Public Secrets Part 104

knowing if the nuns found them and told her father, he would get that

sad, hurtful look in his eyes. She didn't want to hurt him, but she

couldn't forget.

She read the stories through, through she could have recited them by

heart by this time. Looking, she was always looking for something new,

something that would tell her why it had happened, how she might have

stopped it.

There was nothing. There never was.

There were new clippings now-pictures and stories about Bev and P.M.

Some said Bev would at last get a divorce and marry P.M. Others played

up the juicy angle of two men who had been like brothers torn apart by a

woman. There was the announcement of Devastation's new label, Prism,

and pictures of the party in London on the day it had become official.

There was her father with another new woman, and again with Johnno and

P.M. and Pete. But not Stevie. With a sigh, Emma took out another

clipping.

Stevie was in a clinic where they put drug abusers. They called him an

addict. Others called him a criminal. Emma remembered she'd once

thought he was an angel. Emma thought he looked tired in the picture,

tired and thin and afraid. The papers said it was a tragedy; they said

it was an outrage. Some of the girls snickered about it.

But no one would talk to her. When she had questioned her father, he

had told her only that Stevie had lost control and was getting help. She

wasn't to worry.

But she did worry. They were her family, the only family she had left.

She had lost Darren. She had to make sure she didn't lose the rest.

Carefully, in her best penmans.h.i.+p, she began to compose letters.

STEVIE REm 14is in the sunlight, as he sat on a stone bench in the

garden during his morning walk. It was a lovely spot, filled with tea

roses and hollyhocks and bird songs. Little brick paths wound through

it, under arbors of wisteria and morning glories. Both the staff and

the patients at Whitehurst were given free rein there. Until the st.u.r.dy

stone walls rose up.

He detested the clinic, the doctors, the other patients. He despised

the therapy sessions, the scheduling, the determined smiles of the

staff. But he did what he was told, and he told them what they wanted

to hear.

He was an addict. He wanted help. He would take one day at a time.

He would take their methadone and dream of heroin.

He learned to be calm, and he learned to be cunning. In four weeks and

three days, he would walk out a free man. This time he would be more

careful. This time he would control the drugs. He would smile at the

doctors and reporters, he would lecture on the evils of drugs, and he

would lie through his teeth. When he was out, he would live his life as

he chose.

No one had the right to tell him he was sick, no one had the right to

tell him he needed help. If he wanted to get high, he'd get high. What

did they understand about the pressures he lived with day after day?

The demands to excel, to be that much better than the rest?

Maybe he'd gone too far before. Maybe. So he'd keep it a social thing.