Hi friends,
Before you dive into it, yes I have changed the main character's name from Rachel to Miranda. I've changed a lot of the names from the original manuscript so I'll put out a legend at some point to mitigate confusion.
And yes, I have changed locations from the real town of Bethel, which I have never visted, to the fictional town of Truite.
I'm still trying to figure out the balance of staying true to the original story and adding new stuff, so kept it short for this first chapter. Just trying to get a feel for the updated character. I don't want her to feel so far off from the original, just a better and more age-appropriate version of her.
If you read all the way to the end, let me know in the comments; where in the world do you think Truite is supposed to be?
***
Leaving is always bittersweet, but Miranda felt less sadness than she expected when she packed all her things into boxes and handed over the keys to her one-bedroom apartment in Chinatown. She had not managed to accumulate very many things in the almost six years on her own, her whole life fit into the back seat of an AMC Hornet she bought from a couple down the street. She supposed it was the sense of never feeling as though anything was permanent, even though she’d had no plans to leave until recently.
Her grandfather had died. They had never been close - she had not kept in close contact with him since the six months she had spent under his roof after her parents had died the winter before she turned 18. Still she felt the sort of grief and regret you’re supposed to feel at the passing of an elderly family member. It was interesting to her that this kind of grief was less sharp than the grief she had felt over her parents, but then she supposed one-hundred and one was not an entirely unexpected age for a man to die. Still, she should have called more often …
Now she was really alone. She always had been tp some degree since the crash that taken her parents, but now her one remaining kin on earth was gone. Maybe he had been stern, ostantacious and, at times, cold, but he had been her family. She had never felt more like an orphan.
He’d left her everything naturally; some money and the house in that shit town in the mountains. Once, an angry and grieving teenager, she had been desperate to leave. But a lot had happened since then and the view looked different from the top of almost-twenty-five. In half a decade, she had not had a respite from the constant cycle of worrying about coming up with the money for rent, utilities, groceries, and the expensive nights out with friends to whome she felt increasingly distant. Moving back to Truite and living in the house her father grew up in, fresh air, and not having to worry about anything more than the most basic necessities was a far more appealing prospect to her now than it had been then. A break, that’s all it was. She would return when had sorted herself out a bit.
But watching the city skyline slip behind her in the rearview mirror, she knew she wasn’t coming back.
It was almost freeing in a way, the sense that she was leaving everything behind her. She climbed up and down mountain highways, listening to radio stations come in and out of frequency, passing by towns of decreasing size. By the sixth hour she had to admit it was becoming wearisome and the narrow mountain highways more difficult to navigate as the sun set below the horizon. It was a relief to transverse one final canyon and come through a narrow pass that opened up long thin valley ringed by mountains. A gas station flashed by on her left and sign that read “Welcome to Truite”. Next stop: nowhere.
As a town, it was far from expansive. As she trundled down the main road she saw the library, the firestation, and the grocery store, a few houses and a street that branched off into a relatively new subdivision. She knew that if she popped back over to the highway and came back through town that way, she would pass by Gilbert-Brown, the lumber mill her grandfather had co-founded and subsequently been cheated out of in the fifties. Far away in the distance she could see the outline of Storm Mountain at the end of the valley, jutting head and shoulders above the ridgeline either side of it.
Her inherited home was on a hill just above the main road where people who wanted more privacy from their neighbours had built houses on treed lots; a cute two storied thing with cedar cladding and a rather whimsical front door made of white oak with an elaborate crescent moon carved onto it. She suspected that door was the doing of her Grandmother, long dead by the time she had been born. Granddad had never seemed particularly given to whimsy. She pulled into the narrow driveway and cut the car engine.
Unpacking would have to wait, it was past midnight as it was, so she contented herself by carrying just a shoebox of photos under her arm as she struggled with the door keys until finally the lock gave way and she shoved it open.
Nothing had been touched. Wooden surfaces, dated furniture, the knickknacks on the mantlepiece. Gleaming kitchen countertops, installed new in nineteen thirty-eight. His sagging bookshelves in the corner of the living room. It was all just the same as she remembered it, as if he had never really died and come morning she would find him reclining in his favourite easy chair.
As the new owner, she supposed it made sense for her to sleep in the master bedroom but she could only think of that as “Granddad’s room” so proceeded instead to the room that had been her dad’s, and hers for a short time. She undressed without turning on any lights and fell on top of the covers, exhausted.
Tomorrow there would be boxes to unpack and a job to be figured out, but she had survived the first day of her new life. If she could do that, she was sure she could do anything.
***
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Thanks for reading and I'm sending lots of love to you in these uncertain times!
xxKathleen
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