Praying for Time

by Carlene Thompson

  Vanessa had been stunned when producers had approached her to play Na’dya of Ives, the wife of Dominick Beaumond, king of Corinna, in the proposed epic fantasy show. Until then, Vanessa’s professional life had consisted of guest appearances on episodic television and four supporting roles in movies that had barely broken even at the box office. She could pay her bills, but she had been deeply disappointed. She’d so hoped for a more distinguished career.

  Then, two years ago, what seemed like the impossible happened when she was given the script of a new fantasy series and asked to audition for the role of Na’dya, the king’s wife. She’d been dazzled by the writing, the show’s energy, grandeur, and the multiple lush locations. She’d been impressed that the story was told in a ten-week arc versus a self-contained episodic format, and also that the show was not so graphic as to eliminate an adolescent audience. She’d admired the character of Na’dya, a pampered young princess who’d married a handsome, intelligent prince who became king and adored his wife – a wife who was now a strong woman and helped him rule a tumultuous empire.

  When Kingdom of Corinna came along, Roxanne had been missing for over six years. The tempestuous, beautiful, blue-eyed girl of fifteen had disappeared like a leaf in the wind. Within hours of someone whisking the screaming girl away, a massive police search had been launched. Police looked at video of the area of the beach where Roxanne was taken, but neither of the two videos available had recorded anything except empty beach. Since her disappearance, Roxanne had not made any calls or posted on social media. No one knew of anyone she was dating. Her few close male friends had been interrogated, but none of them were ‘boyfriends’. Posters featuring Roxanne’s picture were nailed on trees, placed in businesses, and distributed by hand all along the Oregon coast and throughout the rest of the state. Stories ran on the nightly local and national news along with her photo and pleas for anyone who had seen her to come forward.

  During that time, the police had one prime suspect – Brody Montgomery, the younger brother of Vanessa’s boyfriend Christian Montgomery. When Brody was eighteen, he’d begun hallucinating, left his freshman year at Stanford University and after going missing for two months, returned to Everly Cliffs claiming he was a knight searching for a lady in danger whom he must save. His father Gerald, a surgeon at Everly Cliffs Hospital and recent widower, had immediately sought treatment for his younger son and was crushed when he learned Brody suffered from schizophrenia. The blow was almost too much only months after his wife had died in a car wreck. Doctors said Brody was in the early stages, though, and thought that rest in a convalescent center and the proper medical protocol might control the illness and within a year, Brody could be himself again.

  At this time, eighteen-year-old Vanessa had been dating twenty-two-year-old Christian for a year. Already in medical school, Christian lived up to her own father Frederick’s expectations. In fact, he thought of Christian as the son he’d never had. She knew he hoped she and Chris would eventually marry and Vanessa would give up her silly dreams about acting. She, too, had hoped she and Christian would get married someday. She’d loved him passionately and she knew he loved her. And unlike her father, he didn’t expect her to give up her own career desires. She wanted to act and he’d wanted her to act. He’d wanted her to be successful and satisfied, and not only with him. He’d wanted her to have what would make her feel whole. He was handsome, smart, ambitious, kind, funny, understanding, and an ardent lover. At times, she thought their relationship was too good to be true.

  And it was.

  After a year of calm, Brody had stopped taking his medication and at twenty, began roaming throughout Everly Cliffs, once again believing he was a knight looking for a lady he must save. He’d had a hiding place and for nearly a month eluded the medical and police officials’ searches for him.

  Three days before Roxanne was taken, Brody had been captured by the local police. They had been ordered by the sheriff at the time to not divulge that Brody rambled about needing to rescue Roxanne – to take her away. He also allowed Brody to stay at home with his father until arrangements for confinement could be made. Brody was scheduled to enter a hospital schizophrenic treatment center two days after his capture, but his admission was delayed.

  The afternoon after Roxanne’s abduction, the police learned that Brody had not entered the medical facility until three o’clock that day. When they finally descended on the Montgomery home that evening, Gerald claimed that last night when Roxanne Everly was taken, Brody was heavily medicated with Thorazine and so sedated he could barely get out of bed. Christian had already gone back to Stanford, California, to settle into an apartment before his next year in medical school started, but a friend of Gerald’s came forward and said he’d been at the Montgomery house to keep Gerald company in his vigil over Brody. He swore he’d been there all evening until after midnight and also that he’d seen Brody medicated and sleeping at the time someone took Roxanne. No case could be brought against Brody Montgomery and he’d gone free. By this time, the Everly family found out that Brody had been obsessing about fleeing with Roxanne and Vanessa and her parents were convinced that Gerald was lying about Brody being home and sedated when Roxanne was kidnapped. Over the next two months, Vanessa’s relationship with Christian had exploded from the doubt and stress.

  The search for Roxanne went on but after a year, even when they knew the case had gone cold, police nevertheless told the Everly family not to give up hope – miracles did happen and there was no evidence that Roxanne was dead. She could return. Vanessa’s mother and father held on desperately to that hope, but Vanessa did not believe in miracles no matter how hard she tried. She pretended, for her parents’ sake, to believe Roxanne would walk in the door one day, as healthy and happy as the night she’d vanished. Her grandmother Grace was without hope. She thought the same as Vanessa – Roxanne must be dead. The belief was a dark bond between them and Vanessa’s pain and guilt had never abated. Her lost sister was constantly on her mind.

  Roxanne had been entranced by the worlds of fantasy, royalty and spectacle in television and movies. She would have loved Kingdom, Vanessa thought. She would have had a million questions about the production. Vanessa could have even invited Roxy to some of the sets to watch filming. What an adventure it could have been for both of them.

  Vanessa sighed in regret then forced her attention back to her flat-screen television and saw herself as Queen Na’dya. In bright sunshine, she stood on a castle balcony beside her tall, blond husband King Dominick. Her naturally black, wavy hair – doubled in thickness and length by extensions and entwined with silver ribbon – hung in a waist-length braid. She wore a pale-green brocade dress embroidered with silver thread and a delicately wrought gold crown on her head. A huge faux emerald and diamond ring sparkled on her right hand as she waved with queenly grace to the crowd below watching and cheering a parade led by knights in armor shining in the brilliant sun and carrying banners bearing the sigil of House Beaumond.

  Tonight Vanessa sat in her Los Angeles apartment and smiled. The scene being shown had been filmed in Sorrento. They’d started in the morning and there had been take after take after take. By late afternoon the temperature had reached the upper eighties. In her heavy brocade dress, sweat had run down her sides and her face carefully made up with sheer products was blotted between each take and dusted lightly with translucent powder. But she’d felt most sorry for all the men wearing knight’s armor. Four actors had passed out from the heat by the end of the day’s filming.

  The show was excellent, and she did a good job of portraying Na’dya, if Vanessa did say so herself, although she felt completely different from the composed, relentless, daunting queen. She was not as good at hiding her emotions as Na’dya. Her mind did not work as coolly and rationally as Na’dya’s. She was not as brave as Na’dya. She often couldn’t handle frustration and grief with Na’dya’s outward equanimity.

  ‘Unfortunately, you’re not Na’dya,’ she said aloud,
stood up, stretched, and tucked her long hair behind her ears – a nervous habit. Vanessa always watched the show. During tonight’s episode, though, she was inexplicably edgy, crossing and uncrossing her legs, fidgeting in her chair. She wanted a drink – something relaxing on a night when she felt nervous and depressed.

  ‘Because it’s almost Christmas,’ she said aloud as she headed for the kitchen. Her beloved collie given to her by the cast of Kingdom and named Queen Na’dya, which Vanessa shortened to Queenie, rose from her bed beside Vanessa’s chair and followed her dutifully into the kitchen. Vanessa handed the dog a treat and pulled a can of cola from the refrigerator, ice from the freezer, then reached for the bottle of rum. Christmas was always hard for her because it had been Roxanne’s favorite time of year. Vanessa dropped ice into a glass.

  Favorite? Since she was three, Roxanne had been a whirling dervish at Christmas, mad with joy as the men hung lights outside and she and Vanessa decorated the interior of the house with bows and tinsel. Roxanne wrote endless Christmas wish lists for Santa that her father had always put in his coat pocket and solemnly promised to mail, stared fixedly at the elaborate nativity scene her mother always arranged, and finally spent an evening squealing with delight as they decorated the large evergreen with glass bulbs, antique ornaments, glittering foil tinsel, and strings of lights. Even the last year Roxanne had been with the family on the holidays, she was as ecstatic as she’d been at age five.

  The first Christmas after Roxanne’s disappearance, Everly House had been the same as it was in the summer. No tinsel and lights decorated the large rooms, and no evergreen towered in the corner of the library, bright foil-wrapped and beribboned packages piled underneath. No Christmas music soared through the halls, Vanessa’s father sat hunched over papers at his desk drinking bourbon and her mother Ellen had lain in bed half-conscious from liquor and sedatives.

  The night of the attack, Vanessa’s parents had come home from an evening out and gone to bed, thinking their daughters were also safe in theirs. Instead, Vanessa had regained fuzzy consciousness several times, but she didn’t have the strength to crawl more than a few feet from the line of trees. Just past dawn, a young couple on their honeymoon who’d decided to watch the sunrise from the beach found her curled up on the sand, her face smeared with blood, the fingers on her left hand twisted and broken. Vanessa had barely been aware of them or of the paramedics who’d arrived minutes after the couple had called on their cellphone. They’d accompanied her to the small Everly Cliffs Hospital, the young woman murmuring encouragements all the way. At the hospital, someone had recognized Vanessa and phoned her father.

  Between pain medication and shock, the following days in the hospital were a blur. Vanessa remembered her father’s deeply lined face bending over her and saying she’d suffered a concussion and had surgery on her hand, which she mustn’t try to move. Her mother’s blue eyes, so like Roxanne’s, had hovered swollen and red above Vanessa. She’d demanded over and over in an increasingly shrill voice, ‘Where’s Roxanne? What did you let happen to her? Where’s my baby?’ Then her grandmother Grace would appear, speaking in a calm voice, and lead Ellen from the room.

  Vanessa recalled the sheriff’s endless questions and the doctor requesting him to leave. ‘Thank you,’ Vanessa had murmured tearfully to the doctor. ‘I want to go home. Please let me go home.’

  But home had been worse. At least at the hospital she hadn’t been forced to listen to her mother’s constant weeping and lengthy alcohol- and drug-fueled rebukes for taking her ‘baby’ sister to the ocean at night. It was Grace who’d ordered Ellen to stay out of her daughter’s bedroom. Vanessa’s father Frederick was also drinking steadily although he’d mistakenly thought secretly. Occasionally he wandered in to sit on the side of her bed and stare at her with dark-green, grief-stricken eyes, which hurt her more deeply than her mother’s outbursts. Vanessa felt that only Grace’s gentle care and matter-of-fact conversation had kept her sane.

  Vanessa returned to Los Angeles six weeks later and began school again the next term. She’d considered remaining at home until Roxanne was found, but Grace had urged her to leave. ‘Staying here won’t help the police. Go back to school. Do it for me.’ Vanessa had worn a cast on her left hand. Over the next year she’d had two reconstructive operations and plastic surgery, which doctors hoped with physical therapy would restore the fingers to almost normal. Nevertheless, she had dived into school. When she finished, she stayed in Los Angeles, although she’d always gone back to Everly Cliffs at Christmas despite the cold, dismal atmosphere.

  A few years later her father, who suffered from a bad heart and alcoholism, fell down the stairs and broke his neck. Ellen, whose drinking and use of barbiturates had spun out of control, had a nervous breakdown and retreated into an imaginary world. After a few months, she was legally declared incompetent and sent to a professional care facility where she’d been living for almost three years. The two calamities less than six months apart had been a shock, especially to Grace who’d dearly loved her grave, though damaged, son. This year will be even worse, though, Vanessa thought. Alzheimer’s had started its insidious work on Grace’s mind a little over two years ago and in October she had broken a hip. Complications had delayed her recovery but she was now recuperating at home. Still, Vanessa knew it could be the last year that Grace would know her.

  Tonight the thought sent a shiver through Vanessa and she sipped her drink. That’s why she felt uneasy, she told herself. Next week she would be going home for Christmas earlier than usual. She would be spending what could be her last holiday with Grace. Even when Grace had lived in France, she’d kept in constant contact with Vanessa, the granddaughter she said was most like her. They’d been like girlfriends in spite of Grace’s age and sophistication and wisdom. Vanessa could not imagine a world without her grandmother to confide in and ask for advice.

  Vanessa gazed out the window of her fifth-floor West Hollywood apartment at the galaxy of lights. Usually she enjoyed the sight, and felt pleasure at so much life in a city that never seemed to sleep, but not tonight.

  She flexed her left hand. The hand surgeon had done an excellent job reconstructing the fingers and plastic surgeons had worked miracles on the appearance. Except for a few narrow scars and occasional pain and stiffness in the joints, her hand was almost like it had been before the attack. Vanessa made a fist and winced. It definitely hurt tonight. She took a deep swallow of her drink, thinking her pain was only a symptom of what she didn’t want to admit – she did not want to go to Everly Cliffs. She hadn’t wanted to go for Christmas since Roxanne’s kidnapping but she made herself go to see Grace. And there was her friend Audrey Willis. Their parents had shared a friendship and Vanessa and Audrey had been close since they were children, although Audrey was two years older than Vanessa. She had gotten pregnant when she was an unmarried teenager and had given birth to a beautiful daughter Cara. Now Audrey was a nurse and had been looking after Grace since she broke her hip. She and Cara had moved into Everly House with Grace, and Vanessa knew that Grace enjoyed their company, especially Cara’s. The girl was eleven and Vanessa longed to see the beautiful, dark-haired sprite. Yes, going home was a must. She absolutely could not skip this visit.

  She heard the concluding music of Kingdom of Corinna and realized she’d missed the last half of the show while standing in the kitchen sipping rum and cola and conducting a mental argument with herself. Oh well, each episode of the cable show aired at least three times a week and she could catch it later. Tonight she’d been too restless to concentrate and instead had paced around the compact kitchen of her one-bedroom apartment. Kingdom of Corinna had been renewed for two seasons. She could safely afford a house and she intended to buy one after the next season of Corinna finished filming for the year. The small apartment had suited her since she was twenty-one, but now she wanted more interior space and a lawn for Queenie. She felt as if it was finally time for her life to begin again and she wanted a real home.

>   Two cellphones lay on the kitchen counter: a black smartphone and a blue iPhone. The black smartphone emitted the ringtone ‘Für Elise’ and she quickly picked it up, glancing at the caller ID to see Unknown. Puzzled, she said briskly, ‘Hello.’

  After a moment of silence, a voice screeched, ‘Is she there? Is she with you?’

  Vanessa winced at the piercing shrillness in the voice although it was so ragged, she couldn’t tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s. ‘Audrey?’

  ‘Not Audrey. I’m looking for her.’

  ‘I … I think you have the wrong number.’

  ‘I don’t! Tell me!’

  A chill washed over Vanessa at the ear-shattering voice although she knew this call could not be meant for her. ‘I’m telling you I don’t know who you mean—’

  ‘You do! Damn you to hell if you don’t tell me where your sister is!’

  Vanessa felt as if her heart skipped a beat. Her sister? ‘Who is this?’ she choked out. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Your sister!’

  ‘My sister? Do you know something about her? Who are you?’

  The androgynous voice suddenly sounded fatigued. ‘Don’t … don’t play the fool, Vanessa. You remember that song you liked so much, don’t you? “Praying for Time”? Well, you, my girl, had better be praying for time.’

  The connection ended. Vanessa clutched the phone, shouting, ‘Hello! Hello! Please talk to me!’ But the caller was gone and Vanessa sank to the floor, her legs rubbery, her heart pounding. The kitchen whirled around her and she closed her eyes, lowering her head until the shock passed.

  Because of the television show, she had a large social media presence. But Vanessa valued her privacy and used the blue iPhone, which she called her ‘public’ phone, for most of her calls. She called the black smartphone her ‘private’ phone. Not even her agent had the number – only Grace and Audrey in Everly Cliffs could call her on it. She knew that as popularity of the TV show grew, so would her loss of privacy. For now, though, she tried hard to keep her connection to Everly Cliffs unknown because she didn’t want the story of Roxanne rediscovered and sensationalized. It would be painful for Grace and, if Roxanne was by some wild possibility still alive, could cause her death if her captor thought the search might be started again. If someone called Vanessa on her smartphone, it meant her Everly Cliffs number had been discovered and the results might be disastrous for Roxanne. Who could have given out that number? Grace? She probably didn’t remember it. Audrey? Never. Then who had called her? And why? And who would know she liked George Michael’s ‘Praying for Time’? Was the caller’s aim only to frighten her? After all these years? Once again, the question tolled in her head: Why?