Rowan by Flo (book recommendations website TXT) 📖

It was parked a lot further away than was necessary. We passed several empty spaces along the road outside the school, one of which appeared to have a bloodstain in it, which took my mind off my father for a moment, but once we were past the majority of the students, I had to ask.
"Is he dead?"
Gandalf sighed and stopped walking. "He got a lot worse this morning. I've been with him in the hospital all day. I probably should have called you but it was your first day and everything, plus the doctors said he’ll probably have a couple more days left, so there was no immediate danger."
I took a moment to digest his words. "So, are we going to the hospital now, then?" It might sound bad but I didn't really want to see him, not that I could say that to my uncle.
"Yeah. I've brought my laptop, so if you've got any homework you can do it while we’re there. I'm going to stay overnight, but if you want, I can drive you home after a few hours." he said, and with a rush of embarrassment I realised there were fresh tears in his eyes, the brown of his irises standing out more than usual against the bloodshot whites. I looked away, only for my discomfort to be replaced by trepidation. Lydia was sitting hunched over on a wall twenty feet away, staring at the ground, and I could see in her expression that she had heard everything. This was the last sort of thing I wanted to get around. She looked up suddenly, apparently aware that I'd been staring again, and met my gaze, with a look just as intense as the one she'd been giving the ground, though slightly different- more of a "don't worry, I'm not going to spread this around the year" sort of look than a "deary me, this is bloody awkward" sort of look. You know the one. I gave her an almost imperceptible nod of gratitude in return, and she looked away.

“Rowan…” my father croaked. I looked up at him. Well, I moved my eyes up from the laptop’s screen in order to look at him, but technically I was looking down at him. I raised my eyes? Anyway.
“What?” I asked. Uncle Gandalf had just left the room to speak with a doctor and find some coffee.
“I’m…sorry…for everything.” His eyes were barely open, his skin cracked, pale even against the sterile white and blue of the room. He was running a fever, but his kidneys were failing and he was too dehydrated to sweat. Before his illness, he had been proud that he still had a full head of hair at his age. Now there were only a few wispy grey tufts left on his scalp.
I didn’t know what to say. What do

you say to a dying man? And when that man is your father?
“And…your…mother…” he breathed, “tell her…I’m sorry…for what…I…did…” his eyelids fluttered closed.
“She’s dead, dad.” Our family secret. Skeleton in the closet, if you’re into clichés.
“I know…but…” he fell silent. I looked up and watched him for signs of life, relieved to see the slight rise and fall of his ribcage as he breathed raggedly. A frown creased his skeletal face and he spoke again. “They’ll be here…soon…I can…see them…” he flinched, as if he really could see something I couldn’t. One of the nurses told me earlier that there might be hallucinations. “Don’t let…don’t let them…don’t let them get you!”
I still have no idea where he found the strength to shout his final words.
One of the machines started screaming.
“Don’t let them get you!”
A doctor ran in yelling for a crash team.
“Rowan!”
The nurse I saw earlier ushered me from the room.
And is it wrong that I felt like he’d got what he deserved? Because the skeleton in our closet isn’t just that my mother died.
My father killed her.

It was in the middle of a shouting match with my dad that it all came out. She told him she’d been seeing another man, and she wanted a divorce. She ran upstairs, grabbed the cat, and just left. For the next two weeks I thought he’d lost his mind, but to be honest, I was happy she was gone. I had known something was up for months- I’d seen the texts, caught glimpses of emails over her shoulder, noticed her turning the wrong way down the road when she was supposedly on her way to work. Looking back, she was pretty pathetic at hiding it- part of the excitement I guess. So at least when she wasn’t around I didn’t have to feel the mixture of guilt and revulsion that came every time I saw her.
Then she came back to get the rest of her stuff. I heard knocking, answered the door, and took a step back from the resultant cloud of perfume. She ruffled my hair in an attempt to seem like she gave a damn, and I took another step back, trying to close the door on her, but she pushed through before I managed it. The door slammed shut behind her, and my dad appeared at the top of the stairs, preparing to complain about the commotion. The look in his eyes when he caught sight of her was...well, unsettling. He muttered something about going to make tea as he shuffled down the stairs into the kitchen.
“He hasn’t got rid of my things, has he?” she asked.
“Going straight in with the materialism? I should be used to it by now, I s’pose. So how much is the new guy paying you?” I scowled as I moved to block the staircase, finally feeling the anger I had been repressing.
“Very cute. Get out of my way.” she answered, her faded Californian accent stronger than usual.
“Get out of our house. I’m not letting you past. Your crap’s all gone to the charity shop, anyway.”
“Sweetie-” her eyes flashed.
“Piss. Off.” I spat, angrier than I’d been in my life.
“I’m sorry, but it has to be this way. You’d do the same if you were in my shoes. I know you’re lying, sweetie, now let me get the rest of my things.” Speaking dangerously patronisingly, she placed a hand on my shoulder, at which point I started to shake with fury. My hands clenched into fists, nails cutting welts in my palms.
“Get out.” I growled, my mind blank with rage. She started to push me with the apparently caring hand that rested on my shoulder. I pulled back my fist, about to strike, when she cried out. Something hot splashed onto my cheek, scalding me, and I winced a little. Through watering eyes, I saw my father standing behind her, pulling her head back by her fashionably styled, fashionably copper hair, emptying the remains of a freshly boiled kettle onto her blistering face.
“Dad, what the fuck?!” I screamed. No matter how strong the animosity I felt towards my mother was, I still didn’t want anything like that to happen to her. I leapt towards him as he brought the now empty kettle down on her head, and ended up catching the full force of the blow on the top of my own head, staggering me. He threw me out of the way, and I think I must have passed out for a while, because next thing I knew my mother was curled in a ball, and he had replaced the kettle with an axe, and he was bringing it down again and again, blood splashing all over the walls, the carpet, the ceiling, the furniture. The neighbours heard her gurgling screams and called the police, but I was unconscious again before they arrived.
I woke up in a hospital two days later- the same hospital my father had just died in. The police came to interview me on the murder, but I told them I couldn’t remember what had happened. He might have been a psychopath, but I wasn’t capable of selling him out. They told me his version of events: one of our particularly unpleasant neighbours came around asking for money, went crazy, and attacked my mum when she didn’t give it to him. I got in the way, and he knocked me out. My dad had to kill him with the same axe that finished off my mother, who had died of her wounds in the next bed half an hour before I woke up. I don’t know how my dad managed to frame the guy. I didn’t ask, because I really didn’t want to know, and that was that. We never brought it up again.

I slouched back into a chair, rubbing the scar left by the kettle as I thought back to that time. It was two inches long and a jagged centimetre thick, but fortunately my Mohawk covered the bald patch as long as I didn’t shave the sides.
“What happened? What happened?” Gandalf dropped his coffee, staring through the glass sections of the door.
I somehow reacted quickly enough to catch the coffee, only a little of it sloshing onto the floor. Setting it down on a nearby table, I opened my mouth, trying to talk, but no words would come out. His face paled and he brushed past me into the room, where they were covering my father with a sheet. It was half an hour before he came out again, thankfully not in tears, though he was blowing his nose. I myself hadn’t cried, though my Mohawk had drooped a little.
“Are you alright?” he asked me. I nodded, and he continued, “They’re offering you counselling, if you want to take it.”
I shook my head, and he sat down next to me. There was silence for a moment, as we watched a haggard, blood spattered young doctor run past. I could hear a patient moaning in agony in the direction he had just run from, and wondered if he had screwed up really badly.
“You’re how old, seventeen now?” Gandalf asked.
“In December.”
“Ah, sorry. Well, you have a choice. Either you can stay with me for now, or you can stay at your house and Ellen will move in with you. I think the plan was for her to inherit the house when Rhys passed, given her financial situation.” he said.
“Can I stay with you? She’s a bit…y’know…” Ellen was my aunt on my mother’s side. She had an odd combination of a victim mentality and a superiority complex which resulted in some pretty bad anger issues, but that wasn’t why I wanted to stay with Gandalf instead. I never liked living in that house after what happened, and there was no way I intended to move back there, if it could be at all helped.
“Of course. And you won’t have to move schools yet again, which is a bonus.” he smiled, though it looked painful.
“Thanks...”
“We should get home.” he glanced at his watch. “Wow, its three in the morning. If you want to take the day off school-”
“No. Last thing I need is more time to dwell on it.”
“Let’s get out of here then.” he sighed. We took another few minutes to thank the medical staff, most of whom threw pitying glances my way, but I felt like a huge load had been taken off my shoulders. Don’t get me wrong- inside, I was barely holding together. But it finally felt like the whole business with the murder was over. For the first time in almost three years, I could relax. The secrets were dead, and in a week’s time, they’d be buried.
We waited for the lift for ten minutes before we decided it definitely wasn’t going to arrive, and took the stairs down to the ground floor. I noticed