Promises

by Susan Rodgers

  “Matt! Dan! You asses!”

  Jessie stepped back from Josh. As she swiveled coolly around towards the others she felt her fingers slip from his grasp. She closed her eyes, and it was Charlie’s gentle hold on her broken wrist that kept her standing.

  Downcast, Josh lamented their parting fingers as she glided off to sing, an amorphous impervious fog in the sea-blue dress. Then Dan put a heavy hand on his shoulder, and he turned away.

  ***

  Charlie led Jessie into the house via the back sliding doors on the deck. Jonathon’s place was a modern multi-layered home not unlike Josh’s, just a few miles down the beach. Designed by the same architect, the contemporary homes both featured pools on a lower level and small garages in the driveways, revealing that Josh’s biological father and his son had much in common. Steve let his part in the conversation with Giselle lapse as Jessie walked by without acknowledging him. She was off somewhere distant again in her mind; he knew her well enough to recognize that. But it bothered him that she insisted Josh attend this party; it unnerved him that she hugged Josh, and it threw him completely that she didn’t even bother to wave hello as she walked by less than six feet from where he stood. His intuition kicked in. Something was amiss this day.

  Inside, Jessie was greeted warmly by Christian as Charlie attempted to calm down Dee. Matt and Charles raised their eyebrows at each other. To them it made sense that Jessie was not afraid of Josh, if in fact both he and she were telling the truth. Dee still could not fully accept that. It was too hard on her head to imagine that someone they could not identify might be the maniac who’d hurt her girl. At least by blaming Josh she had somewhere to lash out.

  The party was not marred by any further outbursts. It was a wonderful afternoon filled with jokes and friends and laughter, a pristine perfect day for Jessie to partake of from the perimeter, just watching it all go down. Steve made his way to her side as the cake was being cut, and although Sophie was quietly present with Maggie and Sue-Lyn it was clear she and Steve were not together. Jessie was unconcerned with Steve’s attention. He was affectionate, touching her fingers on occasion, whispering intimately to her when he could get away with it, but she was largely distant, only responding with the occasional subdued remark. She was there to watch, to observe, to sing.

  When the time came, Jessie mounted the two steps to the small stage the carpenters on Drifters built for Jonathon’s party. Jessie wasn’t the only performer, but she was the last. By the time she stood at the microphone ready to sing, everyone had quieted and found seats or stood by the walls. Jessie knew exactly where Josh was - once inside the expansive room, he didn’t move from his place at the far left corner all day. Nobody spoke to him except Charlie, and Jessie found herself once again gratefully in Charlie’s debt.

  She sang a song for Jonathon first - a sweet, positive, upbeat tune about the passage of time that she wrote a year ago. The next song was Promises. It was the piece she and the carefree Christian fine-tuned just the day before, accompanied by a darkening Vancouver skyline and its associated burgeoning red and green nightlights outside her expansive window.

  Christian’s light melodic touch on the ivory keys of Jonathon’s grand piano swept everyone away before Jessie sang her first note. Delicately touching the microphone as she started to sing, sharing her thoughts through lyrics, Jessie gained courage and found a spot on the far wall with which to commune. It was as if there was a spirit afloat there -perhaps a guardian angel to call the song home.

  Entranced by how this girl could wrench the most beautiful music out of the worst kinds of pain, the guests at Jonathon’s birthday party were awed. There she was, a vision in sea-pearl blue, her hair in large curls caressing her shoulders, a cast on her wrist and faded bruises on her legs and arms telegraphing the ordeal she’d suffered a few weeks earlier; and she was singing loud and clear, as if her life depended on getting this song out for all to hear.

  She sang of love the way she described it to Christian, a rainbow version of the different kinds of love, as if she were sending a message out to each - to Charles and Dee, to her friends, to Charlie, to Stephen. She did not sing to Deuce. The dark bow that she had indicated to Christian meant unreciprocated and dangerous love remained buried within.

  As Jessie started the final verses, her eyes shifted to the far left corner. There Josh stood, lost and confused-yet determined, courageous, and it was clear to everyone present that Jessie Wheeler also had a message for Josh Sawyer. As one the crowd was immobilized as they wondered what she possibly had to say to him. Jessie and Josh’s gazes did not waver from one another; his lips parted and he straightened as he, too, became aware that she had something to say directly to him.

  Seek my heart in memories

  when we were lost in dust.

  My promise to you will always be,

  let tears fall if you must.

  Take the world as it wants to come,

  be true and real and wise,

  and let my heart remember you

  as if I’m by your side.

  You loved me once, I love you now,

  life got in the way.

  Don’t let this good thing ever end,

  let tears fall if they may.

  A promise said, a promise true,

  A promise loud and clear.

  One thing remains forever real

  I hold you forever, dear.

  I hold you forever dear.

  I hold you-forever-dear.

  The last three lines she sang with the emphasis on different words. The ballad was recorded on many cell phones in the room as the late afternoon sun silhouetted Jessie and Christian, a team who had introduced many provocative numinous songs to the world together. Everyone present was silent as Christian played the final notes, and then the room erupted as one, albeit confused as to what she had been trying to say to Josh. Was Jessie that real and amazing and true that she could so easily forgive him for what he’d done?

  Stephen stood frozen. He watched her from the start as her husky voice hung above the guests; he could feel the blood drain from his body as he finally clued in to what she was saying to Josh. She still loved him, and always would, despite life; despite a clouded, complicated past few months. Steve felt his heart twist just as Sophie realized once and for all that her man could not win Jessie, and from one glass window to another that day echoed tender, sorrowful, acute reverberations of loss and hope.

  Quietly observant, Josh had watched Steve with Jessie that afternoon. He leaned lower and lower against the wall as the tender touches his old friend let subtly play upon Jessie became evidence of deep affection and perhaps shared intimacies. It upset him to watch them together that way, and he and Sophie momentarily gazed upon each other in a wary but mutual sense of pity, until Sophie was afraid someone would see and she steered her eyes elsewhere. Charlie stepped over to Sophie then and tried to distract her with jokes and laughter, but the leaving was too real in her mind, the wound too raw. It wasn’t until she heard and watched Jessie sing to Josh that she finally let herself breathe and relax; it wasn’t until then that she knew her adversary, even if a real threat, would never love Sophie’s man the way she did.

  Josh slipped away after the song, gliding quietly into the shadows with Dan and Ulysses by his side, his heart weeping, yet in some ways jubilant. She still loved him. Like the night Jessie was so badly beaten, when she nuzzled his neck and asked him to run away with her and he sat there outside her building loving and missing her, believing there was still hope for them; he felt the same way now, buoyed, uplifted, ecstatic. Hadn’t she said that to him once? There is always hope, Josh. I will love you always and forever, no matter what happens. And now, I hold you forever dear.

  He would ponder in the months to come how odd it was that on that fateful horrific night, sitting on the concrete wall outside her building, as he remembered and cherished and missed and hoped for her the most - praying and wishing on the stars - that just above him, below the very sam
e stars, the girl he loved was being so brutally kicked, beaten, raped. What were the stars trying to say? That there must be balance in love, in promises? A yin and a yang? A white and a black, a good and an evil? The more love you feel for each other, the more severe your punishment?

  It didn’t matter what the universe was thinking. It didn’t matter what the people in Jonathon’s house were thinking. He didn’t care what the media thought, or what the world believed. As far as Josh was concerned, he had the knowledge he needed to carry on, to breathe in and out, to put one foot in front of the other each day. That was a start. The next step would be to find her true assailant, and to see that justice was served. If the universe wanted balance, he was a willing participant, even if it meant carrying out the worst crime in order to savor the most serene, beautiful and true love.

  He slid into the back seat of Dan’s Mercedes, and Josh Sawyer’s protectors swifted him away.

  ***

  Jessie accepted heartfelt congratulations from everyone with grace and charm. But she was done. She was done. She had nothing left to give these people, those who she once considered friends, parents, lovers. Her tank was empty. Carefully scrutinizing Jessie as she made the rounds, Charlie knew she was tapped out. Steve sat mournfully at a stool in the kitchen and helped himself to the spiked cranberry punch.

  After sliding a piece of folded paper out of the small purse she had stashed in a cupboard upon her arrival at Jonathon’s house, Jessie approached Maggie. Charlie observed as the women hugged each other affectionately, and he saw a quizzical glint pass over Maggie’s kind eyes as Jessie handed her Drifters co-star the paper. As Maggie tucked it into her own purse for later, Charlie watched Jessie turn and hug Dee tightly before swinging around to make her way down the hall, probably to the ladies’ room. Ah, he figured. She likely needs some time alone.

  Behind her, he noticed Matt discreetly following about ten feet away. The other security guy stayed at the entrance to the hall. Nobody went outside - Matt didn’t see the need. As long as someone eyeballed Jessie at all times, he felt she was adequately covered. Oddly though, Jessie turned back once. Curious, Charlie watched as she gazed distantly, detached, around the large room. Walking slowly backwards, her eyes rested on people here and there. Charles, Dee, Maggie, Sue-Lyn, Carter…Jonathon…Stephen, whom she had to crane her neck to see…when she met Charlie’s eyes, she held his gaze for a bit, slowing, before turning back around and continuing down the hall. Huh, Charlie thought, wrinkling his brow.

  In the bathroom, Jessie pulled open the single window and silently slipped through, her exquisite sundress tangling up around her waist. Whatever. She heard it rip on a coarse brick but she could have cared less. No more expensive silk sundresses for her. No more expectations. No more friends and family who were false when it came down to a tough, tough choice. No more performing monkey. And no more Josh.

  She ran to the hedge and slipped through, her sandals in one hand. There at the corner waited the trustworthy kind-hearted Arnie, an angel from another time, with a friend’s old silver Pontiac Sunfire. Arnie leaned over from the driver’s seat and shoved open the passenger door of the two-door car. It was heavy, awkward, but she grasped it and then on her friend’s instructions pulled down a button behind the front seat to allow herself room to slide into the backseat. Arnie yanked the door shut, and they were off well before anyone suspected Jessie of taking a little too long in the ladies’ room. They all felt she was likely emotional. Everyone was so excited over the second song that they were all talking amongst themselves. In the end it was Charlie who felt his interior thermometer rising. It was Charlie who finally vaulted forward past the first security guy and then past Matt. It was Charlie who had to bear the burden of discovering that their beloved Jessie was gone.

  She hadn’t even bothered to lock the door.

  ***

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “On the average, every day in Vancouver ten people go missing. That’s like, what,

  3 650 people a year?” Sue-Lyn told the group gathered around a large table on the patio at ROAM on a misty, rainy day. She was astonished. They all were. She looked back at her smartphone where she’d pulled up a website about missing people in the Fraser Valley. “Oh. But they usually find most of them. There are only about two that still have not been accounted for. Some are murdered,” she swallowed, then continued, “some kill themselves,” her voice got smaller, “some have accidents hiking or out in the woods or mountains, and,” her voice rose hopefully, “some move away and create new identities for themselves.” She set the phone down triumphantly next to her cinnamon sprinkled mocha.

  Around her, the assembled group was quiet. Maggie looked at her impassively, fingering her latte mug but not drinking. Stephen was subdued, Carter angry, Sue-Lyn forlorn and red-eyed. Christian, sipping his chai latte with reluctance and an air of despondency, also joined Jessie’s friends on this strange day. There had been no sign of Jessie since she went missing three days earlier. And there was no communication whatsoever.

  From his peripheral vision, Charlie spied an Audi pulling up to the curb beyond the coffee house. It was now or never.

  “All right, guys,” he started. “Listen closely. We are here to figure this thing out, and I’ve got something to say. I am asking all of you to be patient, to have open minds about this.” He added, “To trust Jessie.”

  He opened his laptop and double-clicked a file.

  And suddenly it was like she was speaking to them from beyond their reality, from the unknown, mysterious cosmos into which she disappeared.

  His voice and Jessie’s - their conversation on the beach - was being played for all of them to hear. So enraptured were they at hearing her voice and the clues and truths held up as an offering that no one noticed Josh, flanked by Matt and Dan, walking quietly up behind them. The latecomers stood back and watched and listened, but they’d all heard this before. Charlie had played the file for them at Josh’s place a day earlier.

  Several intakes of breath were heard as the voices continued, disembodied and surreal. The little group on the ROAM patio on that foggy day was at once shocked, angry, disgusted with themselves, and genuinely relieved. Their friend was innocent, if one could find it in his or herself to believe this conversation. But they were not innocent. They had been judgmental, vicious, unkind. But they had also been lied to. Victimized.

  Collectively they sat in silence, hoping for more even after Charlie closed the laptop. They saw his eyes move beyond them, and the friends turned too, almost in slow motion. There stood Josh, impassive through their new knowing like a ghost of a war battled without prejudice and malice, but one that had to be fought just the same. It was as if they were suddenly being born again, those old friends of his, as if they’d come through the birth canal anew, wrinkled and red and now alight with a new hope. They were utterly unmistakably relieved and chastened.

  Sue-Lyn, who was on the verge of tears for the last three days anyway, jumped up and threw her arms around Josh, uncertain as to what his response would be but willing to go the distance anyway. He didn’t falter. He held her close and breathed her in. Josh was having a hard enough time of it. He needed the solace of friends, regardless of what state of repair the rekindled friendships would require. Maggie was next, openly sobbing, her sorrow as fresh as the soft day. Carter slapped Josh on the back and gave him a man hug, obviously openly pleased. Stephen stood and took Josh’s hand and gave his arm a squeeze. He wasn’t up for hugs just yet. Christian shook Josh’s hand with vigor and a quiet understanding.

  Amidst the girls’ tears, Charlie gestured for Josh to sit. They had some things to figure out. First, he explained the situation-that Josh was willing to publicly go along with the charade that he harmed Jessie in order to try to suss out the real tormentor and also, as per Jessie’s wishes, to try to keep him safe. Suddenly the friends had a new worry-no longer was Josh the hunter. He had, in a few short minutes, become the hunted.

  The ques
tion at hand then became who was the hunter and what were his tools of the trade? They now knew why Jessie had been so terrified to involve her friends, Matt, the police…but they were angry about it. They wanted – needed - to know more. And they were angry with her, for not trusting their confidences.

  The group sat around the table and, despite the tension and strangeness of having Josh with them, he made it easy on them. He wasn’t sure he would have treated any of them any differently, given the circumstances. The only real downside to the day involved Steve’s hesitancy to openly welcome Josh. He was still hurt over Jessie’s public display of affection for Josh at Jon’s party, over the realization that she loved him and only him. He was curt and dismissive of Josh, the rigidity in his posture like a tiger about to strike. Josh was careful around him that afternoon. He didn’t want to cause any more problems than the large one they were already dealing with.

  Charlie brought them to the task at hand by asking for contributions of odd behavior, or clues that Jessie may have inadvertently provided. Josh texted Kayla and asked her to join them. She showed up twenty minutes later with Paul, amazed and relieved to see her brother at the table with his friends. Kayla was a key, as far as Charlie was concerned, as she had spent a great deal of time with Jessie over the summer, travelling on and off with her dance company for various shows.

  “All I can really tell you is that Jessie was really distant all summer. She was sad, she drank a lot, she smoked weed, even.” Kayla sipped on a vanilla latte as she talked, her left hand resting comfortably on Paul’s thigh.

  “In her room? Or did she go out? With others or alone?” Charlie demanded.

  Matt was on duty with Jessie for the summer shows as well. He jumped in. “Jessie is a free spirit, you all know that. She often went out alone. She refused security more times than she accepted it. We tried tailing her a few times but she learned a long time ago how to evade us. She got pretty angry when she discovered we were following her, too. It pissed me off but technically she’s my boss, right?”