Legacy of the Dreams

Chapter 106 - Revisiting the Tropical Dream

The Abernathys and their company from New York talked while they walked on the morning of December 26th. The topic was dreams and Greg's movie, The Tropical Dream, the story of his and Susan's adventures during and after the airline crash which brought them together more than 10 years before. It occupied them all the way from the gardens near the goldfish ponds to the house. They walked together as a group, discussing their ideas about the concepts for multiple lives, as presented in the film, the entire time. By the time they arrived at the house, everyone was anticipating both lunch and a viewing of the movie, with a chance to ask Greg about it in more depth ... and to a lesser extent Susan, at the same time. The more they talked about the activities planned for the afternoon, the more everyone was looking forward to it.

"It's been a while since we've seen The Tropical Dream. Do you mind if Ashley and I watch too?" Matt wondered.

"Not at all, Matthew. Perhaps you could even help us get the DVD player set up so everyone can watch," Greg said.

Chairs were gathered from every part of the house, and in short order their family room was turned into a make shift theater. Greg found the disk. Matt put it in, and the movie was started while Susan was still in the kitchen, making sandwiches for lunch.

Susan looked around the corner into the room when she heard the opening music and discovered everybody was watching. Greg's nephew's children – Megan, Oliver, and Caleb – took front row seats, along with Ashley and Matt. Zack and Jessie sat to one side on the sofa with Melody, while Greg, Malcom, and Ali sat in chairs on the other side of the room, closest to the walkway that led between the half flights of stairs at either end of the room. Towards the back of the crowd, occupying the room's easy chairs were Alan and Cindy, while their children Noah and Oliva roamed between those in the other seating areas. That was absolutely everybody, including the youngest of the children in the family. It occurred to Susan as she watched them that although most in the family had seen the movie many times, this was a first for Melody, Olivia and Noah. As far as she knew, none of their youngest children had ever seen the movie before.

The movie opened with dramatic scenes of the doomed airliner as it floundered in the storm, followed by the crash: a bumpy though relatively controlled water landing in the midst of the violent storm. The scene was compelling enough to cause Melody to stop what she was doing to stare at the screen. To Greg, Alan, and Cindy's surprise, Olivia did too. When Susan came back around the corner to tell them lunch was ready, she found the little girl standing beside Jessie and Melody, not far from where Cindy sat in the easy chair. Olivia was physically shaking in response to the sight of the many airline rafts in the water around the plane, caught in the enormous waves. Cindy was doing her best to comfort her little girl, trying to encourage her to look away, but Olivia shook her mother off. She insisted on watching as the scene played out. The sequence ended with the camera focusing on a single passenger from the plane, a man who found himself alone in partially deflated raft, carried away from the crash site by mountain-sized waves, surrounded by darkness except for the occasional flash of lightning that accompanied the storm. The slowly sinking aircraft disappeared from view as the darkness became more complete and the raft drifted away. The scene faded, then opened again, focusing on the very same raft at dawn the next morning.

The raft and it's occupant were now caught in gentle waves lapping on the sands of a beach. The camera panned the area, revealing another man, this one in a flight crew uniform with oddly twisted legs. He was sitting alone amongst the trees, leaning against the trunk of a coconut tree. The former passenger scrambled from his raft and approached the man against the tree. He spoke to him briefly. "I'm Albert," he said.

"Help them," the injured man against the tree urged. At his only companion's insistence, Albert began pulling his fellow passengers from the waves along the shore, including several women, one of whom was visibly injured and bleeding from a head wound. And that was in the lead in before the title of the movie.