NEW FIC! In the Deep Woods, for Greyregies
Title: In the Deep Woods (1/3)
Fandom: The Devil Wears Prada
Rating/Genre: g/angst, femslash, fantasy/surreal
Characters: Andy Sachs, Miranda Priestly, the twins, James (omc), Emily, Nigel, Doug, Serena, Lily
Pairings: Emily/Serena, Nigel/Doug, Andy/Miranda (eventually), Lily/omc, surprise temporary het pairing
Summary: Andy got depressed after Paris. After awhile, she decided to start a new life far away from New York. Miranda, just as unhappy, takes comfort in family life. One day, her daughters want to go camping, and in agreeing to do so, she has to confront her own background.
Word count: 4 788 (this chapter)
Spoilers/Warnings: No/a little angsty, mentions of het (briefly), mentions of religion and homophobia (next chapter).
Notes1: I’m so sorry this is late! This is for greyregies who participated in fandomaid’s Help Japan auction. (I’m sorry for not making Andy a cop like you wanted, but I found the initial inspiration for this fic by reading your profile, and I really hope you’ll like this.)
Notes2: Despite the fact that I call the town Andy is in Twin Peaks, I’m not tagging this as “crossover”, because the fic is deeply rooted in the DWP universe, post-Paris, and no characters or major events of Twin Peaks are referred to. I just wanted a name for the place where Andy goes to live, and thinking about it, I thought it better to chose a “real” fictional place rather than a real place I know nothing about. (All the city names I tried to “invent” are already taken, Google told me! Yes, no matter how “crazy” combinations of words I thought of, someone else has already thought of it first and the place exists in the real world…) All you need to know is that strange things can, and will, happen in Twin Peaks…
The rain is falling on the windows and if Miranda listens carefully she can almost hear the melody hidden in each drop as it falls and breaks, rhythmically.
Miranda doesn’t listen. The rain is just rain to her as it is to most people, except maybe children, poets and lunatics. Miranda belongs to none of these categories, for which she is very grateful. Her fingers brush gently against the cheek of the sleeping boy once more before she carefully walks out of the room and down the stairs.
She joins her family in the den where she left them forty minutes ago when she went upstairs with the boy to read him to sleep. Her children are gathered around the computer with her assistant, and they don’t hear her.
“This is perfect,” Caroline says, “but Emily, how can we make her do it?”
“By ‘her’ I assume you mean me.” Three heads turn, three pairs of eyes are shining at her. She loves her twin girls. That doesn’t mean they can get away with anything. “No,” she says. “What ever it is, I’m sure the answer is no.”
“But mom!” Cassidy jumps up from her crouching position beside Emily’s chair. “You don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
That is true, Miranda has to admit that. So what is it this time? A little trip to Egypt to see the pyramids and the Nile? Not a chance, Caroline, that’s too far away. No, Cassidy, not Japan where we could get swallowed by the earth any minute. Take six months off of work to explore all of Europe? Yes, Caroline, maybe when you’re grown up and I’m retired…
Miranda looks at her daughters, expecting all kinds of wild dreams to be thrown at her. Secretly she enjoys it. No, she doesn’t enjoy crushing their dreams but they, too, must know that they can’t ask the unreasonable. These little things are more like fairy tales, bedtime stories.
“The girls were thinking that you could go camping next month.” Emily grins widely and adds, as if it’s an afterthought, “Because you know, James would really, really like to do that!”
A surprised laugh trails off Miranda’s lips before she can stop it.
“Don’t be silly, James is five, he doesn’t even know what ‘camping’ is.”
“Of course he does.” Cassidy, already so tall but still a child, puts her arm around her mother’s waist, snuggling up against her. “Just because he’s only five he isn’t stupid. He can read, he hears things, and other children he knows have been camping with their families…”
“I see.” Miranda nods slowly, thinking. “But if it’s so important to him, why can’t he do it with Nigel and Doug? Isn’t camping supposed to be a father and son thing?”
The girls snort mockingly. Emily simply looks at her, but in a decidedly non-assistant kind of way. The woman is becoming far too sure of herself, Miranda thinks, but she finds herself lacking the energy and the will to do anything about it.
“Don’t even pretend you believe that to be true, Miranda,” the assistant has the audacity to say after a couple of seconds. “But you’re right anyway, sort of. Cass and Caroline think the guys should be a part of this. You can get a mini bus and we can all go - even Serena and me, if you want to.”
“Yeah, that would be awesome, mom!”
Caroline jumps up and down with excitement. If she had had a tail she would have been wagging it wildly.
“Awesome?” Miranda tries to understand the girls’ - including Emily! - excitement, but she fails. “Who came up with this idea? I refuse to believe it was James. And it will be fall next month. Isn’t camping a summer thing?”
“Doesn’t have to be,” Cassidy says, “if the tents are good. And think of all the colors in the nature, we want to experience them for real, not just in the park!”
“Of all the crazy ideas…” Miranda sighs, but allows her daughter to lead her up to the computer where Emily clicks on a Google map, letting Miranda see the location they have in mind.
Miranda takes a step back.
“No,” she says, “no, that’s out of the question.”
The rain beats harder on the windows, insisting that she has to listen, has to give in. She doesn’t want to. She believes she has an ally in Nigel. His partner, on the other hand, will be on her daughters’ side. And her assistant is, after all these years, starting a mutiny. Or hasn’t it already been going on for a long time? It is with a sense of doom she finally accepts. As if destiny thinks she has been running long enough - but she is determined to resist, no matter what it takes.
How, she wonders, how did this happen?
***
The weather is still good, Andy notices as she looks out of the window in front of her desk. She decided to walk to the event, there was still time and she had nothing else to do at the moment.
Working as a reporter at the Twin Peaks Daily is not comparable to working at Runway. It isn’t even comparable, Andy guessed, to working at any New York newspaper. There had been a time when she had wanted to do that, but that had been B.M.
Before Miranda. Andy’s life could be divided in three parts: Before Miranda, Miranda, and After Miranda.
The B.M. era had lasted as long as until her first job after her graduation from college. The Miranda era lasted not even a year. The rest of her life is going to be A.M.
Would Miranda sniff scornfully at this job? Andy’s little walk through the quiet October afternoon is not going to end at the side of a catwalk, in a designer’s studio or at any glamorous function. It is going to end in the upper left corner of Twin Peaks’s town square, where Andy is going to cover the opening of a second hand shop.
It is not a place where any vintage designer clothes are likely to be found. Most people in Twin Peaks can’t afford even the heel of one of Miranda’s Prada shoes from last season. They wouldn’t even go anywhere near it. Still, they buy clothes and they get tired of them, and in the spirit of the time someone has thought about recycling. It is a good initiative, really: most of the profit is going to go to charity, because lots of people in the world don’t even have many clothes at all.
The people of Twin Peaks and the surrounding area are going to be able to do something good with their things instead of throwing them away. Andy is going to write about that. She is also going to taste the cupcakes that are probably going to be there, handmade by some friend of the shop’s owner. Andy is going to mention the name of the baker in her article; she is already thinking of some cupcake-appropriate phrases as she walked.
The trees around her have not begun to drop their bright red and orange leaves yet. They are burning brightly all around her and she takes a deep breath. Life A.M. isn’t really that bad. No, really. Not as long as she avoids thinking about it in terms of ‘After Miranda.’ But there is something in that red color of the maple leaves that reminds her of her ex boss and here she is again, thinking about her.
Andy enters ‘Lucy’s Second Hand Boutique’, formerly known as ‘Hansen’s White Goods’ but it had closed several months before, leaving room for something new. It is a large place, crowded with people. The opening of something new, whatever it is, is always a big event in Twin Peaks.
And there are cupcakes and coffee, offered so kindly to her by a smiling older woman.
Andy talks to the owner and to some other people, and before long, her work there is over. She looks around at all the clothes that are hanging in the big room. Suddenly, her eyes are caught by something very unlikely.
It is a dress that looks like it has been hanging in the closet at Runway for a few years. It looks like something Nigel could have put her in during that first time, before she developed a trustworthy taste of her own.
Andy moves closer to it, as if drawn by an invisible force. She has not gone back to her B.M. style, but she isn’t wearing dresses like this anymore. Why would she, in Twin Peaks? But someone in Twin Peaks had… Andy is a little ashamed of her previous thoughts.
When she looks at it more closely, she sees that it is made in China, not by Chanel. But it doesn’t matter to her. It looks like it has never been used. It looks like something from her old life and she buys it.
I can wear it to the party tonight, she tells herself as she walks away from there. A colleague at the paper has invited her, and although she doesn’t feel much like partying she has accepted. Maybe, who knows… Maybe she is going to meet someone there who has intense blue eyes she could drown in, drown in like a refreshing winter bath. Or green or brown eyes. Any eyes at all would do… She never truly believes it can happen but now she has something new to wear, at least, if she wanted to look pretty for someone. She knows that she is going to be overdressed, but she hasn’t bought anything new in such a long time. And she doesn’t have anything else that would look good to her Manolo Blahniks.
Andy got rid of all her stuff that were ‘too Runway’ when she moved to Twin Peaks. She thought of it as a purging ritual, but a pair of shoes managed to slip through. And maybe one or two other little things. Now she has a new Miranda dress.
She tries not to think of it that way. She shouldn’t, because Miranda would take one look at it and dismiss it. She can smell cheap copies from miles away. But Andy can’t. She had to go real close to see that it isn’t the real thing.
The real thing?
Andy sighs at her thoughts. They never leave her alone, do they, the thoughts? Had she ever truly believed that they could, even when she first moved to Twin Peaks? Twin Peaks had a couple of years earlier felt like the chance of a new beginning to her, desperately needed.
***
Andy had believed that she did the right thing when she walked away from Miranda in Paris. Truly, she had believed it. Like, for half an hour or so.
Throwing away that cell phone into the fountain had felt so good, but later, reality had smacked her hard in her face, it had knocked her over, and she couldn’t get up from the dirt she found herself crawling in. That was what it had felt like at the time, but although she couldn’t go back, she had tried to move on. To get on with her life, as nothing had ever happened.
As if Miranda had never happened.
But ignoring Miranda had been impossible. She loved her, of course she did, but that was her well-guarded secret. She never told anyone about it - as far as Lily knew, her tears were for Nate, and if anything, Lily was glad to comfort Andy when she cried. If Andy cried, Lily believed, then she must really love Nate, and as long as Andy still loved him, there was hope.
Lily was head over heals in love with a man named Richard, they got engaged, and Lily wanted nothing more than to see Andy just as happy. Leaving Runway was, according to her, the best thing Andy had ever done and she tried, in her own way, to be supportive.
But it wasn’t Lily who had made her take the final step. It was Emily. Strangely enough, Andy who could have used a friend while she still worked at Runway found that the snappish Brit was a lot friendlier toward people who weren’t her co-workers. It took a little time but Emily warmed up, and it wasn’t just because of the clothes from Paris.
Emily had taken to call Andy once in a while, to talk a little as she put it - to check up on her, as Andy put it. She didn’t really mind. In her moments of clarity that got through her depression sometimes, she could see and appreciate that her friends were worried about her. Andy was unemployed, she had no boyfriend, she seemed to have lost all ambition, she refused to listen to anything Emily said about work, until finally one day...
Andy remembered the phone call that had been the starting point of her new life, or rather, her new quiet existence.
“Hi Andrea, how are you?”
“I’m fine… Whenever I feel like I’m about to cry, I eat a cube of cheese. Or ten.”
“Oh, come on! I tried that cheese diet once because I was stressed out and really desperate, so give me a break, will you? I know it was wrong but that doesn’t mean that you should exaggerate in the other direction.”
“Yeah, right… Whatever…”
“No, Andrea, I mean it! You’re not a model, you can be a size six or eight or even size ten and still be gorgeous…”
“Oh, it must have been very painful for you to say that, Em…”
“Shut up and let me finish. All I’m saying is that I get it, okay, it’s crazy to starve yourself like I did, but it is just as unhealthy to eat yourself to death like you’re doing. I mean, comfort food is okay to a certain degree but when all you’re doing is to sit on your butt the whole day, eat junk food and feel sorry for yourself…”
“Hey, Emily!”
“Am I not right, Andrea? What did you do yesterday? Or any other day this week? Do you have any job interviews scheduled?”
“Uh… no, but…”
“That’s what I thought. I’m coming over after work, okay? No excuses this time!”
Andy had to admit that Emily was right. She had been living on junk food and tears for far too long, as if determined to turn into the ‘fat smart girl’ for real. Or maybe not that smart. But when Lily offered ice-cream, pizza and a shoulder to cry on, Emily offered action; work, projects, and (if it wasn’t just in her imagination) a faint scent of Miranda’s perfume that reminded Andy of all the ambitions she once had.
Andy tidied up her apartment after the phone call - she got rid of the empty bags of potato chips, the chocolate boxes and all the empty bottles that littered her kitchen.
Then she seated herself in front of her laptop, trying to ignore all the online games, the J/7 fanfic and the RPs she usually killed her time with. She saw that one of her favorite writers had posted a new smutty Minerva/Hermione fic. Hermione would never walk away from Hogwarts throwing her wand in fountain, she thought, but she forced herself away from the femslash community and the escapism it offered, and began working on her resume. Unlike Lily, Emily was aware of her fanfic addiction, but she didn’t want her ex-colleague to catch her reading about Kathryn Janeway or Professor McGonagall or any other fictional female authority figures…
When she finally got to work, time passed quickly. When Emily arrived - pretty early in the evening for a Miranda-girl, so Andy figured the new girl must be in charge of delivering the Book - she was actually almost proud of herself.
“So,” Emily said, “show me what you’ve done today, because I happen to have a pair of Chanel boots in that bag over here and I believe they’re your size… But lazy people don’t deserve designer boots, Andy.”
“I know,” Andy nodded. She looked at the big bag Emily had left by the door, feeling both drawn to and appalled by it. Her life was A.M. now. Chanel boots, did they really belong in the life of Andy Sachs, A.M.? Lily would say no…
“So,” she cleared her throat and looked at the laptop, “I’ve been looking for potential future employers…”
“Good,” Emily offered her one of her rare smiles. “There are many New York publications that should be very glad to have you. I hear that the Mirror is looking…”
“No,” Andy interrupted, “not the Mirror. I didn’t send my resume to any New York publications.”
“What?” Emily stared at her. “You don’t want to be a journalist anymore?”
“Oh, of course I do!”
The truth was, Andy wasn’t so sure about that. She seemed to have lost all sense of direction, all sense of wanting anything at all. But to work at a magazine or a news paper was the only thing she believed she could do. She showed Emily all the places she had sent her resume to.
“What?! Andrea, you can’t be serious. None of these places are anywhere near New York. It’s like you want to get as far away as…”
Andy saw that the truth was finally dawning on her friend.
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s right. And my favorite so far of all these places is the Twin Peaks Daily. I hope they give me a call.”
“You can’t move to Twin Peaks!” Emily looked horrified. “That’s madness, that’s like… in the middle of nowhere…”
Andy nodded, “Yeah. I like the sound of that.”
***
They are driving across the country in the mini bus the guys have rented. They are not camping yet, they spend the nights at hotels, and it feels strange to Miranda, to be on the road like that, so far away from the office.
It is the last day of driving. They will reach their destination soon, and thankfully, she will not repeat the journey in the other direction. When they have had enough of camping, she and Emily will fly back to New York and get to work, and that’s not negotiable. Her daughters accepted the deal.
Miranda refuses to drive and she refuses to play silly car games. They let her sulk; they know she’ll warm up eventually. They do not let her decide what music they are playing, they take turns, one hour each.
The first hour is Emily’s: Temper Trap. Miranda is okay with that. The second hour is Doug’s: Edith Piaf. She is more or less okay with that, too. The third hour, on the other hand, is Cassidy’s: Rammstein. Then, luckily, it is lunch time and she takes James on her lap, enjoying his voice much more than any music.
Caroline and Serena have mercy on Miranda and they share one hour of Death Cab For Cutie instead of taking one each. When it is finally Miranda’s hour, she demands complete silence in the minibus. James is sleeping, thankfully; the boy is the only person Miranda can’t give her deadly Ice Queen glare. The last hour is Nigel’s and he, too, refrains from music but allows talking.
Miranda has to admit that a road trip in a minibus isn’t that bad.
She just wishes that they didn’t have to stop driving. But they have to, sooner or later. They drive through a small, sleepy town. It looks ancient where it lies in a quiet evening slumber between a mountain and a lake, with deep forests all around.
Doug drives around the lake and into the forests, where he parks the car. The first thing they do is to set up the tents for everybody except for Miranda. The back seat of the mini bus can be made into a bed and that’s where Miranda is going to sleep. That’s also not negotiable.
At first she watches in silence as the others struggle with the three tents. Then she sighs and mutters something about unbelievable incompetence and starts giving advice. It’s amazing, really - how can people want to go camping without trying to learn anything first? Doug knows a thing or two about tents, she has to admit, but the others are hopeless.
But James is pouting because they won’t let him ‘help’. The twins are getting annoyed because Miranda tries to ‘boss them around’. So Miranda and the child go away to play instead. If the others are surprised, they don’t show it. They just look, in the corner of their eyes, at how Miranda kneels on the ground - there’s moss, pine-needles, pine bark, bugs! - and shows the brown-haired little boy with his big brown doe eyes how to make animals out of fir cones and small sticks.
“This is how I played when I was a little girl,” Miranda tells James, and they make cows and horses, and sheep out of the smaller cones, and they even build fences. They have soon built a farm and James is completely captured by the game. There are no flashing lights in these homemade toys, no high sounds or other special effects, but he appears to have imagination enough not to miss anything of that.
Miranda sits back and watches him, thinking about how it came to be that the little boy she’s not even related to stole her heart. She doesn’t know if anybody suspects the reason why she let it happen in the first place because they never ever mention certain things, but she doesn’t care much anymore. If there’s a crack in her façade, then so be it… the Ice Queen had to either melt a little, or burst into a million pieces.
It started maybe a year and a half after Paris. That year and a half had been one of the worst in Miranda’s life, worse than all her divorces together, worse than anything Irv could ever come up with, even worse than seeing her Bobbsies cry, because she could always make them smile again. But who could make Miranda smile, who could make the pain go away? There was one girl who could make Miranda smile, who could make her feel at ease, not that Miranda ever told her that. The girl left because she couldn’t stand living in Miranda’s world anymore, she couldn’t stand being poisoned by it and eventually turning into a Miranda copy…
Miranda often asked herself what she could have done differently. But there wasn’t anything she could have done. She was who she was, and she had honestly started to believe that the girl was one of the few people who truly understood her, and who even cared.
It had been a terrible time. Nobody could see it on the outside - except maybe the girls and Nigel and Emily, not that they mentioned it - but her heart was bleeding. She thought that she was never ever going to smile again, not that the world at large would know the difference. But then things began to happen quickly. How did it start? She wasn’t sure. Emily finally dared ask Serena out and they became the couple Miranda had always suspected that they wanted to be. Nigel left Runway and started his own magazine, with Miranda’s blessing, and she was never sure exactly how it had happened but soon he had a business partner named Doug, and before long the young man was his life partner, too.
And Doug was already the father of a little baby boy, not even a year old. Miranda remembered when Nigel told her about it. He had seemed nervous, and at first she didn’t understand why. She had been around long enough to know that gay people could be parents, and not even when she saw the boy did she understand what all the fuzz was about.
The baby was adorable, even if the color of his hair and the shape of his little mouth and even his nose were absolutely heartbreaking and more than just a little unsettling. Miranda‘s heart was beating hard but she told herself that she was being ridiculous, too sentimental - she, sentimental? - seeing ghosts in broad daylight… And then Nigel told her.
“I know you don’t like to hear anybody mention her,” Nigel said, “but I guess you would find out anyway… Andrea Sachs is James’s mother.”
Miranda was not the kind of person to faint when shocking news were revealed. But she was close that time. Andrea was the mother of that child? Her Andrea, a mother? Her Andrea had slept with that young man, who was now dating her old friend, and given birth to a baby the two men were taking care of?
“I don’t understand”, she confessed, and she even closed her eyes for a moment in the middle of the restaurant where she was having lunch with her daughters and Nigel. “It’s unfair,” she mumbled, not sure herself if she was referring to Doug and Andrea, or the fact that Nigel now had Doug while Andrea had walked away from Miranda not knowing about and not wanting her love.
But Miranda was a grown up woman, capable and professional. She could handle any crisis at Runway and she had handled emotional crises before. She got herself together.
Eventually she understood as much as this: Andrea had left the city and she was only marginally involved in the boy’s life. As strange as that sounded to her - not that she was unfamiliar with the idea of women putting their careers ahead of their children, but it was not what she had expected of Andrea - she was also relieved. She could still see Nigel, she could even see the baby, and there was no risk (and no chance) of bumping into Andrea.
Caroline and Cassidy adored their ‘Uncle Nigel’, and not surprisingly, they also adored little James. A few years earlier, when Miranda had married Stephen, they asked her if they were going to have a little brother or sister. Miranda had said no very sternly - the girls asked for a lot, and she usually gave it to them, but another baby was out of the question. She didn’t tell them her reasons but maybe she already then had her doubts about Stephen. When they kept asking her about letting them visit Nigel and Doug, or letting them babysit, she found no reasons to refuse. Her girls needed good and stable men in their life, and if the men were gay, so much the better - they would bother her less.
In the beginning, that was her motive for letting the girls spend time with Nigel. Then she began to share their love for the little toddler. He was a sweet child. She told herself that he couldn’t know it, but he melted her heart by smiling like Andrea. At first she had believed that being around him would hurt too much, like a constant reminder of what she had lost - what she had let slip away - but eventually, she felt the opposite. James was a comfort to her.
She didn’t spoil him - not much - but she wasn’t afraid to show her love for him. After a while, she even let him have his own room in her house. She made time for him and the girls in her busy schedule and she got closer to Caroline and Cassidy in the process, because they loved the boy like a brother. Almost whenever his daddies needed a babysitter, or just some alone-time, she was ready. She was there for him like his mother was not. She opened her heart for him like she had tried her best to close her heart for his mother.
That was how it happened. Now as she is sitting in the middle of a deep forest, she doesn’t regret a thing that has happened during the past few years. James, who can already read, will start school in the fall. Miranda hums an old song about seeing a child leave for school for the first time. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for him.
Just look at where she is now - in a forest she swore, years ago, that she was never going to set foot in again.
But Miranda is there now, and she hears the wind mumbling in the treetops as if it wants to make the trees say that they recognize her. They greet her, but are they mocking her or welcoming her?
We knew you were going to come back one day. All of us knew.
Fandom: The Devil Wears Prada
Rating/Genre: g/angst, femslash, fantasy/surreal
Characters: Andy Sachs, Miranda Priestly, the twins, James (omc), Emily, Nigel, Doug, Serena, Lily
Pairings: Emily/Serena, Nigel/Doug, Andy/Miranda (eventually), Lily/omc, surprise temporary het pairing
Summary: Andy got depressed after Paris. After awhile, she decided to start a new life far away from New York. Miranda, just as unhappy, takes comfort in family life. One day, her daughters want to go camping, and in agreeing to do so, she has to confront her own background.
Word count: 4 788 (this chapter)
Spoilers/Warnings: No/a little angsty, mentions of het (briefly), mentions of religion and homophobia (next chapter).
Notes1: I’m so sorry this is late! This is for greyregies who participated in fandomaid’s Help Japan auction. (I’m sorry for not making Andy a cop like you wanted, but I found the initial inspiration for this fic by reading your profile, and I really hope you’ll like this.)
Notes2: Despite the fact that I call the town Andy is in Twin Peaks, I’m not tagging this as “crossover”, because the fic is deeply rooted in the DWP universe, post-Paris, and no characters or major events of Twin Peaks are referred to. I just wanted a name for the place where Andy goes to live, and thinking about it, I thought it better to chose a “real” fictional place rather than a real place I know nothing about. (All the city names I tried to “invent” are already taken, Google told me! Yes, no matter how “crazy” combinations of words I thought of, someone else has already thought of it first and the place exists in the real world…) All you need to know is that strange things can, and will, happen in Twin Peaks…
The rain is falling on the windows and if Miranda listens carefully she can almost hear the melody hidden in each drop as it falls and breaks, rhythmically.
Miranda doesn’t listen. The rain is just rain to her as it is to most people, except maybe children, poets and lunatics. Miranda belongs to none of these categories, for which she is very grateful. Her fingers brush gently against the cheek of the sleeping boy once more before she carefully walks out of the room and down the stairs.
She joins her family in the den where she left them forty minutes ago when she went upstairs with the boy to read him to sleep. Her children are gathered around the computer with her assistant, and they don’t hear her.
“This is perfect,” Caroline says, “but Emily, how can we make her do it?”
“By ‘her’ I assume you mean me.” Three heads turn, three pairs of eyes are shining at her. She loves her twin girls. That doesn’t mean they can get away with anything. “No,” she says. “What ever it is, I’m sure the answer is no.”
“But mom!” Cassidy jumps up from her crouching position beside Emily’s chair. “You don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
That is true, Miranda has to admit that. So what is it this time? A little trip to Egypt to see the pyramids and the Nile? Not a chance, Caroline, that’s too far away. No, Cassidy, not Japan where we could get swallowed by the earth any minute. Take six months off of work to explore all of Europe? Yes, Caroline, maybe when you’re grown up and I’m retired…
Miranda looks at her daughters, expecting all kinds of wild dreams to be thrown at her. Secretly she enjoys it. No, she doesn’t enjoy crushing their dreams but they, too, must know that they can’t ask the unreasonable. These little things are more like fairy tales, bedtime stories.
“The girls were thinking that you could go camping next month.” Emily grins widely and adds, as if it’s an afterthought, “Because you know, James would really, really like to do that!”
A surprised laugh trails off Miranda’s lips before she can stop it.
“Don’t be silly, James is five, he doesn’t even know what ‘camping’ is.”
“Of course he does.” Cassidy, already so tall but still a child, puts her arm around her mother’s waist, snuggling up against her. “Just because he’s only five he isn’t stupid. He can read, he hears things, and other children he knows have been camping with their families…”
“I see.” Miranda nods slowly, thinking. “But if it’s so important to him, why can’t he do it with Nigel and Doug? Isn’t camping supposed to be a father and son thing?”
The girls snort mockingly. Emily simply looks at her, but in a decidedly non-assistant kind of way. The woman is becoming far too sure of herself, Miranda thinks, but she finds herself lacking the energy and the will to do anything about it.
“Don’t even pretend you believe that to be true, Miranda,” the assistant has the audacity to say after a couple of seconds. “But you’re right anyway, sort of. Cass and Caroline think the guys should be a part of this. You can get a mini bus and we can all go - even Serena and me, if you want to.”
“Yeah, that would be awesome, mom!”
Caroline jumps up and down with excitement. If she had had a tail she would have been wagging it wildly.
“Awesome?” Miranda tries to understand the girls’ - including Emily! - excitement, but she fails. “Who came up with this idea? I refuse to believe it was James. And it will be fall next month. Isn’t camping a summer thing?”
“Doesn’t have to be,” Cassidy says, “if the tents are good. And think of all the colors in the nature, we want to experience them for real, not just in the park!”
“Of all the crazy ideas…” Miranda sighs, but allows her daughter to lead her up to the computer where Emily clicks on a Google map, letting Miranda see the location they have in mind.
Miranda takes a step back.
“No,” she says, “no, that’s out of the question.”
The rain beats harder on the windows, insisting that she has to listen, has to give in. She doesn’t want to. She believes she has an ally in Nigel. His partner, on the other hand, will be on her daughters’ side. And her assistant is, after all these years, starting a mutiny. Or hasn’t it already been going on for a long time? It is with a sense of doom she finally accepts. As if destiny thinks she has been running long enough - but she is determined to resist, no matter what it takes.
How, she wonders, how did this happen?
***
The weather is still good, Andy notices as she looks out of the window in front of her desk. She decided to walk to the event, there was still time and she had nothing else to do at the moment.
Working as a reporter at the Twin Peaks Daily is not comparable to working at Runway. It isn’t even comparable, Andy guessed, to working at any New York newspaper. There had been a time when she had wanted to do that, but that had been B.M.
Before Miranda. Andy’s life could be divided in three parts: Before Miranda, Miranda, and After Miranda.
The B.M. era had lasted as long as until her first job after her graduation from college. The Miranda era lasted not even a year. The rest of her life is going to be A.M.
Would Miranda sniff scornfully at this job? Andy’s little walk through the quiet October afternoon is not going to end at the side of a catwalk, in a designer’s studio or at any glamorous function. It is going to end in the upper left corner of Twin Peaks’s town square, where Andy is going to cover the opening of a second hand shop.
It is not a place where any vintage designer clothes are likely to be found. Most people in Twin Peaks can’t afford even the heel of one of Miranda’s Prada shoes from last season. They wouldn’t even go anywhere near it. Still, they buy clothes and they get tired of them, and in the spirit of the time someone has thought about recycling. It is a good initiative, really: most of the profit is going to go to charity, because lots of people in the world don’t even have many clothes at all.
The people of Twin Peaks and the surrounding area are going to be able to do something good with their things instead of throwing them away. Andy is going to write about that. She is also going to taste the cupcakes that are probably going to be there, handmade by some friend of the shop’s owner. Andy is going to mention the name of the baker in her article; she is already thinking of some cupcake-appropriate phrases as she walked.
The trees around her have not begun to drop their bright red and orange leaves yet. They are burning brightly all around her and she takes a deep breath. Life A.M. isn’t really that bad. No, really. Not as long as she avoids thinking about it in terms of ‘After Miranda.’ But there is something in that red color of the maple leaves that reminds her of her ex boss and here she is again, thinking about her.
Andy enters ‘Lucy’s Second Hand Boutique’, formerly known as ‘Hansen’s White Goods’ but it had closed several months before, leaving room for something new. It is a large place, crowded with people. The opening of something new, whatever it is, is always a big event in Twin Peaks.
And there are cupcakes and coffee, offered so kindly to her by a smiling older woman.
Andy talks to the owner and to some other people, and before long, her work there is over. She looks around at all the clothes that are hanging in the big room. Suddenly, her eyes are caught by something very unlikely.
It is a dress that looks like it has been hanging in the closet at Runway for a few years. It looks like something Nigel could have put her in during that first time, before she developed a trustworthy taste of her own.
Andy moves closer to it, as if drawn by an invisible force. She has not gone back to her B.M. style, but she isn’t wearing dresses like this anymore. Why would she, in Twin Peaks? But someone in Twin Peaks had… Andy is a little ashamed of her previous thoughts.
When she looks at it more closely, she sees that it is made in China, not by Chanel. But it doesn’t matter to her. It looks like it has never been used. It looks like something from her old life and she buys it.
I can wear it to the party tonight, she tells herself as she walks away from there. A colleague at the paper has invited her, and although she doesn’t feel much like partying she has accepted. Maybe, who knows… Maybe she is going to meet someone there who has intense blue eyes she could drown in, drown in like a refreshing winter bath. Or green or brown eyes. Any eyes at all would do… She never truly believes it can happen but now she has something new to wear, at least, if she wanted to look pretty for someone. She knows that she is going to be overdressed, but she hasn’t bought anything new in such a long time. And she doesn’t have anything else that would look good to her Manolo Blahniks.
Andy got rid of all her stuff that were ‘too Runway’ when she moved to Twin Peaks. She thought of it as a purging ritual, but a pair of shoes managed to slip through. And maybe one or two other little things. Now she has a new Miranda dress.
She tries not to think of it that way. She shouldn’t, because Miranda would take one look at it and dismiss it. She can smell cheap copies from miles away. But Andy can’t. She had to go real close to see that it isn’t the real thing.
The real thing?
Andy sighs at her thoughts. They never leave her alone, do they, the thoughts? Had she ever truly believed that they could, even when she first moved to Twin Peaks? Twin Peaks had a couple of years earlier felt like the chance of a new beginning to her, desperately needed.
***
Andy had believed that she did the right thing when she walked away from Miranda in Paris. Truly, she had believed it. Like, for half an hour or so.
Throwing away that cell phone into the fountain had felt so good, but later, reality had smacked her hard in her face, it had knocked her over, and she couldn’t get up from the dirt she found herself crawling in. That was what it had felt like at the time, but although she couldn’t go back, she had tried to move on. To get on with her life, as nothing had ever happened.
As if Miranda had never happened.
But ignoring Miranda had been impossible. She loved her, of course she did, but that was her well-guarded secret. She never told anyone about it - as far as Lily knew, her tears were for Nate, and if anything, Lily was glad to comfort Andy when she cried. If Andy cried, Lily believed, then she must really love Nate, and as long as Andy still loved him, there was hope.
Lily was head over heals in love with a man named Richard, they got engaged, and Lily wanted nothing more than to see Andy just as happy. Leaving Runway was, according to her, the best thing Andy had ever done and she tried, in her own way, to be supportive.
But it wasn’t Lily who had made her take the final step. It was Emily. Strangely enough, Andy who could have used a friend while she still worked at Runway found that the snappish Brit was a lot friendlier toward people who weren’t her co-workers. It took a little time but Emily warmed up, and it wasn’t just because of the clothes from Paris.
Emily had taken to call Andy once in a while, to talk a little as she put it - to check up on her, as Andy put it. She didn’t really mind. In her moments of clarity that got through her depression sometimes, she could see and appreciate that her friends were worried about her. Andy was unemployed, she had no boyfriend, she seemed to have lost all ambition, she refused to listen to anything Emily said about work, until finally one day...
Andy remembered the phone call that had been the starting point of her new life, or rather, her new quiet existence.
“Hi Andrea, how are you?”
“I’m fine… Whenever I feel like I’m about to cry, I eat a cube of cheese. Or ten.”
“Oh, come on! I tried that cheese diet once because I was stressed out and really desperate, so give me a break, will you? I know it was wrong but that doesn’t mean that you should exaggerate in the other direction.”
“Yeah, right… Whatever…”
“No, Andrea, I mean it! You’re not a model, you can be a size six or eight or even size ten and still be gorgeous…”
“Oh, it must have been very painful for you to say that, Em…”
“Shut up and let me finish. All I’m saying is that I get it, okay, it’s crazy to starve yourself like I did, but it is just as unhealthy to eat yourself to death like you’re doing. I mean, comfort food is okay to a certain degree but when all you’re doing is to sit on your butt the whole day, eat junk food and feel sorry for yourself…”
“Hey, Emily!”
“Am I not right, Andrea? What did you do yesterday? Or any other day this week? Do you have any job interviews scheduled?”
“Uh… no, but…”
“That’s what I thought. I’m coming over after work, okay? No excuses this time!”
Andy had to admit that Emily was right. She had been living on junk food and tears for far too long, as if determined to turn into the ‘fat smart girl’ for real. Or maybe not that smart. But when Lily offered ice-cream, pizza and a shoulder to cry on, Emily offered action; work, projects, and (if it wasn’t just in her imagination) a faint scent of Miranda’s perfume that reminded Andy of all the ambitions she once had.
Andy tidied up her apartment after the phone call - she got rid of the empty bags of potato chips, the chocolate boxes and all the empty bottles that littered her kitchen.
Then she seated herself in front of her laptop, trying to ignore all the online games, the J/7 fanfic and the RPs she usually killed her time with. She saw that one of her favorite writers had posted a new smutty Minerva/Hermione fic. Hermione would never walk away from Hogwarts throwing her wand in fountain, she thought, but she forced herself away from the femslash community and the escapism it offered, and began working on her resume. Unlike Lily, Emily was aware of her fanfic addiction, but she didn’t want her ex-colleague to catch her reading about Kathryn Janeway or Professor McGonagall or any other fictional female authority figures…
When she finally got to work, time passed quickly. When Emily arrived - pretty early in the evening for a Miranda-girl, so Andy figured the new girl must be in charge of delivering the Book - she was actually almost proud of herself.
“So,” Emily said, “show me what you’ve done today, because I happen to have a pair of Chanel boots in that bag over here and I believe they’re your size… But lazy people don’t deserve designer boots, Andy.”
“I know,” Andy nodded. She looked at the big bag Emily had left by the door, feeling both drawn to and appalled by it. Her life was A.M. now. Chanel boots, did they really belong in the life of Andy Sachs, A.M.? Lily would say no…
“So,” she cleared her throat and looked at the laptop, “I’ve been looking for potential future employers…”
“Good,” Emily offered her one of her rare smiles. “There are many New York publications that should be very glad to have you. I hear that the Mirror is looking…”
“No,” Andy interrupted, “not the Mirror. I didn’t send my resume to any New York publications.”
“What?” Emily stared at her. “You don’t want to be a journalist anymore?”
“Oh, of course I do!”
The truth was, Andy wasn’t so sure about that. She seemed to have lost all sense of direction, all sense of wanting anything at all. But to work at a magazine or a news paper was the only thing she believed she could do. She showed Emily all the places she had sent her resume to.
“What?! Andrea, you can’t be serious. None of these places are anywhere near New York. It’s like you want to get as far away as…”
Andy saw that the truth was finally dawning on her friend.
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s right. And my favorite so far of all these places is the Twin Peaks Daily. I hope they give me a call.”
“You can’t move to Twin Peaks!” Emily looked horrified. “That’s madness, that’s like… in the middle of nowhere…”
Andy nodded, “Yeah. I like the sound of that.”
***
They are driving across the country in the mini bus the guys have rented. They are not camping yet, they spend the nights at hotels, and it feels strange to Miranda, to be on the road like that, so far away from the office.
It is the last day of driving. They will reach their destination soon, and thankfully, she will not repeat the journey in the other direction. When they have had enough of camping, she and Emily will fly back to New York and get to work, and that’s not negotiable. Her daughters accepted the deal.
Miranda refuses to drive and she refuses to play silly car games. They let her sulk; they know she’ll warm up eventually. They do not let her decide what music they are playing, they take turns, one hour each.
The first hour is Emily’s: Temper Trap. Miranda is okay with that. The second hour is Doug’s: Edith Piaf. She is more or less okay with that, too. The third hour, on the other hand, is Cassidy’s: Rammstein. Then, luckily, it is lunch time and she takes James on her lap, enjoying his voice much more than any music.
Caroline and Serena have mercy on Miranda and they share one hour of Death Cab For Cutie instead of taking one each. When it is finally Miranda’s hour, she demands complete silence in the minibus. James is sleeping, thankfully; the boy is the only person Miranda can’t give her deadly Ice Queen glare. The last hour is Nigel’s and he, too, refrains from music but allows talking.
Miranda has to admit that a road trip in a minibus isn’t that bad.
She just wishes that they didn’t have to stop driving. But they have to, sooner or later. They drive through a small, sleepy town. It looks ancient where it lies in a quiet evening slumber between a mountain and a lake, with deep forests all around.
Doug drives around the lake and into the forests, where he parks the car. The first thing they do is to set up the tents for everybody except for Miranda. The back seat of the mini bus can be made into a bed and that’s where Miranda is going to sleep. That’s also not negotiable.
At first she watches in silence as the others struggle with the three tents. Then she sighs and mutters something about unbelievable incompetence and starts giving advice. It’s amazing, really - how can people want to go camping without trying to learn anything first? Doug knows a thing or two about tents, she has to admit, but the others are hopeless.
But James is pouting because they won’t let him ‘help’. The twins are getting annoyed because Miranda tries to ‘boss them around’. So Miranda and the child go away to play instead. If the others are surprised, they don’t show it. They just look, in the corner of their eyes, at how Miranda kneels on the ground - there’s moss, pine-needles, pine bark, bugs! - and shows the brown-haired little boy with his big brown doe eyes how to make animals out of fir cones and small sticks.
“This is how I played when I was a little girl,” Miranda tells James, and they make cows and horses, and sheep out of the smaller cones, and they even build fences. They have soon built a farm and James is completely captured by the game. There are no flashing lights in these homemade toys, no high sounds or other special effects, but he appears to have imagination enough not to miss anything of that.
Miranda sits back and watches him, thinking about how it came to be that the little boy she’s not even related to stole her heart. She doesn’t know if anybody suspects the reason why she let it happen in the first place because they never ever mention certain things, but she doesn’t care much anymore. If there’s a crack in her façade, then so be it… the Ice Queen had to either melt a little, or burst into a million pieces.
It started maybe a year and a half after Paris. That year and a half had been one of the worst in Miranda’s life, worse than all her divorces together, worse than anything Irv could ever come up with, even worse than seeing her Bobbsies cry, because she could always make them smile again. But who could make Miranda smile, who could make the pain go away? There was one girl who could make Miranda smile, who could make her feel at ease, not that Miranda ever told her that. The girl left because she couldn’t stand living in Miranda’s world anymore, she couldn’t stand being poisoned by it and eventually turning into a Miranda copy…
Miranda often asked herself what she could have done differently. But there wasn’t anything she could have done. She was who she was, and she had honestly started to believe that the girl was one of the few people who truly understood her, and who even cared.
It had been a terrible time. Nobody could see it on the outside - except maybe the girls and Nigel and Emily, not that they mentioned it - but her heart was bleeding. She thought that she was never ever going to smile again, not that the world at large would know the difference. But then things began to happen quickly. How did it start? She wasn’t sure. Emily finally dared ask Serena out and they became the couple Miranda had always suspected that they wanted to be. Nigel left Runway and started his own magazine, with Miranda’s blessing, and she was never sure exactly how it had happened but soon he had a business partner named Doug, and before long the young man was his life partner, too.
And Doug was already the father of a little baby boy, not even a year old. Miranda remembered when Nigel told her about it. He had seemed nervous, and at first she didn’t understand why. She had been around long enough to know that gay people could be parents, and not even when she saw the boy did she understand what all the fuzz was about.
The baby was adorable, even if the color of his hair and the shape of his little mouth and even his nose were absolutely heartbreaking and more than just a little unsettling. Miranda‘s heart was beating hard but she told herself that she was being ridiculous, too sentimental - she, sentimental? - seeing ghosts in broad daylight… And then Nigel told her.
“I know you don’t like to hear anybody mention her,” Nigel said, “but I guess you would find out anyway… Andrea Sachs is James’s mother.”
Miranda was not the kind of person to faint when shocking news were revealed. But she was close that time. Andrea was the mother of that child? Her Andrea, a mother? Her Andrea had slept with that young man, who was now dating her old friend, and given birth to a baby the two men were taking care of?
“I don’t understand”, she confessed, and she even closed her eyes for a moment in the middle of the restaurant where she was having lunch with her daughters and Nigel. “It’s unfair,” she mumbled, not sure herself if she was referring to Doug and Andrea, or the fact that Nigel now had Doug while Andrea had walked away from Miranda not knowing about and not wanting her love.
But Miranda was a grown up woman, capable and professional. She could handle any crisis at Runway and she had handled emotional crises before. She got herself together.
Eventually she understood as much as this: Andrea had left the city and she was only marginally involved in the boy’s life. As strange as that sounded to her - not that she was unfamiliar with the idea of women putting their careers ahead of their children, but it was not what she had expected of Andrea - she was also relieved. She could still see Nigel, she could even see the baby, and there was no risk (and no chance) of bumping into Andrea.
Caroline and Cassidy adored their ‘Uncle Nigel’, and not surprisingly, they also adored little James. A few years earlier, when Miranda had married Stephen, they asked her if they were going to have a little brother or sister. Miranda had said no very sternly - the girls asked for a lot, and she usually gave it to them, but another baby was out of the question. She didn’t tell them her reasons but maybe she already then had her doubts about Stephen. When they kept asking her about letting them visit Nigel and Doug, or letting them babysit, she found no reasons to refuse. Her girls needed good and stable men in their life, and if the men were gay, so much the better - they would bother her less.
In the beginning, that was her motive for letting the girls spend time with Nigel. Then she began to share their love for the little toddler. He was a sweet child. She told herself that he couldn’t know it, but he melted her heart by smiling like Andrea. At first she had believed that being around him would hurt too much, like a constant reminder of what she had lost - what she had let slip away - but eventually, she felt the opposite. James was a comfort to her.
She didn’t spoil him - not much - but she wasn’t afraid to show her love for him. After a while, she even let him have his own room in her house. She made time for him and the girls in her busy schedule and she got closer to Caroline and Cassidy in the process, because they loved the boy like a brother. Almost whenever his daddies needed a babysitter, or just some alone-time, she was ready. She was there for him like his mother was not. She opened her heart for him like she had tried her best to close her heart for his mother.
That was how it happened. Now as she is sitting in the middle of a deep forest, she doesn’t regret a thing that has happened during the past few years. James, who can already read, will start school in the fall. Miranda hums an old song about seeing a child leave for school for the first time. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for him.
Just look at where she is now - in a forest she swore, years ago, that she was never going to set foot in again.
But Miranda is there now, and she hears the wind mumbling in the treetops as if it wants to make the trees say that they recognize her. They greet her, but are they mocking her or welcoming her?
We knew you were going to come back one day. All of us knew.