No Greater Love

by Susan Rodgers

  Jacob couldn’t wrap his mind around that situation. He knew Jessie now – would he ever get used to calling her by that name? She was sweet and quiet and detached a lot of the time, yes, but she didn’t strike him as a pushover, a doormat, a woman who would put up with a boyfriend who hit her. How could things go so far downhill between them that Josh beat the crap out of her a few months after they broke up? The girl Jacob knew and loved did not compute with the Jessie Wheeler who was the brutalized victim of a man she obviously still loved. Unless…maybe she wore the ring as a reminder not to let that happen again…but she was with him, Jacob. She didn’t seem to be afraid of Jacob, or John Paul or any of the other guys they hung out with, or partied with.

  So much to consider. What if by coming to Vancouver Jacob was opening Jessie up to the same kind of trouble? What if this Josh actor guy had some kind of vendetta against Jessie? Or…what if he simply still loved her?

  The thing was…Jacob needed to know. He spent the last two weeks thinking about the situation and realized he couldn’t find any hope in salvaging his relationship with his girl without knowing what – whom – she left behind. Obviously the life she was living in Canada did not agree with her. People didn’t just get up and exit their lives without either a disconnect from reality or a simple desire to start anew elsewhere. Jessie was smart. She had her reasons for leaving. And she would kill Jacob for interfering. She may never speak to him again if he…

  Well, that was the other thing. Jacob didn’t know what he was going to do or say. At this point, as he accepted keys for a rented Mazda hatchback, all he wanted to do was check in at a location where the Drifters gang was known to hang out. If they weren’t there, then maybe the club’s owner would be present.

  In his quiet hotel rooms between gigs over the last few weeks, when John Paul was busy with some random woman or simply not awake yet, Jacob spent time on his laptop. He drove himself crazy watching videos of Jessie, of excerpts from Drifters…hell, he even streamed a few full episodes from season one. Jealousy pulled him away from the screen – there was only so much he could take of Josh and Jessie, or Billy and Kate…Jesus, not much wonder she could take on other personalities so easily. She was, after all, an Oscar winning actor. But it must get confusing at times. How much of the girl Annie was really Jessie? Was it all a farce with her – an act? Since Christmas? Almost three months now they’d been together, which didn’t seem like a long time in the greater scheme of things. But to two people wrapped up in the heady emotions of new love every second was magical, hyper-accelerated, serene and transcendent.

  The cell videos from the night Jessie’s young friend Terri died just about did Jacob in altogether. By then he had already rearranged his flights to accommodate a side trip to Vancouver, but he seriously thought about changing back after viewing that wrenching video. It had taken him more than a week to actually hit play. When he finally found the courage, he was captivated. He’d heard about the video when it first went viral, but Jacob wasn’t the kind of guy to get wrapped up in celebrity news and gossip. He had never seen it. Now he understood why millions of people watched it again and again. Jacob had viewed one of Jessie Wheeler’s music videos before clicking on the hospital video – to go from a touching song featuring the girl he loved showcased on a simple wooden stool singing of love and loss, professionally shot and edited, to amateur video of her screaming hysterically after a very real and definite loss, was overwhelming. His senses were frenzied, wired. Jacob paced his hotel room again and again afterwards in an attempt to calm himself. In the end, he went outside and found a homey treed park where, with shaking hands, he could light up a joint he managed to conjure from a techie at the last club. Almost worse than seeing Jessie in so much pain was the vision – now stuck in Jacob’s head like a frozen internet video frame - of Josh carrying Jessie into the hospital. The thing that got Jacob - really did him in – was that Josh was sobbing too. And Jessie’s arms were wrapped around his neck. How could a man who loved her have hurt her so badly? And – wasn’t that even before they officially got together?

  His head so full of images of Jessie and Josh he couldn’t manage to escape into sleep at night, Jacob pushed the key into the ignition of the Mazda. He used his cell’s GPS to find his way into the hippie city in the midst of a drizzling rainstorm, which he gathered wasn’t unusual for western Canada this time of year. He didn’t bother stopping at a hotel – he figured he would lose his nerve if he didn’t go straight to his destination. Then there it was, Charlie’s Club, seemingly a modern affair, its sign lit from within with green and red neon and a small parking lot tucked around the back and side. Twice Jacob drove around the block before he found the guts to pull in. There was ample parking - it was too early for the nightclub crowd to hit just yet. A low growl emanated from Jacob’s belly – oh well, he was hungry. He might as well go in and check out the joint, order some grub. And a beer. Or two. He would need all the liquid courage he could find.

  ***

  Not surprisingly, there was no one at the club that hour of the day Jacob was interested in seeing. Still, it was a surreal experience to sit quietly in a place where, according to the magazine article, Jessie once spent a lot of her time honing songs and hanging out with Charlie in the early years, and then with Josh and her friends from Drifters in later days. Setting his guitar down by a tall leather stool at the central bar, Jacob slid into a seat and gratefully closed his hands over a glossy menu offered to him by the bartender. At least ordering food and drink would occupy some time.

  The bartender, a lean lanky dark haired guy in a black pinstriped vest worn over a white button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, gestured towards Jacob’s guitar.

  “You’re a little early. The open mic doesn’t start until eight.” He was drying glasses with a linen towel as he spoke. He wiped off water spots and slid them into a rack above his head. As he deposited each glass a slightly faded tattoo of a sailing ship peeked out from just above his left wrist. Wishing he could fix his own problems with a simple towel, Jacob met the bartender’s eyes. Did the tattooed guy know Jessie? Could he ask this guy questions about her? It was as if suddenly there were so many things he wanted to know about her. As if weighing all of them together might solve the mystery of what would unfold in his life over the next few weeks.

  “I – uh – actually, I didn’t know there was an open mic. I was just in the area and thought I’d stop in for some grub. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my guitar in the car.”

  Knowingly, the bartender, Joey, nodded, somewhat perturbed. This frazzled guy was another freak musician dropping by to see the famous place where the missing Jessie Wheeler played, where she once hung out. Joey was constantly amazed at the stream of travellers who turned Charlie’s Club into a damn tourist spot. Frankly, he just wished Jessie would come home already. They were turning her memory into something akin to Mother Teresa’s. Joey remembered a woman who was, at least in the last few months, distant and often wasted. Not so much the saint everyone made her out to be.

  “Know what you want?” Joey reached out for the menu that Jacob had closed and pushed aside.

  “Yeah. Uh – I’ll do the cheese enchiladas. And a beer – something local.”

  Before putting the order in, Joey remarked on the evening’s activities. Might as well see if the guy can play. “If you want to do the open mic, there’s a sign-up sheet over by the stage. It’s the most popular open mic in the city, so you have to sign in early to secure your spot in the line-up.”

  Hmm, Jacob thought. Maybe. Although he was tired from the last two weeks of playing almost straight, there was some eerie attraction in the idea of taking the stage here where Jessie so often entertained the people of Vancouver. He took a sip of the Granville Island Brewery English Bay Pale Ale Joey handed him and thought about asking the bartender about Jessie, but he figured the guy was probably tired of curious Jessie Wheeler fans hyped up on the melodrama of her sudden departure.

  That w
as another thing – Jacob was incredibly humbled by the power of what he and Katrine knew that the rest of the world didn’t. As he fingered his beer bottle, picking away at a little tear in the bottom right corner of the label, he thought back to the time when she disappeared. He recalled that the overwhelming question seemed to be whether or not she was alive. Suicide was one option the media toyed with; but then her publicist came forward and offered evidence that she likely just left ‘for a while’, apparently, according to Jacob’s recent roamings around the internet. Thinking about the Jessie he knew and the Annie he met back in the fall, he remembered mostly how quiet she was, even though she was having a good time with John Paul and Charlene back on that first night. And what was it John Paul said about her the next morning? Oh yeah – she was sorrowful and tragic, or something like that. And he didn’t need that shit.

  Well, nobody needed that shit from his or her partner – what essentially amounted to serious baggage – but let’s face it, Jacob thought. Everybody has shit. You don’t get to twenty, thirty, forty without some history. The question for anybody willing to take on someone else’s baggage is simply how much can you handle?

  He sighed heavily, and the bartender cocked an eyebrow at him. Another clink, and an additional glass was home in the rack above until it was needed again.

  Jessie Wheeler. Feck. Not just baggage, even. A superstar, living a superstar lifestyle. A career that Jacob coveted. This was fucked up. A normal life with Annie? Could she stay Annie? Was that a secret he could keep? Could he tell her he knew the truth? Maybe Katrine already had, for God’s sake. Shit.

  In the foggy outskirts of his brain Jacob heard a voice he recognized and then like a small windstorm Charlie Deacon was suddenly beside him, discussing something so normal as how well stocked the club was for the evening. Jacob narrowed his eyes as the good-looking actor dragged the high leather stool next to him a bit further out and away from the bar, and took off a quilted black bomber jacket that he threw over the next stool. He fell into the comfortable seat beside Jacob, whose steaming hot enchiladas arrived just then, and perched his expensive tan desert boots on the silver rail at their feet.

  “Those any good?” he asked Jacob, referring to the enchiladas.

  Jacob’s voice was gravelly, low. It was everything he had in him to speak to this man to whom Jessie was once engaged, who helped launch her career.

  “Don’t know. Give me a sec.” And he forced a shaking hand to unravel a blue linen napkin, retrieve a heavy fork, and dig in. Surprisingly, he found he had an actual appetite. The food was rich, cheesy, spicy, hot – good. He looked up at Charlie, who of course knew well his own club’s food, but Jacob shrugged anyway. “Yeah,” he said. “Good for a day like this. Rainy and cold.”

  “Then I’m gonna get me some of that,” Charlie responded, thinking the guy seemed pretty down and out and so the hot food would likely be good on any day. He took note of Jacob’s burgeoning whiskers and a blue plaid flannel shirt that hung out over faded, almost tattered jeans, and then he spotted the guitar by the stool.

  “Musician,” he said, and then to Joey, “Guinness please, on tap.”

  He seemed to be settling next to Jacob, which was weird and uncomfortable, but Jacob was starting to find a bizarre humor in all of this. Charlie just ordered Guinness – did he and Jessie always drink Guinness? Did they have some affection for the UK, which in essence brought her to Scotland? Everything now was a clue, a question. How he just wanted to blurt out ‘I know where Jessie is.’ But he liked the power he held over this rich playboy. And to be honest Jacob still did not have a clue whether he was going to do anything at all with his very private information. He loved Annie, who was at least in part Jessie, but would things ever be the same between them now – could they be? It had taken him a long time to find a soul mate, someone who understood music the way he did. Who not only played guitar, but who played it well, who understood the intricacies of melody and lyric and the sweet, sweet playfulness and simple magic between the two. It was everything he had in him not to hang his head on his arms on the counter as Charlie’s enchiladas arrived and Jacob’s empty plate was removed.

  Charlie noticed. “Having a hard day?”

  Ha. Understatement. Hard fecking two weeks. “Feck, yeah, you could say that,” Jacob said, rubbing a weary hand over red eyes.

  Noting a slight Scots accent in the man’s intonation, Charlie forked a hefty bite of enchilada into his mouth. “Woman trouble?”

  It took enormous willpower for Jacob to simply remain seated. He forced himself to look away. “You bet,” he said to the empty chair on his left, embarrassed, not sure what Charlie would read in his eyes if he could see them.

  This was something Charlie understood. “Them’s the worst kind of trouble. Wimmins,” he said, trying to lighten the situation. “They’se pison.”

  What he was saying was that women mattered. Relationships mattered. Love mattered. Jacob heard him loud and clear. And that was the essence of his quandary that day, of the terrific internal struggle he was enduring as he sat there in Jessie Wheeler’s old haunt. It mattered – to him, to her, to her new friends, to her old friends. No one was going to win in this situation. And particularly not he, not Jacob. He had already lost. You could analyze the pros and cons to death, but he had already lost the girl he only just let himself love. Feck. Bad day my ass. Bad fecking life.

  He should just text her now and then hand his phone to Charlie.

  Jacob sneered irritably as he pictured the shock and amazement surely to line Charlie’s face when the actor realized his beloved Jessie was alive and well, and that scraggly Jacob had access to her.

  The universe stepped in then and Charlie was beckoned away for a phone call. He swept his remaining enchiladas off with him, up a set of metal steps to a glassed in office where he could sit like a king over his modern sterile domain.

  After adding his name to the open mic list, Jacob wandered off to a corner where a large monitor was set up, and he found some controllers hooked up to an X-Box. Surprised, but then realizing this suited Charlie very well, or at least who Jacob understood Charlie to be, he battled with Call of Duty until the club started to fill. Then he went back to the bar and watched as Jessie’s friends drifted in, wet and frazzled, seeking liquid comfort.

  Jacob told himself the chances of them showing up this night - when he was actually in the city - were slim, but once again the universe was trying to tell him something, he figured. They weren’t all there, as he read that Maggie was doing theatre in New York, Carter was on a film in New Mexico, and Sue-Lyn was acting in a new series in L.A. But Stephen was apparently between shows although Jacob had read he’d recently shot a pilot for a sit-com. Josh was shooting feature films regularly these days but he was back in Van between shoots, which was one reason why Jacob ventured Northwest. He thought he might catch him in the club. After all, if he – Jacob – had been away, he would want to spend time in Jessie’s old haunts when he returned.

  Michelle was on Josh’s arm. Jacob thought she was very appealing with her perfectly styled dark hair and dimples, but also very unlike Jessie. She seemed all business. It was she who ordered their drinks, who took Josh’s black leather blazer and draped it over the tall chair where he sat at a bar table in the corner. No wonder he is with her, Jacob caught himself thinking. She takes care of him. They had been together now for about seven months. He wondered if she’d experienced any of the violence the rest of the world was concerned with regarding Josh. She was standing there now with an arm draped protectively around her man’s waist. She did not appear to be a woman afraid of her man.

  Stephen had a cute blonde with him – Jacob recognized her from photos he found online as Sophie, a woman with whom Stephen was apparently recently reacquainted. They had broken up for a time but it seemed they were now reconciled. They appeared every bit the happy couple in love. Even from his somewhat removed vantage point Jacob could tell why Jessie and he were friends – Steve was
always laughing, making the others laugh – there was a twinkle in his eyes Jacob could discern even from halfway across the room. Sophie was porcelain, delicate, perhaps a dancer? She watched her man almost in a state of perpetual awe. Perhaps she, like Jacob, knew the sick fear of potential loss. She was a woman afraid of losing her man.

  By the time the host took the stage for the open mic Jacob was getting drunk, plus he was sleepy and tired of watching Josh appear so happy with this Michelle girl. Was love so fickle you could so easily replace your lover with someone else?

  During the evening Jacob took smoke breaks sitting on a waist high cement wall under a canopy outdoors. But finally the host of the open mic - a bouncy, short fun guy who introduced himself as Carl, dressed in expensive Beatles’ style 1960’s stovepipe pants that glistened under the stage lighting - introduced the first performer, a young rather robust twenty-something woman painted into a low cut tank top and tight jeans. She was a very fine singer, and Jacob found himself finally relaxing. Sometimes open mics were not so good, but this one was turning out to be rather pleasant. It seemed the people of Vancouver were smart in choosing where they played, and Charlie’s Club certainly seemed to attract good talent.