The girls wandered over to the racetrack and watched some younger riders spray up dirt. They got a kick out of a little boy of maybe three or four, on a child’s tricycle, circling the viewing area with a pronounced verbalized “Rrrrrrrrrr”.
“Just wait until he gets a motor,” Sophie announced, dryly.
Sue-Lyn piped up. “Boys and their toys. Starts in diapers, does it?”
Sophie giggled and added, “Hey if it keeps my man happy to get out on the track once in a while then I’m all for it, since it usually means he’s in a good mood afterwards and I can convince him to go listen to some jazz or take me out to a French restaurant.”
They were attracting unsolicited stares - although Jessie was on some level accustomed to it, it was new for the others. Drifters had become a big deal in the Fraser Valley, and there was a buzz around the track now that the show’s stars were hanging around. Jessie inched a little closer to Maggie. Although she regularly fought against Charles’ and Matt’s urging to keep some security close at hand, she rarely took advantage of it, and instead preferred to wander around on her own. At the same time, on the occasions that she did venture out in public alone, Jessie usually tried to disguise herself to some degree. And she was rarely in the company of others who would draw notice to her. So at Agassiz the attention was different, and so was somewhat of a revised experience for her, as well.
However, the people at the motocross complex were friendly and down-to-earth. Before they knew it, the girls were lined up at the freestyle track watching their boys practice while Carter, his sleek black hair pulled back in an appealing ponytail, engaged the locals in a serious discussion to help him understand the rules and stunts of the sport. His sense of humor immediately dispersed any thoughts of tension or ego that the regulars might have perceived would attend Jessie and her cast mates, and soon he and all of the girls were enthusiastically engaged in learning about FMX. Soon they comprehended the benefits of two stroke engines versus four strokes, which bikes were the best and why, modifications made to bikes for freestyle and, lastly, the prestigious “kiss-of-death” stunt, and who on the competitive world circuit accomplished it best.
Soon Maggie stopped looking over her shoulder for bears, and Jessie took a personal inventory and discovered with pleasure that she was content and at peace. Life with her friends was almost the normal she continuously sought. They were caring, unassuming and nice to others, and she genuinely loved being in their company. She found herself relaxing more than she had in years and was almost surprised at the comfortable state to which her soul had arrived, finally, in the strange lifetime of turmoil and fame she’d been handed.
After a while, bruised and beat from the constant jarring his body was absorbing from the bike and the introduction to the demanding FMX skills, Josh took a break. He moseyed over to the girls and dropped down on a wooden bench beside Jessie as she watched Steve take a lesson with one of the sport’s more notable riders. Jessie took Josh’s dirty white leather gloves from him and for a pleasurable moment lingered over their softening newness. After a moment she laid her hand over his.
“Eww, you’re all sweaty,” she teased, squeezing his warm moist fingers.
Josh took that as a cue to lean over and brush his three-day whiskered face against her smooth cheeks. Then, as she giggly recoiled from the bristly pinpricks, he placed a big hand behind her head and forced her to hold still while he gave her an exaggerated smooch.
Jessie wrapped her arms around her man and held him tight. She loved the feel of his body against hers, and admitted to herself that the white leather padded motocross gear and boots were in fact tantalizingly sexy. But then again, she grinned to herself, everything Josh wears is sexy. She was crazy about him and was still amazed that they had finally found a way to be together. Life was good.
At day’s end, with no injuries sustained with the exception of a few expected blue bruises, and a few crazy new tricks learned, the gang piled back into the van for the hour and a half ride back to Vancouver, hauling the tired mud-splattered bikes behind them.
“I’m disappointed I didn’t see a bear,” Maggie threw in offhandedly, frowning, which stirred up a hornet’s nest of retorts and responses.
“You’re such a hypocrite!” Carter scolded her, his arm around the demure but smiling Ashley. “You didn’t want to see a bear and now that you’re safe you’re wishing you’d seen one.” Disparaging, he shook his head.
“Well, I know you guys wouldn’t let it attack me, so it would have been okay to have seen one!”
Sue-Lyn threw in her two cents. “From a distance, you mean!”
“A safe distance of what, like a few hundred feet?” Carter kept up his playful banter.
Maggie pouted at their teasing while Josh pointed the van back to the city and Sophie called restaurants to try to find reservations for a late evening dinner.
They hadn’t seen a bear, or any snakes, to boot-but a bear saw them. He’d hidden in the crowd of loyal observers and thrill seekers, watching as the group of friends shared one of the best days Jessie could recall in a very long time. Deuce watched as the production van hauling the bikes pulled out of the parking lot, and he grimaced as he saw Josh reach over from the driver’s seat and pull Jessie towards him for a tender kiss. Then Josh gunned the motor and spit dirt out behind the little troupe so that it arced into the air in the general direction of McCall.
Deuce would give her a little more time. Now was just for observing, to see if the relationship with Josh would stick. But he had no intention of forgiving her for quitting his employ and his life. His ancestors were wealthy plantation owners with many slaves and that cell memory passed on to Deuce. What was once his was always his. He would get her back when the time was right. And that time was imminent.
McCall climbed into his rented Ford Fusion and kicked the dirt off his boots before slamming the driver’s door behind him. He could see Jessie and her friends singing in the van when he pulled ahead of them a few moments later. The Southern gentleman pulled his brown cowboy hat down over his balding head in the event that Jessie decided to glance his way. She didn’t see him but, oddly, she shivered when Deuce’s vehicle passed. Josh rested his arm casually on Jessie’s thigh after flicking up the van’s heater in the cool late autumn evening. It wouldn’t do to let her catch a chill.
The robust spectacled trees observed silently again as the two vehicles passed beneath their honor guard - the hunter and the hunted. Leaves, either hanging on until their last breath, or newly departed from the safety and relative obscurity of their hosts, sensed in their spines that a wicked, appalling game was just about to begin. If they could have, they would have cringed.
***
Chapter Eight
On an inky star-kissed Christmas Eve, with an oppressive ceiling of grey snow clouds slowly moving in to shield the miniature sparkles glistening above Vancouver, Jessie sang “Oh, Holy Night” at midnight mass. She hadn’t been asked, but she went to the service with Josh and Charles and Dee as a sort of conciliatory attempt to align the man she loved with her sort-of parents. They couldn’t seem to find it in themselves to completely accept him, nor could many of Jessie’s fans. Things had settled down a bit, as Jessie had expected; the gossip mags had no shortage of celebrity faux pas to pick on. Yet it seemed the climate surrounding their match was still - at least outside their main circle - not wholly friendly and receiving. Charles and Dee were social enough, partly because of their friendship with Jonathon, but they often enjoyed visits from Charlie when he was in town, and it was crystal clear where their hopes and allegiances truly lay.
At midnight mass a nervous twenty-year-old man with a warm timbre to his tenor voice had been chosen to sing “Oh, Holy Night” in the much esteemed Christian Christmas tradition. Watching as he made his way forward, Jessie - seated in a wooden pew, a short itchy sequined black scooped-neck dress distracting her from the service - was slightly cranky. She was brushing knees with a bristling Dee on one side o
f her, and twining her fingers amongst Josh’s anxious hands on the other.
Although making valiant attempts at civility and social graces, Josh was edgy and obviously upset. It was awkward. Although kind to Jessie, Dee had a habit of couching her dislike of Josh through passive aggressive control tendencies. Throughout the entire Christmas Eve meal of broccoli crepes, mixed green salad and bacon wrapped scallops, which Deirdre and Charles hosted in the charming formal dining room at La Casa, the matriarch’s unfavorable comments were less than subtle. She announced to the table, which included Jonathon and his wife Giselle, that Charlie was by earlier and that he had been recently cast in a new Clint Eastwood film. It seemed Charlie was making an effort to leave his light comedies behind, as this new film was touted as heavy drama. Jessie quietly wondered whether Charlie was trying to make a point, and whether Dee was completely hoodwinked by Jessie’s ex-fiancé. Now, sitting in the uncomfortable wooden pew, she narrowed her eyebrows, remembering the quick rise of her blood pressure at Dee’s insistence on heralding Charlie’s victories in the presence of Josh.
So when in church the edgy young man started to sing the beloved Christmas Eve hymn and couldn’t get past the first verse, Jessie had enough fight roused up in her to consider going to his aid. She didn’t want to upstage him but she quickly realized that he was in trouble and was likely unable to continue the beautiful carol. Jessie was also uncomfortable enough sandwiched between Dee and Josh to want an out and, for Jessie, music was always an out.
In front of the entire congregation, regardless of what anyone would think, she slipped past Josh, walked up the aisle and stepped lightly onto the altar, where the singer had stopped, frozen and embarrassed. In turn, the enthralled folks spellbound in the peaceful hum of their year’s holiest night were starting to feel the yearned for bubble-of-tranquility dissipate. They were squirming in their seats, and a low shuffling and mumbling was overtaking the silence left by the organist, who had removed her graceful hands from the faithfully restored Casavant organ’s original ivory keys. The music director was also helpless. Immobilized in the choir loft above and at the back of the church, he regretted his decision to take a chance and let the talented but obviously overwrought young man sing the treasured carol.
The soloist was staring at the floor, unable to move, when Jessie paused four feet to the left of him, faced him side-on, and took up the verse. She reached out and gathered his hand in hers and, as he looked up, what he later recalled was seeing a presence like an angel, encircled – haloed - in the light. The entire congregation sighed in one collective breath, grateful entranced witnesses to the blessed magic that ensued.
The boy searched for his voice. When he found it, he and Jessie sang together, strong and true, imbued with the divine glow of Christmas Eve as the organist brought the Casavant back to life.
In the pew, Dee chanced a glance over to Josh. He seemed to have forgotten the earlier chides made by Jessie’s manager. The Drifters star was sitting stock still, as mesmerized as anyone else who had the heavenly happenstance to be at the church on that ethereal evening. The hymn was mystical, lilting and lovely, and had the power to transport any non-believer. Watching Jessie help the young man on the altar find his voice was perhaps one of the most incredible glimpses into the girl’s soul that Dee ever witnessed as she had, over time, watched Jessie blossom and grow. And the rapture on Josh’s face was equally revealing. There was no doubt that he loved her but, as the honeymoon period wore off, could he abstain from hurting her? He did have a temper, righteous or not, and occasionally resorted to violence in the past.
In this brief twinkling on an evening when the glory and love of God and the Savior’s birth transcended all of the minutiae and toil of life, Dee let a little window open ever so slightly. She, too, allowed herself to briefly become a momentary believer, only her new belief was in the love story of Josh and Jessie. Her love of God was already complete.
When the hymn found its last sweet note, and the mystical carol drew to its celestial close for one more blessed year, Jessie and the young tenor hugged each other, and the church exploded in an uncharacteristic standing ovation. Neither Dee nor Josh ever loved Jessie more, and Charles and his younger namesake Charlie, and everyone else present, were also completely captivated. Jessie’s gifts were more than just music, songwriting, acting-despite the troubles she’d faced in her lifetime, she was a giving, caring person. Not much wonder people throughout the world loved and admired her deeply.
Afterwards, in the church entrance, Charlie made his way through the excited crowd over to Jessie and gave her a sweet, simple, tender kiss on the cheek.
“Jessie,” he said, shaking his head in wonder, hands lingering on her forearms as he stared deeply into the much missed pearl eyes and thus into the girl’s soul. “You never fail to amaze me.”
Next to her - slightly uncomfortable, tense - Josh watched quietly, uncertain of how he would be received by Jessie’s ex.
Blushing, Jessie grasped Charlie’s elbows and leaned into a gentle embrace. She hadn’t really contemplated what she’d done. It was just something that needed to happen. She couldn’t sit there and watch the boy suffer.
“It was nothing, just a little helping hand,” she murmured. “He was an accomplished tenor who needed a little nudge, that’s all. It was scary for him, up there.”
Charlie glimpsed at Josh, who was shifting his weight from one side to another and who, by glancing at the toes of his black boots, was making successful attempts not to meet the eye of anyone lingering in the church entry. Charlie extended a hand. “Once again, I regret letting this girl go. You’re a lucky man, Sawyer. Don’t fuck it up. If you do, I’ll be waiting in the wings. And I won’t fuck it up next time.”
All Josh could see when he faced his old friend was the debilitating humiliation from that horrifying long ago night in Wes Sawyer’s black box studio. It was funny how those awkward old memories were seemingly impossible to let go. Josh accepted the handshake but he couldn’t speak. The painful memories, and Charlie’s history with Jessie, scared the shit out of him.
Thankfully, Jessie intervened. “Charlie,” she chided gently, loving Josh even more for his vulnerability and slipping her fingers into his to offer comfort and reassurance, “this man is never leaving my side as long as I have something to say about it. Sorry. You know the old saying - you snooze, you lose.”
She didn’t see the need to rub salt in an open would by adding I love him desperately, but she thought it, and the verity of the sentiment lit up her eyes like one of the stars above after the passing of a cottony grey cloud.
Wrapped in a fake fur mink stole thrown casually over the shoulders of a creamy white Donna Karan blazer, Deirdre weaved her way over to the little group. She embraced Charlie and wished him a Merry Christmas, feeling a pang of regret that he wouldn’t be around the next day socializing with Charles and drinking bourbon in her lavish front room.
“Deirdre Keating,” Charlie said, finally letting go of Jessie to accept the imposing Mrs. Keating’s heartfelt hug. “You are exquisite. Merry Christmas to you, too.”
Josh was about as uncomfortable as the challenged singer earlier, so Jessie nudged him out of the door with a goodbye wave to Dee and her boys. Watching, Charles made a grand gesture. With an arm around his elegant wife, he commented on the couple.
“I’ve never seen her this happy, Dee,” he said, a note of relaxed contentment stealing into his affirmative businessman’s speech.
Charlie sighed and rested his hands on his hips as he followed the grey silhouettes of Josh and Jessie, framed in the entry of the church and front-lit by an eerie contrast between the semi-clouded white moon and the city’s brighter night lights as they exited. “I’m the biggest ass on the planet.”
Dee slipped her fingers into Charlie’s and seized the opportunity to alleviate the loneliness she knew the next day would bring. “We stocked up our bourbon. Stop by and have a drink tomorrow. Today, actually,” she said, remi
nding herself that it was now after one in the morning. “Bring Jack and Lydia.”
She breezed out the door and, despite a twinge for Charlie, even allowed herself a small smile as she watched Josh pull open the passenger door of his pick-up and then settle against it to kiss Jessie. Dee stopped just outside the church, on the top step, and saluted them silently as a few whimsical snowflakes drifted lazily down from the few clouds trying their hardest to obscure the starlit night above.
Josh was leaning into Jessie, and her face was turned up to his. Both pairs of eyes were shining as they shared some apparently secret joke. Dee had never seen a couple apparently more in love. She breathed in deeply, remembering a similar heady kind of love with Charles many years earlier. She prayed that the sheer happiness and joy she saw before her would last; then her husband stole up behind her and wrapped his long arms around his wife’s later middle-aged waist. He nuzzled her neck and all of the glory of the universe seemed suddenly revealed to Dee as she found herself encased in one of life’s perfect moments.
Before them, in the parking lot across the road, Jessie and Josh stood illuminated underneath a frosty streetlight. They were no longer smiling, but were simply standing there nose to nose, hands held, eyes closed, reveling in the sweetest of life’s gifts.
After a moment Jessie kissed him again, and then she turned and eased her way up into the truck. Josh gently closed the door behind her, as if by slamming it he would break the spell, and then he walked noiselessly around behind the truck, his booted footsteps leaving wet imprints on the virgin snow. He hopped in on the driver’s side, started the King Ranch, and steered it out of the parking lot, his hand in Jessie’s.
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