jimmy to start up “Pray For Peace.”
The band knew it was time for an emergency intermission when we did “Pray For Peace.”
I sang it on empty, feeling drained, as if everyone in the audience had a sharp straw and they’d stuck it into me. If they don’t like the taste, they can quit sucking me dry, I thought bitterly, and then was ashamed of myself. I was betraying them.
All I wanted was for Baz to show his ugly face. I had a sickening feeling that he was in the same mood I was, and it made me more miserable to think I might be so contagious that he might feel like this in his pigsty up on Ravenswood Avenue. I almost didn’t make it through the last line, “Begging—begging for peace.”
I was stumbling for the wings before the curtain had quite hit the deck.
I hadn’t been in my dressing room twenty seconds when the door burst open. David fell into the room, wrestling with a medium-size guy with long skanky white dreads.
“That’ll do,” I snapped. “David, out.”
David let go of the intruder.
“And keep everyone else out of here. Everyone,” I said in my boss voice.
David gave me a worried look and left.
Baz stood, panting, wiping blood off the corner of his mouth.
I faced him.
He said, “I don’t have time to grovel. You have to do a mood adjustment, baby.”
My mouth fell open. “You dare? After what you said last night?”
“One of my guys just tried to hang himself downstairs.”
“You—dammit—wait—what?”
Baz detoured around the mangled chair in the middle of the dressing room, giving it a nervous look, and took an undamaged chair. He sat down with a bump, as if he was winded and tired and on a mission. The look he gave me told me that King Ashurbanipal wasn’t totally dead in there.
“Yell at me later. I’ll bend over. You can kick me around the block. Later. But you have to fix the vibe now,” he said, intense. “There’s thirty-eight hundred people out there. I don’t want any suicides on my crew—or in my parking lot. I’m serious, Yoni. You’re gonna kill somebody.”
It was the only thing he could have said that would stop the fishwife scream rising in my throat.
I started to think like a pro again.
“Is somebody with him? Your guy downstairs?”
Baz nodded. “I got your medic to sedate him. He’s with him now.”
I stared at my makeup table without seeing it, feeling for my edges outside the dressing room, out on stage, out in the house, all the way up to the top balcony.
I tuned in to the audience’s emotion and flinched. They were starting to yell out there. The feeling was . . . ugly.
“Okay,” I said slowly. There was only one way I could fix my vibe, and I needed help with that. If Baz would meet me halfway.
It was weird that I wasn’t scared to ask him for help.
I don’t ever ask for help. I order it.
I raised my eyes to his. “Can I ask you some questions? I can’t go back out there yet. Please?”
His pale eyes went wary. He nodded.
“Why did you come here tonight?” I said. My throat squeezed like a fist around the words.
He let out a long, long sigh. “It’s my job. I’m here to fly you.” He didn’t sound defensive, now. He was his old, slumped, tilted, relaxed self. Then he smiled, and my tight throat softened. “I’m proud of you.”
Just being near him was making me start to melt inside. Not good. The show was far from over. “Because I blew off the biggest special effect in the show?”
“Yep.”
That made me glow. A reluctant smile came up and I stifled it. “That’s number one. Number two. What the hell was that last night? You had nothing to do with that photograph.”
He bit his lip. “Do we have to do this now?”
“Yes. Or I can’t get the vibe of this show back on course.”
His head bobbed, like, okay. “You’re not gonna like this.”
“I don’t expect to.” That was a lie. I was experiencing wave after wave of relief that he was here, talking to me. The fact that he was here at all made my legs happy-rubbery.
I pulled up a chair and sat down. “You may now annoy me.”
“Okay. The thing is, your goddessness, you don’t need me. I’m actually a liability in this picture. Your family is scared I’ll corrupt you. And frankly I think you’re scared I’ll corrupt you.”
I frowned. “I am not.”
“Oh, I think you are. You can barely take an afternoon off without feeling all shivery with guilt, a big, yummy, pint-of-ice-cream, regret-it-in-the-morning guilt.”
My skin was going cold with exhaustion. That was so not-good. To do the rest of this show, I needed to ride the high all the way to curtain, or I’d collapse early. It had happened before.
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, maybe I feel a little guilty. So?”
“So you’re not really ready for a rest.” He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and looked at me over his big, relaxed paws. “But I am. The truth is, this work makes me tired, babe. You can handle this crazy schedule, the pressure to win, the endless work, the media on the back of your neck like a plague of fifty-pound mosquitoes. Me? I’ve been on vacation more or less continually for twenty-seven hundred years, except for a brief, loony interval when I had the band. I’m still tired from that.”
Some of what he said was true. I opened my mouth to say so, and he put up a palm.
“A big part of the machine that makes this job possible for you is your family. They’re not my favorite people, but you need them. What’s more, they know I don’t like them. They know that if I hang around much longer, it’ll be them or me. It’s reasonable for them to defend their jobs.”
I put my hands over my eyes. He was only telling me part of the truth, but he was right—it was the part I didn’t want to hear. “They’re not acting reasonable,” I said around my hands.
“C’mon. You said yourself, you are this company. You run it all. You sign the paychecks.”
“They’ve kept me lonely, Baz.” If I hang around much longer. Did that mean he would—that he wanted—? My chest ached.
He didn’t speak.
I tried to press my swollen eyeballs back into my head. “They’ve chased away every guy I met for the past ten years. After I took another look at that picture, I did some thinking. Remembering. They know I want a bub—a bub—”
Then I fell apart.
His warm hands made me stand up. I hid my face against his neck. He patted me very gently on the back.
“Pull in the edges, babe. Pull it all in. This is just for you and me right now.”
I pulled it in. The sadness tightened around me, and then it softened as his heat soaked into me. My mood must be getting better. I pulled the energy close like a blanket. I made some privacy around us.
That felt really, really nice.
When I could breathe normally, I looked at the audience monitor in the corner. It was hard to tell, but I thought they were beginning to simmer down.
“And now.” I gulped. “Number three.”
He went still in my arms. “Yeah, I know.”
We both knew what I would ask for. And he still hadn’t told me the whole truth about last night.
“Can you do the new song tonight? ‘Baby Come Home?’”
He looked at me with such pain in his eyes, I wanted to take it back.
But I needed him.
“So here’s a deal. Come out there and do the song we did last night, same way—slow for the first encore, you get offstage quick, then we do three or four fake finales, and then you come back out and we play it fast. Just for tonight?” I pleaded, but I felt rotten. “Because I’ve messed up this show with my crappy mood, and we don’t want any suicides tonight. I have no right to ask.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You might.” He tilted a little.
My heart jumped. “If it will hurt you, we won’t do it.”
He held my gaze. “But it would fix the vibe.”
I slipped my hands into his. “What happened last night, Baz? You were great, you were taking bows, and then you stiffened up and keeled over. You broke a key off your bass. It seemed like you never did come out of it, even after Uncle Chester came in ranting about the photograph.”
“Please don’t make me take the bows.”
I took a deep breath. “That’s not an answer,” I said.
“I know. But it’s a Band-Aid. It’ll get me through the show.”
“‘Just a little pinprick?’ Baz, I won’t hurt you again like that. Whatever it did to you. I won’t.”
This was it, the big secret, the reason his music career had ended.
I was afraid he wouldn’t tell me.
I was afraid he would.
“Make you a counter-offer,” he said. “We do the song, you fix the vibe, I get to back offstage before the bows, and I’ll—” He took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you all about it later. After the show.”
I thought of the job ahead: Fix the vibe, get through the show, get somewhere where we can be alone, and heal him.
I said, “That would work. You can leave the building if you have to. And later, you tell me.”
He nodded bravely. “Deal.”
My eyes stung. “But if you croak on me, there won’t be a later.”
“I never croak.” He lifted my hands and kissed my palms, left and right. “There will always be a later.”