A Song For Josh, Drifters Book One

by Susan Rodgers

  However, by the time she felt a degree of real safety in his company - beyond the first initial heady weeks of new love - the train was already out of the station. Jessie would be marrying Charlie within a few weeks. But here was Josh, the only person who knew what she really needed despite her attempts to ignore everyone who tried to reach her on that arduous day. He was sitting calmly beside her, feeding her greasy onion rings, and she never felt more safe and cherished. Sandy would like him, she thought. Sandy would approve. Josh seemed to sense where her mind was as she sighed and leaned her left shoulder more deeply sideways into the seat. He put the onion ring he’d been about to eat back in its little paper sack and watched her.

  Jessie reached out and laid her hand over his. “I’m sorry, Josh,” she murmured wistfully. “I never meant to hurt you – before.”

  He looked down and turned his hand over to hold hers, the small hand he had become so familiar with all those months ago, the hand that played such beautiful soulful music on an old guitar full of memories he could never share.

  “I think it worked both ways,” he replied honestly.

  They were silent. Jessie knew that to be true. She lifted his fingers to her cheek and held his hand there, in both of hers, and she closed her eyes. Sometimes life just felt so big.

  An annoying ding from Josh’s cell startled them, yanking them out of their brief respite. He pulled his hand away. As she felt him slip away, she wanted to reach out and bring him back to her; they could sit forever with the world at a pause so that they would never know any more pain or loss. But, as the universe is ought to do now and then, it lay down its cards and forced them into action.

  The text was from Charles. One of Jessie’s girls had called Mary Helen. Terri had just shown up about four blocks away from the shelter. A few texts later revealed an address. Josh fired up the truck as Jessie turned back in her seat and shoved the remaining onion rings deep in the paper bag from whence they’d come.

  ***

  The next half hour was a blur. With the windshield wipers picking up speed, they pulled up outside a baby blue cedar-shingled one and a half story house graced with a little flower garden out front, and Jessie caught herself thinking what a cute little house, as if her mind were trying to make sense of it all, and so that nothing sinister could possibly be happening within. Inside, the house was in semi-darkness, lit by a few tacky lava lamps and a cool blue light from the moon. Shadowy shapes were sitting here, there and everywhere, smoking this and inhaling that, and Neil Young was playing his famous guitar licks on some invisible radio or through someone’s iPod. Jessie was glad it wasn’t her music they were listening to, and she silently, fruitlessly, hoped that nobody ever shot up to her tunes. Wishful thinking.

  Josh pulled her closer to him as they picked their way through legs and feet. He showed the inhabitants Terri’s picture on his iPhone, taken on that wondrous day when he and Jessie shared so much of each other. Eventually he got a bite as a girl with long, straight black locks edged with bright burgundy tips pointed listlessly down the hallway to the bedrooms. Jessie felt sick, but none of this was new to her, she just had a bad feeling overall, and the acrid thick smoke floating aimlessly in the room was causing her to cough and making her eyes water. She pulled away from Josh when she spotted Heather, small and wiry with long blonde hair - one of Jessie and Mary Helen’s girls from the shelter - dragging something – no, someone, on the floor.

  It was Terri.

  A steady pounding started to echo in Jessie’s ears. After an endless heart-rending day of searching, this was not the result she wanted. The teen was unconscious. Jessie forced her mind to find a calm inner insulated place of reason, an adrenaline-fueled response in the presence of disaster. She stepped deliberately over a pair of tattooed legs in silver ballet flats and quickly made her way to Terri.

  “Terri,” she said loudly, bending over the girl. She slapped her face. No response. “Hey!”

  Heather was crying. “She went into convulsions and then she passed out. Do something, Jessie!”

  Josh didn’t hesitate. When he reached Terri he scooped her up into his arms, then swung around and headed for the door. Jessie grabbed Heather’s arm and propelled her out of the little house behind Josh. She was having trouble breathing and her mind felt disconnected, but still somehow she was able to take control. Off in the far reaches of her brain she could hear Heather rattling on.

  “She seemed not too bad when I got here, talking super fast but okay, then she started having this panic attack, said she couldn’t come home with me because you and Mary Helen would kill her, she was pacing up and down the hallway, then all of a sudden she drops onto the floor and starts having these crazy fucked up seizures or something…”

  Outside, Josh threw open the truck’s passenger door, juggling Terri in his arms. When he looked back at Jessie, she could see the panic in his eyes. Under the foggy streetlight, as she jumped into the passenger seat and he laid the teen in her arms, she could see that Terri’s lips were blue. She didn’t seem to be breathing. As Josh slammed the door shut she looked up and felt like she was reading Heather’s lips in slow motion as they pulled away. Heather was screaming something about some rich John in a blue overcoat, that he had something to do with the state in which they found Terri.

  Through the passenger window, leaning over Jessie and Terri, Josh was yelling something to Heather as he pulled away. He was telling her to go back to the shelter, to get Charles to meet them at St. Paul’s Hospital on Burrard. Jessie wasn’t sure either heard the other – all she was capable of doing at the time was staring at Terri’s blue lips and wondering if that was the color blue worn by the man Heather was yelling about.

  The truck careened wildly down Hastings towards Burrard and, as Josh hung a quick left on a red light, Jessie came out of her stupor. She bent down to give Terri mouth-to-mouth and, as the girl flailed like a rag doll with every bump, Jessie could taste vomit. Josh was on the phone – 911 – telling them to notify St. Paul’s to meet them at Emerge. He sounded so calm yet she discerned the urgency in his voice. Another jolt, and Terri’s right arm came into contact with the paper bag containing the onion rings. It was a strange sight; her limp, wasted arm rising and falling, innocently dislodging the salty rings as if she were five and this was some kind of child’s game. Jessie knew it was cocaine she ingested, at least on that fateful day - who knows what she had before – she could see remnants of the potentially toxic white powder on the pinched freckled face, and splotched here and there on Terri’s plaid shirt and in her little girl braids.

  Why? Jessie asked herself repeatedly, Why? What drove this young girl to ingest cocaine again after being clean for a number of months? She seemed happy. She was learning guitar.

  When they screeched into the hospital’s emergency entrance, a doctor and nurse pushing a gurney splashed out to meet them, and were only briefly startled by the presence of a famous actor and singer holding a deathly white teenager in her arms. Josh was already out and had the passenger door open. He took Terri and placed her quiet body onto the gurney, and off they ran with her into the bright white abyss of the hospital corridor where, he hoped, they would work their magic and bring the girl back to life.

  Yet he knew, and he was aware that Jessie also understood, that a girl who had once been a cocaine addict, who had been clean for some time, only needed a small amount of coke in order to overdose. And who knew what else she’d had, or what was in the coke. These days, it was generally laced with something or other. Anything to make the cocaine go further – to realize more profits. It was terrifying to contemplate.

  They left his truck in the entrance driveway with both doors open and the cabin light on. It lent an ethereal white glow to the night, and with the keys still in the ignition, Jessie and Josh were followed by an annoying beeping that made Jessie absently think she was shooting some sci-fi flick. Stricken with an impending sense of doom, the actors followed the squealing gurney down the hall and, as they
distanced themselves from the truck’s beeping, it faded, as Jessie feared Terri’s heart was waning too. They stood there together, in a strange slow-motion stupor, and watched as the doctors tried to revive Jessie’s young friend.

  Later Jessie would remember the droning hum of the florescent lights above her. Josh would recall how white and sterile everything seemed, and how he could only hear the people around them in low, mumbled tones. Both would remember the overwhelming sense of fear and helplessness, and also the sense of prescience that pervaded the sterility of the place, the simple knowing that nothing could save Terri now. The feeling of doom crept inside their bodies and invaded their souls, and they stood there, together once again yet oh so far apart - always, it seemed, challenged by circumstances conspiring to rip their very beings into tiny, irreparable shreds.

  The light on Jessie’s shoulders would not have passed muster with the Drifters crew. It was harsh and unforgiving. Her terror would have won her another Oscar, had it not been real. But this was real life, not a film or a television show. Terri died in front of them. She would not be getting up again, to share a very ordinary Mama Burger and onion rings with someone she loved. Her mother would have to be called. Terri was now just another number on the drug overdose statistics, a young runaway who didn’t have what it took to survive on the streets of one of Canada’s largest cities.

  Jessie was no stranger to pain, or to death on the streets. But she’d hoped she’d left that world behind her, that the establishment of her shelter was somehow a karmic cure for the evil and destruction in her world. But as the doctor behind the glass window called the time of death, and then took a step back and looked despairingly up at the famous songstress standing there watching and hoping beyond hope, Jessie knew that painting a house a bright welcoming yellow, or planting flowers out front, would never be enough. Nor were meetings, or friendships, or art - or music.

  Nothing would ever be enough. People she loved would continue to leave her. It did not pay to become attached to anyone, to open her soul and let in the light.

  She turned and walked stiffly back out of the hospital, undoing the steps she’d so recently taken. She made it as far as the hydrangeas at the rear driver’s side corner of Josh’s truck before she vomited. Then she started screaming, but she was not aware. All she could see and compute were the people she loved and the violent deaths they left behind for her to roll around and around in her head. Her father, Rachel, Sandy, and now innocent Terri…she did not sense Josh coming up behind and wrapping his body around her, hopefully sheltering her from the hospital’s security cameras. She wasn’t sentient enough to realize he was holding her hair back so she wouldn’t puke on it. The screams just kept coming and coming and coming and her fists were wrapped in tight little white balls and she didn’t feel the thorns digging into her knees. She squeezed her eyes shut and just kept screaming until finally, mercifully, with Jessie devoid of hope and reason, something pinched her arm and, with the aid of a kind male nurse, she drifted off into oblivion.

  Josh was sobbing too, because it wasn’t fair for anyone to have so much pain thrust upon him or her. It wasn’t fair for him to have survived his own addictions, and for this young girl who seemed to have been doing okay to suddenly rebound and use again, to the point of losing the ultimate battle. It wasn’t fair for Josh to be here in this surreal situation holding and protecting the woman he’d come to love, while others stood and stared, whispering, “Isn’t that Jessie Wheeler?” It wasn’t fair. Nothing about this was fair. He wished he’d found Jessie earlier so they could have had a shot at finding Terri on time. He was angry with Jessie for not responding to his texts. He was pissed she hadn’t let him into her life in a way that could have made a difference here today.

  It felt like everything was suddenly catching up to him. As if the agonized girl in his arms, now a heavy weight as - still sobbing from that hollow wet place inside his soul - he lifted her. Josh turned to follow the compassionate nurse back into the bright, over-lit tunnel, as if Jessie were suddenly a check-in point for him in his life. As if this were the only moment that mattered, that everything up to this point was now null and void, and perhaps, in some weird way, everything to come would also be negated, annulled. Even Charlie, the wedding, his past, her past – none of it mattered. Society and its conventions didn’t matter. Fear was stripped away. In this moment there was just he, Josh Sawyer, and the woman he loved, Jessie Wheeler.

  And as angry as he was at her, at life, it was a moment to celebrate because now, momentarily, all that existed was them.

  He carried her to a small quiet, dark room where he could sit in a wooden rocking chair facing the window, and he held her while she slept as he stared out at the stars. Being there like that reminded him of the sanctity of new life, even though here, tonight, they were experiencing a life’s end. Rocking chairs, after all, were for newborn babies, and Josh recalled the serenity of rocking his niece and nephews on the rare moments when Zach and Hilary trusted him to be alone with them.

  It didn’t matter to Josh whether or not Jessie knew he was the one in whose arms she lay. As his own tears slowed, and his own cries quieted, the sound of the old rocking chair squeaking gracefully on its back and forth rhythm urged him back to the quietude of the after-loss, that ambiguous, cherished time when you hear the secrets of the universe calling, nudging; that time when you can hear God’s gentle voice in every breath. He refused to miss her, not now in this sacred time as he had every second of every day for the past six months or so because, for the moment, here she was, in her exquisite agony, his.

  There would be enough time to miss her again. Josh would not think of that now. Instead he pressed his wet cheek to her sodden one and, tenderly, for this solitary time only, he was the one to softly sing.

  ***

  Charles brought Mary Helen to the hospital to say her good-byes to the girl who had been her ward. He had asked Matt to pick up Deirdre at the airport. When he arrived with Mary Helen, they found Dee sitting in the darkened room with Josh and Jessie, Matt by her side, his arm around her. Nobody was talking – there was no need for words. All Charles could hear was the rocking chair on its endless creaking journey of comforting those who had lost.

  He and Mary Helen took Dee to see Terri, and Matt gently urged Josh to let go of the sanctity of the stars and Jessie’s steady breathing. On the way to Matt’s Audi, Josh noticed that police had arrived along with other members of the Keating security team, and so Matt turned him away from the main door and together the odd little threesome made its way, led and followed by more security, to a door less populated by an inquisitive public. Once outside, Josh noticed someone had moved his truck there as well – he realized he had left it untended at the entrance, the keys still in the ignition. But he didn’t care. All he cared about was the girl in his arms, and although he was loathe to give her up to Matt, he had no choice. At the moment she left his arms, Jessie opened her eyes and looked up at him, murmured his name and, to Josh, it was the most simple, astonishingly beautiful, whispered gratitude he ever received.

  He let her go, Matt whisked her away, and then Josh got into his truck and let the police escort him home. His friends – Stephen, Sue-Lyn, Carter and Maggie - were there, having left their partners home so they could come together as a team to help in whatever way they could. They sat up the rest of the night on Josh’s back deck by the pool, staring out over it to the Pacific Ocean and the myriad of tiny lights coming and going, and they talked about life, and they discussed death, and they pondered the universe, and they worried about Jessie. Josh barely spoke but, as the first cracks of a breaking pink dawn signaled a new day, he toasted it and marveled at how life could go on in the face of such sweet sorrow.

  ***

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jessie slept until about noon, then Dee came in and tried to encourage her to eat, but she still wasn’t talking, much less interested in nourishment. It was as if she were back in that fragile eggshell, or nebul
ous bubble, in which Jack Deacon had found her all those years ago. Charles told Dee to let her rest, that she would come out of it in her own good time but, to Dee, this was just another crisis in which she could not reach this girl she had grown to call her own. When Deirdre checked in on Jessie in mid-afternoon, she found her curled up in the window seat, staring at the hundreds of mourners and well-wishers who were lining the block and leaving messages of hope and prayer. Dee wondered if somewhere in the far reaches of her mind Jessie was curious about where they came from - how they knew. She dreaded telling her there were at least three cell phone videos on YouTube featuring her being sick in the hydrangeas and wailing out her pain, with Josh holding her as he cried, too.

  Dee climbed onto the cushion and wrapped both arms around Jessie. Together they sat and watched the steady stream of fans outside. Some were outwardly crying. Some stared up at the pretty yellow home and tried to discern in which window their favorite actor and singer might be sitting.

  One man, in a long blue overcoat with the collar turned up around his neck, stayed across the street to ensure he was not visible to anyone in the residence. He got a kick out of figuring out where the security cameras were, and of avoiding them wholeheartedly. He liked this grown up game of hide and seek.

  That evening, alone again in her room in the Keating house, Jessie felt as if her mind were waking back up, and with that came the alarming sense that she might explode. She pilfered a set of spare car keys to Dee’s BMW, and tiptoed quietly out a side door. Carefully, she steered down the back gardener’s lane beneath a lush canopy of pretty magnolia trees, and pointed the car towards Langley. An hour and a half later, Jessie pulled up at a little ranch Josh had taken her to during their magical affair months earlier. Seeing nobody around, she helped herself to a horse and saddle. Sometimes a drive was the perfect thing to ease one’s mind after trauma, and taking that drive on four feet and a heartbeat was just the ticket on this messed up day. Jessie felt that since the ranch’s owners were away and Josh’s friend, Freddie the caretaker, only dropped in sporadically, she could buy herself a little time – some cherished, treasured freedom in which to contemplate and think.