New Lives

And an excerpt from my novel, Evangeline

Have you ever woken up in a new life?

Laurie Stone

posed this question as the subtitle of her post on September 18, and it struck me that my answer was yes.

Two novels I’ve written (I’m currently revising both) are about this very topic, no doubt because that’s how periods of my life have felt. These transformations took some time, as I described in my serialized memoir, “Evangelical Therapy,” but the changes were significant, and once I landed in the new spot, a new situation, with a new perspective – I felt like I had woken up in a new life.

Leaving my marriage and the Evangelical church propelled me forward to situations that were so different from my old life that some days, when I woke up in the morning, I’d wonder if I were dreaming. Other situations, which I have yet to write much about, but will be, left me feeling that way, too.

So it’s not surprising that my fiction would reflect that.

Here’s a brief excerpt from my novel Evangeline about a 17-year-old Evangelical girl who, in light of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, has run away from home. In an unexpected turn of events, she opens her eyes to find her surroundings unrecognizable:

Janice struggled to open her eyes and sat up, throwing off the blanket that covered her. She stared around at the splintering walls of the small room, the cracked plaster ceiling, and heaved herself forward on the stained mattress. In a cradle, at the end of the bed, Cody lay wrapped in his blue blanket, on top of some kind of pale fur. A pulse throbbed in her throat. She was staring at Cody sleeping, and at the cradle, thinking that would tell her something about where she was—it was more like a basket than a cradle, thin branches woven together, a few with dried leaves still attached—when a door shut somewhere below her. She went to the window and looked out over the wild tangle of yard.

Just down over a slight ridge, a man stood on the bank of the river, taking off his clothes. His long hair fell forward as he bent to unfasten his shoes. A woman, her back and shoulders bare, was already wading into the water. The man cupped his hands and splashed the water over his face, rubbed his hands in quick, hard movements over his arms and chest, then followed her in, and the two dunked themselves under the still surface. When the woman came back up, her hair was streaming down, bright trickles of water on her face. You are the first born Adam, blessed be the name. You are naked and not ashamed. Janice could hear the man’s voice drifting through the quiet air, as another man, this one wearing glasses, limped out of the trees.

“You get anything?”

“No.” The glasses man, slightly shorter than the other man with a red-looking wound on his lower leg, sat down on a rock, took a screwdriver out of his pocket. “What the hell, Dan? What if the cops show up?”

“She needed help, George.”

“How’d she even get out here?” George thumped the screwdriver against his hand, the muscles in his shoulders shifting under his overall straps.

“Maybe somebody dumped her off.”

“A girl like that? Jesus.”

“Shh,” the woman said, gesturing to the house.

Janice ducked back against the wall. Her hand went to her hair, and she felt the tangled mess, a vague memory coming back of her head jostling against a man’s shoulder, of water being poured into her mouth, and choking, coughing into her hand as the darkness closed over her again. Her ankles were sore and she glanced down, saw the raw skin and a dark bruise forming on her thigh.

She knelt on the floor, pawing through her backpack for her hairbrush, then peered over the windowsill again. Rubble scattered in the yard. A shed, next to the garden. A motorcycle. A tall pole with an antenna on top. She glanced back at the two men, but they had moved further down the bank, half-hidden by the bushes. The woman was just coming out of the water, wringing out her hair. 

Off to the left, she could see the gray line of road stretching off through the desert, disappearing into a patchwork of fields. She picked up Cody, his head warm against her shoulder, opened the door and walked down the creaking stairs. The living room was empty except for two sagging couches, and she looked into the kitchen, scanning the room for a phone, but all she saw was a green card table in the corner, and a rusted sink on two legs.

Maybe if she hurried, they wouldn’t notice. She headed for the dirt path that led along the river. Cody was starting to make his snuffling sounds, and she could hear herself breathing, the weight of her backpack rubbing another sore spot on her back. The bushes and weeds were almost as tall as she was, but it was daylight now and there was a barbed wire fence on one side, fastened to crooked wood posts. She covered Cody’s head to protect him from the scratchy leaves. If she could make it to the road, maybe someone would pick her up or at least tell her where she was—and then she would—she turned, startled, as a large white dog bounded up beside her, its tail wagging. The dog barked, sniffing at her legs.

“Boy-Dog!” 

The man with the long hair was coming toward her. He was wearing his jeans now, but no shirt.

“Hey, where are you going? You heading out?”

She wanted to flee away, but it was impossible not to answer him, the two of them standing on the dirt path. She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t seen him. “The road’s right out there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but not much traffic. If you’re thinking of hitchhiking.” A fly landed on his chest and he swatted it, flicked the squashed insect off his bare skin.

“I need to use a phone.”

“Gas Mart has one. Down the road a ways. Eighteen, twenty miles. I’d give you a ride, but my truck, it’s—” His eyes shifted a little. “Needs some new spark plugs.”

Her head was throbbing from the bump on it, and Cody started to cry, the thin wail of a newborn. He squirmed, trying to pull his hands up to his mouth, and she moved him awkwardly onto her shoulder.

He stared at her and the baby. The dog had plunked down in the dirt now, panting, his pink tongue lolling out. “Want me to hold him for you?”

Milk was leaking down the front of her shirt, and she flushed, fumbling with the buttons. “He’s hungry.”

“I caught six bluegills yesterday. Right down there.” He pointed to the river. “Amber’s baking bread. It’s cool out here, isn’t it? I’m going to buy this whole place. All this land. The house, too.”

The woman, Amber, was standing on the front steps now, smoking, watching them.

He turned back to Janice. “I’m Dan.”

“I need to sit down.” She was half unbuttoned and as she struggled to get the baby’s blanket draped over her chest, he started crying again. 

“You could rub his back. They always like that.”

Amber went inside, letting the screen door slam behind her, and Dan glanced toward the house.

“You need to eat. You hit your head pretty hard last night. I was trying to carry you and—” He swallowed. “You should probably take it easy for a while.”

“I feel okay.” She was trying not to cry. “Except my ankles. They’re all torn up.”

“Want a glass of water? Come inside. Just till I get my truck going.”

“No, thanks.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “So what you are doing out here? Running from something?”

“I—” The shame of the last months flooded over her. Somehow even this man knew that she had done something wrong. “I was on the bus, and—” She felt tears sliding down her cheeks and she sat down on a large rock. “Will you not watch me, please? I need to feed him.”

“Okay, but listen. Last night—I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was scared because—you were kind of out of it, and I didn’t want you to run off and get lost or fall in the river or something. And the baby—I couldn’t find him. So I tied you, your ankles, while I looked for the baby. That’s all. And I found him, see?” He grinned. One of his teeth, an eye tooth, was twisted just slightly, giving him a boyish, naive look, as if he were in motion, somehow, waiting for someone to tell him to sit down, be quiet, hold still.

The memory of the night before flooded back. “No, I sat down to rest for a minute, and then you—” She got up and started walking quickly away. “That’s not what happened.”

“It’s like with a wild animal,” he said, coming after her. “When they’re hurt. You have to tie them, so you can set their leg or whatever. Like a broken leg. You have to. So you can help them.”

“Stop talking to me,” she said, walking faster, and after a few minutes, she glanced back and saw that he was standing where she’d left him.

                                                            ***

But back to real life! (It’s a bit tricky to even make that transition, from a fictional world, back to the current reality, so it’s understandable that changes in our lives would feel challenging, too.)

 Our lives are always evolving and transforming, even if we can’t see that in the moment or feel stuck, and even small changes can feel destabilizing.

Sure, we want to feel intrigued and interested and curious about our lives and what will come next, energized by the idea of new things happening – and at the same time, we crave security and the idea that “it will all be okay.”

The message I’m getting lately is to “go with the flow,” and that despite challenges and difficulties and overwhelming changes, I should try to have faith and make hopeful choices. I’m working on it!

Have you undergone big transformations in your lives? I’d love to hear about them and how you handled them.

And thank you so much to my new subscribers! Although I am now accepting paid subscriptions as a way to support my work, I’ve decided to keep “Evangelical Therapy,” (my serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical), completely free, at least for the time being, so all the posts in that series are still available to read.

And, I’m also so pleased to include this link to an interview my daughter

Ivy Sunderji

did recently with VoyageLA about the big changes that have occurred in her life and how she’s handled them.

VoyageLA Daily Inspiration: Meet Ivy Sunderji

Wishing you all hope and joy –

Constance