S1E1 Subplot B: Alfie

Alfie was a very lucky child. Not that you could have told him that. His life was nothing but a series of unlucky incidents. Trips, spills, and foul-ups were a daily occurrence. But you never see the bus that doesn't hit you, you don't know when you don't get cancer. In this way, Alfie was a very lucky child.

This wouldn't be the way he saw it however, as his luggage had ripped open, outside, in a spontaneous downpour, and, just his luck, a car drove by, hitting a puddle on spraying him with dirty car water.

But you must believe me when I say that Alfie was a very lucky child.

Alfie sighs and patiently begins to stuff his belongings back into the broken suitcase. As he picks up a bundle of soggy postcards bound together with an elastic band, he looks up at the stormy sky and then glances back over his shoulder toward the baggage claim, still thinking about what he saw in there. He wants to believe it was all just a trick of the light or something, but the storm is very real.

Once everything is back inside the suitcase, he picks it up and sets off down the street, hugging the bag in such a way as to prevent everything falling out of the bottom again. He didn’t bring an umbrella because it wasn’t supposed to rain today, but he’s already soaked (thanks to the car) so he supposes it doesn’t matter much if he gets rained on. Matthew and Laura’s house isn’t far from here anyway.

Alfie walked to his adopted family's house near the harbor; it faced the west, but the majority of the house actually faced eastward, towards the harbor and the Atlantic Ocean; on particularly clear days one could even see Martha's Vineyard from the Kitchen.

Today was not such a day.

As it began hailing, pelting Alfie with larger and larger pieces of airborne ice, and the water rushing down the road began threatening to wash him away, he was able to run to his house, and get inside. It was only once inside that he noticed that his parents had company; a well dressed man with angular features and no hair whatsoever, not even eyebrows. He sat cross-legged with his hands on top of his knee, looking quite pensively at Laura and Matthew, Alfie's adopted parents. For their part, Matthew looked stone faced, and Laura seemed worried.