Seattle welcomed them with open arms. The siblings jumped out of the car and snacked on a late lunch at the 1940’s era modest red brick home of their older brother Zachary and his wife, Hilary, who was also Josh’s manager. Zach, taller than Josh, with darker, wavy hair and a persistent three-day beard, owned a chain of three ludicrously successful coffee houses called Fat Cat Coffee. Zach also sold his own brand of roasted coffee beans in Vancouver and so the couple spent a lot of time there as well. Josh always got a kick out of hanging out with Zach and helping him at the cafes. On this day, most of the conversation centered around the properties and science of espresso, and the ability of ROAM’s baristas versus Zach and his staff’s propensity to make ‘the perfect cuppa’. The brothers would pretty much do anything for each other these days – after a turbulent teenage-hood, and Josh’s breakdown and headfirst dive into drugs, they were both just glad to have each other back.
Hilary, petite and wiry, with a runner’s body, was a sweetheart who almost always wore her brown hair in a ponytail. She had managed Josh’s audition and subsequent hiring on Drifters, due largely in part to the fact that he was a good rider. They needed a real cowboy, she was told the day Deirdre Keating called out of the blue. Josh was eternally grateful for their belief in him. He knew he still had to earn their trust, but with addictions, it was always one day at a time. They were all trying.
Zach and Hil had three amazing, gorgeous pre-school kids, who kept Hilary hopping between her home office and the kitchen each day. She had a nanny at the door by eight each morning to help so she could work, although Hil took frequent breaks to referee arguments and cuddle the little ones – two boys and a girl, in the same homemade order of their father’s family. Josh loved to visit with them, but he was usually ready to leave them after goodnight hugs, regardless of how many books they called for Uncle Josh to read. Zach and Hil always teased him mercilessly when he arrived sleepily downstairs afterwards. One of these days you’ll thank all of us for training you!
He doubted that. Twenty-seven and no gal in sight to make babies with…
After lunch, Josh accompanied Zach to Fat Cat’s flagship store and settled down to make espresso at the specific grind and temperature that his perfectionist barista brother demanded. The draws had to be oh-so-long in duration, depending on what you were making, and if the drink called for steamed milk, then there were rules about that too. It was an exacting profession, in fact more so than most people realized, and Josh enjoyed the break from being in his dusty, baggy period attire and having to know lines. Acting, too, was tougher than he remembered from his pre-substance abuse days.
Later, at dinner, the family waited around for Kayla, but although she texted after the audition to say she’d be along for food, she never showed up. By eight, the kids were in bed and Josh was stamping downstairs saying, “What do you mean she’s still not here?” By ten, they were calling everyone they could think of in the biz, just trying to connect with her (and ready to kill her when they did indeed find her), by twelve they were becoming rather incensed with her lack of consideration, and by eleven Sunday morning, when the Sawyer patriarch called from Vancouver to say hi to his grandkids, Hilary let it slip that Kayla was AWOL. She was grey when she admitted to the guys that their dad, the great Wes Sawyer, was livid, and had decided to drive down from Vancouver for a visit.
Josh’s relationship with his father was tenuous at best, and if he weren’t so pissed at his sister and, admittedly, slightly worried, he would have left the house. But by two p.m. the elder man had arrived, and Kayla still had not.
She stumbled in wearily, still slightly drunk, while Josh and their father - still muscular despite his greying hair and equally aging actor’s body - were yelling at each other, a few moments before Wes grabbed his younger son’s arm and smashed it against Hilary’s Chippendale china cabinet.
***
The fight started with the elder man’s accusations that Josh was responsible for Kayla and – once again – had failed. It increased in volume and intensity when he started dredging up all of Josh’s past wrongs. It exploded when he brought up the period of drug use and abuse - The Black Death, Josh called it because he’d felt encased in blackness, and death seemed the only, inevitable, certain conclusion.
Through most of it, the ranting and the raving, Josh stood stock still and let his father’s verbal blows bounce off his body and hit the walls, where he willed the gyp-roc to absorb the intensity of the hurtful comments. Then the tension elevated.
Wes stood at the bay window and stared at his middle child, now twenty-seven but feeling quite diminished in the presence of his austere and demanding father.
“You’re a failure. You can fool everyone else, Josh, but not me!” He pointed at himself to accentuate the point. “You have no sense! You’ve wasted a good two or more years of your life swallowing and smoking shit that soaked up most of your earnings from that stupid Disney film you made back when there was still hope for you!”
“Don’t forget inhaling and injecting,” Josh added, swallowing, his eyes dark bottomless pools of defeat and despair, fists clenched at his sides. His father never spoke to Zach or Kayla this way. But then again, the other two Sawyer siblings hadn’t generally given Wes the opportunity to hit them over their heads with his own bright version of parenting.
“Your mother would be ashamed of you. You’re a loser, kid, and don’t you ever forget it!”
“I’m not likely to.”
Josh blinked, struggling, but he was determined to fight back and not give in to his father’s bullying. He had gained some personal strength over the time at rehab and through Drifters. Still, it was a challenge to stand there and take the abuse. Hilary had long since removed her small children to the yard outside, and Zach had gone to work before their dad arrived. After Kayla’s entrance, she stood watching, shell-shocked, as she had many times in her life while their father lashed out at her brother.
“Your mother would be sick. She was stupid to think you’d ever amount to anything,” Wes snarled between his teeth like some kind of bulldog about to pounce, threatening, inviting Josh to cross some invisible line.
“In fact, my mother was sick, wasn’t she?” Josh snapped back. “Sick of your bullying, you ass.”
Kayla jumped between them before her father could react. “Dad! It’s me you should be yelling at, not Josh! I’m the one who stayed out all night and didn’t call. I got caught up in being with everyone, all the dancers, the people from the audition! I’m old enough to stay out anyway, I’m twenty-five, for God’s sake!”
Wes pushed her out of the way, then stepped forward and shoved his son. “You ungrateful sod, I don’t know why the hell I put up with you as long as I did. Why don’t you get the hell out of here?”
Stumbling, Josh spat back, “For all I know, you made her sick!”
“You don’t belong in this family!”
“You killed her, that’s what I think, you and your affairs and lack of consideration, your constant low-balling and blaming her for everything - you made her sick! You killed her as sure as if you’d driven a fucking knife into her back!”
Wes leapt forward and, with his right arm, grabbed Josh by the collar of his white T-shirt and shook him. Outside, through the open window that fought to circulate fresh air into the stuffy room, somewhere off in the distance Josh could hear Hilary on the phone to Zach, begging him to come home. One of the kids was crying. Josh swallowed.
Wes was so close that Kayla saw her brother recoil from their father’s garlicky breath. “You have no right,” Wes was saying, and she and Josh were shocked to see a wetness glistening in the corners of his eyes. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”
“I know what I saw!” Josh cried, his stomach tense from the effort to quell a sudden urge to scream and then fall into a pile of mush on the ground. His own father had him by the throat – and this wasn’t the first time. He grabbed Wes’ wrist in an attempt to wrench the older
man off him. The wrist was slowly sliding up Josh’s shirt; it grabbed him by the neck, the hairy thumb finding a grip on Josh’s Adam’s apple and settling there.
“She didn’t want you anymore, and you couldn’t handle that! You had how many whores on the side? And she had none, yet she didn’t want you and that was more than you could stand! She didn’t need you or anyone else because you ruined her for anyone else, you destroyed any chance she had at happiness!”
Kayla was in a stupor, watching the drama unfold. She jumped into the fray again and clawed at her father’s hand around Josh’s throat when she saw her brother start to struggle for breath as the thumb increased its pressure. Wes’ black eyes were intense, fierce, determined.
He spoke then, calmly and with purpose, each syllable forced between gritted teeth. “That’s where you’re wrong, kid, that’s where you’re wrong. She had happiness for a time, I know she did, but I made damn sure it had its price.”
The way he spoke terrified Kayla. He was now too calm, yet his muscles were straining to retain control. Josh was strong, younger, physically fit, but he was no match for his father, partially because he refused to fight back in a way that might hurt the older man.
Kayla clawed at the thumb around her brother’s throat, then found herself shoved harshly away again; when she looked up, Josh had been hurled against the cabinet and was gasping in pain as he slid to the floor. Later, they would all remember the sound of Hilary’s antique tableware smashing into bits. Old Country Rose Royal Albert china that had withstood fifty years in this world, including numerous household moves and the vagaries of busy children, was singularly destroyed via one man’s hatred for his son.
It was a neighbor beckoned by Hilary who finally called 911, despite Kayla’s futile attempts to break things up. The police arrested Josh – his dad was an icon in the acting world, so they took his word for it that Josh was the aggressor - and then took him to the hospital to have his wrist set. It was badly broken, and had to be surgically held together with plates and screws.
The ordeal hit the rags before he had a chance to call Stephen, although Hilary immediately contacted Jonathon to give him the heads up, weeping as she cleaned up the delicate broken bits of her beloved china while Kayla kept the small children safely away from the shards of hostility. They’d have enough time to learn about harsh life lessons courtesy of the extended Sawyer family.
Jessie was at ROAM enjoying a Flat White when she saw the headline in the Vancouver Sun’s Online Entertainment Section. Calmly, she downed the last drop and slipped out of the café towards home.
***
Josh was out cold after surgery before Zach managed to calm their father down enough to convince him not to press charges. The old man could be a tyrant when he wanted to be and, when his only daughter was involved - especially when her safety may have been compromised, in his opinion - he took no prisoners.
Sitting alone in the waiting area of the hospital, it was everything Zach could do to keep his own temper under control. He continuously ran his fingers through his wavy, dark hair and thought about the weekend. He and Josh had really only started to get to know each other after Josh cleaned up, and both were trying hard to keep things on an even keel so as to avoid confrontations. Really, the whole fight was Kayla’s fault. She was the irresponsible one who took off, never texted (her excuse – forgot to charge her cell, of course), stayed away overnight in an unfamiliar city, and panicked her older brothers. Hilary shouldn’t have let it slip to the old man that Kayla hadn’t checked in – she was 25, and liked to go dancing at clubs, so it wasn’t a big stretch that she met ‘some guy’ and had a sleepover somewhere.
After a bit, Kayla arrived at the hospital and plunked herself down beside her oldest brother. She slouched down in the uncomfortable seat and stared at the floor, Josh’s truck keys dangling from her hands.
“Okay, I’m a ditz,” she said after a bit. “Once again, Kayla fucks up the family dynamic.”
Zachary put his arm around her and they sat there, unmoving, pondering.
“Nah,” he said. “In my opinion, our dad fucked things up a long time ago. Like when he married our mother.”
They sat quietly and thought about their pretty, vibrant mom, now a nebulous figure in the hazy realm of memory. She had succumbed to breast cancer seven years ago. Once a cellist in the Vancouver Symphony, she was the glue holding the Sawyers together. Their father adored her. But there were often undercurrents of tension and then forgiveness running through their household, like the counterpoint in a conductor’s score, or undulating rhythms that rose and fell, resumed and released, restored and relieved. None of the Sawyer kids had ever been able to figure out where that came from. Theirs was a family of secrets, of untouchable dinner table conversation, and of hidden, unresolved resentments and rather feeble attempts at reconciliations. It painted them all with uncertainty and regret, leaving them on their own to wonder why their family always seemed so…unbalanced. When their delicate mother passed away, with her went any semblance of sanity within the family unit. Josh lost his way, for a time, Zach buried himself in the insane world of an overextended entrepreneur, and Kayla danced it all away. Occasionally the kids got together, although generally without their Dad of late, until this weekend.
“Why does he hate him so much?” Kayla asked Zach.
For that seemed to be where the train went off the track - everywhere Josh was concerned. Their father had always treated his middle child differently, with an absence of grace, a detached dignity, a hollow soul. Even when he was little, Josh was an object of scorn, of ridicule. But it backfired for the indomitable Wes Sawyer, for his wife picked up his slack and, by her, Josh had been deeply loved and cherished.
“I suppose he had his reasons,” Zach responded drily.
“You have a theory…?”
Zach shifted in his chair, removed his arm from behind his sister, and looked at her, the flecks in his eyes catching the light. “Not really a theory,” he offered. “I’ve just thought about it a lot. And it just makes sense that for a father to dislike his own son enough to make it that obvious, there has to be a reason. It’s simple math. Two and two add up. Logical.”
Kayla pondered this for a while. “Mom would never have an affair, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Zach shrugged. “Why not? Lots of people have affairs.”
“Uh, duh, because she loved ‘the great Wes’, that’s why. The big TV star. Why would she need to be with anyone else?” she retorted sarcastically.
“Anyways,” Zach said. “That might not be it at all. But it would explain some things, at least.” He didn’t want to get into it right now, with the doctor walking down the hall towards them in her surgical greens and white lab coat. Besides, it was between Josh and their dad, with their mom long gone. And this latest fiasco was likely an irreconcilable disaster, as far as Zach was concerned. He sighed. He just wanted to get the heck out of this insulated, sterile space and go back to his wife and kids. Sometimes his younger siblings exhausted him.
Wearied, Kayla and Zach rose and shook hands with the doctor. She was allowing Josh to leave the next morning, as long as he was well supervised for the next few days. He could go back to work as soon as he felt up to it. Oh, and what kind of work does he do? Acting? In a television series? Plays a horse wrangler in a period show? Oh.
The doctor pondered that for a moment.
“Well, I suppose that will take some creative camera angles.”
She smiled, patted Kayla’s arm, and walked away. She’d heard it all. But she didn’t envy Josh’s producers right about now.
***
Jessie reclined comfortably on a cast chair just off the schoolhouse set where they were shooting, and watched Jonathon pace back and forth. He was giving directions to his first AD, who was simultaneously on the walkie with the second AD, as together they rearranged the week’s shooting plans. The director for the episode, a lively redhead they all called Brenda B, had i
nitially thrown a hissy fit but then came back down to earth and tried to be amenable.
Sue-Lyn leaned over to Jessie and whispered, “Now everybody’s tense.”
They all felt terrible about what happened to Josh, but it was true, the week was messed up and there was a lot of money on the line here. The DP was creative, though – on his last show he had to shoot out the lead female’s pregnant belly – so he figured he could make the wrist cast work. Josh was expected back in a few days even though he was advised by the good doctor to take a week, at the very minimum. It felt weird without him around. Empty. Like an arm or a leg was missing.
Sue-Lyn was a lovable girl – small in stature, perky and fun, and her ruddy prospector character was a good counterpart to Stephen’s Bokeem. She was a lively individual to have on set, and Jessie was beginning to relax enough around Steve that others were finding her more approachable. Sue-Lyn – and Maggie and Carter, too – were suddenly becoming friends. Jessie just had to remind herself occasionally to let them in, which was turning out to be not as hard as she had often imagined.
She smiled wanly over at Sue-Lyn, who knew Josh better than Jessie felt she ever would. She was more concerned over Josh than over Jonathon’s finances, at this point. The highly publicized fight was with Josh’s father. There were other altercations that had also hit the media – but they were before and during the drug induced fog Josh lived in for a few good years. This one left them all in disbelief – was it even true? Sometimes, after all, the media threw things out of proportion.
A Song For Josh, Drifters Book One Page 14