In Search of the Rose Notes (11 page)

After the sleepover I felt I’d paid my dues and I shouldn’t have to watch this scene again so soon. As the scene drew near, I began to make clicking noises with my tongue against my teeth, to distract myself from the movie, to remind myself that I was real and it was not.

“Shh,” Charlotte said.

I narrowed my gaze on the plush aqua-green upholstery behind her head and the sunken aqua buttons that made the sofa look like a giant pincushion. Whenever I sat on that couch, I had a strong urge to twist and yank at those buttons, which is why I’d lately been sitting in the rocking chair instead.

“What?” Charlotte said sharply. “What are you staring at?”

I hated how people were always accusing me of
staring
when I was only
looking.

“Nothing,” I said, glancing back toward the kitchen. “But maybe your dad forgot about me?”

Charlotte didn’t take her eyes off the screen. “I didn’t hear the car pull out.”

“Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe I’m supposed to walk.”

“Maybe.”

I stood up and walked through the kitchen, then opened the door to the garage.

Rose and Mr. Hemsworth were tucked down low against the wall of the garage, huddled close in conversation. Mr. Hemsworth was seated bowlegged on Charlotte’s old red hop ball, his hand on the handle and his belly resting heavily on his thighs. Rose was sitting next to him in a lawn chair. Both were facing slightly outward, as if the minivan were a third party in their conversation. My first thought, when I saw them that way, was that Mr. Hemsworth’s seat would surely pop. My second thought was that one of us—Charlotte or I—was getting a bad report.

“Hey, Nora,” Rose called to me.

Mr. Hemsworth jumped up off the hop ball, snatching at his lower back as he did so.

“Getting antsy?” Rose asked.

“No,” I said, feeling like a wimp for running to the adults in the middle of a scary movie.

“You okay?” Mr. Hemsworth wanted to know.

“Yeah… I just thought you’d left,” I said. “Even though—I guess—I didn’t hear your car.”

Mr. Hemsworth jingled the coins in his pocket for a moment. Rose shivered and rubbed her hands together, then blew on her knuckles.

“Two minutes, okay?” Mr. Hemsworth said.

“Okay.”

It took me a moment to figure out that this was my cue to step back into the kitchen and close the door behind me.

Just after I did, I heard Mr. Hemsworth say, “She’s an odd one, that kid, huh?”

I strained to hear Rose’s quiet response. There was a “just shy” somewhere in there, but I didn’t hear the rest.

I stepped away from the door, afraid of the next lines of conversation—afraid that they might be about me and that they might be even worse than what I’d already heard. For five minutes I stood in the dark kitchen, glad to have a room to myself. I leaned against the Hemsworths’ dark cabinets, trying to ignore the screams from the living room and the murmurs from the garage.

Chapter Seven

May 22, 2006

I parked on the street, since there was another car in the driveway besides Charlotte’s. Maybe she and Porter were hanging out. I took my time opening the front door and threw my stuff noisily on the kitchen chair so as not to surprise them in the living room.

“Hey, Nora,” Charlotte called.

When I stepped into her living room, I found her curled up on her couch, still in her work clothes. A bottle of wine sat open on the coffee table, next to a stack of papers and composition books. Across from her, in the old rocking chair, was her brother, Paul. I was a little surprised to see him. I knew he lived just outside Hartford—not far from here—but Charlotte hadn’t mentioned he’d be dropping by.

Paul looked exactly the same as I remembered him. The last I’d seen him was Charlotte’s and my high-school graduation. He was about twenty-four at the time. Then, as now, he looked like he could still be in high school. He was pale, freckled, and round-faced, with a wave of reddish blond hair dipping across his forehead. My mother used to refer to him privately as “Opie.”

“Hey, Paul,” I said.

“Hi,” he replied. “Great to see you.”

“You, too.”

He shuffled his feet as I sat next to Nora on the couch. His ultrawhite sneakers made me grin. He was in his thirties, married, with two school-age kids and his own physical-therapy practice, but still the big dopey sneakers.

“How was Toby?” he asked.

I looked up, surprised. “Good. It’s been a while. But he seems to be doing well.”

“He mention how his brother’s doing?”

“Joe was there, too, actually.”

“Really?” Paul shrugged with mild surprise. I wondered how he felt about Joe. They were close as kids, just like Charlotte and me. But they’d grown apart around high school, for similar reasons—Paul was a scholar-athlete golden boy, Joe a bit of a freak.

I decided against mentioning that Joe was a little drunk. Us freaks had to look out for each other’s reps.

“Paul was just getting ready to leave, unfortunately,” Charlotte chimed in. “Got to help put the kids to bed.”

“That’s right,” Paul agreed.

“Will I see you again?” I asked as he went toward the kitchen.

“Yeah, maybe we can visit,” he said, “before you head back home.”

His lack of enthusiasm didn’t bother me. Paul and I never had much to say to each other. When he was seventeen and I was eleven, his entering a room made me want to leave it, and I suspected that the feeling was mutual. I always got a general feeling of discomfort from him, as if he could not for the life of him remember what a person six years younger might want to talk about.

After he’d gone, Charlotte picked up a pile of papers from the coffee table. “Back to these stupid vocabulary sentences. Listen to this: ‘She tried to cover the zit with her bangs, but it was still really
palpable.
’ ”

“Ick,” I said, sitting next to Charlotte on the couch. “Good one.”

“I believe one of the book’s definitions was ‘noticeable.’ ”

“Yeah, I caught that.”

“Yep,” Charlotte said, reaching for her glass. “I’m doing a bang-up job educatin’ those kids. You want some wine?”

“Nah, thanks. I already had two beers tonight.”

“Crazy, Nora. Well, I need it for these vocabulary sentences. I had to pour myself a glass when I came across ‘The teacher has
malevolent
coffee breath.’ ”

“For real?”

“Yup.” She leaned back against the arm of the couch and took a long drink of wine. “Little fuckers think they can break me with shit like that. It’s hilarious.”

I watched her put a neat line of red checkmarks down the page in front of her, then a big red check at the top. She flipped to the next page.

“Hey, I know this is boring,” she said after reading through another paper. Then she kicked at a box under the coffee table. “Listen, I pulled our old favorites out of the basement. Thought it would be fun.”

I yanked the box out. It was torn and musty and full of our old Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown books
.
The top book pictured a human hand reaching out from a celestial blue background, with a star of light exploding from its palm.
Powers of Healing
was written across the top of the black book, in a familiar silver lettering.

“That’s awesome,” I said, grabbing a few books and stacking them on the table. “You kept them.”

“Of course I kept them, Nora.” Charlotte pulled her feet up onto the couch and hugged her knees. “I keep everything. Now, there’s some good shit in those books. Stuff I don’t even remember. Like there’s the one called
Phantom Encounters.
I looked at it when I first brought the box down. Most of it seems to be about ghosts, but I saw this one chapter called ‘Apparitions of the Living,’ thinking, what the hell is that? Ghosts of the living? I couldn’t have read this when I was a kid, because I would’ve remembered it. It starts right in with a story about this woman, this
teacher
—”

Her shoulders shook. She was giggling at the very memory of it. Her pantyhosed feet pressed against the side of my leg. I remembered, for a moment, her writhing on her parents’ couch when we were kids, when her father would sometimes sit with us, grab her foot, and start tickling it.
Stop, oh, GOD, stop!
she’d squeal while I sat quietly on the other side of her, enduring the bumps of her flailing head and sharp elbows.

“This teacher in Latvia,” Charlotte tried again, “in the 1800s. She’d be teaching in front of the classroom sometimes, and the darnedest thing would happen. Her students would look out the window and see her also hanging around in the school garden, sniffing flowers.”

“She had a double? A flower-sniffing double?”

“Yes. She couldn’t see it, but everyone else could. All the students vouched for it. She got fired for it. It freaked the kids out too much.”

Charlotte’s tittering grew into loud laughter and ended in a painful-sounding coughing fit.

“You know, I wish I had one, too. I’m teaching in front of the classroom, then they look through the window and I’m also smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. Better yet,
I’ll
step out for a smoke and my double could teach the class.”

Charlotte returned to her correcting. I picked up a few of the books and started to flip through them.

“A few of these have your old notes in them,” I observed.

“I know, isn’t that crazy?”

“Purple pen. Very cute. Is this the first time you’ve taken them out since then?”

“Um… no. I think I’ve looked at them once or twice before this. When I’ve had a hankering for the paranormal.”

Charlotte’s red pen whipped through another page, then another. I rummaged through the box, looking at all the old, vaguely familiar titles:
Cosmic Connections, Psychic Voyages, Mind Over Matter.

“Goddamn it,” Charlotte snapped at her pile of papers, making me jump. “These kids are driving me crazy.”

“Who? What? More bad-breath sentences?”

“No. This girl’s got a sentence about setting her mom’s bed on fire.”

“Oh. I take it that’s worse?”

“She’s always pulling stuff like this. A couple of weeks ago, she had some sentences about cutting her toes off or something like that. She’s screwing with me. Either I have to be the lame teacher who reports her to the guidance office on the fractional chance she’s psychotic or I have to risk feeling responsible if she does in fact set her mother’s bed on fire.”

“You could throw it away, give her credit for it, then tell her you spilled something on it. Then at least you’ve gotten rid of the evidence.”

“You’re sick,” Charlotte mumbled. “Why aren’t you an En-glish teacher?”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know. It’s a freaky situation with this girl. Give me a suicide threat in a journal any day. That’s at least straightforward. Everybody knows the rules about that.”

Charlotte’s statement took me by surprise, tongue-tying me just for a moment.

“Well—” I began, trying to think of a quick, casual response. But Charlotte had already noticed.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to be glib. I only meant that with that, you kind of know what to do. It’s not like with this girl, who’s just
intentionally
pushing my buttons.”

“Well, the situations are actually probably pretty similar. In either case the kid probably doesn’t quite know what she’s doing or why she’s doing it.”

“Sure. I get that.” Charlotte threw her pen and the stack of papers on the coffee table, then folded her arms. “But that never helps me figure out what to do.”

She frowned and then peered at me, looking a little sheepish. I ignored her for a moment, pushed her glass toward me, and poured a splash of wine into it.

“Are you asking my advice?” I said.

“Yeah. I hope that doesn’t offend you, but I guess I am.”

I took a sip and tried not to grimace. Seven-dollar headache wine.

“I think you should trust your instincts,” I said. “If you know for sure this kid’s just a rat-lipped little brat, then don’t do anything. But when in doubt, I’d say it’s better to show the kid you care than let her see how cool you are.”

Charlotte tapped a cigarette out of her pack. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Shoot,” I said, emptying the glass.

“You didn’t think anyone cared?”

“You know, this is going to sound like I’m ducking the question, but I can’t really remember what I thought. I guess I just wasn’t thinking at all. For a really long time—and I mean since before we even graduated—I felt like that wasn’t
me.
That was some whacked-out version of me, indulging in a vacation from reality for a month or two.”

“Uh-uh. I think I know what you mean. Some of my sophomores—well, never mind. Let’s just say I know that vacation pretty well.”

Charlotte hesitated. “I’ve kind of wanted to ask you. Why the girls’ room, of all places? And
that
girls’ room…”

“Pretty simple. It had the most traffic during lunch. I did it just before lunch.”

“You wanted to make sure someone would find you.”

“If it came to that. But, really, I didn’t take enough to… to really even…”

“I’d heard you’d taken a whole bottle of aspirin.”

“No,” I answered. “I took a few handfuls. But I was too scared to finish. I’m pretty certain I never planned to take the whole thing.”

I paused for a moment. “Who told you that I’d taken the whole bottle?”

“I don’t remember. I’m sorry, but…” Charlotte’s white cheeks turned just a little pink—embarrassed for me still. “
Every
body heard about it. How could they not?”

“Ashley and Karen told everyone I was out with mono.”

Charlotte snorted. “Umm. Yeah. And what a great couple of actresses those two were. They said it with such fake righteousness that you knew they were quietly telling everyone the biggest secret a couple of drips like them could ever imagine having. Just a couple of hens sitting on an enormous egg.

“And besides, how could they keep it a secret when it was Robin Greenbaum who actually came in and found you doubled over. Before she ran and fetched Philippa.”

“Philippa?”

“I mean, Mrs. Norris. She says hi, by the way.”

“Awesome.”

“Robin told a couple of her friends before those two got around to damage control. I don’t think she meant to be gossipy about it. I think she was just surprised.”

“Well, that’s fine,” I said. “I wanted everyone to know about it anyway.”

Charlotte looked surprised. “I know you did.”

“I guess I can say that now,” I said.

Charlotte puffed on her cigarette so intensely it made me want to have a coughing fit.

“One reason I ask why that bathroom,” Charlotte explained, “is that I think of it almost every time I go in there. When I have to go in there and chase the smoker girls out.”

“Well, I apologize.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you think about it much?” she asked.

“Not really. Not anymore.”

She blew an aggressive puff of smoke out her mouth, not taking care to keep it away from my face.

“The main thing about it that still bothers me,” I said, turning from the smoke, “when I
do
think about it—I mean, aside from my mother, how it upset my mother—is that in all of high school that was the loudest, most obnoxious thing I ever did.”

“If you could have been louder,” she asked, “what would you have said?”

“Irrelevant now. I chose for that to be my biggest statement. It’s no one’s fault but my own.”

“I’m not denying that.” Charlotte yawned. “Excuse me. But I’m still asking. What would you have said?”

“Back then it felt like a million different things. Now I can’t remember a single one of importance.”

“Did any of them have to do with Rose?” Charlotte asked.

“Of course not,” I answered, surprised. “Why do you ask?”

“Sometimes I wondered if you’d had some dark vision and that was part of what made you… you know… depressed.”

“No, there was nothing like that. You’d read too many of these books. A
‘dark vision’
? No, just dull misery mixed with stupidity.”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Almost all the girls I teach have some crazy impulse or other. Even if it takes a very different form. Sluttiness. Shoplifting. Cheerleading. That age for girls, it’s like…” Charlotte twisted her cigarette in her ashtray and glanced down at one of the books on the coffee table. “It’s like the Bermuda Triangle. Smooth sailing, then something goes haywire. Nobody understands exactly what happens. And it’s totally random, who makes it out the same, who gets lost, who comes back okay.”

“How about the boys?”

“Oh, God. The
boys.
Sure. They turn into lunatics, too. It’s different for them, though. More outwardly destructive than inwardly destructive, but… basically the same thing.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” I said. “The boys’ stuff seems different somehow… funnier. I mean, Neil tells me these stories about smoking a joint with his friends before chemistry lab and being fascinated with the Bunsen burner and practically setting himself on fire. Or crashing into the annuals driving too fast through the Home Depot parking lot. But that stuff basically just sounds fun. Not pathetic. How come I don’t have stories like that? Remembering that time for him is crazy, but not sad.”