The Rosemary Spell (23 page)

“Shelby?” I holler, somehow finding my voice.

The river races.

Shelby is nowhere.

Gone.

Into the void.

Again.

I kick something. Something solid but not.

I hold my breath. Force my head into the water. Open my eyes. But the water's too cloudy. Grainy shadows are all I see.

I kick again. This time reaching out, feeling for Shelby in the water.

She's there. Or something is.

The panic dies away, and I'm swaddled in a deliciously numb fog. Is this shock? Or hypothermia?

I think about myself like a character in a book, a character I don't really identify with in a book I don't much like.

The cold backs off. The pain in my elbow has dulled to a steady throb. Maybe I could go to sleep. Just for a few minutes.

My mind emerges from the crowding fog and shakes panic awake.

I'm not a character. I'm me, and I'm Shelby's only hope.

I extend my good arm to where I was kicking and fumble around. Something stringy and silky runs through my fingers. Hair. Shelby's long hair.

It's so silky. Soft. Like the fog. I hang in the water, enjoying the feel of her hair floating around my hand, like sand running through your fingers at the beach. Only not warm. And not so nice. Not really. Because the hair is on a person. Shelby. A person under water. Under water too long.

Two things try to connect in my mind, but I'm floating away from myself.

Maybe I should try to pull Shelby out of the river. I should grab her hair.

I close my fist around the hair.

Maybe if I just close my eyes for a minute, I'll feel better. I snuggle into a warmth that comes from nowhere. It envelops me. It soothes away the pain in my arm.

Something orange races toward me. Adam! In a life vest . . . like mine.

He crashes into my right arm and grabs me. It's like a knife digging into my elbow, and all of a sudden, cold shoots through me, and terror snatches me from the false arms of relief. I tighten my grasp on Shelby's hair and yank.

I yank her out of the water.

She's pale. So pale. Her eyes are closed. Her lips are blue.

The three of us hang in the water. A cluster of panic and pain. Braced against the tree or rock or whatever holds us in place.

“Rope,” Adam chokes out.

His eyes aren't focusing right.

I shake my head. I don't have any rope. Why would I have rope?

“Vest,” he says, through chattering teeth.

Through the blood and the fear, his face steadies me. I hold on to the idea of Adam and pull myself away from oblivion.

He fumbles with his life vest. Undoes the buckles with trembling fingers.

“Hold . . . here,” I whisper.

He hangs on to my vest. I hang on to Shelby, keeping her face out of the water.

Adam squirms out of his vest and unwraps the flat rope from his waist. It's not long, but the vest itself makes a sort of lasso.

He wipes blood from his eyes. Takes a breath. Tosses the vest. It collapses into the water. He tries again. The vest brushes the branch and falls away.

“You. Can. Do. This,” I whisper.

He takes a breath, steadies himself against me, focuses on the branch and hurls the vest. It catches easily.

He ties the rope in his hand to my vest.

I keep hold of Shelby. I worry that I might be hurting her, pulling her around by her hair. I worry that I'm
not
hurting her. And I don't let myself think about what that means. I yank again, trying to hurt her. She is still and pale, and I hate her for not reacting to the pain. A sob rises.

“Have to work together,” Adam chokes out.

I stare at the weird contraption of the life vest slung over the tree. It's like a fat, orange rope with thin strands dangling from either side. It sticks against the wet bark, but if we kick together, maybe we can shift it down the branch and move ourselves toward the bank.

I hate leaving the solidity of the thing in the water we're standing on, and I don't know if I have the strength to support myself, let alone Shelby. But we have to get out of the river. The fog hovers on the edges of my mind again, and I'm with it enough now to know the fog is oblivion. And oblivion is the end.

“On three,” I whisper.

Third time's the charm. I don't say it out loud. There is no magic here.

“One,” Adam grunts.

“Two,” I mouth.

“Three.” We say it together and shove away from our foothold. The current drags at us, but Adam hangs on to the vest-rope and hangs on to me, and I hang on to Shelby.

“Again,” he commands.

On three, we kick again. It's harder because now we're just kicking against the current, but we inch closer to the bank.

Again.

And again.

I kick, and my toes drag through the muddy bottom of the river.

“I can stand!” I cry.

We still cling to the rope and to each other, but now we stride against the current, our feet planting more and more firmly on the ground as we move out of the depth, pulling Shelby to safety.

We collapse in a pile on the leafy bank. I breathe in wet bark and rotting leaves.

Breathe. And breathe. And breathe.

Adam crawls to Shelby. Pushes her shoulder so she lies on her back.

She's so pale. Her hair lies around her head in a wet blond tangle.

I struggle toward them, but pain explodes in my elbow. My good arm and my legs are so heavy. Breathing feels like lifting weights.

Thunder rolls. A weird
chop-chop.

Funny. Thunder in winter.

Adam puts a hand under Shelby's neck. Tips her head back. Lowers his head down to give her his breath.

One. Two. Three.

He sits back.

“Is she . . . ?” I can't finish the question.

Again, he breathes into her mouth.

Pulls away.

Her face is so still. A pale pink foam bubbles from her mouth.

How long was she under water? Not breathing. It could have been a minute, two minutes, five minutes, a year.

Something hot is on my face. I reach up and find tears.

Sobs shake me, and my elbow flames.

Adam breathes into Shelby's mouth again.

Nothing.

He roars with rage and grief. He slaps her. Her head jerks to the side.

Chop-chop-chop.

Not thunder. A helicopter.

Voices, shouting. Feet pounding on the sodden earth.

Lights.

They've come.

“Rosemary! Adam!”

“Ambulance . . .”

“Shelby,” I moan.

Steady hands. A warm blanket. I let blissful nothingness swallow me.

A paramedic leans over me. We jiggle and sway, and a siren screams. We must be in an ambulance.

She says “concussion.” Also “shock.” “Broken arm,” she says to someone I can't see.

“Out of joint,” I murmur.

She smiles, kind and reassuring. “Well, that's easy to fix.”

The ambulance is fast and loud, like the river, but it's dry and warm, and they've already given me something that's making the pain back off.

“What about Shelby?” I ask.

Her kind smile freezes. “You'll be all right, Rosemary.”

Out of joint
can be fixed.
Into the void
can be fixed. But not
dead.

Adam is lying next to me on his own stretcher. They are trying to stop the bleeding on his forehead.

We look at each other across the narrow aisle. The siren pulses.

Tears drop down onto my nose.

We stop, and the rear door flings open. They pull Adam out first, his stretcher springing into a gurney as they haul him from the ambulance. I glimpse his mother standing there, arms wrapped around herself, raw panic all over her face.

“Thank God,” she moans as they roll him toward her. “Your head . . .” She reaches out, and her fingers shake as they caress his hair. “What happened? They just called me, and I came, but—”

“Where's Shelby?” he cuts in.

“I don't . . . was she with you?” She plucks at the paramedic steering Adam's stretcher. “My daughter?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am. I don't know.”

They pull me out. The wheels make a high-pitched squeak as they rush me toward the door.

“Rosemary?” Mrs. Steiner is hurrying alongside. “Was Shelby with you?”

We pause at a desk, and she leans over me.

“Do you know where Shelby is?”

My voice comes out in a whisper. “We found her, but . . .”

I can't say the next words.

Mrs. Steiner's face crumples. My heart breaks.

I
STRUGGLE THROUGH THE FOG
of anesthesia into consciousness. There's a dull throb in my elbow, but the stabbing, breathtaking pain is gone. A splint cradles my arm, and a tidy blue sling rests against my chest. I'm warm and dry.

Mom's sitting beside me, a book unopened on her lap.

“Adam?” I croak.

She leans forward and rests her hand on my cheek, the way she did when I was little and had a fever.

“He'll be fine.” Her voice is low, cradling me in its calm. “He has a concussion, fifteen stitches, but he's all right.”

She sets her book aside.

I steel myself. She will tell me now that Shelby is dead. My fingertips and my kneecaps are numb, already crushed under the weight of the grief that's coming. Stabbing grief and rushing guilt.

Mom won't know it, but I'll know and Adam will know that it's our fault Shelby is dead. We rescued her from one void only to send her into a different one.

“Shel . . .” I whisper, because I don't have enough air to say her name.

Mom looks down at her hands. “They took her by helicopter to the medical center in Lionville.”

Dead people don't get taken to medical centers.

“They don't know how long she was unconscious,” Mom continues. “She nearly drowned. You all nearly . . .” The words choke off.

Adam and I didn't drown. We held on. To the branch. To each other.

But not to Shelby. Her hair floats through my fingers. Horrible pink foam bubbles slowly from her blue lips.

I force out the question. “Will she live?”

Mom doesn't look at me. Her hands clutched in her lap tell me that she doesn't know.

I turn onto my side and curl my knees to my chest.

Mom's voice is far away. Broken and garbled.

“ . . . brain function . . . medically induced coma . . .”

Void and nothing. Void and nothing. Void and nothing.

To void and nothing, turn life.

The one-legged Barbie grins crookedly. Shelby's headphones disappear.

The poem won after all.

I must have fallen asleep. I don't know how much time has passed.

“Rosie.” Mom sets down her book when she sees I'm awake. “How do you feel?”

“Sleepy.” I stretch.

“It's the pain medicine,” Mom says. “And the trauma.”

Her hand on my cheek again. I raise my good arm and press my hand on top of hers.

She makes a small, strangled sound. She's crying. “Oh, Rosie. I love you so much. I don't know what I'd do . . . if I ever . . . if you ever . . .” Her head drops on to the side of my bed.

I try to stroke her hair the way she does mine, but I'm clumsy with my left hand, and all I manage is an awkward pat.

A hand reaches into my chest and twists my heart. She's so emotional because Shelby's . . . because Shelby . . .

“Is Shelby . . . ?” a voice asks. My voice. I ask.

Mom shakes her head. “There's no change.”

She's still alive.

Mom grasps my hand. “Don't you
ever
. . .” she begins.

“I'm sorry, Mom.”

I'm sorry I wrote in Shakespeare's book. I'm sorry I said magic words out loud. I'm sorry I went to the island. I'm sorry I didn't think about life preservers. I'm sorry I didn't hold on to Shelby.

“I'm sorry,” I whisper, but no one cares that I'm sorry. Sorry doesn't make any difference.