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New York Times bestseller Jacquelyn Mitchard's novels include The Deep End of the Ocean, Twelve Times Blessed, and The Breakdown Lane. She is also the author of The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship, a collection of her newspaper columns. She lives with her husband and six children in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Julieanne Gillis's family collects them. An advice columnist for a local newspaper, Julie dispenses wisdom to her readers, but somehow missed the signs that something was wrong in her own home. Devoted to being a good mother and keeping her twenty-year marriage fresh and exciting, she is shocked by her husband's surprise announcement that he needs a "sabbatical" from their life together -- and devastated when he disappears, leaving Julie with no funds to raise two teenagers and a small daughter alone. But it is the discovery that Julieanne suffers from a serious illness that truly crumbles her family's foundation -- setting her children on a dangerous, quixotic journey to locate their missing father . . . before it's too late.

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The Breakdown Lane

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Genesis

Excess Baggage
by J. A. Gillis
The Sheboygan News-Clarion

Let's begin at the end of the beginning. The first moment of the second act of our lives.

It was ballet class. It was the second class of the week, made up of dance combinations and mat Pilates. Steady on the studio floor, I was ready to begin my final stretches. I remember that, a wonderful feeling. I was spent, but pleasurably, my hips not so much aching as aware they'd been asked for something strenuous. This class, and my weight training were the times during my week I felt freed from strain, just shy of pure.

I extended my right leg along the floor in its customary turnout -- posturally correct, erect on my sitz bones, a little bit smug, but trying not to glance around me to observe that other women, even younger women, noticed the way my flexibility still came easily -- and leaned forward for the hamstring stretch.

What I saw when I looked down horrified me so much that my mind scrabbled away from me, across the birchy floor.

What was it?

Numb shard of bone? Foot clawed birdlike, in spasm?

Worse. It was ... nothing.

Nothing was different than what I'd seen when I sat down five seconds earlier. It was only my leg, my ordinary leg in the unsoiled glove of my unitard (the silver one my youngest daughter used to call my "mermaid clothes") still bent in a forty-five-degree angle at the knee, my pointed toe nestled against my thigh.

Doesn't sound like much, does it?

You have a right to expect more of terrors. Sharp, single shriek on a silent street. Pea-sized lump your finger grazes as you soap your breast. Tang of smoke in the still air, footsteps' rhythm matching your own, in the dusk of an empty parking lot. A shadow that jumps against a wall in a room in which you know you are alone.

But think! A thing so huge it will dismember your world can be invisible. It can be a germ. A scent. It can be an absence.

You see, I had felt my leg open smoothly, like a knife with a well-balanced mechanism. But it had not.

A cascade of thoughts, like the fountain from a child's sparkler, showered over me: the phantom limb phenomenon, the precursor to a stroke, a paralysis caused by some virus. My first instinct was to scream. Instead, like any sane person, I tried again.

My leg refused.

Metallic, icy sweat burst from my pores, bathing my face and neck, painting gleaming half-moons under my breasts. I dampened like a true mermaid in my "mermaid's clothes." From the corner of my eye, I glanced at my friend, Cathy, who took the class with me, as her arms branched and she arched down over her own leg. Her eyes, closed in concentration, suddenly flipped up, like one of those old venetian blinds, as if she'd heard a crack, a clap, as if I truly had screamed. She looked at me, quizzically, one eyebrow a beckoning finger. I grinned ...

Excerpted from The Breakdown Laneby Jacquelyn Mitchard Copyright © 2006 by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Excerpted by permission.
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