Broken Crown Read online

  Broken Crown

  Sand & Fog Series

  Book 1

  Susan Ward

  Copyright © 2015

  Susan Ward

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1515371077

  ISBN-13: 978-1515371076

  Cover Photo and Illustration: Sara Eirew

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “It is good, very, very good that none of us can truly see the future. It is good for all of us that the future, no matter what we see, is really black.” ~Chrissie Parker

  Prologue

  CHRISSIE’S JOURNAL

  The older I get the less I feel a part of my own story. I don’t think that is unique or strange for a woman in her forties. I hear it all the time from my girlfriends, how they slowly disappear and get lost in their marriages, their children or their careers. I don’t know if that is what’s happened to me. I don’t like to overly analyze it. I am quieter now and I savor the quiet in me.

  I watch more sunrises and I stir the pot less. I’ve learned that things happen around me, because of me, and to me, and there is not much you can do or really have any true understanding of which kind of event each is. I breathe, I watch the sunrise, I love, and I cherish my tokens and my tears, kissing them both thankfully for they both are a part of me, bringing me here to where it is comfortable to be less a part of my own story.

  As badly as I have done many parts of my life, it was never because I didn’t love. The old cookie tin in the closet holds both my love and my regrets.

  I pull out my tokens and tears one by one and I stare at them, these pieces of meaningless nothing to others that are markers of the milestones of me.

  I kept the photo of Alan and me for twenty-five years. It is the one of us that I keep with me always: Alan asleep beside me, leaning against my breast, at that quiet moment on the terrace during sunrise before he exploded into the universe, not just a star, but a non-waning supernova.

  It is funny how a moment, the most significant moment of your life, can happen without you even being aware. At eighteen the photo made me cry. It was splashed across the tabloids with black tar innuendo and other photos, private violations that made me cry. It still makes me cry at forty-two, but the reasons are different. We looked so young. Alan, commanding in his universe, and yet lost and holding on to me. I was young, too, but I’m holding on to him. Somehow we made it through that complex and layered three weeks, but we were both so young.

  There is another photo in my tin, cut from the newspaper from the day stories of the suicide ran in 1994. Kurt Cobain. The two photos are eerily similar: hair tumbling forward, the world at their feet and the air full of sorrow. I remember how shaky and sick I got when I first realized Kurt died at twenty-seven. If we are both alive after twenty-seven, Chrissie, we will both know what we are. I almost called Alan that day, but I didn’t.

  Between the two pictures sits the silly half dollar from the bet Neil made me that night at Peppers. Neil was right, Kurt did change music forever, but I never paid my half of the bet.

  It has been ten years since I buried Neil. I still miss him every day. There are many in my life who do not understand how I could love him, but I did and I still do to this day. We said it to each other simply that last day we lived as man and wife: you can’t help who you are in love with. We both had other loves, but it didn’t prevent us from loving in that human, connected way.

  The objects tucked together make sense to me, but it is the picture of Alan that I look at the most. I knew the first time I left Alan that he was the love of my life. What I didn’t know that day is that the love of your life doesn’t always become the love throughout your life. Sometimes they are a thought, a private joy, a secret hurt, a ghost in passing, the ghost always at your side or a promise in the future.

  Alan would become all those things for me and I would never again love anyone else the way I love Alan.

  It is good, very, very good that none of us can truly see the future. It is good for all of us that the future, no matter what we see, is really black. I could not see the future, a heartbreaking and frightening thing, at eighteen. I can’t see it at forty-two, now a comfortable and quiet thing.

  I listen to my family return to the house, bags being dropped, children running the halls looking for me. This is my life, the core, the everything that is me. It is a perfect place for me to step back, enjoy living, and be less part of my own story.

  I am blessed that Jesse was here with me for nine years. Nine years; I did not always do it well, I did not always do it honestly, but I never regretted being married to Jesse.

  So this is what I think happened. I don’t really know for sure. I pieced it together from things I was told and reading Alan’s biography.

  It is peaceful to be in that place where the most significant parts of your life are not the parts you actively live on your own. They are the parts shared with you, the part of others you try to mend, the moments you are no part of and yet the catalyst for them to have been.

  I sit back in the quiet and I let life, even my own, happen around me, where it is more comfortable.

  Chapter 1

  “Alan Manzone”

  January 2013

  It’s a long fucking flight from Tokyo to New York City. I should never have agreed to allow the biographer to travel with me on my jet. I don’t even let the band travel with me anymore. I like to be alone. In the silence of my own thoughts, the best parts of my life exist. They sure as hell don’t exist in the real world. And haven’t for a very long time.

  A moment of drunkenness and missing her—thinking of her…consumed by her—and I agreed to this so I wouldn’t be flying across the Pacific with only my memories of her. My manager, Brian Craig, thought it would be good for the writing collaboration. Maybe get the author to soften the pages and make me look likeable. Apparently, it was not going well. Apparently I was coming across a total asshole. No surprise there. I am an asshole. It sells records. It makes money. What the fuck does Brian think got us all here? Rich. Famous. At the top of the music industry. My musical genius and greater genius at self-promotion, i.e. how to fascinate the world by being an asshole every minute of my life.

  I smile and wait as the biographer fumbles around trying to compose his next question. That’s the book you should write, mate. How to be an asshole and make a fortune doing it.

  But no, we are doing another tired celebrity biography and here I am, alone with the putz they hired to finish the work since Jesse Harris, my first biographer, died last year—I cut off my thoughts. No, not going there today. It’s hard enough staying calmly composed while this asshole rummages around in my personal shit, without thinking about that.

  I need to be careful what I say while having this private, out of the limelight, one-on-one time with that literary wanker who thinks he can write something that will make sense of my life…and a big fucking payday for him, no doubt.

  Why the hell did I agree to continue with this? Jesse’s death gave me a no-litigation way out of the contract with the publishing house since I was not obligated to continue with the publisher’s choice of a replacement author. I should have shit-canned the project then. I don’t need a celebrity biography to memorialize my life and career. I sure as hell don’t need the publicity.

  What more can a man want in his life than what I’ve achieved? I have money, more than I could ever spend in a lifetime. My face is adored and recognized by millions. I’ve got pussy shoved at me 24/7. There isn’t a woman on this planet I can’t have. I’m obnoxious to everyone and they tolerate
me. I do what I want always. My entire life is about me. How many men can say that and have it be true? It’s why everyone wants to be me.

  Fuck, I know that sounds arrogant, but it’s the truth. I wait sprawled on the long bench seat, scotch in hand, looking rock star chic and wondering if this jerk will ever get around to asking another question. At least when I started this project with Jesse it was fun and interesting. I could probe him about his marriage to Chrissie in between the questions he posed to me.

  We’ve only got twelve more hours until we land. Another question, Miles, so we can finish this fucking thing finally. I’ve got things to do in the States. Once I set foot on US soil, I’m ditching you there. I’m not taking you along for the ride to see in real time the epilogue of my sorry life tale.

  I make the scotch swirl in my glass, a subtle gesture of my impatience with him. He’s probably sitting there, wishing he were me. Fuck, second arrogant thought in under five minutes. I down my drink…and he would be wrong to want to be me.

  Miles Abernathy looks up from his notepad. “I spoke with Jackson Parker before joining you in London. I asked about the Chicago incident. He refused to comment.” Those beady eyes focus on me from behind his heavy-rimmed glasses. “Can you explain what happened in Chicago?”

  I can feel my gaze begin to simmer and I wonder if he’ll back off since I’m giving him the fuck off stare. That was territory specifically noted as a no-go. I haven’t talked about it, not once, in twenty-five years. Jack hasn’t either. Why would this idiot think I’d be willing to share? And I hate euphemism. Chicago incident. Fuck, he’s a writer. He should have been able to frame that question better.

  I arch a brow. “Which part do you want me to explain? When I drove a motorcycle off stage injuring two fans? The going to jail? The part where at a party I snorted a mountain-sized speedball intending to kill myself? The waking up in the hospital? Rehab in California, maybe? Or the day in that Chicago apartment where Jackson Parker filled a syringe with enough heroin to kill a horse and threatened to pump it into my veins? Or do you want to know how Jack kept me from shooting up for six fucking hours in a dingy Chicago squat by laying a picture of his daughter in the center of the table beside my smack and talking nonstop about Chrissie?”

  Miles’s eyes widen like a bullfrog and his face turns crimson. He definitely wasn’t expecting that answer and I definitely wasn’t expecting to answer with parts of the truth. Fuck, why did I do that?

  “Did all that really happen?” he asks, stunned and excited.

  I shift my gaze to my drink. “As far as I can remember, yes.”

  He hits the icon on his phone to start recording. “Start at the beginning. As much detail as you can provide will help me when I sit down to write this chapter of your story.”

  Why do people still want to know about Chicago?

  * * *

  Chicago, November 1988

  My eyes open to a stark room flooded with too-bright morning sunlight, and I try to move and realize I can’t. I’m in a hospital strapped to the fucking bed, and there are handcuffs on one of my wrists as if the canvas restraints weren’t enough to make this fucking humiliating.

  Don’t these assholes know who I am? Who the hell tied me to the bed?

  “You’re alive,” says a calm voice. “You’re not dead, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  I turn my head. Jesus Christ, that’s ’60s iconic musician Jackson Parker sitting in a chair, staring at me. What the fuck is Jack Parker doing here? We don’t even know each other. Why the hell would he be here?

  “Where am I?” I snap.

  Jack leans forward in his chair. “Mercy Hospital, Chicago. Don’t fight the restraints. They’re not coming off. You tried to kill yourself.” His gaze sharpens. “Do you remember any of past two weeks?”

  Oh shit, what the hell did I do? A vague memory of riding a motorcycle on stage and then into the crowd is followed by flashing images of a party, of snorting something, and then nothing.

  My temper flares. “I didn’t try to kill myself. Tell them that. I want the fuck out of here.”

  Jack’s lips pucker. That irritated him. “Don’t try to bullshit a bullshitter. You need to shoot up or maybe you just want to finish what you tried to do with that speedball. I’ve been where you are. Well, technically not exactly where you are. Nope. Never been in a hospital bed tied down for my own good. Never tried to kill myself, though I did fucking nearly do it with a bottle. But I’ve been where you are, no doubt about that. Do you think you’re the only man to ever lose a child?”

  My black eyes begin to simmer and against my iron command over my own thoughts, Jackson Parker’s personal story flashes like billboard images in my head. Jack on stage at Woodstock. He’s a fucking musical genius and the voice of his generation, an undisputed walking, breathing, adored worldwide fucking legend. The death of his beautiful wife, Lena Mansur, the virtuoso violinist. The suicide of his enormously gifted punk rock son, Sam Parker. And yes, fuck what it said in the press. It was a suicide. I know that about Sam the same way Jack knows my snorting that pile of smack was deliberate. No need to say it. And no need to deny what I did. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter who has been where you are. Jack Parker is right about that one.

  “Who the fuck told you about Molly?” I ask, infuriated.

  Jack’s expression softens into something almost amused and definitely annoying as hell. “Brian Craig.”

  My temper explodes internally as I keep my face carefully expressionless. The second I get out of here, I’m firing my fucking manager. If Brian Craig thinks he can tell my personal shit to anyone and I’ll tolerate it, he’s got another thing…

  “He’s also the one who called me,” Jack continues compassionately. “Asked me to come. Asked me to help you. I wouldn’t fucking be here if he hadn’t told me about your daughter, Molly. Got me on a plane from Santa Barbara. Got me to leave my daughter, Chrissie, while she’s home from school over the winter break. Got me here. Now it’s up to you how this plays out.”

  I look away. There is something unnerving about those brilliant blue eyes. Like he can read my thoughts. I wish I could fucking do the same thing. What exactly is it we’re playing out?

  “What precisely are you referring to?” I snap.

  “Oh, I forgot. You don’t know your current circumstance.”

  My gaze shifts back to him. “Enlighten me.”

  Jack pulls a yellow sheet of paper from his pocket. “Do you know what this is?”

  Fuck, how am I supposed to be able to read it from across the room? I glare and shake my head.

  “This is the term of your release from the Cook County Correctional System.”

  “Release?”

  “You fucked up pretty darn good. You’d be in jail for that motorcycle stunt if your lawyers hadn’t been able to convince the judge to let me try to help you instead of putting you in a cell.”

  He takes a key from his pocket and undoes the handcuffs. He removes the restraints as well.

  He smiles. “I should have removed those long ago. Call it a symbolic gesture leaving them on. I wanted you to get a clear picture of the direction your life could take when you woke. You are not under arrest any longer. The judge released you to my custody this morning. You’ve already passed the seventy-two-hour psych hold for the suicide attempt. You are now a voluntary patient here.”

  First fucking piece of good news I’ve heard this morning. Eventually Jack will leave or I’ll drive him away. Then I’ll be done with this and can get the hell out of here.

  “Thinking about cutting out, are you?” Jack says, pulling me from my thoughts. “Sorry to disappoint you, but that would only see you back in jail. You’re on probation. Let me enlighten you of the terms of your probation. One: you are in my custody. You do what I say when I say. I report directly to the judge. You fuck up, I call the judge, he puts you in jail and you are facing three years there.”

  Three years? My eyes widen.

  �
�Now I’ve got your attention, don’t I?” Jack states confidently. “Consider us glued at the hip for the next six months. That’s the term of your probation. Finish it successfully and no jail time, all charges dropped. I gave my word to the judge to help you. You’re my responsibility. I take that seriously. I don’t break the law and I won’t lie for you. Are we clear?”

  Fucker. “Crystal clear.”

  “You’re feeling pretty good right now, but it’s not going to last. The doctor has been medicating you to keep you from full withdrawal. I wanted you clear-headed and focused enough so we could have a lucid conversation this morning. They gave you your last dose of methadone seven hours ago. But now you’re going to do a straight seventy-two-hour detox. Get the shit out of your system. And if you survive that, I’ll be back, and we can talk about what happens then.”

  Jack Parker stands and leaves the room.

  Three hours later, I’m not feeling so cocky. They are going to make me go fucking cold-turkey detox. The sweats have started. The pain. The shaking. It’s too much. I’m not fucking doing this, especially since I haven’t completely abandoned the notion of killing myself and once Jack left my memories of Molly became inescapable.

  I search the hospital room. In a locker I find a bag. My clothes smell disgusting, but they are in here. Shit. No money. No cigarettes.

  I go to the door and ease it back an inch. Hallway empty. The nurses check in every half hour or so. They’ve just left. I’m dressing and getting out of here.

  It is surprisingly easily to escape a voluntary detox program. I was spotted going down the corridor. No one even tried to stop me. Then I’m into the elevator and out the front doors without incident and I’m free.

  Now, standing on the pavement out front, I’m not sure what the hell to do. I haven’t got any money, I’m in a strange town, and I need a fucking wake-up shot. If I call anyone, they’ll send for Jack and this time I’m going straight to jail and not to a hospital bed. I don’t doubt Jack Parker when he says he won’t lie for me.