by Mere Joyce
“Wesley came up with the idea,” Autumn says, studying me as I read, as I finish the piece and stare again at the photo of Watching Storms. “Right after he joined the group, he got the band, and a few other bands, to put on a concert.” She smiles, blowing air onto her nails between sentences. “It was a great night. Everyone paid a cover, and we had a concert in Grands Park. Some of the money went to helping fund your search, like, printing flyers and stuff. But, well, there wasn’t much searching anymore. I think Wesley just wanted to remind people, you know? So most of the money went to charity. An art therapy organization, actually.”
“Are––Are you s-serious?” No wonder Wesley thinks my therapy is so important. He placed a donation to the cause, even before I started attending the Healing Expressions collective.
“Yes.” The word is pointed, and Autumn’s expression is as stern as I’ve ever seen it. “Look it up online sometime. You can see videos. I’ve got them on my computer, too, if you’re ever interested.”
I want to take her by the shoulders and force her to play them for me this very instant, but all I do is nod. It’s too much information, too much to process, too much to understand.
“Why do you . . . h-have this?” I ask, running my fingers over Wesley’s article, over the ink-penned instruments drawn down the margin of the page.
Autumn’s eyes trail my fingers, and then she closes the book and hugs it to her chest. She looks down at the ground when she speaks, another uncharacteristic quality for her. “These are the only memories I have of you from––then,” she says awkwardly, like she’s not sure she’s getting the right words out, like she’s not sure what the right words are supposed to be. “They’re not great memories, but they’re all I have. I mean, you know, the pieces from before you got back. The ones I put in there now are all bits of good news. I wouldn’t want someone to find this book in fifty years or something, and think the bad parts were the end of the story.”
I’m touched. And amused. And disturbed. The emotions whirl together, creating a tempest in my brain.
“I––” I have to say the right thing. Autumn doesn’t need my approval to keep a scrapbook like this, nor does she need me telling her to stop adding to her collection. “Thank you,” I say at last, and Autumn looks mildly surprised by my reaction, though she has the grace to cover the look immediately with a smile of apparent disinterest.
“Well.” She shrugs, and replaces the book in her desk, standing with her back to me for a few long seconds before she slides the drawer closed. Then she throws the cover of her bed back, revealing a knapsack and three textbooks, and fishes the topcoat polish out of the bag so I can finish off her new look.
Chapter Seventeen
The next afternoon, I sit on my floor with my laptop open before me, two assignment sheets and a textbook spread out on either side of the screen. I read the latest history lesson for one of my online courses, and make notes on what chapters I need to study next. It’s boring work. I like history, but it’s a subject to be taught in person, preferably by someone excited to relate stories of epic wars or quirky local customs. This course is a straightforward read-a-chapter, test-a-chapter format, with a few small question exercises thrown in about once a month. I’ll be glad when it’s over in a few weeks. I have more coursework to do this summer, but this is the last history class I have to take online, and the day of my final test is one I’m definitely looking forward to.
I finish my reading, compile my notes, and sign out of the class website. I’m about to shut down the computer all together, but before I click the command, I remember what Autumn said last night about Wesley’s charity event. My fingers hover over the mousepad, lingering until I make up my mind and open the browser window. In the search bar, I type in ‘Watching Storms’ and press Enter.
The results are less than enticing. A bunch of meteorological sites show up, pictures of people recording storm activity and talking about their experiences chasing foul weather.
“Oh, honestly,” I grumble beneath my breath, letting out a sigh as I think of how best to narrow my options.
I add the name of our town to refine the search, and have better luck finding something worthwhile. There are a few bloggers, local musicians promoting their own band’s attendance at the event, or people relaying the concert from a spectator’s point of view. I read the posts, some of them with pictures of the bands on a small black stage, or of people in the park sharing drinks and waving to the camera, and try not to get emotional.
Looks like a good time was had by all, as they say. Most of the faces in the photos are strangers, people I’ve never met who were probably unaffected by my disappearance. I would’ve been uncomfortable if the images showed groups of people crying as they mourned me, though. My being taken at least gave these strangers a reason to donate money to a good cause, so I don’t mind if they laughed and sang and waved gleefully at their friends’ cameras while doing it.
I go back to the search results, skim through a few more websites, and then click the Videos tab at the top of the page. This is what I’m really interested in. There are several small clips of the event taken on shaky camera phones, but a few people have posted the whole concert, and I manage to find one video with good quality footage. The running time is a little over two hours. I pick up the laptop and crawl into bed with it.
“Okay,” I say aloud, sitting cross-legged with the computer in my lap. “Let’s see what this was all about.”
I click the play button, and nestle back against my headboard. The first group to perform consists of four teenagers––three mop-headed guys and a girl with blue hair. I watch their entire set, which runs about twenty minutes. They sound awful, but they’re obviously having fun with their grunge-inspired performance, and no one in the audience seems to mind their off-key singing or off beat drumming. When their final song ends, the girl tries to make a big show of stage-diving, but there isn’t enough of a crowd for it, so she hops energetically to the grass before running around to the back of the stage where a makeshift wall of white material hides the bands, pre- and post-performance. I laugh out loud at her embarrassing finish, but I’m impressed at how casually she manages to pull the whole spectacle off.
After the group, whose muffled name I couldn’t understand as it was screamed at the beginning of the set, is finished, someone walks out onto the stage. The camera zooms in, until I can make out Wesley’s figure. I turn the sound up, my heart throbbing in my ears so loud I’m afraid I won’t be able to hear him speak.
“Thank you all for coming,” he says into the echoing microphone. He’s fidgety, nervous standing up before the crowd. It’s the only time I’ve seen him like this, in the space between fourteen and seventeen, between when I disappeared and when I returned. Here, in this video, Wesley is at the horrible stage of adolescence where none of his pieces fit together. His arms are too long, his legs too short for his torso. His hair is shaggy, blowing in the breeze, and his skin has a red tinge to it, likely from too much time out in the sun. His clothes are simple, jeans and a collared shirt open to a black t-shirt underneath, but they’re all baggy, as if he’s wearing everything two sizes larger than he needs.
Standing on the stage, Wesley is gawky. And tense. And still beautiful. He’s perfectly awkward, perfectly subjected to the disasters of growing up. My heart and my stomach both ache to see the time I missed, the time I wish so much I could have witnessed up close. But still I grin while I watch him, content to at least get this delightful glimpse of the maturation of my favorite boy.
“A year ago last May,” he says, gripping the microphone stand with one hand, the other working to keep his hair out of his eyes, “Madison Deacon––” he pauses, looks down at the stage and then back out to the crowd. “Um, Maddie went missing,” he continues. He stops again, and my eyes sting to see how hard this was for him.
“Wes,” I whisper, as the Wesley in the video offers the crowd half a smile.
“So tonight, we’re, um, we�
�re here to raise money. For Maddie, and for a charity I think she would have liked. So, um,” he nods his head, bites his lip, glances to the side of the stage. “I think we’ll get on with the show. Thank you.”
He ducks quickly off the stage, and I laugh, while the audience in the video applauds like he’s just given an awe-inspiring speech. Another group soon takes the stage, this one an all-female jazz quartet. I listen to their first number, much better than any of the last band’s songs, and then I drag my cursor over the video timeline to find where Watching Storms comes on. I’ll view the rest of the video later. I’ll probably view it several times. But for this watch-through, I just want to see more of Wesley.
The band’s opening number is one I don’t recognize. It has the essence of what I heard at Jolly Joe’s yesterday, but not the precision of it. Autumn said this event took place just after Wesley joined the group, and it’s clear they’re still figuring out how their personalities and instruments fit together. They’re good, though. Watching Storms had, even at the beginning, a unique look and an undercurrent of smouldering sexiness in their sound, seeds which have, over the years, blossomed into major components of the group’s style.
The third song in the set is one I heard last night. Last night, a short time ago that now feels rooted incredibly far off in the past. I listen to the song, not as finely tuned on the video as it was in the coffee shop, and I remember Wesley closing his eyes and drifting languidly into the music as he played, his body shed of its awkwardness, his personality defined and his manner confident.
The camera shooting the video is panned out too far for me to study the younger version of Wesley. I watch his vague figure anyway, and enjoy the music as one song ends and another unfamiliar tune begins.
The last song of the set is an important one. Wesley steps up to the microphone again. This time he’s more relaxed. He thanks the audience for attending, thanks the people who helped organize the concert. The list of names is long, and it’s unbelievably weird listening to them all spilling out from Wesley’s lips. Seeing this video is surreal, like I’m watching these people from beyond the grave. Most of them, maybe all of them, thought I was dead when this concert took place. I get to see how they would have acted if I had actually been strangled or starved or chopped to pieces and buried under a riverbank.
It’s creepy, this feeling. Unsettling, like I’m not supposed to be watching this, like this should be reserved only for people unaware I’m alive in my room, safe, sound, and only minimally crazy after all’s been said and done.
“For our last song,” Wesley says, glancing over his shoulder at his bandmates, “we’d like to play you our newest piece. This, um, this entire night’s been dedicated to her, but I just want to say that this one, especially?” His voice breaks. “Maddie. This one’s for you.”
He doesn’t look up at the sky as if he thinks I’m watching from on high, which is a relief. Of course, it doesn’t change the fact I’m desperately trying not to cry, and the greater relief is I’m viewing this alone.
The song starts up, and I’m not surprised to hear Watching Storms. The familiar melody washes over me, taking me back to an unexpectedly tranquil recollection of sitting in the coffee house, sharing a cinnamon bun with Autumn as the music flows around us.
But just like last night, the song doesn’t leave me in peace for long. The video, which started filming in the lingering hours of day, now shoots through a dark night, the outlines of the stage lost in the blackness of the surrounding landscape. But as the chorus of the song begins for the second time, something lights up on the wall behind the band.
The crowd erupts as the image is displayed, and the cameraperson zooms in to get a better look. It’s a vision to capture the song’s darkening mood, a picture of a girl standing by a window, staring out at the rain.
Or, rather, it’s a painting of a girl. It’sStorm Watching.
I see my painting flashed huge before the crowd, and with its appearance the same confused disappointment from last night plunges down my throat and into my stomach. I can’t figure out whether seeing my artwork displayed like this is a compliment or a violation, and it’s frustrating being unable to decipher my own feelings.
But then a horrifying thought strikes out at me from the video, and suddenly I no longer care about the painting one way or the other. I scan the audience, what I can see of it in the camera’s frame. I search through the bodies, half-expecting . . . and wholly afraid.
What if he was there? What if The Painter was standing in the crowd, listening to Wesley play and looking at my painting?
He left his house at random times, night and day. I don’t know if he worked, how he got the money to pay for his food and his paints. But he left, sometimes. He was gone when I escaped, and he’d been gone many times before then. So it’s possible. He could have been in the crowd, one of the small bodies caught within or left outside of the camera’s lens. He could have been there, seeing my family together, smugly aware he was the reason I couldn’t be with them.
He could have been there.
With a petrified jolt, I slam the laptop down, cutting off the song and the video and the idea of his nauseating enjoyment at my suffering family’s expense.
Chapter Eighteen
My head hurts. I sit on my bed for a while, making sure I won’t be sick, won’t stumble and fall if I try to stand. When I think I’m sturdy enough to move, I get up and go to the kitchen so I can take something for the ache between my eyes.
The house is unusually quiet for a Wednesday afternoon. Dad’s working from home in the basement office, and Autumn’s at a friend’s. Mom’s at the hotel she manages until six, which means there’ll be chaos at dinnertime when everyone converges for food. For the moment, however, a lovely silence has settled over the kitchen. I swallow a couple of pain-relievers, and then I sit at the kitchen table, staring out the window to our backyard.
When the pinching pain and the pulsating panic begin to subside, my thoughts trickle back to the video. I’m sickened by the possibility, by my agonizing sense of absolute certainty, The Painter was present at the concert. I wonder if my parents, or Wesley, had the same thought as the bands played and people made donations on my behalf. I hope they didn’t. I hope it never crossed their minds.
But it’s crossed mine. And because I know the sinister suspicion is well founded, I’m jittery with determination to do something for Wesley and my family. To tell them I’m sorry for his presence, to thank them for not letting him take my name and memory, even when he’d taken me.
I’ve heard almost nothing of their searching, of their hoping, of their pain. And it’s odd to learn they held an event in my honor when I was only in a house on the outskirts of Colwood Bay. While they played songs dedicated to me, I was probably waiting for The Painter to release my bonds so I could crawl to my mattress and nurse my sore wrists, as he bolted the door and pushed something against it in case I managed to break it down during the night.
Everyone wasted so much of their time worrying about my fate. I want to apologize for the fallen tears and dark dreams my absence caused.
It will take years to make it up to them, if I ever can. But I need to do something, anything, right now. A small gesture will work. I haven’t given a single thing back to anyone in the last five months, and I’m finally coming to the long-overdue realization I’ve spent enough time being totally self-absorbed.
An idea starts to form about what I can do for my family, but it needs consideration and a bit of time to plan. Wesley, however, is easier.
I get up, and walk back to the kitchen cupboards, pulling out baking supplies and Mom’s Christmas cookbook. Wesley deserves a whole world full of thanks. But something sweet will at least show him I have no lingering resentments over last night’s performance. I flip open the cookbook and turn to the recipe for gingerbread cookies. May is hardly the time for gingerbread, but I’m not much of a baker, and these are the only cookies I can make with consistent decency
.
I used to bake these with Dad, with Autumn, with Wesley himself. Every holiday season, we would gather in the kitchen on a cold and often snowy afternoon, listening to Christmas classics and coating every surface with sugar and flour and glittery sprinkles. Mom supervised, and when we were little she took over assembling the more complicated gingerbread house. But these cookies were ours to make on our own, and I’ve followed this recipe enough times to be nearly confident of my ability to make a delicious cookie.
I preheat the oven and start mixing ingredients, adding egg and vanilla, molasses and brown sugar. I’m lucky we have everything I need on hand, a fact I realize only when I have to dig through to the back of the cupboard to find the last remnants of cinnamon in stock. I’m also lucky Mom’s tweaked the recipe with her pen scratchings on the page, so I don’t have to chill the dough for a few hours before baking it. I want to get the cookies done before Autumn gets home, or else she’ll want to help and will end up eating half our creations in the process.
I dislike the mess of baking. The sticky fingers and flour-dusted counters are a pain to clean afterward. But stirring the wet ingredients, folding in the dry, rolling out the completed mixture to a nice, even thickness, these are calming exercises I relax into. When I’ve got my baking tray ready for the oven, and the gingerbread rolled on the counter ready to be cut, I find the plastic container that holds all of our cookie cutters, and look for one cutter in particular. I feel triumphant when I find it, like it’s a long-lost treasure.
I press the cookie cutter, the metal shaped in the long, curved design of a cello, into the soft dough. I bought this cookie cutter with my own money when I was eight. It was a proud moment, my birthday money spent mostly on paints and toys and candy, but also on this one curious baking tool. Mom laughed when she saw it, but hours later we made a batch of cello-shaped sugar cookies to bring to Wesley. He wasn’t home, so we left the cookies in a tin by his back door, knowing they’d be found when Wesley’s dad undoubtedly went to light the barbeque for a supper of burgers or steak.