Chasing Hope – A Novel About Finding Family

~ One ~

Highway 306
Pamlico County, NC
September

In a stroke of sheer genius, or maybe it’s a sign of a quickly approaching mental breakdown, I left D.C. seven and a half hours ago and headed toward the coast of North Carolina, with the pain of my greatest loss, taking up the most space in my truck. Besides my personal things and the furniture, I brought into my marriage, I left everything else in my brownstone or on the curb. The truth is, my ex-husband and his Legislative Assistant have most of our belongings. I’m not sure what one should feel when you leave your life in a pile at the curb, but I’m damn near certain it feels about like this. What’s this you ask? Doom. And perhaps a little paranoia. Definitely fear. When my marriage ended, I thought we could peacefully co-exist – like normal divorced people. You know, like the rest of America. Burns would keep our houses in McLean and Ridgemont and I would live in Georgetown. I forgot that Burns Cooper is not normal. Leaving is the only way.

I am a doctor. A good one. I went to the best schools. Harvard for undergrad, Johns Hopkins for medical school, and my Meds-Peds residency was at Georgetown. The competition to get into that program just about killed me. Yet, despite my success, there is only one thing I’ve wanted my entire life – to have a family. I don’t say this out loud . . . ever. There are few people in my life who understand the depth of my longing. There’s an assumption that the life I created before I met Burns and the kids, is exactly what I wanted. But I’m not going to lie, medicine had been a way out. I didn’t want for a thing growing up in a privileged family. Let me clarify – I didn’t want a single thing that money could buy. My family life growing up had been unhappy. Dysfunction exists in all families in some form or fashion. But ours is legendary. Our household knew knock-down drag-out fights, or long periods of silence. Either way, my brother and I were mostly raised by a woman my parents paid. She loved us. But there’s always an innocent and entirely normal desire in every child to be loved unconditionally by their parents. It always felt like something was missing for me and my brother. So yes, medicine was my way out. My mom wanted me to stay and take over her business. My dad didn’t care what I did. For my mom, medicine wasn’t the type of career a “woman like me” should pursue. Therefore, I went after it wholeheartedly.

Flowing under every dream and hope I built my life on, there lived this longing for a family. When friends said they wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, ballerina, or architect, or whatever else, I did too. I may have said “doctor” but under my breath and in my heart, I said, “Mom.” I spent hours playing with my dolls and thinking about what my family would be like – it looked nothing like the family I was raised in. I cut out pictures from magazines, tore out recipes, and spent hours looking at catalogs thinking about my home, a home I wanted to be beautiful, happy, and warm. This is my dirty lost secret. Women today are not supposed to admit this. We are supposed to want a career. We are supposed to leave our children with nannies or at a childcare center. If we are stay-at-home moms, society makes us feel like we’re less than. But that’s what I wanted. When the opportunity presented itself to do just that, I grabbed hold. Harper, who had been three years old when we met, had this angry snarly way about her. She didn’t want to be loved, touched, or held. Her father complied, lacking a basic understanding about how a child seeks to get their needs met. William was one and happy as a clam. From the moment I met them, I knew their paths were meant to cross mine. I loved them as if I’d given birth to them myself. Their mother, by all accounts, had the sweetest personality that most of her family and friends say perfectly matches William’s. I wanted to raise them as she would have, totally certain she and I would have been great friends had we ever met.

When I found out I was pregnant with Katie, life could not have been more perfect. I mean, I could have had a loving husband but other than that, my life really looked like everything I’d ever dreamed. Katie was perfect. Except for her heart. She was a beautiful baby with a head full of brown hair and the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. I took a lot of time off after I gave birth, because of her surgeries. I will never regret taking the time off, in spite of what many of my colleagues thought. After we brought Katie home from the hospital, after her long NICU stay at birth, I marveled at every little thing about her, from her tiny fingers wrapped around mine in quiet moments in the nursery, to the way I could see myself in her. Katie didn’t make a fuss about much of anything. She let you know when she needed to eat and be changed, but quietly. I love her and my step kids in a way I never dreamed possible, but hoped to experience for as long as I could remember. Six months after Katie was born and had recovered from her first surgery, I put her in her car seat and drove to Harper and William’s school to pick them up. It had been a rare luxury as my work schedule didn’t allow for very many afternoons like it normally. On the way home, I took them for cupcakes. With Katie in my arms, as I tried to eat a cupcake and listen to the kids talk about their day, I thought that life looked exactly as it should. Exactly. But my life is nothing like that now. Everything is gone, even the two-story townhouse I bought in Georgetown after the divorce. I hoped against reason that Burns would wake up and see what he had done. He didn’t.

I shove the memories down deep, as fast as I can. Charlie and I trudge through the high grass, walking away from the parked truck, closer to the abandoned house. The dog wanders to the end of his leash. He sniffs in a circuitous route as he goes. In the early afternoon dappled light, the sun’s beams dance through the spindly, Q-tip like pines that line both sides of the highway. The air is filled with the smoky goodness of burning leaves, smelling like a campground bonfire. I close my eyes and let it all sink in. The last car passed by us ten minutes ago. Clearly, this is as different from D.C. as one place could possibly be.

Which is the point.

***

This is the first chapter of my novel, Chasing Hope. I will be releasing two novels on Substack, in serial format. This chapter is free. To read the rest, you can subscribe for the price of less than two full length paperback novels. To read the second chapter (and future chapters), go here.