See You Tomorrow

ONE

                                                   ❆ ONE ❆

        DR. FORREST DARLING always had a flair for the dramatic.

For Lucy’s tenth birthday party, he’d booked her Justin Timberlake as the performance act. His curly brown hair was, quote unquote, “Absolutely to die for” and that “she’d kill just to run her fingers through that chocolate mane”(it wasn’t until sixth months later it became painfully apparent that it was only a lookalike who also happened to have a particularly gorgeous head of hair).

When the twins, Felicity and Truman graduated high school, side by side, both as valedictorians with identical GPAs, he reserved all of IHOP for their celebration feast and ordered stacks of their favorite pancakes each (granted, he did achieve this by extracting a large sum of money from both of their college funds, but, as was so often his catchphrase, “it’s the thought that counts.”) He also exhibited such pageantry when Rudy singlehandedly carried his middle school football team to victory and hired a skywriter to plaster the sky with Rudy’s winning score (they also may have misspelled Rudy as “Rudder,” but, again, “it’s the thought that counts.”) And oh, but who could forget when he and his wife celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary and he bought her fifteen doves, all named after her? (Disclaimer: said doves were promptly returned to Hope Animal Shelter two days later due to an allergy he’d forgotten about)

Dr. Forrest Darling was not only dramatic in personality, but in practice as well. A highly regarded holistic specialist, hundreds upon hundreds had made it their priority to seek out the doctor in search of answers where traditional medicinal practices would not grant them such. “It’s just a backyard business,” is what his wife, Eloise, would always say to those who questioned her husband’s work. “It’ll never go very far.”

It started to go very far around two months after Lucy’s twelfth birthday, to be absolutely precise. Dr. Darling had been bombarded with calls for weeks about remote villages in Europe that required his unique expertise, and he felt it was his calling to answer them. To quote verbatim, he’d call it a “religious experience – or maybe it was just gas. I don’t remember.”

Regardless of whatever variety of experience it was, it held rather catastrophic consequences. What initially started off as a month long excursion to heal the sick turned into six months; six months soon turned into a year; and that year turned into five, and suddenly hope turned into a memory that none of the Darling children seemed to be able to summon. Lucy counted the number of birthdays missed, Felicity and Truman’s report cards stacked up, and the stands at Rudy’s football games were one person short. And Eloise stopped expecting that he’d fly into New York with a cage of doves at his arm long ago.

What Eloise, or rather, what the entire Darling family does not expect, then, is what occurs on the night of December 1st, 2014.

                                                            ❄

                             THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 1ST, 2014

It’s been about ten seconds since Lucy’s gotten out of the car, and already she has at least a handful of snow in her shoes.

The train ride from the city all the way to her mother’s cramped colonial house on the cusp of nowhere in western New York had been an unfortunately long and tedious ordeal. Lucy, always loud and oftentimes inappropriate, hadn’t made it easy on herself or anyone else on board when she complained about the lack of heating on the train, or the bumpy detour through Saratoga Springs, or absolutely that heinous two year old who wouldn’t stop whining the entire time. Lugging her baggage over her shoulder, she’s just able to make out the light from her house in the distance, shrouded only by the dense foliage. Through the snow, she slowly makes her way up to the porch, knocking wildly on the front door, desperate to get inside and dump the snow out of her boots.