In Search of the Rose Notes (23 page)

Toby tried to clasp my hands. “It’s okay, Nora. I won’t touch you. Please stay.”

“I can’t,” I repeated. “Don’t make me stay.”

“Okay,” Toby said, dropping my hands. “I wouldn’t. I won’t.”

“Okay,” I said, grabbing my prissy black satin handbag. Stupid prom, stupid formalwear. Why had I decided to do any of this?

I grabbed my shoes and raced down the stairs. I held the black pumps close to my chest as I ran down the hill, then slipped them back on my feet for my approach to Mrs. Crowe’s. The lights were off, but I preferred to wake everyone up with the clicking of my heels than continue to feel the desperation that my stocking feet implied.

No one woke up. I ran upstairs and threw myself onto my bed. I stared at the ceiling and willed September—when I’d leave this room and this town forever—to come and come fast. I fell asleep in my prom dress, with the lights on.

Chapter Fourteen

May 25, 2006

Sally and I talked about her son, Max, for a good fifteen minutes before anything else was said. He sat on her lap, alternately gumming and conversing with a rubber turtle. I asked her about teething and crawling and sleeping through the night—all the basic questions I could think to ask about babies. I have this problem with my friends who already have kids—I don’t know how much or how long we’re ever supposed to talk about the baby. I’ll keep talking about it forever, so as not to seem the insensitive, childless heathen, but I have trouble listening very intently to the answers.

And Sally and I really didn’t have anything else obvious to talk about. That became clear to me with each infant-related question I asked and each thoughtful answer she gave. I watched—rather than heard—her answer. Her face was a bit chubbier than I’d remembered, and she had a more stylish, more angular haircut than the one she’d always had as a kid. She seemed perfectly at ease with a baby in her lap and smiled more in the span of our twenty-minute conversation than I’d remembered her ever smiling in high school. This was a person I no longer knew—or, more accurately, had never really known.

It wasn’t until after she’d come back from nursing Max in the ladies’ room that we started to chat a little about Rose. She brought it up, which didn’t surprise me. Probably it was the biggest news Waverly had had in recent memory. She admitted she’d never known much about Rose—she was startled to hear that Rose had baby-sat Charlotte and me.

“Really?” she said, with genuine surprise.

I explained to her that we’d always had a childish interest in Rose’s life and had been nosy about her boyfriends.

“And actually,” I said slowly, “we were wondering if your brother and Rose ever dated or anything like that.”

Sally struggled to swallow her mouthful of caramel latte.

“Rose Banks? And my brother? Are you kidding? What would make you think that?”

“Oh, well, see…” I was unprepared for the question. “She just… uh, hinted about another guy. After she dumped her first boyfriend, she said some things that one might think—”

“There’s no way,” Sally interrupted me.

“Why do you say that?” I asked, relieved she hadn’t waited for more of an explanation.

“She was a pretty, relatively popular girl, right? That’s what I gather anyway.”

“Yes. As far as I know, that’s true.”

Sally’s little pink mouth remained expressionless, but she cocked her head slightly. “I don’t know if you remember, but no one in my family was ever popular. A girl like that would never have gone out with my brother.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” I said, feeling I should say something charitably contrarian. Besides, Rose
was
turning out to be less predictable than I’d thought.

“Well, I
do
know,” Sally said. “I don’t believe they were ever friends. Not that he would have mentioned it to me, actually. But her name never came up. I don’t think I ever heard of her until she disappeared.”

“Would you have known who all his friends were?”

Sally looked at me patiently, with her little mouth drawn in tightly—as she used to when I couldn’t figure out the simplest of chemistry equations.

“There’s no reason you’d remember much about my family,” she said quietly. “But our parents kept pretty close tabs on our free time. Any friendship that the family didn’t know about wouldn’t be a significant one.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding, embarrassed that my question had come across as pushy. “Okay.”

Max threw his turtle on the floor and squealed. Sally shifted him onto her left knee and picked it up for him.

“How
are
your parents?” I asked.

Sally sighed and shifted Max back to the middle of her lap.

“Fine, as far as I know. I don’t see them much. Brian and I left the church quite a few years ago. Only my sister Laurie stayed. Most of what I hear about them is through her.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay. We’re used to it, I guess. I hope things will be different in a few years. I hope they’ll want to get to know this guy at least.” Sally indicated Max, then kissed his head.

“Yeah. Hopefully. That sounds hard.”

“Is this what you and Charlotte wanted to ask me? When you wrote to me?” Sally asked. “About my brother and that girl Rose?”

“No…” I said.

Sally took a careful sip of her latte. “Charlotte doesn’t work for the paper anymore, does she?” she asked.

“No.”

“I used to read her articles, but I heard she was fired.”

“She’s teaching high school now. At Waverly, in fact.”

“Oh. Now,
that’s
interesting. And how is her brother?”

“Oh. Paul? Okay, I guess. I saw him the other day. He’s a physical therapist. He’s married. Has a couple of kids. A boy and a girl. ”

Sally looked thoughtful. “Did
he
say something about my brother and Rose?”

“No. No, I guess we didn’t think to ask him.”

“Well,” she said after a moment, “I’m certain they weren’t friends, Rose and my brother. And you probably wouldn’t remember the timeline, but when she disappeared, he was in the hospital. It was a pretty intense period for all of us. The disappearance of this girl in his class didn’t really register that much, at the time. We were all too busy dealing with Brian and his… circumstances.”

Sally cleared her throat. “But, you know, if you’re just looking to talk to people who were in her class, I’m sure he’d be happy to talk to you. I really don’t know how much he’d be able to tell you. By the time that girl disappeared… he was still in the hospital. He was getting used to being in a wheelchair. And dealing with memory-loss issues from the accident.”

She hesitated. “Just a lot of difficult stuff at the time. So as far as Rose—more than anyone at Waverly High back then, I can guarantee you he wasn’t paying any attention.”

“I understand. And I wouldn’t think of bothering him about this.”

“Well… I wouldn’t go that far. He wouldn’t want you to avoid talking to him if you’re talking to everyone else. He doesn’t like to be treated that way.”

“Where is he now? What’s he up to?”

“He lives in New Haven. Teaches at Southern.”

“Teaches what?”

“Political science.”

“Oh,” I said. “How nice.”

“I can give you his e-mail if you want.”

Sally’s tone seemed to soften when she said this, and I took her up on the offer.

“So… that was what you wanted to meet to talk about? It sounded to me like you and Charlotte had a friendly wager going or something.”

“Oh. Yeah. Umm… no. It wasn’t about that. We were actually wondering if you ever wrote for the
Looking Glass
.”

“For
what
?” Sally looked distracted. She put her face closer to her son and sniffed.

“The school literary magazine.”

“Oh,” she said, sitting back up. “No. I didn’t do any extracurricular clubs or anything. I tried writing for the school newspaper once or twice, but it didn’t work out, because I didn’t have anyone to drive me home.”

“But kids didn’t have to be in the actual club to submit to the magazine. A lot of kids even submitted anonymously.”

Sally smiled. “You’re asking if I did?”

“It’s a long story. When Charlotte was the editor, there were a couple of anonymous poems in there that she thought I’d written. For years she thought it was me, I guess. But it wasn’t. It came up during our visit. We were talking about it, about who else it could have been, and your name came up.”

“Me? Why?” Sally looked amused. “What were they about?”

“Oh, just these little poems. They were well written. You were one of the better writers in the class, we were remembering.”

I actually had no clue if Sally had been a good writer. But she had been an all-around good student, so it was plausible.

“I see.”

Her eyes looked dubious, but the corners of her mouth went up a little at the compliment. At that moment I felt ridiculous for bringing her here, for dragging this perfectly nice woman into my lingering high-school neurosis and its accompanying face-saving lies. So we’d both sat next to each other over a Bunsen burner a decade earlier—so what? Almost everyone sits over a Bunsen burner with someone or other. I could have been anybody. She could have been anybody. The randomness of our sitting here together now was particularly embarrassing, because I was the one who had initiated it.

“It was just a silly thing between Charlotte and me,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Sally said, cocking her head again, smiling gently. “And no—no, it wasn’t me.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Must’ve been quite a poem, if you two are still wondering who wrote it. Now, what year did you say it was printed?”

“When we were juniors,” I answered. “Long time ago. Really, it was just a lark, just a stupid—”

“Oh, that’s okay. But I’m curious now… what was it about?”

“Oh… it wasn’t just one poem, actually. Just a bunch of poems. Kind of abstract poems. Like riddles, almost. All attributed to ‘Anonymous.’ ”

“You gonna contact anyone else?” Sally asked. “Any other ideas? Like, Rob Fishkin was a good writer. You guys asked him?”

“Umm… no, not yet. Maybe Charlotte will,” I said quickly.

Sally picked up her fancy caramel coffee and took a sip. “Mmm,” she said, putting it down. “I’m glad we came here. I love this stuff.”

“So… how did you meet your husband?” I asked, hoping to bring at least part of this conversation into the current decade.

“He’s a vet,” Sally said. “Where I work.”

I nodded, and she asked me a similar question about my husband. And we were off again.

Spirit Summonings:

December 1990

Charlotte’s dad was angry. Charlotte had forgotten to use the bungee cords on the trash cans again when she’d taken out the trash, and now some dog had gotten into it and scattered garbage all around the yard.

“Get on out there and clean that up,” he told her when he got home. “Did you just walk right by that mess when you got off the school bus?”

“I don’t know,” Charlotte said sullenly.

“Well, you’d better go clean it up.”

“Okay,” she said, and then turned to me. “C’mon.”

I started to get up. This would be the second time—Charlotte and me plucking moist tissues and chicken bones out of the grass, our hands growing cold and numb in the wind.

“What do you mean, ‘C’mon’?” Mr. Hemsworth asked Charlotte. “The garbage is your responsibility. Nora doesn’t have to help you pick it up if she doesn’t want to. Right, Nora?”

I hated it when adults did this—put me between respect for them and loyalty to my friends. There was never a right answer. I nodded vaguely but said nothing.

Charlotte rolled her eyes and stalked out of the room. I was actually glad to be rid of her. She’d been talking about psychometry again, this time suggesting that we use the mugs she was pretty sure she’d seen Rose using. Luckily, Charlotte’s father had come home early, but I envisioned her making me press a
WORLD’S GREATEST DAD
mug into my forehead in the near future.

I needed something to distract her—or at least make her see things my way. She had to see that this game wasn’t fun anymore. The outcome was probably going to be worse than either of us imagined.

I gazed at the black books fanned out across the carpet. I wanted to talk to her in language she could understand, and maybe one of her books would help me with that. I sorted through the volumes and made a small pile of the ones that had to do with ghosts and dead people:
Phantom Encounters, Hauntings,
and
Spirit Summonings.
The pictures on the covers of the first two were dark and creepy, but the one on
Spirit Summonings
was pretty. The young woman on the cover had her eyes closed, with cloudy blue sparkles swirling around her delicate face. It was sort of a comfort to think of Rose that way—sleeping in the light of blue stars. Maybe this was what Charlotte needed to accept the truth—a comforting way to think of it.

I started to look through the book for something to help me talk to Charlotte. There was a man with a mustache who talked to dolphins in his head. Kind of cool, but not useful to me at the moment. A story about two girls named Kate and Maggie Fox, who started the séance craze in 1848 by tricking their mom into thinking there was a ghost in their house. They did it by tying an apple to a string and knocking it around under their bed. That sounded like fun, but I didn’t want to
fool
Charlotte. I just wanted her to see things the way I saw them: Rose was probably dead.

I kept flipping pages. Old-timey pictures of séances. (Could I convince Charlotte to have a séance? Did I want to?) People spitting and oozing something called “ectoplasm.” More old photos. Harry Houdini. Arthur Conan Doyle. Boring, boring, unhelpful, boring.

Near the end of the book was a short section on Ouija boards. A Ouija board could certainly be arranged. Robin Greenbaum had one—we’d used it at her birthday sleepover. But everyone had gotten giggly and stupid with it. When we’d all quieted down and begun to take it seriously, Robin’s little sister had freaked out and started to cry. After that we decided to communicate only with “future ghosts”—made-up people like “John Zappo from 2095.” That had been Charlotte’s idea, to calm Robin’s sister. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or disappointed by this innovation. Could there really be such thing as “future ghosts,” and if so, what, exactly, made them less scary than past ones?

In any case I probably didn’t want to involve Rose in a similar giggly, stupid activity. And if she was really dead—not pretend dead or “future dead”—it felt terribly disrespectful somehow to make her the subject of a board game.

I turned a couple more pages sadly. Maybe it was hopeless. Charlotte was interested in experimenting with my head but not so interested in learning what was really inside it. I wanted to tell her what that was, but I was afraid of what she’d think of it. She might hate me for it—just as she’d hated me for a few days when we were in second grade and I admitted I no longer believed in Santa Claus. She’d been so disgusted with me she’d kicked me out of her house for the afternoon. You’d think
I’d
be the one disgusted with
her,
for her babyish belief. But somehow it ended up the other way around, with me home watching a boring soap opera with Mrs. Crowe, straining to believe again.