Can't Find My Way Home - a novel
First draft started February 2008
Completed October 2016
overview:
On the run after a gutwrenching breakup with his fiancee, David Reardon heads south with everything he owns in his pickup truck. A surprise snowstorm hampers his progress, and in southeastern Kentucky he is involved in a horrific accident that kills two men. Thrown headlong from the collision, amazingly he is uninjured, but is unable to recall any of what has happened. While in the throes of amnesia, he hitchhikes further south to a rural area past Knoxville, Tennessee, and is found cold and unconscious outside the home of a gentle, God-fearing family, who takes him in. The interaction of David with these rescuers, especially their young son, Justin, as well as others he encounters in this East Tennessee landscape, evoke in David a yearning for connection and love that he finds difficult to consummate. An unplanned confrontation with a rogue law enforcement agent complicate his problems and ultimately cause him, with the aid of two friends, to embark on a vendetta of epic proportion, in a desperate attempt to gain not only revenge, but the fulfillment and connection he's always sought but never attained.
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an excerpt:
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Very few lights were visible; instead the wonder of a winter snowfall presented itself. The new snow carpeted everything in sight, frosting the pines, blanketing the rolling pastureland and hayfields astride the ridges north and south of the highway. A plowed road curled away from the highway, leading to the ridgetop; it would offer a good route to the top. The snow was not deep and the wind bore the sweet tang of hickory. He began to walk, with no clear destination in mind, but with a strong sense he was moving toward something, not away; it was a curious feeling, one to which he was not accustomed.
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The narrow road first led west, then bent north under a canopy of snow-laden pine boughs. A small, flat-roofed cabin sheltered in the woods to the left of the road, a whiff of kerosene smoke emanating from it. Only a dim, flickering light was visible within. David kept hiking. Farther up the hill another house was tucked back behind a thick grove of evergreens. A snow-covered pickup truck sat in the driveway but no lights were lit inside. Maybe the residents were already asleep.
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What in heck time is it? Doesn't feel like bedtime.
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His headache worsened. Through the thickening fog of pain, David wondered what he'd do or say if and when someone opened their door to him. The incongruous temerity of knocking on the front door of a total stranger and asking for shelter began to gnaw at him.
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This is nuts. What the hell am I doing? How'd I get here in these godforsaken woods? And where's my pickup truck?
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The more he worried, the worse his head hurt. Bright, flickering lights appeared at the edge of his field of vision, dancing away when he turned his head to look at them. The cold seeped into his bones, vicious and unrelenting.
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Is that a house up ahead, just beyond the top of the ridge? Or am I seeing things?
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He tried to cut diagonally across a stubbly field and immediately fell into the snow, his shin raked sharply by a broken cornstalk. He struggled to his feet, his head pounding, his shoulder throbbing, his shin burning.
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He'd always heard that the brain couldn't process more than one pain signal at any given moment, but by God, he was here to tell whoever had come up with that harebrained theory that it wasn't true. Everything hurt simultaneously.
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He finally reached the mouth of the driveway that led to the lighted house below. With the taste of copper in his mouth, a frigid wind in his face, and redoubled pain battering his head, he stumbled down the rocky driveway, nearly falling again and again, somehow remaining afoot until he reached the bottom. Then, his vision blurred and watery, a huge, hammering pain in his temple, he staggered against the trunk of a small car, hitting it with an audible thump, and collapsed to the ground. A dog barked sharply inside the house.
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In a stupor, peripherally aware of a light blinking on, a door opening, a dog barking, David lay in the snow. He thought he felt the dog sniffing him and poking at him with its nose, but wasn't sure. He tried to focus his eyes. Was that a man peering down at him? The man's mouth moved, but David heard nothing. Motionless he lay on the ground in the snow, his breathing shallow and rapid, the pain in his head blessedly forgotten.