In Search of the Rose Notes (10 page)

Now that sentiment felt foolish. Seeing them next to each other in the booth, it struck me that they didn’t have much in common besides dark hair and dark eyes. And Toby seemed to have come out the more together of the two brothers. Maybe I’d feel differently if I saw Joe on a better day.

“Eyeball,” I said. “Listen.”

Toby tugged at his ear. “Been a while since I heard that name.”

“I’m really sorry about that one night. Remember, the night of the prom?”

Toby shook his head and took a long sip of beer. “Don’t do that, Nora. It’s been, what, ten years?”

“Nine.”

“Okay. Nine years. Sometimes time fixes some things so you don’t have to talk about them. Even if I didn’t really understand then, I understand now.”

“Okay. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“Don’t be sorry. You know what I think your problem is? You haven’t been back here at all. Maybe somewhere in your head you think the whole place has been in a holding pattern since you left. You think everybody’s still driving the same car, radio tuned to the same station… . You think I’m still
Eyeball.
And that I’ve still got blue balls from that night…”

I blushed again and stared at my beer.

“Laugh,” Toby said. “That was a joke. It’s all supposed to be funny now.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I know it is. I’m just a little slow.”

Toby shrugged and finished his beer.

“How are the Bankses taking all this?” I asked, changing the subject back to Rose. “How do you think they’ve been doing?”

“Up till now they haven’t changed much. Mr. Banks is kinda sad, but his gardening seems to make him happy since he retired. Mrs. Banks—she keeps busy. You know she sells cars for the Honda dealership now?”

“No, didn’t know that.”

“She’s their top salesperson. Not a big surprise. She’s good at that sort of thing. Schmoozing.”

I nodded. Back when the Bankses ran their restaurant, Mrs. Banks had played the role of bubbly restaurateur—visiting everyone’s table, making new people feel like regulars. The place was called Popovers, and it was slightly cuter and significantly more expensive than most of the old American-fare joints in town. The Bankses closed it about a year after Rose disappeared.

“You talk to them much?” I asked.

“Mr. Banks, sort of. I helped him with his Christmas lights. He’s kind of a quiet guy, though. And Mrs. Banks is never around much. Or out in the yard anyway. And I haven’t talked to them since this latest thing with Rose, if that’s what you’re asking. And I wouldn’t really know what to say if I did.”

“Yeah, I can imagine.”

Another guffaw came from the direction of Joe’s barstool. And again I thought of the later Elvis. Joe’s laugh reminded me of that recording where Elvis can’t get through the lines of “Love Me Tender”—the one where he keeps making jokes and laughing because he’s all high on something.

“Is he okay?” I asked Toby.

“Yeah,” Toby answered, shaking his head a little. “This has just been a hard couple of weeks for him. Broke up with his girlfriend, which is why he’s camping out at my house. And this thing with Rose… You know, they were friends—at least when they were little. It’s kind of rough.”

“And so soon after your dad…” I added sympathetically.

Toby nodded, then shifted his gaze slowly from his beer to me. I was startled by his eyes—I’d forgotten what it was like to look at them. Back when I was in high school and had trouble looking most people in the eye, I’d never had any trouble with him. Since one of his eyes was slightly askew, it was a softer stare than most, as though part of him wasn’t looking at you anyway. I had liked that about him.

“What’re you thinking about?” I said.

“Rose,” he said, a little sadly. “I had a little crush on her. I thought she was so cool.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Do you remember when I had to stay back in fourth grade?”

“Yeah.”

“It was partly because of my grandmother dying and partly ’cuz I missed so much school that year, when I got pneumonia, I don’t know if you remember. But let’s call a spade a spade—I was kind of a little bonehead, too.”

“Oh, now, let’s not—” I began, suddenly sounding like my mother. My mere geographical proximity to her was changing my speech patterns, apparently.

“But she didn’t make fun of me for it, like almost everyone else did.”

I was silent. I was probably included in the “almost everyone else.” At least I certainly never came to Toby’s defense.

“But I remember her and my brother talking to me about it, trying to make me feel better. She kept trying to make it sound like it was a good thing, going on and on like, ‘This is a harder thing to go through than those kids know anything about. And once you get through this year, you’ll have something they don’t have, something they don’t even understand—you’ll be better than them, tougher than them, because you’ll know you can get through it.’ I’m paraphrasing here. But she made it sound like staying back was like getting a badge of honor. And I bought it. Because I wasn’t very bright.”

“But it made you feel better, right?”

“Yeah,” Toby said. “Rose was actually full of shit sometimes.”

I nodded vaguely at this, even though I’d never really thought of Rose that way. But it sounded like she had a different side to her when she was around boys. I was so busy puzzling over this that I didn’t notice the waitress dropping our check on the table. Toby grabbed it before I could stop him.

Mystic Places:

October 1990

Mystic Places
was, in general, my favorite of Charlotte’s black books. I didn’t care all that much about Atlantis, but I liked the pictures in the other sections—of the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. Especially Stonehenge. The pyramids were impressive but somewhat explainable, thanks to social-studies lessons we’d had on Egypt in the fourth grade. Stonehenge and the Druids were another thing entirely. There was something forbidden about them, as they were never mentioned in school. I’d noticed that while the pyramids were always pictured drenched in desert sunlight, Stonehenge was almost always pictured under a darkening sky. And while illustrated Egyptians wore next to nothing, the Druids wore mysterious-looking hoods. I respected the Egyptians but feared and loved the Druids.

Charlotte didn’t really like
Mystic Places,
but she always let me take it out when we were planning our trip—the around-the-world trip we’d go on when we were eighteen, just after we graduated. Rose would be twenty-three, which was unfathomable, but she would come with us if she didn’t have kids by then. Charlotte had made a shadowy, stapled-together copy of a large world map on the library photocopier weeks before. Now it hung on her bulletin board with little red construction-paper flags on our planned destinations. Stonehenge was marked on my insistence. It worked well for us to go there, as there were a number of haunted castles Charlotte wanted to investigate in Ireland and Scotland.

As we finished marking all our British destinations, checking and rechecking their locations as best we could, Rose had grown bored, slipped
Alien Encounters
out of Charlotte’s stash, and started flipping through it.

“Could we go to the Bermuda Triangle?” Charlotte asked when we’d finished.

Rose gazed at the page in front of her, skimming.

“COULD WE GO TO THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE?” Charlotte repeated.

“Don’t be rude, Charlotte. I heard you the first time.”

“Then why didn’t you answer?”

“Because I was thinking.”

“No you weren’t. You were reading.”

Rose defiantly read a few more lines before giving Charlotte her full attention. I stared at the two-page photo in
Mystic Places
of “modern Druids” gathered at Stonehenge for the summer solstice. A few of them were dressed in white robes and head scarves. More of them had on regular clothes—sweaters and jackets. A few sat on top of the high horizontal slabs. I’d often wondered how one went about becoming a modern Druid, whether my American birth and Unitarian mother automatically excluded me as a candidate.

“I was
thinking,
” Rose said, “that that might have to be a separate trip. That’s in a totally different direction.”

“Well, I
know
that. I guess I was just asking if you’d wanna go there, too. Not just Europe and Egypt.”

“Sure,” Rose said with a shrug, lowering her gaze back to her book. “We could get bikinis and—”

“I don’t like bikinis,” I protested.

“We could spend a few days on the beach before sailing out to the triangle,” Rose continued, without looking up. “Get a little sunbathing in. Make a real nice trip of it. It doesn’t need to be all business.”

“My mom doesn’t even let me wear a bikini,” I explained. “She makes me get a one-piece.”

“You’ll be way older by then,” Rose said. “She can’t tell you what to do.”

I scoffed at this weird notion, this mystical time and place—age eighteen—in which I’d wear a bikini and my mother could not tell me what to do. Atlantis seemed more probable and more reachable.

Rose was reading again.

“Maybe we should do a separate map for that trip,” Charlotte said.

“Maybe,” Rose murmured. “I guess you’re going to need to photocopy some more maps.”

“How about just one big around-the-world trip?” I asked. “If we do, can we add Easter Island. I’ve been meaning to add Easter Island. I love those big stone statues on Easter Island, in that other book—”

“Jeez, Nora,” Charlotte said. “What’s with you and the megaliths anyway?”

Charlotte probably just said that to use a big word, so I ignored the question.

“Man,” Rose said, gaping at her book. “Your parents really let you read this stuff?”

“What?” Charlotte snatched at the corner of the book, tilting it down so we could both see it. “I haven’t read much of the alien one yet.”

On the page was a drawing of a very weird-looking child, its whole huge head visible under gossamer hair. It appeared to be wearing eyeliner.

“It’s a half-human, half-alien baby,” Rose said.

“How’d
that
happen?” I asked.

“Oh, think about it, Nora,” Charlotte said, rolling her eyes for Rose’s benefit. “How do you
think
it happened? That is
gross.
”

Rose didn’t react. I stared at the drawing. Aside from its head, the shape of its body wasn’t visible. It was clothed in a long, shiftlike dress with a wide, low-slung belt.

“She looks kind of like Kelly Sawyer,” I replied.

Charlotte giggled. Kelly Sawyer had big, creepy blue eyes and a funny bowl cut that made her look like a character from one of Paul’s seventies movies.

“But she dresses kind of like Sally Pilkington,” I added.

Charlotte frowned. “Probably you shouldn’t make fun of Sally,” she said.

I bit my lip, chastened. Usually Sally was an easy laugh, because everyone thought she dressed weird—not to mention she was a Jehovah’s Witness. But her older brother had been in a car accident recently and was still in the hospital. Apparently we weren’t allowed to make fun of her again until her brother recovered.

“I’m going to read that book next, I think,” Charlotte said, keeping her hand possessively on the book’s page.

Rose gazed silently at Charlotte’s hand for a moment before acknowledging her.

“Well, add Roswell, New Mexico, to one of your maps,” Rose said slowly. “That’s where I’d like to go.”

“What’ll we do there?”

Rose gently pushed Charlotte’s hand away and turned the page. “We’ll drive around in the desert.” She sounded frustrated with us. “Looking for human-alien bastards.”

Then, ignoring Charlotte’s gasp at “bastards,” Rose slammed the book closed. “Let’s do something else, okay, girls? I’m not in the mood for this shit anymore.”

Somehow we ended up watching
Jaws
again late that afternoon. Rose hadn’t noticed my pleading glance when Charlotte suggested it. She’d simply popped in the tape and then settled at the kitchen table with her homework, leaving me in the living room with Charlotte and the shark. Charlotte’s dad was no help either. When he came home from work about twenty minutes into the movie, he didn’t seem to notice what was on the screen.

“You want a ride up the hill, Nora?” he asked.

“Up the hill?”

“A ride home. Would you like a ride home? I’m going in that direction, to the transfer station, so I can take you and Rose.”

“Okay,” I said with a shrug. Every so often, on garbage day, Mr. Hemsworth offered to drop me and Rose on his way. The walk was so short that it seemed silly, but it always felt impolite to say no.

“She doesn’t have to go now if she doesn’t want to, though,” Charlotte said. “If she wants to walk, she can stay, right?”

“Charlotte.” There was a sharp quality to Mr. Hemsworth’s voice that I didn’t understand.

Maybe he wanted to get rid of me and he didn’t like Charlotte’s lip getting in the way. Maybe it was something else entirely. Dads were a mystery to me, with their gruff moods and unpredictable preferences. Charlotte’s dad in particular was an enigma, with his arms so hairy and gray they reminded me of a dryer lint trap and his tyrannical interest in things like lawns, car washing, football. In a way he didn’t seem real, but rather like just another dad I watched on television. He was tall and chinless, with a paunch that pressed robustly against the buttons of his white work shirts. His face was always red, but his anger always seemed halfhearted.

“I’ll be ready to go in just a few minutes,” he said. “Got to pack up the garbage in the van first. You and Charlotte can watch your movie for a few minutes, and I’ll give you a holler when I’m going.”

“Okay.”

I rocked enthusiastically in the Hemsworths’ rocking chair, now relieved that I wouldn’t need to stay for the movie’s final scenes. By the time the fisherman got eaten before Charlotte’s eyes, I’d be having a quiet dinner with my mother, eating salmon patties and white rice at the card table, telling her about school during the commercials of the
CBS Evening News
.

But before I knew it, fifteen minutes had passed and one of the other dreaded parts of the movie was approaching—the part where the kid on the raft gets eaten, his blood squirting up and out like a fountain, the other swimmers running and screaming while his poor mother looks for him frantically on the beach.