She stared out across the barren wasteland she had called her home for the last five years. The slate gray concrete mixed with the pure white softness of the snow that had fallen the night before were a common sight, but this would be long gone as soon as her mother returned from the depot with three train tickets to London.
Her heart sank a little lower as she realized that she might never see this place again, like her father. He had been gone for almost a month now, but somehow she knew he was never coming back. Her eyes began to water when she remembered her mother crying the night before over something she didn’t know about. She tried to comfort her, but it didn’t seem to work. Nothing she could do would calm her mother.
As her eyes shifted from the icy ground in front of the house to the street, she could see her mother’s car roll towards the drive, it’s rusted blue surface gleaming in the early morning sun. She ran out to her with suitcases in hand as her brother dragged out more from the house. He was about five years older and now the man of the house. He had no idea what kind of responsibility he’d end up taking on, but rest assure, he always found ways of easing the tension of the situation.
He poked her in the side from behind as he ran back into the house to grab a few more suitcases. She ran after him to return the pain, but her mother ended up catching her in her arms. Her brown Spanish eyes transfixed onto the bright Russian blue of her daughter. “Be good, Alanna,” she spoke in perfect Russian.
“Yes, mother,” Alanna replied as her mother put her down. “Mother, why is Daddy not coming with us?”
“Because nobody knows where he is,” her mother replied.
“Not even you?”
Her mother took a moment to think about the answer. “No, not even me,” she calmly replied.
For some reason, Alanna didn’t believe her, and never would from that day on. It seemed as if everything in her mother’s life was a secret, the details only surfacing many years later when she would grow up to be exactly what her mother was at the moment.
Alanna’s mother went back into the house to grab the last of their things, and soon they were off to the train station to start a new life far away from Moscow, far away from everything they had known, and far away from the truth.