No Greater Love

by Susan Rodgers

  Watching him storm down the hallway, Carlotta wrapped her terry cloth robe tighter around her waist. Then she plodded into the kitchen and put a pot of water on to boil. She reached into the cupboard and retrieved some ginseng and lemon green tea. This night wasn’t likely to be ending anytime soon, and tea had a way of calming folks. Carlotta perched on a stool and waited as the kettle sputtered its way to a slow and steady boil.

  Everybody in Jessie’s usual circle was present. That was the primary thing Josh noticed when he burst into the media room. Charles and Dee, Steve and Sophie, even Matt and Julie were there. Charlie - who had humbly introduced Jane and Jessie earlier - was there too, amazed watchful eyes contemplating Jessie as if he didn’t believe her presence was real. Josh followed his scrutiny to spy Jessie huddled in a corner of the large sofa leaning against the arm as if she wanted it to absorb her entirely. Steve was next to her, his left arm draped possessively around Sophie, his feet relaxing on an ottoman.

  When Josh first stormed in, eyes flashing, hands in fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, Jessie’s heart leapt into her throat. A fleeting unsettled memory that her old flame was known for his temper flitted across her mind. But she had never been witness to his rage apart from what they called Horse Stunt Day in Drifters lore, when he growled her out loudly in front of the cast and crew for trying a dangerous stunt based on reckless emotion. Here now though, she could see he was incensed. All that long day Jessie wondered if Josh even knew she was home. Shooting a sideways glance at Stephen, who sent her an apologetic look that also contained some kind of warning, she felt her stomach tighten. The men in the room immediately all went on high alert. Steve rose from the couch and stood in front of Josh, but was quickly shoved aside. Charlie and Matt found positions close by, Charlie on the arm of another sofa across the room, about six feet behind Josh.

  Well, Jessie thought, I guess it’s time to face the music. Better late than never. Her heart was still caught in her throat, making swallowing difficult. After all this time, after eighteen long months, there was Josh - the man she still loved deeply, but who she once cast away out of fear for his life. His scuffed black cowboy boots were planted two feet apart, and his faded black jeans dragged slightly over the floor so just the toes peeked out. Loose, unsnapped sleeves from a black western style vintage shirt with tiny detailed red and green embroidery on the chest fell over his fisted hands. His chestnut hair was shorter than when Jessie last saw him at Jonathon’s party, but it was still layered and looked as if it drove him crazy, as he kept pushing it behind his ear. His face was red with rage, his jaw clamped tight. Jessie and everyone else in the room remained silent. Whatever he needed to say, it had been building, and Josh quite obviously needed to let it out.

  Jessie was bone weary – Edinburgh time was now nine a.m. the next day, but nobody seemed to want to go to bed even though here it was one o’clock in the morning. Good thing she had napped for a while earlier in the evening after a brief respite in the back garden to inhale some calming weed. Still, this was a confrontation for which she wasn’t quite prepared in her current state of exhaustion.

  Josh could see she was tired – her face was pallid, and underneath her eyes shadowy black circles were so prevalent they appeared painted on. Still – he couldn’t help himself. There were things he needed to say. Who was this girl, anyway? Purple hair? And she smelled like pot. What kind of character was she playing over this last while, anyway?

  Slowly, Jessie uncurled first one long leg and then the other. Drawing herself up to her full height, shoulders back, she faced Josh solemnly for the first time in ages, her face set and body tensed for what she knew was coming. When their eyes locked onto each other, both felt the earth give way as their bodies trembled.

  He started, his voice threatening, low and edgy, every syllable drawn from his core with affected determination and precision.

  “You have a lot of fucking nerve.”

  His fists continued to clench and unclench. Glaring, he stared around the room. “Let me guess. The rest of you have been treating her like royalty. Well, I’m not afraid to call it like it is, Jessie. You’re weak. You’re selfish.”

  He pointed fingers at her, punctuating his accusations so they landed like bullets between Jessie’s eyes. “You said your goodbyes, I get that, in that song you sang at Jonathon’s party, but this goes back a hell of a lot further than that. In the beginning, when all this shit started, you lied to me. You lied to all of us. You didn’t ask for help, and then said you supposedly made choices based on protecting me. Well let me just ask you this, Jessie, what did you do for me? What kind of life do you think I’ve been living these last few years? Since Agassiz. Because I have news for you. You don’t get to make all the choices in a relationship. Relationships are partnerships, the good and the bad.”

  He was trembling so hard the fingers he pointed were noticeably shaking. Facing him, Jessie stood impassive, taut, taking it the way she had learned over a lifetime to accept all the bad stuff that came her way. Nearby, Dee vaulted up.

  “Josh, take it easy on…”

  Charles grabbed his wife’s arm and shook his head. Dee gritted her teeth and forced herself to sit back down and remain quiet while Josh continued his rampage.

  “You had no right. No right to take off the way you did and fuck up everybody’s lives, everybody in this room and a whole helluva lot more. You left us wondering, waiting, we didn’t know if you were alive or dead! We had no idea whether McCall had you locked up in some fucking basement in Mexico, or whether you had – whether you had killed yourself!”

  Choking on his own emotion, Josh had to take a second to catch his breath. No one moved. What he was saying was irrevocably true. He was speaking for all of them because they hadn’t the guts. But Jessie surprised them all. She had been quiet for most of the day but she knew what they were thinking about her – she knew they were all withholding their anger until such time as it was appropriate to unleash it, like lions pacing within a cage, demanding release the second the door squeaked open on a rusty hinge.

  She faced her adversary and former fiancé head on, eyes narrowed and heart pumping furiously. Like Josh, her voice was low and contained, but at a threshold that could potentially explode. She was exhausted. She was a grenade whose final trigger in this surprising few days had just been pulled.

  “You have no right to march in here and tell me you are angry with me. Do you know why I went away? Because I felt I had no choice. I knew what the outcome would be if I stayed.”

  She glowered at Matt and Charles. “Do you honestly think you could have protected him from Deuce the fuck McCall? You can’t protect anyone from McCall. Matt, could you absolutely one hundred per cent guarantee you could have protected Josh?”

  Matt shook his head. “No, Jessie. But I would have liked to have had the option to try.”

  “That would not have been enough, Matt. Even now, it’s not enough.”

  Jessie frowned as she readjusted her stance square on to Josh, preparing for battle. Her eyes narrowed even more as she fought to retain control of her emotions. She inhaled deeply and pulled her sweater down over her hands so the sleeves almost covered her fingers.

  “All right. Do you want to know what happened in Charleston, Josh?” She heard a sharp intake of breath from behind her – Dee. Jessie closed her eyes and geared up to recall the most horrible night of her life. Fretfully licking her lips, shifting her weight from side to side, she called upon some inner resource of strength she didn’t know she had until this night when she needed it, and she spoke again, trembling.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  He stared her down, anger still flashing in his dark eyes, willing Jessie to let the dam break once and for all. There would have to come a point when she learned to trust her friends with her secrets. It may as well be now.

  “Yes,” he responded almost under his breath. It was a dare.

  “Fine. I’ll tell you. Rachel died because D
euce fed her percs she crushed and melted, then injected. He got her hooked on those and then coke, and then she went over the edge. But by then he already raped me, in his office in front of her in fact, on my eighteenth birthday. The day she died. It was his gift to me. He got some kind of weird kick out of that. So I quit working for him and a few weeks later Sandy and I decided to get the hell out of the city, a fresh start, you know? But all this time I didn’t have my guitar, my dad’s Gibson, because when I quit I left the club in such a hurry I didn’t take it; it was back in the green room. So I begged Sandy to go and get it, I had to have it, it was my dad’s.” She gulped, willing the jagged rock in her throat to vacate, because suddenly it hurt trying to breathe around it.

  Then without realizing it, Jessie switched tenses. Suddenly she was there, in Charleston, in the present. “So Sandy, he goes to the club because I am scared to go in, but the guitar’s not there. Someone tells him Deuce took it home. So Sandy and I go down to Tradd Street and he breaks in, because by then neither of us want to run into Deuce, and we think he is still at the club, only he isn’t, you see.”

  She stopped and took another deep breath. Jessie’s eyes did not leave Josh’s. Nor did he break the spell all of them were now under. Even Carlotta could hear – they all knew Jessie was unearthing a deeply hidden part of her soul here tonight and that, as profoundly raw as her story was, it was a necessary truth that had to be loosed. None of the gang dared move or make a sound, nor could they bring themselves to make eye contact with each other. They just watched Jessie in her standoff with Josh, trembling and aching, her body stiff and her voice steadily rising in pitch as the horror was unleashed. It was everything Stephen – and Charlie, too - had in him not to grab her and hang on while she revealed the terror that held her captive for so many torturous years.

  Jessie’s eyes were almost vacant, hollow. She was back in Charleston.

  “I wait and wait for Sandy, he’s broken in through a window in the backyard, and he’s not coming out. I see a light come on at the back of the house so I know someone’s in there, but where is Sandy? I wait and wait and it’s dark and getting cold, it’s been hours, and finally I get up the nerve to go around back and see what’s up. I try the back door and it’s open, so I let myself in, and then I find the room where Sandy is, he’s tied up and he’s black and blue and only semi-conscious. The Gibson is in the room, it’s against the wall, there’s a bed in there, it seems like a downstairs bedroom or guest room or something. Well I’m trying to untie him and then lo and behold, fecking Deuce comes in; he loves that I am there and so he hits me too and for three days he leaves me on the bed tied up, with Sandy on the freezing floor in the corner, and he rapes me so many times I lose count. Finally on the third day Deuce knows he’s going to kill me if he continues, and Sandy is just lying there ignored, and he and I can only speak through our eyes because there is duct tape over our mouths. And I can see that he is scared, he’s so fecking goddamned scared.”

  She was sobbing openly now, hugging her belly, her knees weakening, but Jessie was powerless to stop. Dee tried to go to her again but Charles held her back. There were other low sobs in the room. Jessie’s suffering was hard to bear. Josh held her gaze but he was wavering now too. Like all of them, he knew the worst was yet to come. Charlie turned away.

  “We’ve had nothing to eat or drink, we’re both sick and hurt, and then finally Deuce goes to Sandy instead of me on this last day, and he has this knife, this big fucking dagger, you’ve seen it, you’ve all seen it,” she looked around the room, her eyes crazed, wild, her voice an unrealistic falsetto, “because it’s the dagger that was left by Josh’s truck the day his tires were slashed. Only I had the great pleasure to see it covered in blood because Deuce took it and shoved it into Sandy’s chest and stomach six times!” She pantomimed this, her shadow on the wall adding a strange dimension to the grisly telling.

  “I know because I watched every goddamned thrust of that thing going in and out; he was holding Sandy by the hair on his head, and all I could hear were the thrusts of that knife and the agonized moans of the boy I loved, and Deuce grunting from the effort. I think he would have stabbed him more but he was getting tired, and so he let my boyfriend…drop to the floor. And then he came over and untied me, finally! And I crawled over and held Sandy in my arms while he died. I saw the light go out in his eyes and there was blood, there was blood everywhere and this high-pitched laugh and it was Deuce. And me screaming, I know I was screaming but likely not very loud because I had nothing left by then.”

  Uncertain what to do, rubbing her hands through her hair again and again, the anxiety growing to a point she could no longer manage, Jessie marched forward and grabbed fistfuls of Josh’s black shirt and started pushing on his chest, hard, so that he involuntarily lost his balance and stumbled backwards.

  “You fucking bastard, you can call me selfish if you want, and maybe I am because I don’t want to go through that again! Do you? Do you want to go through that? Do you want to die that way, Josh? At least you would be dead, whereas I would have to try to live! Without you in – my - life! Forever.”

  She pounded on him then, in complete hysterics, although somehow through the fuzz and the mist Jessie could smell Josh’s musky scent and feel him and she ached to hold him but she was out of control. Josh, his eyes lost and searching now as the fear and terror Jessie must have endured alone the summer after Agassiz suddenly had a visual motive attached, let his fists grip her biceps but he, too, was adrift somewhere deep inside her agony. Unable to stand it, Dee finally mobilized out of Charles’ grasp and tried to grab a hold of Jessie, but Jessie jumped away from her as if Dee’s hands were fire on Jessie’s skin. Backing into the corner, weeping hysterically, Jessie started screaming.

  “Don’t touch me! Everyone please just stop touching me!”

  She couldn’t make eye contact with anyone. Aware of their presence but somehow back in that room on Tradd Street more than a decade ago, witness to the last fleeting breaths of a boy she loved as he lay dying in her arms, Jessie was unable to calm herself and come back down from the age-old horror.

  Stephen and Josh stood motionless in utter shock and disbelief. Charlie started pacing. They were all just sick about what this troubled girl finally shared with them, about the anguish she kept hidden for all those years. They had been unfair. Their torment could not possibly compare to hers. No wonder she made the choices she did.

  Jessie wasn’t finished. She started again, haltingly, struggling to breathe, her hands fisted in her hair, her eyes fevered. “He gave me the Gibson and told me to get lost and that he would find me again, that I belong to him. The only reason I agreed to come back now is by praying Deuce will leave Josh alone now, because Josh is with someone else and has been, for what, seven months? And there are only so many chances you get in your lifetime to experience great love. And I know that, I know I have that with all of you. It just took me some time to realize what I’d given up, who I’d given up. Not just Josh,” she wept profusely. “But all of you.

  Turning back towards Josh, forcefully trying to regain some sense of calm, Jessie was devastated at the pain she saw in the eyes of the man she loved. He reached out for her but she didn’t react. Instead, she simply told him, “I love you. I will always love you. You know that, Josh. You know it. But,” she breathed, “I know that I lost you. I lost you the day Deuce showed up at Agassiz. Because I loved you – I love you - too much to let you go through that hell. And so yes, I am selfish, Josh. I am selfish because I choose not to give Deuce a reason to hurt you.”

  She looked around the semi-dark room where the people she loved were hanging on her every word, unable to help Jessie through what they all knew was a traumatic recall of a horrific time in her life. “I don’t want to give Deuce a reason to hurt any of you. You should have let me be, in Edinburgh, with Jacob and Katrine, just hanging out in the pub and writing music. I was happy there, and although I would still be looking over my shoulder every
day until I die, I felt reasonably safe there. And all of you were safe. Josh…was safe.”

  Jessie met Josh’s stricken gaze one last time. Steady and unwavering, she suddenly settled herself completely. She was a stone again, untouchable, a formidable contestant in the game of life.

  “I wish you well with Michelle, Josh. I really do.” And she reached up to her neck, where she had once again placed the engagement ring on its leather string, and she pulled until it came away in her fingers. Stepping forward, Jessie took Josh’s hand and placed the ring on his palm. Wrapping his strong fingers around it - the fingers she loved to touch and caress and see twisted around her own - she looked up at him, into the pleading sorrowful chocolate eyes. “I won’t be needing this anymore.”

  And then Jessie left the room, sucking the air along with her. She pulled her clothes off on the way up the stairs, struggling to recover a normal breathing rhythm and heart rate. All she wanted now was the blissful peace and freedom of sleep, although sometimes even that wasn’t the escape it was meant to be, for nightmares often haunted her. She ached to pull Jacob onto her chest but he was nowhere near. She was alone.

  The media room was silent as its occupants struggled to take in all they heard from Jessie. For years all of them wondered what Jessie’s secret hell was, the life she held captive and for so long feared to release. Now they knew at least most of her story, whether they were ready to accept it or not.

  Charles got up and drew his shaking wife into his arms. Steve and Charlie eyed each other warily, exhausted by the dose of reality to which they were just subjected. Jane crossed the room and sat by Sophie. She took her hand. The two women sat in quiet disbelief. Matt’s wife Julie stole up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. He bore a lot of responsibility – the couple had a small child at home to keep safe. Deuce McCall was still out there somewhere, likely hatching his diabolical plans. Suddenly, with Jessie back and her story made painfully clear, everyone realized just how formidable the southerner’s threat really was.