Chapter One (Searching)

A woman begins her journey to discover what life holds for her

The air was chewy with humidity when I finally dropped my keys through the apartment office mail slot. The ’67 Dodge Challenger that Adam and I had found as an ugly, rusted shell and lovingly restored over the first three years of our marriage purred smoothly when I turned the key. On the backseat were a cardboard box, a duffle bag and an oversized suitcase. The passenger side held my purse, my laptop bag and a brand new road atlas. “Lorelei”—Adam had named the car after the song we heard the first time we took her for a drive—held all of my worldly possessions. It had been surprisingly easy to part with the rest as I’d either sold off or given away nearly everything from our apartment over the past few weeks; I’d started as soon as I realized that I needed a change and I never looked back.

 

     I stopped for gas at the corner and bought a small cooler, six energy drinks and ice to fill it. I also gave in to temptation and bought a pack of cigarettes and a bright orange disposable lighter when the pimply-faced cashier asked if I needed anything else. I’d given up the habit when I started dating Adam since he was allergic to smoke, but a road trip wouldn’t seem like a road trip without a cigarette in my hand when I started out. After adjusting the radio, tuning into a rock station, I buckled up, lit up and pointed Lorelei toward the city and the highway.

 

    Of course, there was a huge slowdown at the aptly named malfunction junction, I-4 and I-75, but finally I crept my way through and was soon speeding north on I-75 to a place where I could maybe start living again. I’d never left my hometown of Tampa, but Tampa no longer held anything for me, and it was time to start over, to find something new and, most importantly, become someone new.

 

      I drove north for a while and then turned east, towards the coast, picking up I-95 eventually, leaving it for I-26 until Columbia, SC, where I switched to I-77. I stopped for gas a few times, stocking up on caffeine and nicotine, even eating lunch at a little truck stop diner that served amazing fried chicken and decadent strawberry pie. I got tired about 30 miles past Columbia after driving for nearly nine hours and got off at an exit promising lodging.

 

     I checked into the easy on, easy off budget motel around seven, ordered Chinese from one of the delivery menus in my room, ate half of my Pork Lo Mein special and an egg roll, took a shower and crawled into bed, the television tuned to an old black and white movie, Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s.

 

     I was asleep long before the sisters’ prayers for a new school building were answered.

 

      It had been a long day, and I dreamt of highways, of red Georgia clay and South Carolina palmettos. Songs from junior high and beyond provided the soundtrack, and I turned to see Adam laughing and singing along, keeping time on the dashboard. My mind was screaming at me that it wasn’t possible, but I didn’t want to leave the dream. I wish I had.          

 

     …Here we are now, entertain us… As Kurt Cobain sang about teen angst, my husband morphed from his smiling, fun-loving self into a skeleton, his rotting flesh falling from his bones, his dark curls a bed of worms. I woke up, stifling a scream, sweaty, with the covers tangled around me, holding me fast.   I lay there, shaking, while the panic passed, like I had so many times before. 

 

     When all that remained was the sick feeling so deep in my stomach it seemed to emanate from my very soul, I got out of bed, turned on the light, and reached for the small three-subject spiral notebook I carried in my oversized tote bag of a purse. Flipping through the pages, I found the first blank one and using the pen clipped to the wire, I wrote down all the details of my dream—even the part where it turned into a nightmare. It wasn’t pleasant, it never was, but the therapist I’d seen said it would help me to confront my terror. 

 

     She was right; I woke up petrified once every week or ten days instead of three or four times a week now and the familiar ritual of reducing the nightmare to words on paper calmed me, taking the worst of the ache from my heart, helping to bury the rest in a deep place. It would never go away completely, I’d always hurt when I thought of Adam, but I was learning to live with and control the pain of my loss. 

 

     The settlement money that was enabling me to start a new life in a new place was good, but it would never replace the man I loved—and still did with my whole heart—nor would it bring back the baby I lost when the stress caused me to miscarry the child Adam and I had created. It wouldn’t change that my craving for orange juice put my husband in the path of a drunken pizza delivery driver or prevent me from waking up in the middle of the night, haunted by visions of a rotting corpse. 

 

     1.5 million dollars did a lot of things—paid for therapy, let me grieve without worrying about paying my rent, allowed me to pack up my car and drive away—but no amount of money could ever give me back any part of what I’d lost. I’d been vilified in the local press, called a money-grubbing b***h by a shock-jock on a syndicated radio show, and the local news glossed over my donating a quarter of the two million dollar settlement to charities that provided alcohol counseling as part of their services, instead choosing to focus on how I just held out for more money. 

 

     I’d sued because the driver’s manager wrote him up for smelling like beer, but still let him deliver pizzas. I’d sued because a nineteen-year-old college student attended a keg party at his fraternity house before going to work. And, I admit, I sued because the national chain’s lawyers offered me $500,000 to stay quiet and not tarnish their family- friendly image. That made me angry, furious. I decided that they could keep their hush money and took them to court, but it was more painful than I could have imagined, and when they offered a million, my lawyers countered with two, and they couldn’t agree fast enough.  

 

     The dark, twisted details of my dream tucked back away in my purse, I ran warm water into the bathtub and lowered myself into the steaming water. I knew I wasn’t going to go back to sleep, but I also knew I needed to rest if I was going to keep driving. I soaked for an hour or so, cried a little in loneliness, but emerged feeling better, calmer. 

 

     I toweled off and pulled on a pair of old gym shorts and an ancient red hoodie, the only thing of Adam’s I still had. After each wash, I sprayed it with his cologne, and wearing it made me feel like he was wrapping his arms around me, hugging me, reassuring me that everything would be okay. My therapist discouraged this behavior, but it made me feel better, so I ignored her advice. I had a teddy bear I got as a kid in my second foster home that served the same purpose. I gave that up when I was ready; I’d give this up, too, eventually. The bear, however, was in the box in the backseat. I just didn’t need it to sleep anymore.  

 

     I finished my Chinese and watched a 24-hour cable news channel until dawn, when I made a pot of weak coffee in the stained pot on top of the microwave. I got dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, pulling the sweatshirt back on over my head. After packing up my dirty clothes, I checked out, restocked my cooler and headed back out on the road. 

 

     I had a vague idea where I wanted to go. In my atlas was a state park on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border, not far from Lake Erie, surrounded by open farmland and dotted with little towns. Small-town rural life sounded idyllic, and I was ready to try it out.

 

     I was glad I’d put the sweatshirt back on. Early April in Florida might be warm, but at eight in the morning and getting close to the southern border of North Carolina, it was pretty chilly still, and Lorelei’s heater smelled funny when I turned it on, so I’d shut it off almost as quickly. 

 

     I stopped at the first rest area in North Carolina and threw my two newly empty caffeine and sugar loaded energy drink cans in the trash as I rushed toward the restroom. Relieved at last, I took my time walking back to the car. The sun was bright and it was warmer, but I was still surprised at how much cooler it was than when I’d left the day before. 

 

     The rest area was pretty, with spring flowers blooming in neatly manicured beds and picnic tables scattered about. I sat on one of the tables and watched red and yellow tulips bob their heads in the breeze. I’d been hoping that the natural beauty would help erase the imprint of my nightmare, but it was an exercise in futility. 

 

     Traffic to the facilities picked up and cars and families interrupted the serene quality of my surroundings. A cloud passed over the sun and leached the color from the bright blossoms. The gentle breeze, carrying the scents of freshly mowed grass and the faintest hint of the richness of the summer to come felt cold and I gave up and climbed back into the driver’s seat. 

 

     My stomach started to rumble as my elevation climbed and my gas gauge needle dipped. I scanned the signs before each exit, looking for one that offered fuel for both me and Lorelei, but I was starving before I finally had to stop. I’d wanted to avoid fast food, but I could make do with whatever I found; the car couldn’t be as picky. 

 

     I ate soggy, bland chicken on a bed of half-frozen lettuce topped with slimy sliced onions, paper-thin cucumber slices and soft, overripe tomatoes. It was supposed to be a grilled chicken salad, but it didn’t look anything like the bright, crispy one pictured on the menu. Yeah, I get cranky if I don’t eat. The energy drinks help control my hunger, but when I finally do get hungry, it has to be good, worth eating, or I’d almost rather be miserable. More accurately, I’d still be miserable, even after I filled my belly. 

 

     When I started out again, I was mindlessly scanning through the radio and finally gave up. All I was finding were country stations and R&B, neither genre appealing to me, so I flicked it off and was left alone with my thoughts.

 

     I used the time to think about what I wanted out of my new life. 

 

     “Start with the superficial,” I said wryly, out loud. It’s a lot easier to change the outside than the inside, I realized. 

    

     Cut off the ponytail I’d clung to since childhood, maybe dye the mousy brown a vivid red to bring out my emerald eyes. Adam’d always loved my eyes. He said it was like looking into dewdrops on the stems of fresh cut flowers from our patio. Corny? Maybe. But he could always make my heart melt.

 

     Eat better, exercise more, ease up on the caffeine… maybe even manage to lose the weight I’d put on when I’d finally started eating again. After Adam died, I’d lost nearly thirty pounds, had dropped to 110 and looked terrible. At five and a half feet tall, most women would just look skinny, but I was sickening. I have the wrong body type to be that thin. I smiled to myself, remembering my second foster mother, Deborah, telling me as I hit adolescence and filled out that I’d never look like a model, but a real woman. 

 

     I could hear her voice as clearly as if she were in the car with me. 

 

     “You’ll have breasts, and hips and curves. And one day, you’ll realize that you are beautiful. Those girls in the magazines, they’re like boys with pretty clothes and makeup.”

 

    When I lost Adam, I couldn’t eat. It went in and came right back up, if I even remembered at all. Eventually, though, my body rebelled and I couldn’t get enough. And the thirty pounds I lost came back… and brought friends along. I was pushing 170 now and I really didn’t like it. Hence the avoidance of fast food and the suffering through the awful salad at lunch. 

 

     I’d learn to dress better, maybe even take the time to do my hair and makeup, put the awkward foster kid in hand-me-downs behind me and project an aura of mystery and strength. Yeah, right. My jeans and sneakers weren’t going anywhere. 

 

     I’d make time to read more, and not just cotton-candy popular fiction. I loved the classics once, when I still read them. Maybe I’d even try writing again. Before I grew up and got a life that changed my childhood dreams, I wrote constantly. Poetry, short stories, my head filled with visions of being the next Great American Author. Or maybe I’d just open a small bookstore and lose myself in my own merchandise. 

 

     My thoughts carried me through the mountains of North Carolina and I pretty much missed the sliver of Virginia I sped through and before I knew it, I was in West Virginia. I stopped to fill up again and checked my map. I decided I could wait a while to eat, but passed over the energy drinks in favor of bottled water. Might as well get a head start on my self-improvement plan, right?

 

     Traffic was thickening as I got closer to Charleston, the state capital, two hours later. I didn’t really want to get lost in an unfamiliar city during rush hour and even though I was feeling the effects of my paltry, unsatisfying lunch, I decided I could wait a little while longer to stop for dinner. If I hadn’t eaten lunch so early, I wouldn’t be ready to join the old people at the table. It was barely four in the afternoon. The traffic served one purpose, though. It made me slow down and actually appreciate the late-afternoon sunlight glinting off the golden dome of West Virginia’s state capitol. 

 

     I’d managed to find a new station by now and was rocking to the 80’s classics of my childhood, Poison and Bonnie Tyler, and the alternative rock of my middle and high school years—Green Day, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains. There were even a few newer songs thrown in for variety, I realized when I caught myself singing along. 

 

     “If it’s not perfect, I’ll perfect it ‘til my heart explodes…” I’d loved that line ever since Adam had bought me Hinder’s Extreme Behavior  CD. I think I donated it to one of the thrift stores. After I put it on my laptop and iPod, of course.

 

     Traffic dropped off sharply as I got north of downtown. I saw a gas station sign looming ahead of me and decided to take my chances on the availability of edible food. 

 

     The exit name made me smile. Tuppers Creek. Seriously. I’m not sure why it amused me so much, but it did. I’d been getting a little grumpy, tired of driving, sick of the getting there, ready to be there and get started with whatever I was going to do to make my life better, so when something as simple as the name on a highway exit could lift my mood, I accepted it and didn’t really question why. 

 

     There was a sub place tucked into the gas station and I could smell the bread from the parking lot, but I was a good mommy and fed Lorelei first. Some creepy kid in a pickup stared at me as I walked to the door, but even that didn’t dampen my oddly out-of-place glee. 

 

     I took advantage of the booths to eat my toasted roast beef and cheese on wheat. The view was beautiful. In Florida, the trees were fully leafed out, green and bright against the blue skies, but as I’d driven, it was like the seasons had been moving slowly in reverse.   This far north, the limbs were dark and starkly outlined against the growing dusk, overlaid with a faint watercolor wash of green, the nearly transparent coloring of tight, fresh buds at their tips before they spring to life. 

 

     After dinner, I was in no hurry to get back on the road. The trip was longer than it looked in the atlas and I wanted to stretch my legs. I wanted to reach my destination before stopping for the night. Or, at least the area of my destination. Surely, one of the small towns ringing the park I’d found would have some kind of short-term rentable lodging. I strolled up and down the aisles, browsing aimlessly, but when I could feel the eyes of the old man at the register boring into my back, I made my way to the coolers and reached for more bottled water. 

 

     I decided to live dangerously and opted for some kind of vitamin-enriched, flavored water, pomegranate and black cherry. It sounded good, so I took two. Afraid that my sleeplessness the night before would catch up to me, I bought an iced coffee and a couple of energy drinks, too.   I didn’t want to stop again unless I absolutely had to, but I didn’t want to fall asleep, either, so I was able to rationally rationalize the caffeine overdose.

 

     Obviously, there was no such thing as twilight here, at least not at this time of year. It was dusk while I was eating my sandwich and full dark by the time I left. The moon was nearly full, and I was so far up and the sky was so clear that it seemed as though I could almost stroke her pregnant silver belly. 

 

     I drove even farther north for a while, crossing the Ohio River at Marietta, and continued on through the Buckeye state. I paused briefly at a rest area to again consult my atlas, and with a fairly clear idea of the state’s highway system, I hurried on my way. 

 

     By the time I left trusty old I-77, I was exhausted. I’m sure that’s why I got lost. The map showed the smaller state route crossing another little highway that would take me within a hair’s breadth of where I wanted to be… in the atlas, at least. The little road did cross the highway I was looking for—it crossed right over it, I’m pretty sure, though I still can’t figure out where. Someday, maybe I’ll go back and see if I can figure it out. On second thought, maybe not. I drove around for hours, on smaller and smaller roads. A lot of rural roads with no lights but what the moon and my headlights lit around me. I thought about stopping at a gas station for directions, but open ones were few and far between, and those were in dark, scary places. Maybe rural life wasn’t as idyllic as I’d thought, after all. 

 

     Somehow, I crossed into Pennsylvania and knew I’d gone too far east, but I got lucky and drove past a brightly lit gas station and 24-hour supermarket in a dark and quiet medium sized town. I took my map in with me when I asked for directions and forty-five minutes later, I was driving through the first of my possible new homes.

 

     Another gas station pit stop, this time to inquire about a place to sleep for the night—God, I missed the handy signs on the highway!—only to find out I’d have to drive another fifteen minutes around the southern shore of the lake to its western edge, to some little place I hadn’t even found on my map, Damville. It had a family-run motel that usually had vacancies. 

 

     I hadn’t even realized I’d made it to Damville until I came upon the traffic circle in the middle of town. It looked like most of the others I’d driven through. A bank, a grocery store, gas station (closed, of course), and other dark and silent businesses. On the far side of the circle I could see a faint glow; something was open. The bank had a time and temperature sign that alternately displayed 41° F and 2:53 in glowing red characters. 

 

     I drove slowly around the deserted circle and was elated when I saw that the faint glow I’d spotted was indeed an open business. Not only that, but it was even the one I was looking for. A, in my experience anyway, discreetly lighted sign advertised VACANCY at what I was pretty sure said the Stay n’ Sleep. I wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying, but sleep sounded heavenly to me.

     Even in the dark, the motel had a sweet, quaint look about it. There was what looked like a collection of small bungalows spread in a half-circle around a large open space with dark shapes I was assuming were picnic tables and benches. I didn’t see a sign marking the office, but there was only one light visible through any of the windows and I was willing to take a chance. I parked as close as I could in the rather large parking lot between the motel and its neighbor. I couldn’t read the sign in the moonlight, so I wasn’t sure what it was, but I felt safe in my belief that it wasn’t a refuge for escaped axe murderers or anything.

Author's Note

Rough draft, only edit spelling and obvious grammar errors as I write. Worried about an opening chapter with only one character, so please let me know where it drags. THANK YOU for taking the time to look at this; I know it's pretty long!

Reviews

[cloister]

It drags in a number of spots, but there are bright points as well.

The first real "it's dragging" moment I had was the description of driving out of Tampa. All those meaningless freeway designations. I'm not from Florida (quite the opposite end of the country, in fact) so they mean nothing to me. We could have done just fine with a simple "I headed north, out of town. Out of the state. In Florida, north is really the only option for escape."

It also drags when talking about the mundane details of where to stop for gas, et cetera.

But there were bright moments, too, such as where you recap the accident, lawsuit, and settlement. I thought that was pretty well done.

On the whole, I think the biggest challenge in a piece like this is inherent in the premise: the narrator herself has no idea where she's going. She doesn't even care, particularly. Thus, NONE of the events of the trip itself--none of the choices she makes--have any real meaning or consequence to them. If she turns right, eh, she could just as well have turned left, so who cares? She doesn't, so why should the reader? Et cetera.

This is not to say that a travelogue isn't an effective story structure, either for a chapter or a whole book. It certainly can be, and there are plenty of examples of such. "Thelma and Louise" jumps to mind, for one.

It's an interesting example to contrast with your story. It starts similarly to yours, in the sense that T&L are just out for a lark of a weekend. They, too, don't much care where they go or what they do so long as they're _not at home_. But then, if you'll recall, something unexpected happens that pushes their journey in a new direction. Something that provides them with a strong motivation and destination to work towards. Something that creates a considerable set of obstacles for them to overcome, and this tension between their goal of escaping to Mexico while evading the law is what drives the rest of their very compelling story.

Your story has an unexpected incident, too: the husband's death, although it takes place in the past. What is missing, however, is that sense of motivation on the narrator's part to do/go/achieve anything in particular. In that way, Thelma and Louise succeeds in capturing the viewer where your story doesn't so strongly capture the reader.

I'm honestly not quite sure what to advise you as far as addressing this. I know it must be possible to write a compelling story within the events of an aimless journey. I know that to do it you're going to have to create elements of character arc, of the narrator undergoing an emotional growth process, as events unfold. I know that to do it you're going to have to create surprises and challenges for your character, things that get in the way of her journey.

Maybe something goes wrong with the car, forcing her to be stationary in some town she doesn't want to be in at a time when she wants to be moving, moving, moving. Because at that point in the journey, movement is still tantamount to escape from her old life. She's not ready to be still yet, so you force her to be still. She overcomes the problem and gets moving again, so you create another surprise and challenge for her.

Maybe she picks up a runaway teenager, hitching on the side of the road. Her instincts tell her "take this kid to the authorities" but her own need to be free of her past makes it emotionally impossible for her not to empathize with the kid's own flight from whatever horrible home life she's running from. You give your narrator a sidekick who is an external reflection of her internal emotional struggle, and see how that works out.

She and the hitchhiker eventually part ways and maybe by now the narrator has come to some kind of decision about what she DOES want to do, where she does want to end up. So then you create obstacles to her getting what she wants. Maybe she decides to do the bookstore thing, but everywhere she looks she can't find a place that "feels right"--the right kind of space in the right kind of town with the right kind of people that will make for the life she wants to have. Something--exhaustion? More care trouble?--makes her stop somewhere (again, not voluntarily) and there perhaps she discovers that it's not about _finding_ the perfect spot to start over, it's about _making_ the perfect spot to start over. So she decides not to fix the car, she leases a dusty old former hardware store on a run-down main street in one of those fading-away farm towns in middle-America, and decides "Here. _This_ is where I start over. Not because it's perfect, but because I know I can make it work. Somehow, I WILL make it work."

And then, in book 2, the Sequel, you get to show how she makes it work. How her little bookstore, with maybe a couple of tables in the front and an espresso machine, attracts students from the local AG school and ends up revitalizing the town. :)

Anyway. That got a little long. I don't mean to tell you what to write in your story, only to suggest that the essential elements of compelling fiction--conflict / obstacles, and character growth--are mostly missing from this piece. You have important other elements--a narrative structure to work with (the travelogue), a motivating incident (even though it happens in the past)--but you need to add the rest to create something really compelling.

[Lauren Marie]

First of all, the line, "On the backseat were a cardboard box, a duffle bag and an oversized suitcase," I believe it would be "was a cardboard box ..."

Also I agree with the other comment--moments seemed to become dull. It seemed like the main character drove from Florida to the small hotel in two days. I would suggest either elaborating excessively on the trip (which would require more chapters; but also would provide ample character developement, which I also noted was lacking), or cutting out the traveling and starting the story just before she arrives at the hotel.

As to the character development, I continue to agree with Cloister's review. Since the main character doesn't care, the readers won't care. A great help I use for developing a three dimentional character is I actually sit down with my protagonist, and put him/her in many different situations to see what responses I recieve. I interview them. You can find a great recourse for that at: http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/106 (it is provided by the Gotham Writer's Workshop.)

Also, every story needs to have that "major dramatic question." It's that question that keeps the readers (and the characters) going. Right now, from this first chapter, I have gathered that the major dramatic question is, "Will the main charater ever be able to start (and complete) her new life?" Of course, there are other, smaller questions within the chapter, such as, "Will she ever reach her destination?"
As of right now, the protagonist's major dramatic question is excellent, and many people can relate to it. But the main charater doesn't seem to care too much about answering that question. Then it goes back to the three dimentional character.

But all rough drafts are revised for the better, and as of right now, I think that I have just stumbled upon a great novel in the making.

In answer to your fear of one character for the opening chapter--I personally like it. There comes a point in my mind when I'm reading, that when too many characters are introduced too quickly, I forget which people are which.

Keep on writing! Can't wait for the next chapter!