Rowan
A story by Rebecca Hamilton.
When I was seven, I stopped understanding my brother. We were born twins – him first then me a half hour later – and as little kids, we could understand each other almost without words. But when I was seven, something snapped. Instantly, we were no closer than raindrops on a windscreen; we lived parallel lives. It was then that he started running away.
Ever since we were seven, he’s run away. Never a word. Never a reason. I’d just wake up to find his bed ruffled and still warm. His bag tugged out from under his bed, leaving footprints of dirty clothes and old unloved toys. The first time, our parents were frantic. My memories of that day come in faded sepia prints: the searching, talking to the police, phoning his friends. Finding him curled up with a quilt and a teddy bear in the Co-op car park. But now, it’s just normal. It’s just Rowan.
A hurricane echoes in my mind. Hailstorms battering my cerebral cortex and lightning creating jagged swathes of electricity across my cerebellum. The world around me is underwater, voices looming massively in my ears and then fading to sighs and swirls of conversation. The only way to escape the storm is to run.
I wake up at six that morning. A malicious gust of cold air cuts through the sleepy room, making the curtains fuss irately so I get up to close the window. Somehow, something seems amiss. As if I’d woken up on the edge of a fragile portal to a parallel world. Yet everything’s the same. The room messy with discarded school uniform and ripped up pieces of paper that I was trying to capture my art on last night. My bed piled with blankets and cushions. Rowan’s bed empty.
It’s only after I’ve eaten breakfast that I realise that his bag is still there. Under the bed. Cobwebbed and dusty with sadness.
*****
They’re my family and yet… I’m somehow different. Her hair is the colour of roasting chestnuts on a smoky campfire. My mother’s hair is the colour of an oil spill on a desert highway. My father’s hair is the colour of rainclouds touched by the beginnings of sunset. My hair is brown. I walk behind them as they talk with vibrant hand gestures and shining eyes. Not for the first time, I think how much better they’d be without me.
It’s at that second that my heart tries to escape. It revolts, tossing off its duties, telling me to panic. Something breaks inside me and I race downstairs. Do I even know why I’m suddenly full of deadening terror? No, but I’m not going to ignore the dread making every capillary heavy, as if all my blood is turning to tar. Out the door. Down the road. Ignore Mr Heming looking at me curiously. Where is Rowan?
For months, I thought about it. When. Where. How. The storm in my mind wouldn’t quieten down any other way and I wasn’t part of this family. I was an interloper, a changeling child, and I just drained the joy with my sadness filling every room in the house with a suffocating tumultuous ocean. When I decided on Bunny-Best Woods, for the first time in ten years, I felt at peace.
*****
The woods. That’s the last place I saw him laugh. The last place I saw him at peace. To both of us it held some kind of mysterious power. Our mother went into labour in the middle of the woods and we were born in the abandoned lakehouse. That’s why she named us as she did: Willow and Rowan. After the trees that witnessed our entrance into the world.
*****
She’s coming. I can hear her screaming my name but she hasn’t found me yet. My shoes come off. And then my clothes. There’s something calming about the feeling of the wind on my skin, whispering that whatever comes next will be ok. Just as I walk into the lake, as the woods fade into swirls of ink, she turns to see me.
‘’Rowan!...’’
Ever since we were seven, he’s run away. Never a word. Never a reason. I’d just wake up to find his bed ruffled and still warm. His bag tugged out from under his bed, leaving footprints of dirty clothes and old unloved toys. The first time, our parents were frantic. My memories of that day come in faded sepia prints: the searching, talking to the police, phoning his friends. Finding him curled up with a quilt and a teddy bear in the Co-op car park. But now, it’s just normal. It’s just Rowan.
A hurricane echoes in my mind. Hailstorms battering my cerebral cortex and lightning creating jagged swathes of electricity across my cerebellum. The world around me is underwater, voices looming massively in my ears and then fading to sighs and swirls of conversation. The only way to escape the storm is to run.
I wake up at six that morning. A malicious gust of cold air cuts through the sleepy room, making the curtains fuss irately so I get up to close the window. Somehow, something seems amiss. As if I’d woken up on the edge of a fragile portal to a parallel world. Yet everything’s the same. The room messy with discarded school uniform and ripped up pieces of paper that I was trying to capture my art on last night. My bed piled with blankets and cushions. Rowan’s bed empty.
It’s only after I’ve eaten breakfast that I realise that his bag is still there. Under the bed. Cobwebbed and dusty with sadness.
*****
They’re my family and yet… I’m somehow different. Her hair is the colour of roasting chestnuts on a smoky campfire. My mother’s hair is the colour of an oil spill on a desert highway. My father’s hair is the colour of rainclouds touched by the beginnings of sunset. My hair is brown. I walk behind them as they talk with vibrant hand gestures and shining eyes. Not for the first time, I think how much better they’d be without me.
It’s at that second that my heart tries to escape. It revolts, tossing off its duties, telling me to panic. Something breaks inside me and I race downstairs. Do I even know why I’m suddenly full of deadening terror? No, but I’m not going to ignore the dread making every capillary heavy, as if all my blood is turning to tar. Out the door. Down the road. Ignore Mr Heming looking at me curiously. Where is Rowan?
For months, I thought about it. When. Where. How. The storm in my mind wouldn’t quieten down any other way and I wasn’t part of this family. I was an interloper, a changeling child, and I just drained the joy with my sadness filling every room in the house with a suffocating tumultuous ocean. When I decided on Bunny-Best Woods, for the first time in ten years, I felt at peace.
*****
The woods. That’s the last place I saw him laugh. The last place I saw him at peace. To both of us it held some kind of mysterious power. Our mother went into labour in the middle of the woods and we were born in the abandoned lakehouse. That’s why she named us as she did: Willow and Rowan. After the trees that witnessed our entrance into the world.
*****
She’s coming. I can hear her screaming my name but she hasn’t found me yet. My shoes come off. And then my clothes. There’s something calming about the feeling of the wind on my skin, whispering that whatever comes next will be ok. Just as I walk into the lake, as the woods fade into swirls of ink, she turns to see me.
‘’Rowan!...’’