There is a woman, who is 28. She is married, to a nice bloke in Seattle. They live together happy in a cute bungalow in Queen Anne. She works in PR, he works in Tech. They love each other and have a nice little life.
Then, one day, as she lay in bed drifting off to sleep she thinks about her life and how different it might have been if she'd decided to go to college in Massachusetts at Mount Holyoke instead of the Pacific NW. And she falls asleep.
When she awakes, she is in a bed in a room without windows. In the next room the window looks out onto a bare brick wall. In that room is a girl and the girl stares at her. And our protagonist, Lucy, well, she stares back.
Lucy says, "Hello. Where am I?"
Other girl says, "In our apartment? What the hell happened to you?"
The "other" girl, who's now been established as Caroline, proceeds to tell Lucy about Lucy's life in New York, as a PR exec (I think she should even work for the same global PR company to make it a real wink and nod), with a bastardly boyfriend.
Then Lucy is frantic and shoots about trying to determine where her brothers and mother and father are. Lo and behold her parents are still living in South Dakota, on a farm, in an isolated and rural area of prairie.
Lucy takes her expense-account, high-limit credit card and then proceeds to gallivant around the county seeing her parents, who never left their farm to move to California Lucy's sophomore year of high school as Lucy remembers . And her older brother in Fargo who now sells insurance (in her memories he's a surgeon in Santa Rosa, happily married and a father), is unmarried and childless and then to Minneapolis to see her younger brother who's married to a tart (the same tart who in Lucy's world he divorced after an ill conceived young marriage in college).
She then makes the hard trip to Seattle to find the man SHE knows as her husband. She ostentatiously drives to his mother's house on Whidby island and lies to her by saying that she was friends with this woman's son's best friend and that this woman's son lent her money and she needs his adress to pay him back. After fanagling with his mom, who is distrusting, she gets his address and then proceeds to try to woo her husband back. He now has a girlfriend, the same preening one who emailed him while (in her memories) Lucy was dating him.
She meets him. They connect, same passion, same love. They, in three words, fall in love. But the husband still has a girlfriend, so Lucy chats him up all night long (just like on the first date of Lucy's remembrance) and as they lay down on the bed next to each other, she asks him tearfully just to hold her, which he gentlemanly obliges. She falls asleep in his arms.
To wake up in his arms again, in her own bed and in the cute Queen Anne house of her remembrance.
(Pretty clever, eh?)
Thursday, May 7, 2009
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