A Song For Josh, Drifters Book One Read online

  A Song For Josh

  Drifters Series, Book One

  Susan Rodgers

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2013 by Susan Rodgers

  Third Edition – September 2015

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  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author or publisher except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, businesses, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, actual events or locales is purely coincidental.

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  Cover art (copyright) by Alanna Munro.

  All rights reserved.

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  Edited by Sarah Elizabeth Murphy.

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  Prologue

  “Jessie! Jessie. Come out of there. Come on.”

  David peered through the hardy purple lupins behind his russet forty-year-old cedar-shingled storage barn to spy his small daughter sitting on her haunches in a pile of dirt. Clad in denim shorts and a pink T-shirt, the seven year old had a death grip on a paper lunch bag that bulged in odd places. His heart softened when she turned to look up at her father. The little girl’s face was tear-streaked, evidenced by the swaths of dried red Prince Edward Island dirt stretching across her piqued expression.

  “I won’t,” she said stubbornly, a fierce fire in her young ice blue eyes. “I won’t come out, Daddy. Mommy’s mean. I’m running away.”

  David sighed. He was almost fifty, an age he thought was old for a seven-year-old’s dad, based on most of the fathers he knew from Jessie’s elementary school. Figuring he had only one alternative to deal with this obstinate child, he shoved a pile of the ubiquitous weeds aside and plunked his medium frame down next to her, settling his broad back against the sandpapery surface of the barn. He ran a calloused hand through his wiry ash-blonde hair, leaving it standing up in spikes as unruly as Jessie herself.

  “Honey,” he said. “Mommy’s not mean. She’s just tired.”

  “She’s mad at me.”

  Another tear snuck out of the corner of the little girl’s eye and trickled down her pink cheek. Frustrated, she angrily swiped it away. A strand of her loose shoulder length sun-kissed auburn hair got in the way, and she shoved that away too, her pint-sized hand deft and swift.

  “She’s not mad at you. She’s angry with herself.”

  They sat together, old father and young daughter, staring out at the expansive field of potatoes growing before them. Blossoms were just starting to form on the tidy rows of robust leafy green foot-high plants. It was a warm, sunny summer day in this east coast Canadian province, and Jessie had been swiftly sent out to play by a mother who was occasionally short tempered and demanding.

  David leaned over and brushed a grease-stained finger across the paper bag. The bag made a crinkly sound when Jessie pulled it away. She hugged it tightly against her diminutive frame.

  “What do you have in there?”

  She pouted. “My lunch. A peanut butter and jam sandwich and chocolate chip cookies.”

  David’s lips turned up at the corners. His eyes glinted in the sun. “The cookies you and I made yesterday?”

  “Yes.” She was softening, remembering a parent who always seemed kind and never had an angry look of disapproval in his eyes.

  “Can I show you something, little one?”

  She looked over at her father, sitting there amongst the dirt and the brightly flowered weeds. His soft blue eyes, identical to Jessie’s, were sympathetic. She could almost feel the love radiating from them. She loved the miniature wrinkles stretching from the corners like tiny road maps of his life.

  “Okay,” she said. She was getting bored staring out at those old potatoes anyway. And earlier Jessie saw a tiny grey field mouse she hoped wouldn’t get too brave and come closer although she admitted that, from a safe distance, it was cute. She sniffed, bravely withdrawing her waterworks.

  They went back into the house where Jessie’s mom Emily, also near fifty, her hair whipped back into a scruffy bun, was sweeping the square copper tiles of the family’s ceramic kitchen floor. David grabbed his slim, pretty wife and waltzed her around the claustrophobic kitchen. Against the mom’s protestations they danced encased in a dusty sunbeam, silhouetted against the daylight streaming in through the window.

  Emily started to laugh and then soon, so did Jessie. David swept his daughter into the cozy circle too, until finally Emily pushed her family away.

  “David, I have work to do. These floors aren’t going to sweep themselves.”

  Saluting his wife lightheartedly, David took Jessie by the hand. He led her around the corner to his music room, where a few guitars and an old upright piano greeted them. He pulled out a wooden stool and patted its round top. Jessie climbed up and relaxed, her small legs dangling above the floor. Her dad took the paper bag from her fingers. It crinkled again as he rested it contentedly on the floor by the stool. Reaching out for his Gibson guitar, David raised his eyebrows expectantly at Jessie, and then placed the instrument in his little girl’s arms.

  “Daddy!” she objected. “It’s too big for me.”

  He grinned. She did look rather dwarfed with the bulky guitar in her skinny arms.

  “This is the thing, Jessie,” he said. He took her left hand and positioned her fingers on the strings to form a G chord. She really couldn’t reach, but she got the idea.

  “When your mother – or anyone else for that matter – becomes too much to take, you pick up a guitar and you play. I promise you – you’ll feel better. Music is a salve to our souls in this bitter world.” His words were edged with life and its torment. “Sometimes it’s the only light I can find. Besides you and your mom, I mean.” David’s blue eyes were a little distant now.

  Jessie protested, wiggling her butt on the stool. “I’m too small.”

  She pulled her left hand away. Her father promptly returned it and repositioned the tiny, smooth fingers on the strings by covering them with his large, calloused ones.

  “No,” he said firmly. “When times get tough, we need a place to go. Music is a good place, Jessie. Music has the power to heal.” He looked into his daughter’s eyes, imploring her to understand. “Besides, you remember that old Bible story about David and Goliath, right?”

  Her dirty face peeked up at him from beneath a cascade of red-brown hair. “Where the boy defeated the giant, right?”

  “Yes! Yes.”

  Jessie beamed. She’d made her beloved daddy happy.

  “Well,” he said, bending down in front of her. “Sometimes us small people have our Goliaths too. And we need to know we can defeat them.”

  “Even though we’re small.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not small.”

  He paused at that. Oh yes. He may not look small. But Jessie’s dad felt small.

  She saw a cloud pass over his eyes.

  “Jessie,” he said. “Do you want to learn to play?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said. “This is G.”

  He positioned the tiny fingers again, and showed her how to strum. She was a patient learner.

/>   Beneath her feet, Jessie’s sandwich and homemade cookies, testament to a father’s patient love, lay untouched and forgotten so when Emily cleaned the music room two days later, the sandwich was starting to sprout little blue-grey spots.

  “That Jessie,” she said haughtily as she dumped the bag in the green compost bin. “Seven years old and already her head is in the clouds.”

  Standing on the stairs nearby, where she’d just responded to her mother’s call for lunch, Jessie felt the air stiffen. Her lungs compressed, and she clenched one hand into a small fist. But she raised her head high. Her daddy had disclosed some powerful secrets to survival the other day. David was small but he still defeated Goliath. And music has the power to heal.

  Besides, she thought, as her mother turned around and spotted her standing on the bottom step hanging onto the smoothly worn newel post, I still have my daddy.

  Jessie walked proudly into the kitchen, sat down at the little café table she and her mother used for meals when it was just the two of them, and nibbled on a freshly made peanut butter sandwich. They listened to the radio, and she was surprised when her mommy started to hum. Daddy would be home later, after working at the gas pumps all day. He would play music for the three of them, and all would be well in the Wheeler household once again. He was the key - the link - to their survival as a family.

  He was the first person Jessie loved…who went away far too soon.

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  Chapter One

  Twenty years later – Present Day

  Jessie stood at the edge of her world, on the thirty-first floor of a downtown Vancouver office building, and gazed at the bustling city below. A few minutes ago she’d heard the urgent screech of emergency sirens, rising and falling like the sound waves of life. About five blocks ahead, just off Robson, two fire trucks careened around the corner and stopped, one in front and another behind an old three-story building. Little men and miniature women hurried around pulling out hoses and setting up ladders.

  Idly, Jessie watched the action with her arms crossed, and wondered what the firefighters’ lives were like. At this point likely the adrenaline was flowing and they were moving with purpose, but what would they be thinking at the end of their shifts? Would they go home with a sense of peace for having served their city, or would they hang their heads in defeat - exhausted, remorseful, unsuccessful? Did they choose lives as firefighters, or did they stumble into that dangerous and gratifying career?

  Turning away from the floor-to-ceiling plate glass separating her from the harried abyss below, Jessie left the city’s best to their work. She supposed that at the very least, those little people with their miniscule hoses and tiny ladders could go on with their lives, anonymous to most, protected by their normalcy, enjoying potluck barbecues surrounded by righteous grandparents and the simplicity of children. For most people in the world, ordinary lives were lived with zest and gusto, whether they knew it or not. To Jessie, a life of relative anonymity and the accompanying cozy familiarity of family and friendships ended years ago.

  At age twenty-seven, Jessie could hardly remember the regular life she left behind, with a father and a mother who loved each other in an east coast Canadian town where kite flying and lazy summer days playing in the waves and eating barbecue chips on the beach were the norm. And music…there was always music in Jessie’s memories when she felt strong enough to let her mind take her back to those days. Her dad had been an avid guitar player and bar singer, a kind man not afraid to let his passion for the music show.

  To this day, Jessie’s favorite memories of her parents were drawn from the nights her dad played at Crosswinds, the local pub in an old barn just outside town, while her mom watched in total adoration. They knew the owner, weathered old George, who served Jessie virgin Singapore Slings and let her sit on the bar stool next to her mother, and who tapped her on the shoulder when the liquor inspector was expected so she could run downstairs to the family section and watch television. She could still feel the tap as the gangly old fellow, in a ubiquitous long trench coat and grizzled chin, beckoned her. His gentle gray eyes echoed his laid back mantra of one-day-at-a-time. Now, in her twenties, Jessie understood the necessity to look at life that way, to recognize that the survival of people in this fast-paced world was dependent on the ability to sit back and chill, to strip away the extraneous fragments to the bare essence of being.

  Those idyllic days lulled by sweet sentiment in her father’s husky voice and the dear, melodious love shared by her parents ended suddenly when Jessie turned twelve, at the second her father cruised around a corner in Clinton, Prince Edward Island, and stared down a car hurtling towards him. He ended up in the Southwest River from which he had, only moments before, pulled his faded red canoe.

  Clinton was one of the most beautiful and beloved areas of P.E.I., Canada’s smallest province, with its gentle hills and patchwork green grass, and a narrow country road bordered for miles by cone shaped purple and pink lupins. Afterwards, Jessie would remember someone at the wake talking about how the flowers so often admired and copied by potters and painters alike were really just weeds, poisonous to some animals. It seemed apropos to Jessie, because she went with her inconsolable mother and her chirpy Aunt Evelyn, and stood disembodied in the distance watching as her mother keened in her sister’s arms while the tow truck slowly, hauntingly, retrieved her dad’s Hyundai from the river. As it emerged as breathless as its driver from the watery prison, she could see that it had picked up some lupins on its speedy, unstoppable journey down the hill. They hung there, not lively and bright and pink and purple anymore, proudly facing the world, but instead dripping and wilted like Jessie’s spirit would be forevermore.

  The once beautiful lupins, as the dirty, thick cable arced the car gracefully over the hill, left miniscule traces of the water that drowned her father on the lovely soft green grass below. Jessie would always remember those water droplets settling upon the grass, reflecting the magic hour light of popping oranges and reds, a light sought after by photographers and cinematographers the world over. Those droplets, life-blood of the river over which Jessie’s father rode like a knight gracefully dipping his paddles and undoubtedly singing as he cruised happily atop his future prison on this magical summer day, were about as part of the river now as Jessie’s beloved dad would be in her life – nothing more than fragile, faded, eerie, ethereal reflected light.

  As her father died, so did her mother, in spirit. And that led to consequences Jessie was unable to bear, and so – as it seemed the mother she knew existed no longer - one night when Jessie was fourteen, she packed her school knapsack with two pairs of panties, one training bra, a pair of jeans, three T-shirts, two pairs of socks, and Tedsy, her old fashioned light brown teddy bear with no arms and half an eye. She grabbed her father’s 1985 Sunburst Gibson J-45 in its stickered, faded case, and headed for the door.

  Looking back now, Jessie wasn’t sure she could have done anything differently. Part of her would always be lost with the lupins, their beauty and soul diminished and destroyed. She supposed that was the reason she ended up here, in this office on Robson Street in Vancouver, reading scripts and booking dates and making plans. The career she ended up with was not her choice, but instead had picked her up and carried her along with the force of a river much stronger than P.E.I.’s Southwest River and, because she long ago lost her fight, she just went along for the ride. Some people dream of such a crazy life and long for it, but there are others who are wired for it, and to who it just seems to come, like a wave to its shore. Jessie was one of those people, someone whose soul was hidden so deeply that only music and acting could draw her out. Certainly her relationships could not. It was a lonely life, but it offered her the seclusion she desired, and the creative release she attained from her art kept her sane. The money was ridiculous, so she spent a lot of it on charities, and that also kept her mentally intact. Otherwise, the guilt would have eaten her up whole.

  Fame. This thing called fame was b
izarre, but Jessie didn’t dwell on it. At five foot nine, a slim and pretty auburn-tinted brunette with shoulder length curls and deep sea-pearl eyes, she was not traditionally beautiful, but instead was comfortable in her skin, and that shone through. She had enough hits behind her to command superstar status, and had earned her first two Oscars last year, one for acting and one for best original song. She was at the top of her game. But she was lonely as hell. Although she told herself that was fine, and was indeed the way she liked it, she still couldn’t erase the ache and the pain deep in her gut.

  Now, she faced the large mahogany desk in her office and, wrapping her arms tighter around her belly, dropped into an overstuffed black leather chair and faced the fifty-two inch monitor on the far wall. She reached forward and pushed a button on the remote. As a lively theme song filled the room, horses appeared on screen, and Jessie watched as the pilot to a Canadian western themed television series started in earnest. What was she thinking – TV? She was a film star. Taking an acting job in television would be like going backwards. But she had her reasons for wanting some continuity in her life, the continuity that a long term series could provide, especially one that was shooting in nearby Langley.

  Anyways, she was just having a look. She hadn’t made any promises, and so there were no expectations she’d take the part. But then – there was no logic except her intuition – why had she listened to Jonathon, the show’s executive producer, in the first place, and offered to have a look at the script? Did she care that the show’s chances of success weren’t great, that the series was only offered a full season out of trust that its producer could pull off better writing and attract the viewers it needed?