Runaways

by Rachel Sawden

  When our family was whole they were so full of life, even Audrey and I could barely keep up with them. My father had worked his way up the government department while studying capoeira three times a week while my mother ran the PTA at our school and volunteered at an animal shelter. But when we received The Call, he never went back to capoeira, and my mother resigned from the PTA. Since that day, it seemed like the life had been sucked out of them, and they were operating as shells of their former selves. My father had always talked of taking the family to Brazil one day, but after his last international flight — the flight to bring home Audrey’s body from Bolivia — South America was never spoken of again.

  My mother seemed to leap from the loveseat and ran towards me, arms open, while my father walked behind her. I dropped my daypack, and she hugged and kissed me as if I were a soldier returning from war, covering my face in red lip prints. Once she finally let go, my father hugged me as if he thought he would never hug me again.

  Mom wiped her tears. “We’ve missed you so much.” She clutched my hands in hers and stretched my arms out wide so she could get a good look at me. “You look like such a traveler.”

  And it was true. I wore purple parachute pants, a stained tank top, ratty flip-flops, and forearms covered with bangles and bracelets. It was an outfit I wouldn’t have been caught dead in months ago, but I had never felt more like myself.

  “Let’s get you settled in,” Dad said, picking up my daypack.

  My mother hooked her arm in my elbow, and we followed him through the marble foyer and into the elevator. In the elevator, she let me go and joined my father, both facing me with wide eyes and wide smiles. I was grateful that they had each other. They had been together since their first days of university and were still as in love as they were then. When I saw their hands clasped like newlyweds, I realized that perhaps my desire to marry Adam was rooted in my desire to have a relationship as strong as theirs.

  When the elevator opened, they led me down the hallway and into a room far too spacious for just me. Windows as tall as me overlooked the city, a cloud-soft double bed was pushed against a decorative wood paneled wall, and the floors were covered in carpet that squished under my toes. A pang of guilt pinched me — they must have spent a small fortune on this trip.

  “We didn’t have to stay here, I sent you a list of budget hotels,” I said, setting my backpack down on a cornflower yellow couch.

  “Darling, this is the first vacation we’ve taken since Audrey died. We wanted to treat ourselves,” my father said, kissing me on the top of my head.

  I stood staring at them. My mother’s smile hadn’t cracked since our hug in reception, and my father seemed to be able to breathe deeper. The energy about them had shifted drastically from the last time I saw them.

  “We’ll let you get settled in,” my father said, glancing at his watch. “Ready to explore in twenty minutes?”

  He was practically bouncing, and a light behind his eyes that had been extinguished three years ago flickered.

  “Sure,” I said, pulling them both in for a group hug.

  With that, our long overdue family vacation could begin.

  ***

  Being at the bottom of the world, seasons had been turned upside down, so while I had always associated April with spring, I had to remember that it was fall. And I wasn’t in hot and humid Southeast Asia anymore. When we left the hotel, the sun ducked behind a blanket of clouds, and the cool air nipped at me, forcing me to pull a sweater over my bare arms. Sydney was a clean city, free of heartbreaking poverty and pollution that had plagued all of the other cities Lana, Jade, and I had experienced on our journey. Though I was excited to see a new country, as we walked through the big city streets towards the harbour, I couldn’t shake the discontent bubbling under me. It was all too familiar: the western faces, the recognizable languages, business suits, high-rise offices. I had always fancied myself to be a city girl, but now I realized that it was because I didn’t know anything else. After these months spending time in warmth and nature, I felt as if I had found myself, I felt as if I were living my truth. If I didn’t win the competition, I wasn’t sure how I could go back to city life.

  Audrey had always wanted to visit the Sydney Harbour, and as we stood on the walking path the greasy smells of hotdogs and French fries from food vendors wafted through the air while tourists milled about. Fighting the flat lighting, I turned my camera on the street performers juggling and wobbling on unicycles. I laughed as I looked back on the playback as my mother accidentally photobombed a set, grimacing at a sword swallower. Even though only three of us held hands watching a painted Aboriginal man playing a longer-than-I-was didgeridoo, a warm breeze blew over us, and I had a strange feeling, a feeling like I had in the desert in Pushkar, that our family was complete.

  As we walked, I told my parents of our adventurous stories, editing out the parts that would make them try and convince me to go home early with them. They loved my tales of the cycle trip to Luang Prabang, gasped at the story of how Jade ran off and Lana’s failed attempt at keeping the business afloat, and were saddened to hear that Adam and I had broken up.

  “You’re both young. You’ll both find who you’re supposed to be with eventually,” my mom said while my father patted me on the shoulder.

  I nodded, but I still couldn’t shake my worries that I would be alone forever.

  Taking a moment to sit and drink in the surroundings, we settled onto an empty bench with a clear view of the famed Opera House, its white curved shells rising from the rippling water like scales on a giant sea serpent.

  “You weren’t planning on going to Singapore, were you?” my mother asked with that gossip glint in her eyes. “I ran into Miles Cooper’s mother, you remember him, right?”

  “Yup. I do,” I said, raising my camera to capture the Opera House. I framed the image so the architectural wonder filled the top half of the image, and its reflection on the undulating water filled the bottom half.

  “Well, she said that he was moving to Singapore and might do some traveling in the area. I mean, I know it’s silly to think, the continent is so big.”

  To tell or not to tell?

  “Oddly enough, I actually did run into him.”

  “I hope nothing happened between you two.”

  “Nope, nothing.” I turned, met her eyes, and forced a slight smile to hide my clenching jaw. “Just ran into him a couple of times.”

  Her eyes narrowed, seemingly to debate whether or not to call bullshit. She could always tell when I wasn’t telling the whole truth. Her mouth opened but closed again when she seemed to remember my father’s presence, though he was more interested in catching up with his work emails on his Blackberry.

  “Did he tell you about his engagement?” she asked in a hushed tone.

  Engagement?

  “Not exactly. He did tell me that Celia left him when his father ordered him to open the Singapore office.”

  “What a liar,” she said shaking her head.

  “Liar?” I blurted the word out, hoping that she couldn’t read my mind.

  “Well, through the Toronto grapevine, I heard that he was cheating on Celia. He had some girl in New York he would see,” she raised her hands to make air-quotes, “on ‘business trips.’ Celia became suspicious, hacked into his email account, and found months of correspondence. And the emails had nothing to do with the contracts.”

  My mouth dropped open. I had lapped up everything he had said about what running into each other had meant to him, and almost abandoned my trip to be with him in Singapore. Where, no doubt, he would have done the same thing to me as he had done to her. Even in university, he always had a reputation of being a ladies’ man, but I, along with, so many other girls, gave him the benefit of the doubt. It was like when a waiter brings you a hot plate and tells you not to touch it, but you want to touch it anyways, and you do and you burn your finger. But, in my case, I never learned the first time.

  “So rumour h
as it,” she continued, “when the news broke, his parents were furious, naturally. There was a lot of damage control to be done, as Celia’s family are major clients. To try and protect the business, they cut Miles off, shipped him off to Asia, telling him that he has to make up for the damage he did by opening the office there.”

  “It is rather ironic given his father’s fondness for…” Now it was my father’s turn to make air-quotes, “…’Email correspondence’ with other women. I, for one, am glad you have nothing to do with that boy. I always knew he was trouble.”

  I leaned back against the bench, stunned as I let my parents’ words sink in. It all made sense, and was even angrier with him than before. Before I could forgive him for being a pathetic man-child, but I could not forgive him for being a lying and manipulative man-child.

  ***

  The next morning, we set out to ogle sea creatures at the Sydney Aquarium. We wandered from tank to tank pointing out fish we remembered from Finding Nemo, but my parents seemed to walk a little slower today. I thought perhaps it was because their sleep schedule was off or perhaps there was no way to maintain the level of excitement they displayed yesterday, but I knew it had more to do with the date. There were two months that made my parents walk a little slower: December and April. Respectively, they were the month of Audrey’s death and her birth.

  I was still going to hatch the plan I thought up that morning at Angkor Wat, but I needed to tell them the reason I asked them to bring her ashes with them. And I had to be careful with bringing it up.

  Once my mother requested we rest for a while, we returned to the hotel. After ensuring that they just wanted a break from walking and were not quite ready to nap yet, I asked for their assistance in choosing images to submit to the Awesome Adventures competition. The deadline closed in mere hours. I sat at the desk in their room with my laptop in front of me, my parents peering over my shoulder, and Audrey’s urn sitting on the desk. The entire family was present as I flicked through all of my edited images.

  “These are lovely. You have a talent, darling,” my mother said as I narrowed down my favourite twenty shots to ten.

  I flip-flopped back and forth, moving images from my yes pile to my maybe pile, and back. After Googling the images of the winner and runners-up of the past years, it seemed there was no rhyme or reason as to why they were chosen. They varied between portraits, to architecture, landscape, wildlife, underwater, and macro. Digitally stalking the winner of the previous year once more, I noticed that he had a particular style. Just like Steve McCurry, his artistic voice sung in well-defined range throughout his body of work. As I stared at my own images, I remembered that I wasn’t Steve McCurry, nor would I ever be. I was Harper Rodrigues, the one and only. Rather than emulating another artist, or trying to figure out what the judges wanted, I thought it best to showcase the work that spoke to me. The work that I saw myself in.

  And so, I consulted with my Facebook page, Flickr portfolio, and blog posts to see which style of images had the most likes and views. Unfortunately, since the entries had to be previously unpublished, I couldn’t actively seek out confirmation from the masses. It seemed that the images where I captured the unspoken connections between people, those loving moments, captured in time, garnered the greatest response.

  Beginning my top three with my parents’ help, I chose the image of the frustrated fisherman teaching his son to cast a net in the river in Vang Vieng. It would also count as a landscape shot, as behind the pair, across the brilliant green rice-fields stood the towering limestone cliffs. Next to enter my final pile was a shot of a mother and daughter in a rowboat in Ha Long Bay. They both sat amongst a pile of fruit seemingly painted by all of the colours of the rainbow. The mother held an oar in each hand and leaned forward beaming with pride at the child, barely old enough to begin school, counting coins and notes in her tiny hands.

  Lastly, we chose an image of the sisters who sold water at the base of Death Mountain, the bold elder kissing and squeezing her bashful younger sister. I had enough of them to make a flipbook, but I had edited the image that captured the moment where smiles were widest, and you could feel their pure unadulterated joy just by looking at them. That image was declared the favorite and in unison my parents gave what sounded like a nostalgic sigh as they looked at the image of two sisters who shared a love that could traverse time, culture, geographical boundaries, and even death.

  These images spoke to me, and in them I saw what was most important in the world.

  I struggled to upload the images and fill out the entry form as my fingers trembled. Pushing out the worrying thought that my images may be stolen, and I was consenting to being used again, I stared at the “submit” button, covered my eye with my left hand, peeked through my fingers, and pressed it. Relief and fear washed over me as I was redirected to the confirmation screen. It was over. It was all done. The culmination of my work and nearly all my life savings. They would announce winners in one month. All I had to do was wait.

  Breathing out the breath I had been holding in, I looked up and said to the Universe, “Please, please let me win.”

  I pushed the chair back, rose to my feet, stretched my arms above my head and shook out my jitters. My mother smiled as she sat up in bed, remote in hand, flicking through the television channels.

  “So what are you going to do when you get back home?” Dad asked, folding his shirts on the bed.

  Et tu Brutus? Why did no one ever listen to me?

  “I’m hoping to win this. Keep traveling, keep taking photos.” I turned to face him. “Can’t we just leave it at that?”

  He piled up four shirts in varying shades of blue and said, “You have to start thinking about getting a job. Darling, you must be realistic.”

  Realistic? I did everything I was supposed to do, business degree instead of art school, real job instead of giving my passion a chance, a relationship with a loving and stable guy, and it all gave me depression, guilt, and a severance package.

  “Why is it so unrealistic to want to live my life doing what I love, regardless of how stable it is? I know what I want to do is unconventional, but why can’t you just support me?”

  “Darling, you’re an adult,” he said putting his hand on my shoulder. “It’s time to start acting like one.”

  I shook his hand off. “One minute I’m your little girl, next I’m an adult, which is it?”

  At the end of a long breath he said, “Your sister…”

  “Is dead,” I blurted out.

  “Harper!” Mom yelled.

  I didn’t mean it to sound so blunt and insensitive, but I knew things about what Audrey wanted to do with her life that they never knew about.

  “Audrey is never coming home.”

  Guilt rippled through me as Mom broke down in tears. Clutching the remote control to her chest she shuddered and sputtered a cry only those who grieve for their children know.

  “You’re upsetting your mother.” His voice was stern and glare harsh. “And me.”

  I pressed my hands to my face. It was all coming out so wrong. I wanted to help. But maybe sometimes like when a broken nose heals badly, it needs to be broken, reset and only then it can heal properly. I padded across the soft carpet and sat on the bed next to her.

  “I’m not trying to be cruel,” I said, placing my hand on her thigh. “But you guys need to let her go so you can live your lives. Our house is too big for just the two of you. If you sold it, you’d have money to retire with. But you won’t sell the house because you can’t let go of your old life when she was in it.”

  Dad held his hands on his hips and huffed, “You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child.”

  “No, I don’t, and I hope I never will, but I do know what it’s like to lose my sister. Audrey meant everything to me, too. But she lived a stable life dreaming of more and never got to do any of it.”

  Mom put her hand on mine and began wailing. I knew I had to keep talking. I had to finish what I wanted to s
ay.

  “Mom, I don’t mean to upset you I really don’t, but I need you to know, you both to know, that she is here. Not in a physical sense, but she’s here,” I waved my arms around me as if someone were going to take them from me. “She’s everywhere. Always. Do you remember on the first anniversary of Audrey’s death how you got a strange urge to call me?” She sputtered and nodded. “Mom, I was about to do something very bad to myself, and I know in my heart that Audrey contacted you and told you to call me. I know what I’m about to say will sound even crazier, but I spoke to her when I was in India.”

  “You what?!” both of them said in unison.

  I looked up at Dad. “Please don’t freak out, but I kind of drank this drink in the desert and then I talked to God, who took the form of a mountain and then Audrey spoke to me as a voice in my head.”

  That, too, didn’t come out quite like I had hoped.

  He gave me that look I knew too well from when I broke his golf clubs. “You… did drugs?”

  I refused to change the topic. “And do you know what she said to me? ‘I’m with you always.’” His arched eyebrow remained in place. “Don’t you see? She’s not coming home. She’s not even in that urn. She’s in here.” I drummed my palm on my chest above where I thought my heart was. “She exists, but we have to change what we think her existence means.”

  Thankfully my mother had stopped crying, and my father stopped looking at me as if he were going to ground me.