The Rosemary Spell (18 page)

The whoops fade away as we head for Goodsell.

Inside, a sign directs us to the third floor.

The elevator is painfully slow.

Adam repeats, “
Rosemary, that's for remembrance.
”

“
Pray, love, remember,
” I answer.

We stand in the dim light of the elevator and remember. Shelby letting me wear her tutu from the dance recital, Shelby rowing the boat, Shelby leaning back in the V tree with her eyes closed, Shelby walking ahead of us with John.

“Remember,” I repeat through clenched teeth, as snow drops from my side and disappears into the tired carpet, leaving only a faint, dark stain.

W
E EXIT ON
the third floor and follow the signs to the Christopher Jordan Herbarium. The tiny room is filled with four big metal cabinets and a blocky black table like the ones in the science lab at school. On the table are a gallon jug of something white, a glue gun, and one plant, the color of cooked spinach, dried and pressed between a piece of wax paper and a heavy white card.

“Where are all the other plants?” I whisper.

Adam gestures toward the thin, metal cabinets. Each one has double doors and a small white label on the side. The label shows a range of numbers, like call numbers but not from any system I ever learned about in library class.

“Do you think someone will come help us? Like a librarian, or an herb-rarian?” I ask.

“Someone has to come. This is not a normal classification system.”

We wait awkwardly near the door. Adam studies the labels on the shelves. We're both completely at home in a library of books, but a library of plants has different rules.

“What was the rue spell again?” Adam asks.

I recite:

For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep

Seeming and savour all the winter long:

Grace and remembrance be to you both,

And welcome to our shearing!

His head is tipped to one side. “How do you know it's a spell?”

“I don't, but it seemed like it could be.” I explain about my computer search.

“
Grace and remembrance be to you both.
It's a command,” Adam says.

“Huh?”

“Like,
Pray, love, remember.
You know?”

“I guess it is. Maybe that's why I thought it seemed similar.”

“Hello!” A breathless young man with curly brown hair pulled back in a ponytail appears behind us. “Sorry. The herbarium is quiet even during the semester, and now that it's break, I really wasn't expecting anyone.”

“That's okay,” I say. “I'm Rosemary Bennett. My mom's Claudia Bennett? She teaches English?”

“Sure!” Ponytail Man smiles. “How can I help you?”

“Uh, well, Adam—this is Adam—”

Adam offers a lame wave. Ponytail gives him a reassuring smile.

“Adam and I are doing a poetry project for school? For this creative writing elective that we get to take?” Why am I making everything a question? “Anyway, we're trying to write some poems about rosemary and rue. You know, they're herbs?”

“Right.” He gives me an encouraging nod.

“Yeah. So, my mom suggested that maybe we could see some rue here.”

Adam chimes in. “And rosemary, too.”

Ponytail grins. “Your name is Rosemary, and you're doing a project on rosemary?”

“It's totally appropriate, right?” I manage a smile.

“Absolutely.” He crosses over to an old-fashioned card catalog in the corner. “Only instead of rue, I'd think you'd want to write about Adam's Needle. You know, to see the plant-name connection through.”

Adam perks up. “There's a plant called Adam's Needle? No way!”

Ponytail nods. “Way.” His fingers walk through cards grown yellow and soft with age. “Unfortunately, we don't have it in our collection, but you could look it up online. You'll find some good photos. But rosemary and rue we do have.” He mutters catalog numbers to himself, steps over to the first row of cabinets, and opens the door. Inside are about twenty shelves, really shallow, with folders lying in small stacks. He squats down and pulls a stack onto his knees. He sorts through the folders and extracts one. “Here's rue.” He stands and turns to the cabinet behind him. “Rosemary should be . . .” He runs a finger along one metal shelf, another, and another, and frowns. “Huh.”

He places the rue folder on the black table. “You can start with this. I'll have to check the online catalog to track down the rosemary.”

“Thanks.” Adam slides into a chair.

“No problem.” Ponytail pauses in the doorway, on his way to wherever the online catalog is. “Don't touch the
Ruta graveolens.
It's fragile. And poisonous.” And he's gone.

“What's ruta whatever-he-said?” I ask.

“The scientific name,” Adam answers. “See?”

We look together at the label pasted onto the corner of the paper. It's typed by a real typewriter and says
Ruta graveolens, Potomac Riverbank, Franklin, West Virginia, June 17, 1923.

“So it does grow near Pennsylvania,” I observe.

“But probably not in December,” Adam points out. “Did you know it was poisonous?”

“I don't know anything.”

The plant arcs across the page. I was expecting it to have some color, but it's just brown, though a complicated brown with hints of rust and sage green mixed in.

“It's the same color as your eyes!” Adam exclaims.

“It is?” I thought my eyes were plain brown.

“Yeah.” He looks at me intently.

I break away and focus on the plant. The stalk looks like a miniature tree branch. It's taped to the paper with a piece of thin white tape. The branches—six of them—are glued down, but one small branch hovers over the others. Somehow, over the years, it's escaped the page.

Some small leaves cluster near the stem, and, about three-quarters of the way up, the leaves thin out. At the top, there are what must have been flowers. The leaves, shaped like thin teardrops, angle upward. The flowers look like dry lentils with tiny hair-like tendrils.

I lean in and inhale a slightly spicy smell. Is that the rue or just old paper and glue?

Adam yanks me back. “Don't breathe it! It's poisonous!”

“It's dead—” I start.

“
It keeps savour all winter long.
”

“Okay. I won't breathe it,” I promise. “But I will . . .” I glance over my shoulder for any sign of Ponytail man. Just an empty doorway. I put two fingers between the one loose branch and the paper. Before I can think twice or Adam can stop me, I use my thumb to snap it off, and I'm holding a dried sprig of rue in my hand.

Adam sucks in his breath sharply.

Quick footsteps. The squeak of a rubber sole on polished tile.

I shove the rue in my coat pocket.

“According to the records—” Ponytail bustles into the room, holding an open laptop and reading from the screen. “The rosemary specimen was reported missing four years ago. I don't know why it hasn't been replaced. It's easy enough with the rosemary patch on the island. Come spring, we'll have to take some students over there to collect a replacement, but for now, I'm afraid I can't help you with rosemary. Sorry.” He looks up from the screen with an apologetic smile.

“It's okay,” Adam says and stands up too quickly. His chair starts to fall, but he catches it and rights it.

“Well, thanks,” I say. “It was cool to see the rue at least.” Rue and rosemary.
Rosemary, that's for remembrance . . . Grace and remembrance be to you both.

“Will it help you with your project?”

In my pocket, I carefully roll the thin stem between my fingers. “Definitely.”

“Of course you could just buy rosemary at the grocery store,” Ponytail says. “Though I suppose that's not very poetic.”

He's right. We have rue, and we can get rosemary easily, but we still don't know what we need to do with the herbs.

We say thanks and don't talk as we walk back to the elevator. The swish of our snow pants is mortifyingly loud in the long corridor.

Adam pushes the elevator button. We wait.

Doors slide open. We step inside. Doors slide shut.

Adam looks at me like he doesn't quite know me. “I can't believe you stole from a library! They trusted us, and you just . . . I mean, they have everything all cataloged and organized, and you just took—”

“But I had to!” I protest.

The doors open. He walks ahead of me.

I can't believe it! He's putting one tiny bit of a dried plant above his sister! Somehow, even though I know I did the right thing, he's managed to make me feel guilty.

I follow him, not trying to catch up but keeping pace. By the time we're near the grove, the guilt has twisted into rage.

I lunge forward and yank him around. “I don't know what you thought we were going to get from just seeing the plant. We need to have it. The spell doesn't work without the herbs.” I rip the small sprig of rue from my pocket and wave it in his face. “This is the antidote! The antidote to that horrible poisonous void poem. That we said!” I'm crying now, and Adam's pulling away from me.

“You're losing it, Rosie,” he murmurs.

“It's our fault!” I sob and clutch the rue. “Shelby would know what to do, but we have to figure it out, because she's gone, and that's the problem. We need her. And she's your sister. Who we disappeared. Do you remember?”

The question arcs out over the snow and dissolves into silence. Maybe he doesn't. My anger and sadness pivot into alarm.

“Do you? Adam? Do you remember?”

“What do you mean?” Beneath his anger, I hear confusion.

I grasp him by both arms and recite the memory spell.

“I remember,” he whispers. “Thanks, Rosie.”

“We have rue,” I say in a firm voice. “And I only took a small piece.”

He nods.

“But we don't have rosemary. Like the guy said, we could buy some. Or, we could find the bookmark. Maybe we can find it? Maybe it's in your room?”

“I don't know.” He rubs a hand over his face. “I had it when I left your house the other night . . .”

“You dropped it,” I say. “But you picked it up.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw you from the window. You put it in your pocket.”

He yanks off his glove and reaches into one pocket. Then the other. He shakes his head.

I stick my hands in his pockets. They're fleecy and damp and empty.

He rubs his hand over his face again. “Okay, I must've dropped it after that.”

“Let's go check your room,” I say. “Maybe you took it out and put it away but then you forgot. Anyway, if we can't find it, we'll just get my mom to take us shopping.”

“Or we could go to the island,” Adam suggests.

We walk together down the hill. Grass already pokes up through the snow in the tracks left by our sleds.

As we cross George Street, we pause to watch the river race angry and bold to the south. Muddy water has crept over the launch, and the rowboat strains as the current tugs it downstream.

“Do you think we can even get to the island?” I ask. “I mean, if we want to go.”

The water is dark, like it's churning stuff up from the bottom, and it's running so fast that things—branches and hunks of ice—race along with the current.

Adam doesn't answer. Rowing through that water is out of the question.

We squish through the soggy snow in Adam's backyard and pull off our boots in the mudroom. We enter the kitchen in our socks.

Mrs. Steiner looks up from the stove. “Lunch is almost ready. Soup. Chicken with white beans.”

It smells like comfort and warmth.

“Thanks, Mom.” Adam heads for the stairs. “We just need to look for something first.”

Adam's room is ridiculously tidy. Everything has a place, and everything is in its place. Square plastic bins with neatly printed labels line the shelf in the closet. The drawers are filled with carefully folded clothes. Nothing is under the bed. No dirty clothes or half-read books clutter the floor. I can tell instantly that the rosemary bookmark is not here.

Mrs. Steiner's voice wafts up the stairs. “Lunch! Come eat!”

We sit at the table, and Mrs. Steiner puts supersized bowls of soup in front of us. She's a really good cook, but since she started working so much, she hasn't had much time to spend in the kitchen. Shelby cooked sometimes, but then she got too busy, too. And now she's gone.

Adam blows on a spoonful of golden broth.

I lean in to inhale the steam rising from my bowl. Along with the rich smell of chicken, there's a familiar piney smell.

“Mrs. Steiner, does this have rosemary?” I ask.

Adam looks up at his mother.