Moons Over Red River

Chapter 1 : One More Bad Beginning

Lucy's eyes blankly stared out the window of the old blue Ford pickup. Outside the window the south Louisiana landscapes rolled by, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn't focus. In the background her aunt chattered on about what she'd been up to for the past fifteen years, and though Lucy was sure that she would love the woman if given half a chance, she simply couldn't muster up the energy to listen. Instead she focused on the drive. On the cypress trees and the marshy swamps that rested just off the shoulder of the highways.

She remembered some of this. From old pictures of course. They passed the old wood shop with the ridiculously sized rocking chair outside. They sped across the agonizingly long bridge that spanned the Atchafalaya. They even stopped once for her aunt to buy a crate of strawberries from a man parked on the side of the road. Even with all this, all these little things that should have brought her some level of comfort, there was nothing comfortable about this drive.

The past three months had been pure agony for Lucy. It all began when her mother left for a morning jog. Everything had been normal. She woke Lucy and her twin sister Sadie up for school, slipped into her favorite yoga pants and laced up her running shoes before stepping out for her morning jog. She did the same thing every morning, and like every morning before it, the girls had dressed, argued over the last chocolate chip muffin and left for school. When they got home that afternoon they walked into a kitchen buzzing with police and their very distressed father sobbing over a cup of cold coffee.

Their mother had not been seen since she walked out the front door that morning. More worrisome still, her house keys, cell phone and a lone sneaker had been found along the running trails in the park down the street, her mother's favorite running spot.

They never did find any further leads, just some disheveled dirt near the shoe and another runner who reported hearing screaming, though they'd seen nothing.

As bad as things seemed then, they had only gotten worse the next month when, police appeared on our doorstep again, and again Lucy found herself staring in disbelief.

Sadie was dead.

Lucy couldn't even process what they were saying. It would be three days before the reality would become real. The reality that Sadie, her other half and best friend, had climbed to the railing of the Brooks Park Bridge, and jumped.

As if life without her mother was not hard enough, life without her sister? It seemed almost impossible.

Lucy didn't know what to do. She couldn't eat. She couldn't sleep. Everything around her reminded her of the two people in her life she'd always been able to count on, and those people were...they were gone. Vanished, without so much as a ripple left in their wakes. 

Lucy tried to reach out to her father but he was his own kind of mess.  Stock and silent. She was sure that sometimes she could almost pick up anger from him, especially when her mother was mentioned.  Though she couldn't bring herself to believe her mother would simply run off, Lucy wasn't convinced her father felt the same way.  The loss of Sadie? Well, he simply seemed to be unable to process it all together. 

Lucy knew how he felt. At least she thought she did.

She'd not been to school in three weeks when her father came in and dropped a new bomb shell. He needed a fresh start -- a new start.

Naturally Lucy had reacted the way any teenager reacts to that kind of news. She screamed. She yelled. She cried.

Her dad had packed his things up and taken a new job in New York state. Lucy had found herself in the custody of her mother's older sister, a woman she had no memories of, no relationship with mind the occasional holiday card and a yearly check on her birthday.