It’s widely recognized that Christmas time it’s a period for meetings and where people, wherever they live, try to come back to their family’s home. The home where they normally spent their childhood.
This is a story about meeting and loosing people, therefore I could say that it isn’t probably a happy story or thinking twice it’s simply a different story.
Marie lived in the other side of the country. She was 25 years old and she lived by her own in L.A. She had studied economic in Boston, exactly in Harvard, and it could be said that she was a brilliant student. She had got one of the best marks of her degree and it was a fast way to be called by one of the most important companies in the world. So, with this hopeful future she packed her luggage and she started a new life en L.A. overnight, what was a hard hit for her parents and her younger sister.
Anne was only two years younger than Marie, but both of them were totally different. Marie was so responsible, mature and so perfectionist that sometimes it was really difficult to put up whit her. Probably, all those skills drove her to work in that important company. In change, Anne was crazy, sometimes immature but always optimistic and above all a very good person, very worried about her family.
So, with those descriptions we could picture their parents very quickly: Marie was exactly like her mother, Brenda, and Anne was the spitting image of her father. What didn’t mean that they didn’t get along, on the contrary, they were very close but everyone in their place, I mean, Brenda, John and Anne in Boston and Marie in L.A.
As you can imagine Marie was a very hard-working person so she didn’t allow herself to go on holiday even go out on weekends, so she saw her parents only once or twice a year and one of them was in Christmas holidays. This year it wasn’t going to be different.
It was 23 December and Marie was up with work, and she could decide to stay all holidays working but, on the other hand she knew that her family was anxious for spending those days with her and, of course, she felt, more or less, something similar but her sense of responsibility was sometimes stronger. Despite of that she joined forces and clicked on American Airlines website and she got a ticket in the first plane to Boston. “If I arrived as soon as possible I would be able to come back earlier and I would finish the project for the company”, she thought.
At five o’clock Marie started to board, the journey would last five hours, therefore she had enough time to work with her laptop and to relax as well.
Brenda and John were so happy, finally they were going to see Marie for the first time since six months when they all together decided to spend some days in Las Vegas. Well, this was what the mother thought because actually they communicated through Skype almost everyday.
That night, Anne and John had thought to pick Marie up at the airport while Brenda stayed at home preparing Marie’s room.
John drove his car with caution because it was very dark and temperatures went down, the winter was being very hard. In the radio some fashion group was playing but neither Anne nor John was listening to, they were so excited that they couldn’t stop talking. Suddenly the music shut up and a strong voice from a man started to talk:” Sorry for cutting the emission but we must communicated terrible news, one plane flying from L.A. to Boston got into burn when it was going to land. We still don’t know anything about the possibility of survivors but due to the huge flames nobody had probably survived.
John and Anne felt panic, there were a lot of daily planes but at the same time that Marie’s plane.....Their fears were confirmed when they arrived at the airport. The shock was terrible and the worst thing was communicating Brenda the news. That was the worst phone call that John had ever made.
This fact would change the rhythm of their lives forever, especially Brenda’s life.
During next year all of them tried to keep on with their daily routines. John, working morning and afternoon and Anne went on with her part-time job, what let her spend more time with her mother during the afternoons. Nevertheless, this wasn’t useful at all. Brenda started to suffer from terrible headache and she wasn’t able to sleep most of the days or when she did it, she only had nightmares.
Anne tried to hide their real feelings showing herself cheerful and animated, but actually, She noticed every day darker than the previous and waking up represented for her a really effort. Sometimes, in the depth of herself, she felt relieved thinking that it could be possible her sister was in a better place.
Snow was disappearing and spring showed off its better face, what encourage Anne and John. Brenda didn’t fell down so much and little by little her mood was changed to see life differently: “Everything must keep on and now our family is smaller, I have to get used to that”.
But the fate is fickle and it wanted the lifetime of this family to worse, it could be said that Berman’s weren’t lucky people.
Finally, Brenda, though her efforts to recover herself, had to visit a psychologist. The treatment consisted of talking to him twice a week and that seemed to work. But one of the days when Brenda was walking to the query, she was immersed in her thoughts while she was crossing a street and she didn’t notice a fast speed car. When the driver wanted to stop it was too late. Brenda was hit by the car and her head hit the floor in a thud.
After five or more minutes she started to distinguish some voices and fuzzy figures. All of them were smiling and they were shouting for joy. A man extended his arms to her and a woman beside him, dressed in white, was congratulating him because of his wonderful baby. “But what baby? Where was she?” Suddenly Brenda understood everything for a second and after that she forgot her former life forever.
Soraya Bragado Bao
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