Karina Bliss: What the Librarian Did

The sound of retching stopped and they turned around. The drunk-Paul-had pushed up to a sitting position and was wiping his mouth on some copier paper. White-faced and sweating, he glared at Devin. “Who do you think you are, manhandling me like that?”

Devin shrugged. “Someone had to stop you making an ass of yourself.”

But Paul had already turned on Rachel. “I hope you’re happy reducing me to this state.”

“She didn’t force alcohol down your throat,” Devin said quietly.

The librarian swallowed. “Paul, I’m sorry. I had no idea you cared about me this much.”

“You think everyone’s as lukewarm as you are?” Paul balled the paper. “I did all the caring in that relationship. All the work in bed. You-”

“Have really, really bad taste in men,” Devin said, because Rachel was hugging herself and obviously taking this Paul’s rant way too seriously.

The librarian seemed to remember he was there. She straightened her shoulders. “Thank you, but I can handle it from here.”

“You sure?” She was obviously out of her depth. “He’s likely to get more abusive. I can toss him in a cab for you.”

“Thanks,” she said awkwardly, opening the door, “but I’ll be okay.” Devin got the impression she wasn’t used to accepting help. Any more than he was used to offering it. For a moment he had an odd sense of his world shifting. But it had shifted so often lately he ignored it.

Something incongruous about her appearance had been bothering him, and as she bit her lip Devin finally figured out what it was. Her mouth-lush and full-was more suited to the L.A. strippers he’d shared stages with in the band’s early performing days than a prim librarian. He grinned just as Romeo grabbed the box and started hurling again.

Rachel stiffened. “I’m glad one of us finds this funny.”

“Your mouth doesn’t fit your profession,” he explained. “It’s like seeing something X-rated on the cartoon network.”

He didn’t think to censor himself because he’d been a rock star for seventeen years and never had to. And got a sharp reminder he was no longer in that world when she shut the door in his face.

“Lucky the librarian fantasy never made my top ten,” he told the door.

DEVIN WANTED TO BE treated as normal, and yet once his amusement wore off, Rachel’s reaction gave him a profound sense of dislocation.

She’d looked at him without his fame in the way and hadn’t liked what she’d seen. It was a scary thought, because whoever she saw was someone he was going to have to live with for the next forty plus years.

He strode across the road from the library into Albert Park, then stopped in a stand of tall palms that reminded him of L.A.-his home before his life depended on leaving it. For a full five minutes he looked up through the fronds to the blue, blue sky, homesick. Then he started walking again, around the quaint Victorian fountain, past oaks and a lot of trees he didn’t recognize.

This must be how refugees felt in a new land…displaced, wary. And yet he’d been born here, was still a citizen, though he’d left for his father’s country when he was two. He breathed in the smell of fresh-mown grass, only to regret it wasn’t L.A.’s smog.

“Your pancreas is shot to hell. Any alcohol and you’re dead.” The doctor had been blunt, and left him sitting in a private hospital room full of flowers from fans. The band had imploded at the same time as his health… What the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life?

His car keys fell out of his hand; someone bent to pick them up. Another teenager-shit, this place made him feel like a dinosaur.

“Are you okay?” Gray eyes, intense in a pale face. Lank blond hair.

“Of course I am.” The kid stepped back and Devin took a deep breath. “I’m fine…thanks.” He couldn’t rush the ascent, but had to stop and acclimatize, then kick up a bit more. He reminded himself that the surface was there-even when he couldn’t see it.

“You’re Devin Freedman, aren’t you?” Nervously, the kid hitched up his baggy jeans. “I heard you’d be studying here this year.”

Living on a remote part of Waiheke Island since his arrival in New Zealand two months earlier, Devin had got used to being left in peace. Something else to give up. “Yeah,” he said grudgingly, “I’m him.”

In his drive to take control of his life, Devin had started taking online accounting courses to decipher his financial statements. A tutor had suggested university. When Devin stopped laughing he’d thought, why not?

And already his growing fiscal knowledge had paid off. He’d appointed a new financial advisor who’d found disturbing anomalies in some of Devin’s statements. It looked like someone had been ripping him off; unfortunately Devin suspected his brother. But he needed to be very sure before he acted.

“I’m a huge fan. Darkness Fell was a work of genius.”

“Not The Fallen or Crack the Whip?” Rage’s final albums.

The kid looked at his feet and shuffled. “I really liked the early stuff. I know the others sold well…I mean, not that’s there’s anything wrong with commercial albums…”

Devin put him out of his misery. “You’re right, they were crap.” By that point the band had barely been speaking.

“But you still had some phenomenal guitar riffs and-”

“You play?” Devin asked, cutting short the hero-worship. He gestured to the expensive guitar case slung over the kid’s shoulder.

“Bass mainly, but also some electric and acoustic-like you.” The next words came in a rush. “Would you sign my guitar for me?” At Devin’s nod, he unpacked a Gibson and scrambled in his bag for a Sharpie.

“What’s your name?”

“Mark White.”

Devin hesitated with his pen over the guitar.

“Your autograph will be fine,” insisted Mark. “I hate phoniness, too.”

Grinning, Devin signed, then handed back the bass. “See you around.”

MARK MANAGED A CASUAL NOD but sank onto a bench as soon as Devin disappeared. Mark’s knees were shaking. He clutched the neck of his instrument, looked at the manicured gardens of Albert Park and thought, I imagined that. No one meets a legend, a god among bass players walking through freakin’ rose beds.

He glanced down at his guitar and for a moment panicked because sunlight was bouncing off the lacquer and he couldn’t see it. But then he adjusted the angle and there it was scrawled across the maple. “To Mark, stay honest. Devin Freedman.”

And Mark grinned because one part of him wanted to run back to his apartment, jump on his computer and flog it on eBay, and the other wanted to sleep with it under his pillow. You are one screwed-up dude, Mark.

So what was new?

Still, he let himself be happy, because it wasn’t every day a guy got to meet his all-time hero. Then he looked toward the campus and his smile faded under the familiar gut-wrenching nausea, anger and terror. She was here…somewhere.

Mark had seen the University of Auckland envelope at the adoption agency when he’d asked the woman to check his file, claiming he was in an open adoption. Funny how people didn’t care about hiding envelopes. The woman had been very kind, considering he’d been lying to her. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

He’d lied again. “Sure.”

Abruptly, Mark stood and began walking. Why had his birth mother started out wanting an open adoption, then changed her mind and severed contact? The question had been eating away at him every since he’d discovered he had a different blood type to both his parents.

He’d searched through his parents’ private papers and found correspondence from an adoption agency. Mom and Dad still didn’t know he knew…and Mark tried not to blame them because it was clear she’d made secrecy a condition of adoption.