Writing Rachael’s Return

There are so many elements that go into why an author chooses to write a particular novel. For me, the primary question I am answering with the writing of the story must be an unusual and intriguing one. With Rachael’s Return, I caught myself wondering what would happen if a destined soulmate connection between mother and child were to be thwarted before the baby could even be born. And my novel evolved from there. 

I have always been interested in spiritual matters. Having been raised in a religious church-going family, I was introduced to ethereal ideas about the existence of souls and an afterlife from a very early age. 

As an adult, I began reading a number of books about reincarnation. I was particularly interested in stories of young children who innocently recalled their most recent past lives to the incredulity of their parents. I also devoured books by psychologists who, with the use of hypnosis, regressed their patients to address childhood trauma and ended up inadvertently uncovering memories of past lives, life between lives and soul groups. 

Reading these accounts liberated me from some of the negative concepts my early church upbringing had instilled, such as an eternal fiery hell for all nonbelievers. It also inspired a work of fiction where a couple of unique characters suddenly strolled onto the page one day and began having a conversation as I penned it. The muses came out to play and it felt like pure magic.

In the excerpt that follows, I introduce one of my favorite characters who has a role in helping bring together all the major players in this emotional drama when she sticks her nose into her neighbors’ business just a little bit. Yet she does so for all the right reasons.

And this is my introduction to a novel I wrote while still in my pajamas most days. Because once I got going, the story began to flow so well, I didn’t even want to get dressed until I finished the first draft. I can only hope it is as compelling for booklovers to read as it was for me to write.

RACHAEL’S RETURN: Excerpt

Ragna Sweeney looked out her kitchen window at the apartment building across the alleyway. 

“They’re going at it again,” she said. 

“Call the cops,” her husband, Harold, answered, not bothering to look up from his newspaper. He had settled for the evening in his favorite recliner in front of the television set. 

“Well, it’s over now; there’s no need to. Besides, I don’t like poking my nose in other people’s business.” 

Harold turned his face toward his wife. His forehead crinkled as he looked over his bifocals at her, and his throat released a muffled chortle. “Oh really?” he said. “Then sit down and watch Wheel of Fortune with me. It’s starting right after this commercial.” 

Ragna hesitated a moment, then let the curtain panel fall back into place against the window. This time her neighbors had their blinds drawn, so they could only be heard and not seen. The last time, she had actually witnessed the guy socking the young woman about her head, and she had called the police. By the time they arrived, the man had already forcibly taken his very pregnant wife—or girlfriend, Ragna wasn’t sure which—thrown her into his dark-gray Dodge Challenger, and raced his engine in the direction of Winnetka Avenue. Afterward, when the police knocked on Ragna’s door, she gave them a description of the man: “He’s a handsome guy: looks Hispanic, in his late twenties or early thirties, about five feet, ten inches tall, one hundred sixty pounds, defined muscles. He’s got a pronounced tattoo of a snake coiling the entire length of his right arm. I heard he’s an actor or stuntman or something of the sort.” Then they asked about the woman. 

“She’s just a girl, really,” Ragna had told them. “Can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen. I doubt she’s even out of high school yet. Pretty thing, too—I mean, if she cleaned herself up. The really sad thing is she’s pregnant. Looks like somewhere in her third trimester.” 

“Honey, can you bring me a beer since you’re up, please?” Harold looked up at his wife and kissed the air in her direction. 

Ragna smiled back and turned toward the refrigerator, reaching into the back where she had placed the six-pack. She twisted the metal cap off the bottle of Bud Light and drained it into a tall glass tilted sideways to keep the froth from forming too thick at the top. 

“Wheel! Of! Fortune!” she heard the audience yell in unison from the television set. She turned to walk toward the living room, reaching to switch off the light as she headed out of the kitchen. 

And that’s when she heard it. 

She would later tell the police the precise time because it occurred at the beginning of her favorite show. “Seven thirty p.m.” she would say. “At first I thought it was a loud backfire—as if the car was in the alleyway directly beneath my kitchen window—it was so loud.” 

Ragna startled, dropping the glass of beer on the solid linoleum floor. She watched it shatter and disperse into a myriad of tiny wet shards around her feet. Then she heard the scream that followed, and she knew it wasn’t a backfire. It was a haunting scream—one that would cause her to have nightmares for many nights to come. She looked out the window and saw nothing. She reached for the telephone hanging from the wall in the kitchen and dialed 9-1-1 with trembling hands. Harold stood now, his newspaper having dropped to the floor beside him. His eyes bulged, brows raised. 

“Was that what I think it was?” He and his wife exchanged glances. 

“Oh my God, I think so,” she said. She shook her head from side to side and felt her face heat up. Tears began to fill her eyes as her body spontaneously reacted with emotion to the sounds, causing her to picture, against her will, what must have just happened in the apartment across the alley from her own. “He’s shot her,” she said. “That bastard just shot her.”

—

RACHAEL’S RETURN

In present-day Los Angeles, Caroline Martin has everything but the thing her soul craves most: a daughter. When she undergoes what is supposed to be a routine hysterectomy, she unwittingly aborts the little girl she’s always longed for, leaving the unborn baby’s soul in limbo.

Sharing a hospital room with Caroline is a pregnant woman who’s just been shot by her boyfriend. Her unborn child is barely hanging on—and the soul of Caroline’s hovering baby cannot resist the overwhelming urge to rebirth via this unclaimed fetus.

In the aftermath of these events, two engaging heavenly guides, working together through sensitive humans, struggle to find an alternate way to help Caroline and her would-be daughter forge the link that was always meant to be between them—before the child’s brutal father makes good on his vow to steal the girl and disappear with her forever.

By turns comic and tragic, Rachael’s Return explores the concept of soulmates, the afterlife, reincarnation, and relationships that never die, even as it offers readers a glimpse of the mysteries that exist within the ordinary and challenges assumptions about the true nature of reality.

Buy the book HERE

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Janet Rebhan is the author of the novel Finding Tranquility Base (2012). Born in Texas, she was sixteen when her family moved to Los Angeles, where she graduated from Chatsworth High School before pursuing an acting and modeling career for a number of years. She went on to study creative writing at UCLA and Moorpark College, whereupon her short stories were selected for publication in the Moorpark Review. Rebhan has two grown daughters and currently lives in Agoura Hills, California with her husband, Robert.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/janetrebhan

Find out more about her on her website https://janetrebhan.com/

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing