If anything could give Rowan back to herself, surely that would. Rowan was afraid her mother would cry out with disbelief, but Rowan would tell her this was really herself, and the family would drive out the impostor—and then Rowan realised fully what she had become, for her mother stared straight through her and turned back to the child who was reaching for the parcel. The sunlight went out, and sleet that Rowan couldn’t even feel slashed through her to shatter on the window.
So she was nothing. Even her feelings were suddenly more difficult to grasp, slippery and melting like the meaningless shapes of sleet on the glass. Her experiences since the graveyard were catching up with her: not only had the world around her turned into a dream that was often a nightmare, she had been little more than a dream of herself. As she realised that, her feelings grew exhausted, the exhaustion of her journey home, of being robbed of herself after all the time and effort she had spent. At least she could rest now she was home.
She wouldn’t go to her room. Nobody wanted her there, and she wouldn’t have gone near her bed even if it had been offered to her, now that her parents had given it to someone else. She would rather hide where it was darkest, sleep and sink into the dark on the top floor until perhaps she forgot who she had been. All that held her back was not knowing how to get into the house, unless she was scared of what she instinctively knew.
She watched the impostor unwrapping the parcel and lifting out a dress that once upon a time Rowan would have loved to wear. She was forgetting how jealousy felt, which seemed to promise that soon she would feel nothing at all. She watched her body take the dress out of the room, and lingered at the window. The thought that she would never see her mother and father again once she settled into the dark touched her with a distant sadness. She might have wept if she had been able to, but she could only feel thinner and more vulnerable. Her body came downstairs in its new dress and was admired by everyone, and then Jo and Eddie and their children made for the door.
As the five of them crowded out of the house and ran through the sleet, Rowan shrank back. The idea of their being somehow aware of her seemed agonisingly shameful, a feeling that cut through her as if the sleet were able to reach her after all. When her mother stared out of the porch under the splintering sky, Rowan huddled against the drenched wall of the house. She felt like a shadow full of sleet, but she didn’t dare move until her mother closed the door.
The soaked dunes looked like mud now. The sky and the sea were a grey whirl of sleet with which she felt close to merging, being borne away in fragments on the wind. She drifted back to the window, but her family was blurred by the sleet that streamed through her onto the glass. She watched them and her body eat Christmas dinner, listened to everyone trying to make her body feel more welcome, until her mother came to the curtains and closed the light off from her.
Night was already massing like dark knives of ice, since this was almost the shortest day of the year. Rowan followed the light around the outside of the house from room to room, first to the kitchen and then the curtained living-room. Eventually the lights began to climb out of reach, to the bathroom and the room that had been hers. When the light in that room went out she knew her body was in her bed.
Would it dream? She wondered if the nightmare she’d had to struggle through in order to return had been Vicky’s or her own, or a tangle of both. That confusion made her feel in danger of drifting back into the nightmare, until she concentrated on the house and made herself think of nothing else. Hours passed, and the sleet became thin icy rain. Lights climbed the house, bedrooms lit and were extinguished, and then the house was dark except for the lamps in the hallways.
Now that all the family must be falling asleep, the house no longer seemed to have sufficient presence for her to hold onto. She wanted to be inside, not cast out in the night that could turn into nightmare. She went to the porch door and gazed through the small latticed panes. Beyond them and the window of the inner door was the silvery hall, where suddenly she yearned to be. Her surge of yearning was stronger than her fear of making her way in. The next moment, easily as dreaming, she was in the hall.
The way the house felt came as a shock: old and stale, however new it looked. The silvery wallpaper on either side of her, and the new plaster on the staircase wall, were no more convincing than chalk sketches, already fading from the bricks. She didn’t like the way the darkness of the house seemed to reach for her through the lamplit halls, but she was more afraid of the night outside. At least the dark here was familiar. She let herself go effortlessly to the stairs, and up.
She would have enjoyed the lack of effort if she had been dreaming, but it made reality feel slippery, made her feel closer to the darkness underlying the new paper and plaster. She settled on the first landing and gazed along the hall towards the room where her mother and father were. Another remnant of emotion flared in her. She wanted a last sight of them to take with her into the dark.
As soon as she thought of it, she was passing along the hall. She faltered by the door of the room that had been hers. Someone, presumably her mother, had left the door ajar. A dull helpless resentment and a compulsion to see what her enemy looked like in her sleep took her to the gap.
It was almost like seeing herself dead. Her still face was upturned on the pillow, the blankets were humped over her clasped hands. Only the slow rise and fall of the bedclothes showed that her body was alive. Rowan gazed at it until she felt she had forgotten how to move, until she began to feel trapped not by watching but by being watched. She felt as if her body had become the lair of the hidden ageing of the house. She was reminded of the shrunken thing she’d seen in the grave and afterwards; she felt as if it had become so shrunken that it could hide inside her body. The idea frightened her so much that it released her, and she fled to her parents’ room.
Their door was ajar too. Rowan hesitated on the threshold; she didn’t feel welcome enough to go in. Her parents were in bed, their backs to her. Her mother was closer to the door, one arm around Rowan’s father, her face against his shoulder. Rowan watched them for a long time and hoped they felt safe in their dreams. She watched until she felt sure of remembering how they looked just then, together and untroubled. Perhaps dreaming of them in the dark would be like being with them. She ought to go up now, while the sight of them had made her feel peaceful. She was withdrawing from the doorway, lingering over her last sight of them, when her mother stirred restlessly. She let go of Rowan’s father and turned towards the hall.
For a moment Rowan thought her mother was aware of her—that perhaps she was able to sense her because she was asleep. She shrank back until she realised that despite having moved, her mother was too deeply asleep to be aware of anything. Peace on Earth, Rowan thought with vague contentment, and then the sight of her mother seemed to lurch towards her as she saw how much older her mother looked.
She hadn’t looked so old while she was awake, but she couldn’t pretend in her sleep. She’d aged while Rowan was away, not by the months Rowan had taken to come back but by years. Her face looked pinched and lined and starved of colour, as if worry had dragged at it until the skin wore threadbare. Rowan wished she could give her just one kiss on the forehead to get rid of the lines that would always be there now, but what was the use of wishing? At least her parents had each other, and they would look after each other—but they couldn’t keep each other safe when they didn’t even know that their child was no longer their child.
Her father turned just then, groping blindly for her mother until his arm bent round her. The two sleeping faces lay on the pillows, aware of nothing outside themselves. Her father’s wasn’t as drawn as her mother’s, but both seemed dreadfully vulnerable, at the mercy of the thing that was hiding inside Rowan’s body. She couldn’t bear to leave them like this. Somehow she had to waken them.
At once she was in the room, having slipped through the gap between door and frame without needing to sidle. This was the room she’d crept into during their first nights in the house, whose chilly emptiness had troubled her sleep. She’d snuggled between her parents and hidden from the huge dark. They had let her do that instead of telling her she was too old to be scared of the dark, and the memory made her feel closer to them, a closeness that ached. Might she even reach them while she felt like this? She went like a leaf on a wind toward the bed. She was almost there when she caught sight of the dressing-table mirror. The bed and her parents and the stretch of carpet leading to the door were in the mirror, but there was no sign of her.
That snatched away the last of her sense of herself. She was shrinking like a picture on a television that had just been switched off, she was being dragged toward a pinpoint by the nothingness on the far side, and the smaller she grew, the less strength she had to resist. There was nothing to hold her, nothing to contradict the absence of herself the mirror was displaying with a cold glassy glare like ice that was fixing her absence forever.
Then her parents stirred again. They moved apart and lay on their backs, their faces slack. They looked even more helpless, each of them alone in sleep. At least the dismay that seized her managed to hold her there in the room. She turned away from the mirror, blotted it out of her awareness, and tried to feel as if she were leaning rather than sinking bodilessly towards the bed. She was so close to her mother that she could see how dry her slightly parted lips were, how they trembled minutely with each breath. She could see veins sketched on her mother’s forehead, under the skin that looked fragile and worn. Behind the long eyelashes her mother’s eyelids looked bruised, and uneasy with a dream; a drop of moisture glistened at one corner. Rowan was suddenly desperate to hold her and be held. Without thinking, she stooped to kiss her mother’s lips.
She jerked back just in time from the imminent sensation of falling and being unable to stop. Why was there so little of her, when Vicky had seemed so real? She mustn’t give in to the sense of being outcast and bodiless. All she had to do was make her parents realise she was here, because then they must know that the creature they had taken for her was something else.
But when she tried to call out to them she couldn’t even hear herself. She tried to feel that she was standing by the bed instead of hovering beside it, in case that allowed her to reach out and touch them, but that didn’t work; she wasn’t even able to judge how close she was, since she couldn’t see herself reaching. If she touched her mother, she might sink into her. The idea seemed warm and comforting, almost unbearably so, but it wouldn’t keep her mother safe. She tried to scream at her parents and her helplessness instead, scream at her parents to waken while she was still there.
Trying to scream only made her more aware that she no longer had a mouth. She could feel the mirror reaching coldly for her, the nothingness beyond the mirror waiting to draw her in. She tried to hold onto the sight of the lit room that used to be her refuge. She remembered snuggling between her parents under the blankets and murmuring to her mother, who was always the one who wakened. “It’s me, mummy. Can I stay with you tonight? It’s too dark out there. I’m frightened.” The memory was achingly intense, so intense that she could hear her own voice in her mind, the voice she hadn’t heard for so long. “It’s me, mummy. It’s only me.”
And then her mother’s face turned towards her, eyes flickering within the eyelids as if they were fighting to see. Her mother’s hands struggled out of the blankets and groped clumsily toward her. “Oh, Rowan, it
is
you, isn’t it?” she said in a voice clogged by sleep. “I thought I was going mad.”
Chapter Thirty-One
On Boxing Day the family went for a stroll by the sea. The day was piercingly clear. The dunes were still pockmarked by yesterday’s sleet, but the sea had drawn into itself all the pools the downpour had left on the beach. A few distant ships glinted beneath the cold bright blue sky from which seagulls fell like shards of ice. The men and Rowan led the way along the concrete promenade while Edith held onto Alison’s arm and chatted about old times, the days she and Keith had spent across the river at New Brighton when there had been a pier and a fairground and a tower, when there had been a ferry to bring them back to Liverpool and the overhead railway along the dock road. “Happy days,” she sighed, and Alison nodded and murmured agreement and stared ahead, barely hearing her mother. Perhaps she had been right in the first place about herself, perhaps she’d told herself the truth last night on the edge of wakefulness. Perhaps she really was going mad.
She gazed at Rowan’s back and winced from her own feelings. The child was wearing the long dress Keith and Edith had bought her for Christmas, its hem swaying beneath her duffel coat. She was holding her father’s hand and Keith’s, and strolling gracefully. The combination of elegance and childishness made Alison’s eyes moist, but did she deserve to feel that way? Suppose Derek had been right, and there was madness in the family, surfacing in her because she hadn’t been able to cope with her fears while Rowan was lost in Wales? Perhaps she had been so riddled with the fear that Rowan might be dead that she was secretly unable to believe she had come back—but there could be no excuse for her suspecting her own child.
Yet she couldn’t dismiss what she’d thought she had heard last night and what she had certainly seen. She’d heard Rowan calling her, sounding more like Rowan than she had for months, and the child had seemed so close that Alison had wondered why she was unable to touch her. She’d felt a surge of love for Rowan as intense as when Rowan had first been laid in her arms, and she’d murmured to her, welcoming her back as she blinked away sleep and opened her eyes. She had been so convinced she would see Rowan that the deserted room had looked like a dream from which she had yet to waken. The room had been real enough to make her eyes sting as she stared at it, and she’d been telling herself sadly that Rowan’s voice had been the dream when she’d heard it again. “It’s me, mummy. It’s me.”