WE FOUND LUCY!(Benjamin Ijenu) Lucy was a normal child who belonged to a normal family. She loved to dance and sing and when her parents told her then news that they were taking a family trip to Nigeria, her dancing and singing was at an all time high. She would joyfully prance from room to room of the house and sing of the adventure in Nigeria that her family was going to take her on.

They arrived in Nigeria by airplane and though the flight was smooth, the lengthy trip was causing Lucy and her brothers and sisters to become quite antsy. As soon as they got off of the airplane Lucy and her brothers and sisters played a game of tag. Regardless of their parents’ attempts to quiet the children down, they enjoyed their noisy game while causing quite a stir with the other people in the airport.

The children were running by groups of people and avoiding their parents while playing this game of theirs. Finally, when all of the children seemed tired and ready to abide by their parents request, they took seats in a row of chairs and waited on their parent’s scolding. Their mother could be heard shouting from where they were to the other end of the airport, it caused an even bigger scene than the children had caused by playing their game.

It took them a few moments to realize, but Lucy was not with her brothers and sisters. “Where’s your sister?!” their parents could be heard screaming. An airport attendant asked them politely to lower their voices, but even the attendant realized that something truly must have been wrong and called his manager along with the airport security to report that Lucy was missing. The children’s mother sobbed into her sleeve and tears poured from her eyes, as she feared for the worst. Their father was in complete shock and did not say much of anything.

The entire family, save Lucy, was taken into a back room at the end of the hour to be briefed by airport security on what they had discovered of the day’s events, unfortunately that was nothing. “I’m sorry Miss,” one security officer said to the mother, “we just couldn’t find her. We think she was probably confused with the big crowds and perhaps went with another family. We’ll continue the search though until we find her. As the family left the airport in pursuit of a hotel room, the father stopped in his tracks and thought for a moment that he saw his daughter, Lucy, walking through the airport. In a moment she was gone. He thought it must have been his imagination, if the security said she was not in the airport then she must not be.

They found a hotel not too far from the airport; they needed to stay nearby in case the police needed to question them or in case the airport had any urgent news for the family. The mother and father spent day and night scouring the airport for any trace of where their little girl might have gone, trying to retrace her steps. It was useless though because the cleaning crew cleaned every night, so any evidence of Lucy would’ve been cleaned and gone by the time they arrived the next day and even less would be there the days after.

A week had passed and there was still no word on Lucy. The father could see the toll that all of this was taking on his wife and children so he thought it best to have them sent back home while he stayed and continued the search for Lucy. As his wife and children left he could see the look of defeated despair in his wife’s eyes and he knew that she had come to the conclusion that they would never see their beautiful daughter ever again.

The police and airport did not seem to be of much help and the longer the search for Lucy went on, the less they seemed to be interested in finding out what happened. It was as if they accepted, just as his wife had, that Lucy was gone and the reason was not important, all that mattered was that she was gone.
Months passed and four months to the day that Lucy went missing, a funeral was held back home to lay her soul to rest. The children and mother had begged Lucy’s father to attend the funeral, but he did not. The idea of burying an empty casket for his daughter who he felt was still alive made him sick to his stomach. He said aloud to himself, “I love her too much to give up.” And the more that he said it to himself, the more he realized that is was as true as it had been on the day she had went missing. He was still in Nigeria as friends and family gathered around an empty wooden casket to lay little Lucy’s soul to rest back home.

He marched down to the airport and demanded that airport security show more initiative in regards to his missing daughter, it seemed as if they had all but given up. As one security officer was about to suggest that there was nothing more that they could do, Lucy’s father glanced at some security footage that was replaying on the televisions that the security team had been sitting in front of for months trying to find clues within the security tapes. “Look! Look there, that’s her, that’s Lucy!”

It looked so casual and natural that nobody had even noticed it. Lucy was following a crowd of people as they boarded another airplane. She had unknowingly made her way onto another airplane; it also looked as if she were holding the hand of an old woman. Nobody had noticed this before because it truly looked as if Lucy was with the old woman.

Airport security contacted the airport where the flight that Lucy boarded had landed that day. They did not remember anyone reporting anyone being lost or stolen, though one woman who was working at a service desk did take down a phone number of an old woman who was escorting a young girl that day. The old woman had reportedly given the service desk clerk her phone number and said something in Italian, a language that the woman working at the service desk did not speak. She assumed it related to some missing luggage or something and simply reported it as a missing luggage incident at the end of the day. Nobody suspected that she was reporting a lost girl that she had found.

It took a few tries but finally the airport was able to get the old woman on the telephone. They had to call in a translator but it was indeed the old woman who had Lucy. The old woman said that she reported it to the airport and was quite angered by their lack of support on the issue, but she was more than happy to see to it that Lucy made it back home.

It was the fifth month of her disappearance, but because of Lucy’s father’s love and belief that she was still alive, Lucy is now safe at home with her family. Nobody knows what would have become of Lucy if her father had not given up hope and kept searching for his daughter. Luckily, nobody has to know what would’ve happened because due to his faith that Lucy was still alive, she is now as happy as ever, still singing and dancing at home. Though the family has noticed a few Italian words slipping into her songs.

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