Disclaimer: That '70s Show copyright The Carsey-Werner Company, LLC and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, LLC. The fictional band Degenerate Matter, their albums Vagabondage, Ultrarelativistic, WIMPs and MACHOs, Frozen Stars, and all the lyrics contained therein copyright to the author of this story (username: MistyMountainHop, maker of Those '70s Comics).

CHAPTER 43
THE PRICE OF ADMISSION

March 3, 1995

Foster City, California

Jackie's House
…

Jackie locked the front door to her house in Foster City. Steven was complimenting her digs, but she only half-listened and scrutinized the top lock's latches. They were properly extended into the door. The deadbolt was pressed into the doorknob. She checked the living room windows next, making sure they were all shut.

"Think the paparazzi trailed us?" Steven said, giving her a convenient way to lie. "'Cause you're acting like it. You spent the drive over here looking out the rear window."

"One can never be too careful." She gestured for him to follow her to the solarium. He did, and she hurried to the sliding glass doors. They led to her private boat dock outside, but they were locked. Across the lagoon, lights from houses brightened the night. Ralph wasn't lurking on her deck or the dock and, as paranoid as she felt, wouldn't be hiding in the lagoon. Even he couldn't hold his breath that long.

Steven picked up a dumbbell from the solarium's mini-gym and did a few biceps curls. "Man, your place is nicer than mine. This is what MTV would call rockstar. Alls you need is some leopard-print furniture."

Jackie unlocked the glass doors, and cool air rushed in. He clearly had no idea who Scotty Roxx actually was, that "Scotty" had been married to her or given her this house in the divorce. "My ex-husband had expensive taste," she said and stepped onto the deck.

He joined her outside with his backpack. A few wisps of his hair had escaped his Giants cap, and they danced in the breeze as he looked out over the lagoon. "Ever go swimming here?"

"All the time."

"City's got an interesting layout."

"Mm."

The lagoon splashed against the boatless dock. After a minute of it, Steven turned toward her and said, "I fucked up tonight, but I didn't want you to fuck up your life."

"It's my life to fuck up, Steven. And that's not what ... I'm accustomed to my mom and my 'friends' using me. Then they started to use me to get to you, and they had to learn that wasn't going to happen. I make them think you'll attend this lavish party full of press, record industry people, and my stepfather's poser band, Ecliptic. You don't show. After that, because of that, they would've known I wasn't their obedient wind-up toy anymore."

He gazed into her eyes for was probably a few seconds, the dock lights gleaming in his own eyes like beacons, signaling comprehension. "That's why you had me leave that message on your machine. Why didn't you just tell me what you were up to? I had to hear it from Donna the night before you..." He shook his head slightly. "We could've worked out somethin' together."

"I'd already worked it out."

"By usin' me and keepin' me in the dark so I had no choice in it."

"To protect you!" Her words echoed across the lagoon and in her ears, and she said more quietly, "Why didn't you call me?"

"No time. Learned about it last night. Me and the band had five-hour drive to get to you after a late-as-hell GRAMMYs party. I needed to set it up with Wintry so she could cancel Ecliptic. Lee's on doctor's orders to rest his wrist before the tour, so he couldn't play with the band. Booked a rehearsal studio on short notice so Scotty could learn the songs well enough. I had to practice myself for 'Spark'—then we were at the Wintry hotel for the gig."

Jackie's arms were itchy. They craved to be written on. But she'd left her markers in her purse, and her purse was on the bureau by the front door.

"Donna gave me the impression you were gonna torch yourself for this. For me." A gossamer web of grief wove around his voice. "Couldn't let you, man, even at the risk of pissing you off. Of losin' your respect and trust. I figured out how to screw over your ma and those 'friends' of yours without you gettin' screwed in the equation." He rubbed his cheek, hard enough that the skin reddened under his fingers. "So I did ... without askin' your permission."

He blinked, and the grief in his voice glazed over his eyes. "Apologies ain't enough."

"Apologies aren't necessary." Wind, not gusty but strong enough to affect the lagoon, caused water to keep slapping her dock "We both went about this the wrong way. What is necessary is for us to talk when we've got plans that involve the other somehow." She glanced away from him, toward the solarium doors. "What I did wasn't fair to you, either. I did use you, no matter how noble my intentions were. This should've been our scheme, together."

A chill crept up her neck. "But I don't understand how Degenerate Matter playing the Blonde Brigade's party—because it really was their party, not mine—will hurt them." She stared at the inky-black lagoon, streaked with light from houses on both Shearwater and Dolphin Isles. "You gave them exactly what they wanted."

"I gave Ann-Marie Wintry what she wanted," he said, "but with a devil's twist. It'll pit her against your mom, cause squabbling among the rest of 'em. And you'll be in the free and clear."

She pulled a lock of hair from her mouth. The breeze had plastered it to her lips. "They'll expect me to take sides."

"Don't take any. Stay out of it. They'll be too self-absorbed and distracted by their fights with each other to give a shit what you say."

"How do you know?"

"Went to the same high school as you." He shrugged off his backpack and denim jacket. A patch of manicured grass stretched beside the dock. Jackie often read on the stone bench she'd had put there, and he dropped his backpack and jacket onto it, along with his Giants cap. "Tomorrow," he said, "The LA Times will have Wintry's version of events in the paper to hype her hotel chain. Tabloids'll have another version next week, more to do with Degenerate Matter, Ro, and me. You'll be—"

He cupped the side of his neck. A bandage was taped to it, hidden earlier by his jacket.

"Did Ro...?" she said, unable to complete the question.

"Nope. GRAMMYs afterparty. Strung-out dickhead named Hiver pulled a knife on me."

"Not Charleston Hiver."

"One and the same."

"I know him. Used to know him, though my dad. He was a spoiled brat."

"Still is." He patted his right leg. "Got me in the calf, too."

"Why?" Breathing became more difficult. Her leg muscles twitched, begging her to sit, but she grabbed Steven's hand. "Why would he do that?"

He told her about how he'd refused to sign Hiver's band to Burnout Records, about Hiver's drug and ego problems. "Guess my face and name bein' out there gave his messed-up head something to focus on."

Her heart beat wildly, violently, as if it would blow apart. She thrust herself at him to contain the explosion, secured her arms around his back, and pushed her ear against his slower heartbeat. "I need you safe," she said. "I wish I could keep you safe."

Her fists clenched the material of his shirt. She hadn't meant to speak her thoughts, but he hugged her and laid his cheek on top of her head, the way he used to when they dated. "That's why I did what I did tonight," he said. "Jackie ... I need you fuckin' safe, too."

She shut her eyes. No one but her dad had ever said that to her. "I understand."

"Do you?" His arms tightened around her back. "Made a shitty choice the first time around. Not gonna let anyone hurt you like that again."

"Steven." She inhaled deeply. He was talking about Michael. "You didn't have control over that, and..." it was too late. She'd already been hurt again, more than once, thanks to her own choices. "I should've known who I was with that night," she said, unsure of which night she meant—or whom she meant. "You couldn't have stopped any of it."

She pulled away from him. His embrace was devoid of lust but full of a warmth she had no right to accept.

"Why'd you disappear tonight?" he said.

"I told you, bathroom issues—"

"No, in the greenroom. Was it something Ro said?"

"I barely remember Ro talking to me." Her gaze drifted to the houses on Shearwater and Dolphin Isles. Being in an enclosed space with her ex-husband had caused her mind to distance itself from her body. A mental fog had rolled over the greenroom, deepening her sense of unreality. Her therapist called it depersonalization and derealization, states created by Jackie's trauma and potentially re-triggered by dates, places, and people connected to that trauma.

Steven removing her from Ralph evaporated the fog. Her mind and body reconnected as he'd driven her home, but the ordeal had brought up unwelcome memories. Her eyes were fixed on Dolphin Isle, but she saw only that plastic surgeon's office from years ago. "He wanted me to get a boob job," she said absently.

"Who?"

"My ex."

"Husband?"

"Yes. They wanted to cut me—him and the doctor. Shove these sacks into my breasts." She gestured to her chest, and a sad laugh threaded through her voice. "I used to think they were perfect. Small but perfect. I used to love them, but they're ruined. I ruined them."

"You let 'em...?"

"No. No." She curled her fingers into claws, and they scraped the air in front of her. "Before Ralph, what I did, I might as well have taken a rake to my body by eating my feelings away. I'm marked-up, scarred. The ones on my chest are becoming silver, but the rest of me..."

She was looking at him now, and he was looking at her, searching her face. The inappropriateness of what she'd just revealed hit her like like a comet. Her body flinched, and she backed away from him.

"You were brutalized," he said.

"I brutalized myself. … Do you want to be a dad?" An inelegant change of subject, and he flinched just like she had.

"Jackie, come on—"

"You don't need this." She tapped her temple. "The more you hear from me, the more you must think I'm crazy."

His chest rose with a heavy breath. "You're not more nuts than I am—and you were brutalized, man. Don't care how you spin it, but we also don't have to talk about it."

"Thank you."

"And to even shit out—" he sat on the dock and began untying his boots—"I had my chance to be a dad. My first serious girlfriend after you, I got her pregnant. She had an abortion."

A spear of cold pierced Jackie's forehead. "I'm—I'm sorry."

"We both agreed ending the pregnancy was the right choice, but the choice was ultimately hers to make. Didn't think too much about it at the time." His boots were unlaced now, and he removed them. "A few years later, though, when the kid would've been five, it caught up with me. Started obsessing over it." His legs dangled over the dock. He'd stuffed his socks into his boots, and he plunged his feet into the lagoon. "Huh. That's pretty warm."

"Yeah, the water tends to be sixty or seventy degrees." Part of her ached to sit beside him, to dip her toes in the lagoon, to stay close. But she sat on the stone bench, next to his backpack, jacket, and Giants cap. "How did you get over it? I mean, did you?"

"The guilt weakened once I realized I would've been a crappy father. Me raisin' a kid at twenty-three was impossible, not without severely messing it up."

"But you became a dad to Betsy."

"Sure ... for about two years. This was from '84 to '86, once my sobriety finally stuck. Made Betsy breakfast, picked her up from school, took turns with Brooke readin' her stories at night. Tucked her into bed. That part of life was good, but Brooke sensed the rest for me was ..." He scratched his fingers through his hair. "She told me I wasn't happy. I said happiness is overrated, and she asked if I wanted Betsy to feel that way, too. Of course the answer was freakin' no.

"That Christmas, Dad tells Angie and me that he's expanding Grooves into a record company. Angie would become senior vice president, and he offered me an A&R position. He thought I'd be perfect for it, or it would be perfect for me. But the current state of music was such crap I refused. Later that night, Dad talked to me privately. Tried to get me to admit a few things. I denied all of 'em but one: I didn't want to work at Grooves anymore, not even running the Chicago shop."

He glanced back at Jackie from the dock. She shuddered on the bench though the breeze outside wasn't cold. His admissions were too much to process fully. All she could do was listen and indicated for him to keep talking.

"January of '87," he said, "I left Grooves and got a job at The Underground, a rock-punk club in Chicago. Lots of unsigned punk and punk-influenced rock bands played there then. Thought this would be the music that'd kill the hair-metal scene.

"By October, I go back to Dad, say I want the A&R job, but the bands I planned on signing were like those I heard at The Underground. Dad says it's a risk, that punk bands signed to a commercial record label are usually branded sellouts. He wasn't wrong, so I convinced him to let me create an indie-like sublabel: Burnout Records." He cleared his throat, but his body remained otherwise still on the dock. "Had to go cross-country in search of bands to sign. That's when I quit bein' Betsy's dad, quit havin' any real responsibility to her. I could come and go whenever while Brooke did most of the work."

Jackie's impulse was to dig her shoes into the grass, but she kicked them off instead. Over the years, the idea of Steven fathering children who weren't hers inspired chaotic, even terrifying thoughts. But to hear him talk about his actual experiences underscored just how much time they'd spent apart. Other people, other women, had shared and shaped pieces of his life she could never touch ... just as her experiences with other men had shaped her.

She slid her hand over her stomach. "Do you ever feel selfish for not wanting to be a dad back then, before Betsy?"

"Would've been selfish to have a kid. Wasn't right enough in the head to do right by a baby."

"But now?"

"Not in the cards. Ro doesn't want kids."

"But you do."

His body swayed, as if he were dragging his feet through the water. "Yes."

"Then maybe you and Ro can—"

"Won't happen." He pulled his feet from the lagoon, splashing water onto the dock. "And I'm okay with it. I've got two funny-as-hell nephews, Curtis and Andre. A niece—Izzy. Our goddaughter, Betsy … but can't have everything, you know?"

She did know, too well. She slipped on her shoes and went inside the solarium. She came back outside with a towel. "You may not be able to have everything, but you can have this."

He accepted the towel and dried off his legs and feet. "What about you? You still want kids?"

"I have nothing to give a child."

His fingers wrapped around his sock. "Not what I saw at the Formans' Christmas."

She crouched in front of him so her eyes were level with his. He hadn't yet grasped the depth of her selfishness, but he would now. "Watching a child have all the potential I squandered," she said, "watching her pursue her dreams, fall in love—be beautiful in a way only the young are beautiful—my resentment at God would fall onto her. The contempt I have for myself." She pushed off his shoulders and stood up. "I won't pass that onto a child."

"The way your mom did to you."

Her cheeks burned as if she'd been slapped. "At least my mom let me live."

Steven laughed bitterly, and his lace-tying became aggressive. "Was wondering if you'd ever get a burn in. Didn't expect it to be about that."

"It wasn't—" Adrenaline surged inside her. He thought she'd meant his ex-girlfriend's abortion. "I—" Her throat constricted, but her words tightened into a fist. "I had a miscarriage. I caused it."

She reached the bench before her legs gave out. Steven sat beside her, and she leaned into him for support. His arm slipped around her shoulders, but she was trembling uncontrollably.

"It happened the third month of my pregnancy," she said. "I started bleeding, cramping. Ralph wasn't home. He was on—was working, but I called an ambulance. Doctors told me the fetus had a chromosomal abnormality, but I'd gotten pregnant for the wrong reasons."

She gulped air, and Steven held her hand. His touch was gentle, and it imbued her with the courage to continue. "I wasn't sexually attracted to him, to Ralph. I'd hoped having a baby would give me an excuse to stop being with him that way. Give our relationship a different focus, but deep inside I didn't want it. The baby. Not with him."

"Doesn't make it your fault. Me and Cheryl, we purposely ended her pregnancy. Yours ended on its own."

"I willed the baby not to exist—"

"That's bullshit."

"It's true!" She sat up straight as another breeze swept over the lagoon, but in her mind she was utterly alone, existing in an eternal darkness. Her body instinctively sought out Steven's, and his arm warmed her shoulders again. "The thought of being tethered to Ralph the rest of my life horrified me," she said, "and he knew it. He knew I didn't want our child."

She brushed her fingers over the bridge of her nose. "He was drunk and shouting awful things. I shouted back, and he—we divorced."

"You didn't cause the miscarriage," Steven said. "It was a fluke of the cosmos, maybe saving you from what you couldn't save yourself from."

She shook her head, rocking it against his chest as tears welled in her eyes. "I wasn't ready to be a mother then. I'll never be ready."

"You've got to realize who you really are." He emphasized his words with a light pat to her arm. "Not in relation to other people. Not as a wife or mom or daughter or friend—but as Jackie."

"I don't know how," but that wasn't true. She'd avoided trying. If she integrated her trauma instead of allowing it to take control, as her therapist consistently offered to help her do; if she realized who she really was, she might lose any doubt she was completely worthless.

A post-and-chain fence ran between the lagoon and grassy area outside her solarium. It prevented people from accidentally falling into the water. The towel Steven had used to dry his feet was slung over the fence, and she reached for it. Her intention was to hide her face and allow herself to cry, but she grabbed the towel and shoved it under the bench.

"You write anything in that notebook I gave you?" he said.

"No."

"Maybe you should. Listen to music, any music. See what comes out on the page from your subconscious."

"Is that how you write lyrics?"

"Yup."

"I'll think about it."

"While you're thinking about it," he said, "you can open this."

A rectangular, gift-wrapped box dropped into her hands. "What is it?"

"Your birthday present."

"Having Degenerate Matter play at the party was enough." She flicked the gift's ribbon with her thumb. "More than enough, especially considering everything you and the band are going through."

"Yeah, well, I'd pretty much go to the ends of the Earth for you, so..."

She'd almost stopped trembling, but a shiver crackled through her like lightning. "I don't get it," she said. "I don't understand why."

"You don't have to understand. Just accept it."

"If it's out of obligation because you left me fifteen years ago—"

"That word's got to go, all right? I'm sick of hearin' it. Nothing I do for you is out of obligation." He glided his hand over his chest and rubbed. "It's out of this. Now open your damn present."

She unwrapped the gift. Beneath the paper was a white box, and inside that was a glasses case. "I have perfect vision, thank you very much."

"That's debatable," he said, "but this ain't about reading a menu. Open the case."

She opened it then snapped it closed. "No."

"They're the real deal."

She opened the case again. His sunglasses from the '70s, in pristine condition, were resting on black foam. "How?"

"Got them fixed a while back. Wore 'em at the GRAMMYs—"

"I thought they were replicas."

"They're as real as me. Figured you could use a little protection."

She pulled the sunglasses from the case. They were Aviators, whose lenses were tinted dusky rose "Protection from what?"

"Your mom and your 'friends' when the shit hits the fan. Maybe the shades'll remind you to stay Zen. To stay out of it." He zipped up his backpack, where he'd taken the gift from. "I'd be here in person during the initial fallout if I could. So would Donna. We'll both call you—"

"I'll be fine," she said and closed the sunglasses in their case. "The last thing you need to do is worry about me."

"Same goes for you about me. Not just about this tabloid crap, but about what you told me tonight. You did nothing wrong. Then or now."

She looked at his face under the deck lights. Mixed within all his presence and love was an equal measure of suffering. It was the same she'd seen the summer of '79, during their last moments together. He'd carried it and more the last fifteen years but refused to explain it. Or give a concrete reason why he'd ended their relationship. As much as she wished to reflect back that he'd done nothing wrong either, she couldn't.