Oakwing Read online

  For Miriam and Rose

  PROLOGUE

  They were finally inside the park.

  Rowan’s mom paused, closed her eyes, and took a big, grateful breath in. She smiled for the first time that day, standing on the edge of that great, green sea in the heart of the city. An hour on the top deck of a big red London bus had brought them here, with Rowan pressing her face up against the window, arms outstretched, pretending to fly through the streets. Rowan’s little sister, Willow, had sat curled up in their mother’s lap.

  Now they swung their hands together as they strolled toward their favorite spot in Kensington Gardens—an ancient tree trunk that had been carved with all manner of fairies, birds, and fantastical creatures, and painted in glorious colors. The Elfin Oak.

  “Pick one, Rowan,” whispered her mom as they drew close.

  Rowan circled the oak slowly, peering in through the black iron railings that protected the tree. Her eyes passed over the little blue mermaid hugging the bark, the wise orange owl standing watch, the green elf with his head poking out of a hollow. Finally she pointed at a little blue fairy with tiny shells for wings.

  “Perfect,” said her mom.

  Then, as always, the three of them sat on the bench beneath the little clock tower, and Rowan’s mom wove a fabulous tale about the character Rowan had chosen. It wasn’t from any book that Rowan knew. The story just seemed to spill out as though it had been hiding inside her mom all along, waiting for the right moment to escape. Rowan craned her head back. There was a saying engraved beneath the clock above their heads. Time Flies. And it always did.

  “Ice cream!” cried Willow suddenly as she wriggled off the bench.

  “But the story isn’t finished!” protested Rowan.

  “Then there’ll be some left for tomorrow,” her mom said, smiling.

  Rowan slumped back and folded her arms. Willow was always interrupting the story at the best part.

  “Shall we get a boat?” said her mom. Rowan unpeeled herself from the bench. She was secretly quite excited about the boats, but she wasn’t going to show it.

  “Bobbily boats!” cried Willow, doing an eager jumping up and down sort of dance.

  They bought three strawberry ice creams by the Serpentine Lake, and were about to climb into one of the little wooden rowboats tied up by the shore, when dark clouds gathered in the sky. A breeze started whipping little waves across the water. Rowan’s mom closed her eyes and turned her face up to the rain.

  “Come, quickly!” she said, her eyes snapping open again as she tugged them away from the lake.

  “Bobbily boats?” wailed Willow as she looked behind her.

  They were looking around for somewhere to shelter from the rain, when Rowan noticed a huge tree nestled on a sloping bank. It had a great branch curving over right at the top that seemed to hold the rest of it up. It was almost like the tree was upside down. The branches and leaves all cascaded down from the top, creating enormous sheets of foliage that made it look like a giant teepee.

  “Tree crying!” said Willow.

  “You’re right, little one,” said their mom. “It’s a weeping beech.”

  The rain was falling in big droplets now, splattering the dusty ground. Rowan’s mom pulled back one of the branches like a curtain and ushered the girls inside. They sat, safe and dry, with their backs against the tree trunk as the summer shower fell all around them.

  Now Rowan could concentrate on her ice cream. Carefully licking all around it, she pounced on any stray drops that slid down the cone. Willow slowly licked one side of her ice cream, creating a dangerous overhang that was beginning to make Rowan nervous.

  “Breathe in, you two. Can you smell it?” Rowan’s mom said as she pulled them both close to her.

  Willow took a big sniff and got a dollop of pink goo on her nose. Rowan took a deep breath in, but she had no idea what her mom was talking about.

  “It’s the most beautiful scent in the world. On a summer’s day, when it begins to rain. You catch it only for a moment. But when you do? It’s better than the biggest bunch of flowers.”

  Rowan looked over at her mom. She was gazing beyond the branches, smiling as if she were remembering something. Rowan looked closer. Her mom’s eyelashes were dewed with tears. She glanced at Rowan and shook the sadness out of her face.

  “The rain’s a bit lighter now. We could make a dash for the bus stop,” she said, dusting herself off.

  “Bobbily boats!” wailed Willow as her scoop of ice cream finally fell off its cone.

  “Next time, Willow. Are you coming, Rowan?”

  Rowan hung back. The afternoon had been perfect despite the rain, and she couldn’t understand why her mom had become upset. She was about to ask, when . . .

  “We can come back, Rowan. We can always come back,” her mom said quickly. But they never did. That was the last time Rowan saw her mom in the park.

  Because the next day was the day that Rowan’s mom disappeared.

  * Chapter One *

  HAPPY TUESDAY

  Rowan always got up before everyone else. She’d sit with a glass of apple juice and gaze out the window, high above the noise of London in their block of apartments, watching the orangey morning light bouncing off the glassy skyscrapers in the distance. She liked to have a little time to herself before the day began, time when she didn’t have to worry about the others. Now that Mom wasn’t around, looking after the family was up to her.

  Dad wasn’t much help. He didn’t do much of anything anymore. He hadn’t done a lot of smiling in the seven years since Mom had vanished. He’d done a lot of sitting. A lot of staring at the TV, even when it wasn’t on. He went to his job during the day, though Rowan didn’t really understand what it was. Something at the Council that involved computers and talking to as few people as possible. All she knew was that he wasn’t really like other dads. Her friends’ dads took her friends swimming, or for bike rides in the park, or walked them to school. She would have been happy with any one of those. But Rowan still couldn’t swim or ride a bike, because her dad had never taught her. She had to get herself and her sister ready for school every morning. Dad could barely look after himself, let alone his two daughters.

  Rowan heard alarm clocks ringing in other parts of the apartment, and the banging and thumping sounds of two people not really wanting to get up. She took a deep breath and headed into the kitchen to start getting the breakfast ready. She opened a cupboard to pull out a box of cereal, but her hand clutched at thin air. “Oh, Dad,” she sighed. She closed the door, and noticed the calendar hanging on the wall. Her eyes widened as she saw the date. In one quick movement she grabbed the calendar off the wall and stuffed it beneath a pile of dish towels.

  Willow yawned her way into the room, making Rowan jump. Her little sister was wearing pink from head to toe, and had a pair of gauze fairy wings attached to her back with elastic.

  “Did you sleep in those?” Rowan asked.

  “So. Hungry,” Willow said, ignoring the question.

  She flopped down into a chair, staring at the space in front of her, as if she were waiting for a bowl of cereal to magically appear. Instead Rowan slid a plate with two pieces of limp, dry toast in front of her.

  “Dad forgot to go to the shops on the way back from work,” said Rowan.

  Willow sighed.

  “Happy Tuesday,” said Rowan.

  Something banged against the hall wall. “Ouch!”

  Rowan and Willow looked toward the kitchen door as their dad stumbled in, rubbing his head. He looked like a schoolboy who didn’t know how to dress himself. He’d knotted his tie, but it was yanked off center. One side of his collar was up, the other down, and a lock of his hair was stubbornly sticking up at an angle. He had at least shaved, but he’d cut himse
lf a number of times and had little pieces of toilet paper stuck to his face to stop the bleeding. Rowan nodded over at Willow, who immediately put down her toast, wet some paper towel under the tap, and climbed onto a chair. She reached up and plastered her dad’s unruly lock of hair down. Meanwhile Rowan straightened his tie and arranged his collar, before rattling a plate of toast onto the table in front of him.

  Without a word their dad sat down and began eating. Then he froze with a piece of toast in midair as he stared at the wall. “Something’s missing,” he said.

  “No, no, I don’t think so,” said Rowan, managing to catch Willow’s eye and nodding urgently toward the stack of towels.

  “It’s the calendar!” Willow piped up. “Rowan put it under the dish towels!”

  Rowan rolled her eyes. Willow whipped out the calendar and handed it over to their dad.

  “Nooo, Willow,” Rowan hissed at her sister. “Put. It. Back!”

  Rowan tried to wrestle the calendar away, but she was too late.

  “Oh,” said Dad as his finger traced across the day’s date. The twelfth of August. The day when Mom had disappeared seven years before. The day she’d decided to go to Hyde Park on her own. The day she never came back.

  There was an awkward silence around the table. Dad made an odd face. Willow looked back and forth from Dad to Rowan. But neither of them said a word. Dad stared down at his toast.

  Rowan broke the silence. “It’s time to go, Willow.”

  Dad’s head jerked back up. “I thought school had finished for the summer?”

  “It has, Dad. You’re taking Willow to Gracie’s house on the way to work, remember?”

  “Oh. Yes. Of course.” Dad rubbed a hand over his face. “Come on, Willow, let’s get going.”

  He wrestled Willow and her wings into a shabby coat she was too big for and bustled her out of the kitchen toward the front door, with Rowan following. He stopped as if he had forgotten something, turning back to look at her. “What about you? What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” Rowan replied with a halfhearted smile. She was used to fending for herself. “I’ll find something.”

  “Right. That’s . . . good.”

  The silence grew between them. Then he stepped out into the corridor.

  Dad closed the door behind him as Willow’s shouts echoed down the stairwell. “See ya, Rowan Snowman!”

  “Bye-bye, Willow Pillow!” Rowan called after her.

  She turned back into the apartment. Their home suddenly seemed much bigger and quieter. A baby started crying a couple of floors away. Rowan looked at the clock. It was still only nine a.m. She wandered back into the living room and picked up a picture frame from the sideboard. It was a photograph of her mom in happier days, playing a violin in an orchestra. As she looked at the picture, Rowan could almost hear the music. How beautiful it was too. “It’s not just a violin,” her mom would tell Rowan. “It’s a machine for making your heart sing.” Once, the apartment had been filled with her mother’s music. The violin had been almost the only thing that could stop baby Willow from crying. Though sometimes the hair dryer would do the trick.

  Rowan looked more closely at the photo, her finger tracing across her mother’s neck, where a necklace seemed to be. It was hard to make out, but the wooden charm looked like a miniature tree. Rowan raised a hand to her own throat, pulling out a necklace from beneath her T-shirt—the charm was a wooden acorn.

  A thought suddenly occurred to Rowan. She strode into her dad’s bedroom. After climbing on top of a chair, she opened a cupboard above the unmade bed. She pulled out a few old rolls of Christmas wrapping paper, a pile of raggedy towels, and some shoeboxes with high-heeled shoes spilling out. Right at the back of the cupboard was a dusty black instrument case. She lifted it gently down, put it on the bed, and popped the locks to carefully open the lid. Nestled in the case’s velvet-lined interior lay her mother’s violin. Rowan gently lifted it out, as though she were cradling a newborn baby. She held the polished wooden instrument to her chin, then realized she didn’t have a bow. She scrambled back up onto the chair and, standing on tiptoes, saw that in the corner of the cupboard was another case. She stretched as hard as she could to reach for the box, and finally grasped it and pried it open to reveal . . . a long, wooden bow strung with horsehair.

  Rowan climbed back down. She held the violin to her chin and poised the bow above it. She closed her eyes and drew the bow across the violin’s strings. Screeech! This was not how she remembered it sounding. Rowan winced and tried again. The second time was even worse. Now it screamed even louder, like the foxes that sometimes woke her up at night. It was no use. Her shoulders sagged as she carefully set the violin back in its case and hid everything back in the cupboard. She worried what Dad might say if he knew she’d been in there.

  She padded back into the living room and slumped down in the chair that used to be her mom’s favorite. It was an old armchair that had seen far better days, and had belonged to Rowan’s grandfather. Dad had kept the chair just as it had been when their mom was with them. It didn’t face the television like the sofa and her dad’s chair, but looked out the window instead. Their block of apartments wasn’t the loveliest place in the world, with its cold concrete stairwells and peeling gray paint, but by far the best thing about it was the view. From high up in their tower, they could see all the way across London. Past the London Eye, over the great winding River Thames, through the ocean of brick and glass, and beyond to the little green desert islands of Hampstead Heath and Primrose Hill. Rowan’s mom had loved nature. She’d grown up in the country and had never stopped missing it. That was why Rowan and her sister were named after trees. When she couldn’t visit the parks, Mom would sit here and gaze at them from afar.

  As Rowan sat in her mom’s favorite chair, she realized what she needed to do. Today of all days.

  * Chapter Two *

  FALLING IN

  Rowan went to her wardrobe and picked out her favorite summer dress. It was the only white one that hadn’t gone a dirty pink color when her dad had mixed up the laundry by mistake. After locking the door behind her, Rowan pushed the button for the elevator. Nothing happened. As usual, it wasn’t working.

  She held her breath as she raced down the stairwell instead. She didn’t like to think what must have happened on the steps to make them smell like that, because no one ever seemed to clean them. As quick as she could, she was through the double doors and out into the noise and busyness of London. She slipped through the dark, echoing subways beneath the huge roundabout near their tower block, and on the other side jumped onto a big, red double-decker bus parked at a bus stop. Even though she was only eleven, the bus driver didn’t give her a second look. She scrambled up the stairs.

  There was hardly anyone on the bus, which meant she could sit in her favorite seat—right at the front of the top deck. She stuck her face really close to the glass, held out her arms, and imagined that she was flying through the streets of London, just like she’d done when she used to catch the bus with her mom.

  “Hey, No One!” came a voice. A jolt of alarm passed through Rowan. She dropped her arms and turned to see Jade, Jasmine, and Jessica from her class at school. They were sniggering to one another over a take-out box of chicken wings and fries.

  “I think her name’s Rowan,” said Jasmine.

  “That’s what I said!” Jade shrieked, and they all collapsed into a fit of giggles. If Rowan had made a list of the top twenty people she would least like to see her pretending to fly on the top deck of a bus, Jade, Jasmine, and Jessica would probably have come out as the top three. Rowan turned back, sunk down low into her seat, and wished the scratchy upholstery would swallow her up. A few fries hit the window in front of her, and smeared ketchup trails like tomatoey slugs as they slid down the glass. More loud snorting from the back of the bus. Rowan screwed her eyes tight shut in the hope that it would make her invisible. Surely the girls would get bored soon?

&nb
sp; Rowan’s hand went to her necklace. She held the acorn tight and stared straight ahead, refusing to cry. Then, just when she thought she couldn’t hold on any longer, the ting of the bell signaled the bus slowing down for the next stop. The girls all trooped past her.

  Rowan stared straight ahead as an empty, ketchup-smeared carton landed in her lap.

  “Wanna come shopping with us, No One?” screeched Jade. “You could buy yourself a new mom!”

  Cackling with delight, the girls clattered down the stairs.

  Rowan blew out a breath, like she’d been holding it in for the last twenty minutes. She gingerly removed the greasy carton from her lap and stared out the window. One small tear spilled from her eye, but she quickly wiped it away.

  Rowan got off the bus just before Marble Arch and turned left into Hyde Park, ignoring the street full of shiny white shops to her right. As she walked over the threshold of the park, she stopped, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, just like her mom used to. That made her feel much better. It was turning out to be a nice summer’s day. Even the men shouting at Speakers’ Corner couldn’t spoil the feeling of peace. She passed the statue of a boy blowing into a horn, who her mom had told her was called Peter Pan, and headed into Kensington Gardens to find the place she had come to visit.

  There, guarded by the shiny black railings, was the Elfin Oak. Rowan pressed her nose up against the metal and smiled. It was like seeing an old friend. She saw the little fairy with the two tiny shells for wings, the one she’d picked out that last day with her mom. If only Willow hadn’t interrupted the story. Now Rowan would never know how it ended. She looked over at the bench under the clock tower, where they used to sit, and saw another mother feeding a toddler some ice cream. She felt a lump come to her throat, and she knew she couldn’t stay any longer. She walked back through the park to the café by the Serpentine Lake. She bought herself a pink ice cream and went to find the weeping beech.

  When she got there, she was disappointed to find that a large iron railing had been erected around the beautiful garden that the tree stood in. She turned back round to face the lake. All she could see were happy tourist families seesawing around in their rowboats. That made her mind up for her. She looked around a little nervously, then climbed quickly over the fence, carefully holding her ice cream above her. She dashed across the open grass, through the drooping branches, and into the leafy, secret tent of the tree.