THIS IS HOPE Chapter One (again) and an update

Happy Monday (said no one ever). It's my last few days of vacation, as job #2 starts on Wednesday. I'll be teaching Comp II...as long as the class fills. Time will tell.

Because a few people have asked--and I haven't updated since dinosaurs roamed the earth--here is the latest version of Chapter One of THIS IS HOPE. This is version six or so, though the first chapter hasn't changed much. Enjoy.

The full manuscript is currently on an in-house read at Curtis Brown. While I'm waiting, I'm working on a new shiny idea. I'll post more about that eventually.

xo

Dori

Chapter One

Day One

We were still in bed when the power went out.

            I lay on my stomach, propped on my elbows, the sheets tangled around my waist.  It was a hot day, and the windows stood open to the breeze. The late afternoon sunlight spilled across the room, lighting the mussed bedcovers and throwing long shadows onto the wood paneled walls. Overhead, the ceiling fan spun lazily, drying the sweat that still beaded my shoulders.

            James lazed back against the pillows, piled in a white stack against the dark wood headboard. His dark eyes were closed, black lashes a spidery pattern on his cheeks. He was not sleeping. A small half-smile lifted one corner of his mouth.

            God, he was beautiful.

            I loved it when he was still like this. A government agricultural inspector by trade, living up here on the edge of nowhere, James never stopped moving. Whether he was outside enjoying nature, in the kitchen—damn, the man could cook—or working, he was in constant motion. I’d know him since we were both freshmen in high school, more years than I cared to count, and he’d always been like that.

            Once, he’d been thrown out of class for it.   Always mischievous, a kid who in later years would have been diagnosed as hyperactive and medicated, James Foster had taken an early dislike to our freshman biology teacher, Miss Harvin. A tall, thin, skittish woman, Miss Harvin was a screamer, and even at fifteen James had had an issue with authority figures.

            Miss Harvin was often late for class, leaving her twenty-three Biology Honors students to sit at our desks and wait for her. She would stroll in, five or ten minutes after the bell, coffee in hand.  The day before James had decided to teach her a lesson, a day she’d actually been in class on time, she’d yelled at James when he dashed in the door seconds after the tardy bell.  He’d muttered something under his breath, and slunk to his seat in the back.

            She’d filled her classroom with stuffed animals. Not the cute, cuddly toys but actual dead animals that had been stuffed. The many creatures that adorned her walls—everything from the local raccoons and squirrels to more exotic monkeys and even an anaconda—loomed over us as we filled in Punnet squares and diagrammed the parts of a worm. One of the most menacing looking animals was a mangy raccoon, frozen in mid-snarl, yellowish fangs bared and one paw raised to attack. The thing creeped us out.

On that particular Tuesday afternoon, James slid into his seat before the bell. To be honest, I’d hardly noticed him before that day. We weren’t really friends, just classmates. When the late bell sounded, and no Miss Harvin appeared, James walked to the door and looked down the hallway. He snorted and walked back into the classroom. At least half the class, myself included, watched him. When he dragged Miss Harvin’s stool across the room, and climbed up onto the counter, he had our full attention.  At fifteen, he was already over six feet tall, and had very little trouble lifting the scary raccoon down from its perch overlooking the class.

James jumped off the counter and crossed the room to the door. Twenty-two heads turned to follow his motion. He placed the raccoon in the middle of the open threshold, snarling snout toward the hallway. He quickly got back into his seat, a smirk on his face. We could hear Miss Harvin’s high heels clicking down the hallway. We sat silently, waiting to see what would happen.

Miss Harvin entered the doorway and was confronted with the snarling raccoon. She screeched, the sound echoing in the cinder block room, and dropped everything she’d been holding. Papers and books scattered everywhere, and her coffee cup shattered, sending shards of white pottery and hot liquid flying all over Kara Grossman, who sat up front. Kara screamed, Miss Harvin shrieked, and the rest of us burst into startled laughter.

Only James laughed hard enough to fall out of his seat.

The headmaster, who taught a few rooms away, came running. He hauled the still-laughing James out by his shoulder and pushed him down to the office.

            That was all years ago, though, years before I wound up in bed with him when the world ended. There we were, both married—though not to each other—thirty-eight years old, laying in bed naked when it all fell apart.

            Not that we realized it at the time.

            I looked at James, laying there in the afternoon sunlight. I’d known him for more than half my life, known him intimately for the last five years. It still startled me, the way this had turned out. I propped myself on one elbow to study James’s face in the fading light. He must have felt my gaze, because he opened his amazing eyes. Dark brown with flecks of bright gold: I’d noticed his eyes years ago in high school, long before I’d noticed the rest of him. He grinned then, setting off a deep dimple in his right cheek.

            I leaned towards him. He pulled me onto his lap, buried his face in my neck.

            The ceiling fan stopped. In the other room, something popped, and James’s black lab, Rolf, gave a startled woof. I started to sit up, but James tugged me down again.

            “Just the power.” His mouth pressed into my neck, each word sending chills through me. “Happens all the time.” He reached up for my face, and I lost myself in the kiss. His hands slid around my waist, onto my hips, pulled me close against him. I’m not sure how much time passed, but it was certainly less than ten minutes. Perhaps a whole lot less, as I was paying more attention to James than to anything around me.

            The entire house shook at the same time a dull thud sounded, somewhere far away. It broke into my awareness. Startled, I looked up. James’s hands stilled on the small of my back. We both stared toward the windows.

            The curtains, also white, blew gently in the breeze. Outside the afternoon slid towards evening, sky streaked with pink and orange. The many trees waved slightly. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

            “Earthquake?” I was still looking toward the windows.

            “Don’t think so.” James swore softly, but the moment was over. I slid off him a bit reluctantly and reached for my shirt. James got out of bed and slipped on a pair of shorts. I admired him in the sunlight for just a moment before getting my own pants off the floor. “I’ll be right back.” Shirtless, barefoot, James walked out of the bedroom. He greeted Rolf as he walked by. The screen door slammed, and I

heard his footfalls on the front porch.

            Out of habit as much as anything else, I reached for my phone, lying on the bedside table. I pressed the button, to see if anyone had called —a brief vision of my husband and sons flashed quickly before my eyes, and I banished it guiltily.

            Nothing. The phone refused to light up. I pressed the top button twice, then held it down, thinking I may have powered it off. The screen remained stubbornly blank.   “What the hell?” It puzzled me. The phone was more than three quarters charged. But it was completely dead.  I didn’t even get the annoying white apple. I got out of bed and pulled the rest of my clothes on then walked across the wooden floor and joined James on the porch.

            He stood just at the top of the steps, looking out across his driveway. Rolf lay at his feet, panting. The air was still hot, very humid. I stepped up beside James, slid my arms around his waist. My rental car was parked beside his truck. For a few days a year, I pretended that we had something, pretended that we could make this work. The rest of the time, I lived in the real world, but these days were my fantasy. I resented that something had broken into it.

            “My phone is dead.” I leaned my cheek against his arm. His bare skin felt warm and slightly damp.

            “What?” He turned toward me.

Something in his voice warned me. He was most of a foot taller than me, and I had to tip my head way back. I repeated it. He frowned slightly. “Do you need to make a call? The landline should work.”

I shook my head. “Just wanted to see what time it was.”

He smiled. “That’s easy.” He turned to walk back inside. I followed. He picked up his own phone off the counter where it had been charging. He pressed the button.

Nothing. A plain black screen.

James said nothing, just dropped the phone onto the counter.

“Maybe something took out the cell towers.” I still leaned against the granite, which felt almost cold to my heated skin.

He looked at me. “Do you only use your phone to call?”

I shook my head.

“No. You use it to check the time, right? To write stuff on lists and on your calendar, keep track of your clients? None of that is dependent on the tower.” I looked at him, not sure where he was going with this. “You just need the phone to turn on, just your battery to run those things. Even if every cell tower on the planet stopped working, your clock would still work. Mine could have been fried, I suppose, if there was a power surge. But yours wasn’t plugged in.”

It wasn’t a question. I answered it anyhow. “No.”

“Did it have a charge?”

I nodded. He paced across the kitchen. The slate tiles squeaked under his bare feet. I leaned against the counter, saying nothing. When he was concerned, James moved. I just stayed out of the way. He picked up the sole landline telephone with a cord, almost an antique, and hung it back up. “Not even a dial tone.”

The first tendril of fear uncoiled in my stomach. “What does that mean?”

James walked back into the bedroom without an answer, and I followed him again.  I didn’t know what else to do. James rummaged through the pockets of the jeans he’d taken off earlier. Tension marked the line of his shoulders. I sat on the edge of the bed, watching him, suddenly sure something was very, very wrong. I clasped my hands together to hide their shaking. James pulled his keys out of his pocket, and walked back outside. His stride was much longer than mine, and I hurried to keep up.

I watched him from the porch when he jumped, ignoring the steps completely. I quite honestly believed he had forgotten my presence. He pressed the unlock button on his key fob and walked to the truck. He pulled the handle, but the door remained locked. He swore, jammed the key into the lock, and opened the door.  James slid behind the wheel, put his key in the ignition. He turned the key. I watched him as the last of the light bled out of the sky.

Click.

It was almost unearthly silent outside, and the sound carried through the still air.

“Oh, fuck, no. Not today.” James hit the wheel with one hand and tried again. Nothing. The truck sat in the driveway, sleek, the last bits of sunlight glinting in the black paint. He drove a Ford F250, rugged, nearly new. James was not the type to leave his lights on or let his battery die. Was he?

Something was wrong, and I was completely confused.

            The sun set, then, the dark nearly complete. James lived on the top of a hill a few miles outside of town. The night before, we’d sat outside and looked at the stars. The lights of the town had been below us, like closer stars, twinkling though the many trees. Tonight, there was nothing but darkness down the hill.

            James reached down under the seat of his truck for something. I sucked a sharp breath through my teeth when I saw him straighten back up, rifle in hand.  Fear flared briefly, then passed quickly. He held the weapon with authority, with a practiced casualness. James was an excellent marksman. A few years ago, after ridiculing my ultra-liberal gun control stance, he’d taught me to shoot that rifle on a lazy late summer afternoon. He’d explained it all to me, that afternoon and since, and I’d come—reluctantly—to see his point of view. “It’s necessary out here, Em. Where you live, the police are moments away. Here, it can sometimes take an hour for help to arrive. I’m my own best protection. Besides, I hunt.”

I sank down on the steps, watching him. Rolf at his side, James walked off towards the road, holding the gun with a familiarity that shouldn’t have surprised me. Instead of upsetting me, though, the presence of the gun was strangely reassuring.

            What a strange situation ours was. Five years ago in our hometown, we’d met up by accident. Neither of us still lived in the area. We’d grown up in southern New Hampshire, one of the many towns that boomed as the ever-expanding suburbs of Boston crawled north of the border. I’d been home from Atlanta with my boys, then seven and nine, and he’d been visiting from Montana, where he’d recently moved after getting the job he’d always wanted.  I literally ran into him at the grocery store. I’d pushed my cart around the corner and connected with something solid. I looked up, mortified, into those gorgeous golden brown eyes. Memory rushed in.

            “James Foster?” I said the name in surprise. He’d been awkward as a teenager, too tall, with long thin arms and legs. Now he…wasn’t. His sheer physical presence took my breath away. The old Red Sox tee shirt he wore couldn’t hide the definition in his arms. I’m sure he realized that I was ogling him, and I’m equally sure he was used to it.

            He smiled, setting off the damn dimple in his cheek off. “Emma? Emma Houldson.”

            I couldn’t help smile back; his grin was contagious. “Ryan, now.”

            We stood there talking for a long time, long enough for the ice cream in my cart to begin to melt. My boys materialized from the aisles, lugging junk food, which they dumped into the cart. Robbie, small, thin, almost delicate with my blond hair and his father’s dark eyes, watched James but didn’t say anything. Jordan, taller than his brother though he was two years younger, with his wide grin and floppy dark-blond curls, immediately made friends. His eyes were a bright hazel-brown, a perfect combination of mine and Robb’s.  I introduced them.

            “Can I take you to dinner tonight? To catch up?” James smiled and held up his left hand. The fluorescent grocery store lights reflected in a gold band on his ring finger. “Just as friends, I promise. Pick you up at seven?”

            I agreed. My mother was more than happy to take the boys. They weren’t much younger than my half-brother, who lived with her, and the three of them would have a fun night, playing video games and basically being boys. At the last second, I decided to change into something nicer than the old shorts and flip flops I’d been wearing. I put on the one dress I’d brought with me, a white sundress, with a pair of decent sandals.  I can’t help thinking my life might have turned out differently if I hadn’t made the effort, but there it was.

            We spent hours at dinner, and two hours after that in his truck. I knew I was making a mistake. I didn’t care; for the first time in nine years doing something completely selfish. I thought it would end there, be nothing but a one-night-summer-fling.

            I was wrong.

 James became a drug to me, something addictive that I should have stayed far away from. I saw him five more times in the two weeks I was home, and each time had the same result.  I went home to the sweltering heat of Atlanta in the summer time, and swore I would never see him again.

            I’d lied to myself, and even then I knew it. Through text messages, emails, and a few cell phone pictures I never mentioned to anyone, we continued our affair. When his wife went away a few months later, I invented a real estate convention that I needed to attend in Chicago—I worked as a title lawyer—and hopped on a plane. Once there, I boarded another plane to Billings Logan Airport. He called in sick, and I spent four glorious days in his arms. The next year, James came to Atlanta on a pretext, and I snuck away to his hotel room every chance I got, dropping the kids off at school and calling out of work, getting dressed only in time to get home that evening.

            Five years passed. My Robbie started high school, though even at fourteen he looked closer to eleven or twelve. He’d gotten very sick as a toddler and had eventually been diagnosed with Type I diabetes. Diabetics were often small, his pediatrician assured us, and he’d grow bigger. Eventually. Jordan, who had been taller than Robbie for years, started playing football. Both boys loved fishing with their father, camping, playing video games. As they got older, they needed me less.

            Any guilt I had started to ebb away, too. If Robb knew what I was doing, he never called me on it.  Between trysts, which never happened more than once or twice a year, I acted the perfect wife, mother, and lawyer.

            And yet, on that humid mid-September afternoon, everything changed.

            I sat on the porch until James and Rolf returned. The darkness was nearly complete by then. In the distance, thunder rumbled, the only sound. The clouds blacked out the moon and stars. James sat beside me on the steps, and Rolf dropped at our feet.

            “What’s going on, James?” I banished the panicky edge to my voice. “Why won’t your car start?”

            He let out a sound, half-way between a grunt and a sigh. “No idea.” James still had the rifle, now balanced on his knees. The breeze of that afternoon had picked up, and the air felt good. It was so hot out.

            Off in the distance, there was a strange dull orange glow. It was in the wrong direction to be a city, toward the Wyoming border and the National Parks. “What is that?” I asked James. He turned toward it, just a lighter shadow against the black.

            “A fire.”

            “Like a wildfire?” I leaned against him and felt his arms circle my waist.

            James shrugged. I couldn’t see him but I felt his shoulder move. At that moment, the thunder rumbled again, closer. Lightning lit up the sky, spider webbing out behind the clouds, beautiful but a bit scary. James stood up beside me. “Let’s go inside.”

            I followed him, stumbling on the steps in the dark.

            Inside, I stood by the door, surprised by the complete darkness. James moved across the pitch black space with perfect confidence, reaching the kitchen with no trouble. I heard him open a cabinet door.  Lightning flashed outside, and I got a brief glimpse of him, dark head bent, looking at something in his hands, before the darkness returned.

            A warm glow filled the small kitchen. I crossed to where James was leaning against the bar. I suddenly felt bone tired, as if I had been standing for days rather than for minutes. A small battery-operated lantern, the type I used while camping, stood on the counter. James had two wine glasses in his hands. He took the pitcher of sangria he’d made earlier out of the fridge and poured.

            “Enjoy the chilled wine.” James turned his glass, so the dark red liquid shone in the dim light. “It might be a while before you get any more.” He took a big gulp of the wine and then another. He topped off his glass.

            “Why?” I took the glass from him but didn’t sip.

            “The power can be out here for a day or two, Emma. It’s not the city. They get to us when they can.” He took another sip of wine.

            I didn’t drink. “Is this just a power outage, James?” I looked at him. He stood very still, an obvious contrast to the restless motion he’d shown before. His eyes glowed in the light, and I was again amazed at his beauty, at my luck at being here with him.

            James sighed. “Take a drink, Emma. You’re going to need it.”

            I frowned. “Why?”   

James shrugged again. “Generally, landline phones work in a power outage, Emma. And cell phones. Always, the cars work. Always before now, anyhow.”

“Maybe your battery is dead.” I watched his hands on the glass. Swirl, swirl, sip. Repeat.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he looked up. “Maybe. Give me your keys.”

I picked up the keys to my rental from where they lay on the counter. James walked outside and I heard the car door open, then nothing. After a moment, he came in, brushing raindrops off his shoulders. He shook his head. “Nope, dead.”

“So what do we do?”

James raised his wineglass, toasting me in the weak battery-powered light. “We drink, Emma.”

I reached for my glass and took a sip. The sangria was delicious, fruit flavor bursting across my tongue. “And then?”

James smiled, and I felt heat slice through me that had nothing to do with the weather or the wine. “Oh, I’m sure we can think of something.”