The Rosemary Spell (6 page)

When I get home, Mom is waiting for me, all delighted with herself for having found bright yellow curtains with rainbow speckles.

“For your room!” she exclaims with a big smile. “Do you love them?”

I stand on the stepladder, and Mom hands me the metal bar with the curtain sleeved onto it. My arms aren't long enough to set both ends of the rod on the hooks, and one end falls out when I try to put the other one in place and then the other end falls out, and Mom and I start laughing. Finally, she takes my place on the ladder, and I step back to admire the splash of color at each window.

She wants a tour of where I've put everything, and I realize she has felt left out of the momentous business of moving me into a new room. It's hard to believe it's only been three days.

“I love how you organized the books.”

Not for the first time, I consider how Mom and Adam are a lot alike.

“Adam and I were thinking maybe this used to be Constance's room. You know, when she lived here.”

“Maybe.” Mom smiles. “That's a nice thought.”

We go down to the den, and each of us curls up on one end of the couch, with our toes just touching in the middle. She's reading some massive nineteenth-century novel with the spine all creased and lots of pencil marks all over the margin, which means she's rereading. So am I. I flip ahead to the scene in
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
where Harry starts writing in the old diary he found, and I disappear into the story.

At eight thirty, after I've gone up to my room, Shelby calls. She's so sorry she missed my call. The musical rehearsals are crazy long but so much fun. I should totally try out when I get to the high school next year. Everyone's so nice. Blah. Blah. Blah.

“Anyway, what's up?” she asks.

“What did Adam tell you?”

“He said it was about the diary, but he got weird and wouldn't say more.”

“Yeah, we were using the diary for our poetry journal. For Mr. Cates? And this writing kind of appeared,” I falter. I can't summon the image of the words on the page.

“Uh-huh.” Shelby doesn't even try to keep the skepticism out of her voice.

“It did!” I exclaim. “It really did write back.”

“Are you reading
Chamber of Secrets
again?”

“No,” I lie.

“Okay. So, what did it say?” She doesn't believe me, but the faintest hope that I might be telling the truth lifts her voice.

Why can't I remember? “Hang on.”

I pull the diary from my backpack. The sweet, musty scent of old book rises from the parchment as I turn page after page.
Diary of a Poet.
The list of herbs. The line from
Hamlet.
Our lame notes from class. And nothing more.

“I . . . it's nothing.” It is nothing, but it wasn't. Was it?

“You okay, Rosie?” The skepticism is replaced with kindness and concern.

No, I'm not okay. I think I'm going crazy. But I don't say that. I make an excuse about being tired.

“Is Adam still up?” I ask.

“You know he keeps the schedule of a toddler,” she quips.

“Why does he do that?”

“Always has,” she replies. “You sure you're okay?”

I could tell her. I could tell her the book was blank and then it wasn't and now it is again, but is that really what happened? Maybe Adam and I just wanted so badly to find something in the diary that we imagined we did. But my chair clattering to the floor in the library echoes in my head. We did see something. I'm sure of it.

“The book . . .” I begin. “It's . . . strange.”

“It's pretty different, that's for sure,” Shelby says.

She's waiting for me to offer more of an explanation, but I don't know what to say. My throat tightens like I might cry.

“Yeah. Really different,” I choke out. “I gotta go.”

“Okay.” She sounds uneasy. “But call me back if you want.”

I nod but can't speak, so I just hang up. I use all my strength to hold tears at bay. I thrust the book back into the cupboard, where it had waited for who knows how long to come out and confuse me and torment me. I slam the door shut.

In the morning, I stand in the middle of my room, biting the inside of my cheek and trying to decide whether or not I should take the diary to school. When the honk summons me, I tear down the stairs to the front door, but then I pivot and dash back up. Yank open the cupboard and grab the book. The cracked leather cover feels like skin. I don't want to touch it. I shove the book into my backpack.

I pull the front door closed behind me and climb into the Steiners' back seat.

“Hi, Michelle.” The name is awkward in my mouth. “I thought your mom was driving.”

“She had to be at work early,” Adam grumbles.

“This is great, actually.” I unzip my backpack. “I can show you what we found in the diary.”

“What did we find?” Adam twists to look at me over his shoulder.

My memory of the afternoon in the library has gone fuzzy around the edges. Why can't I remember what we thought was so strange? “Was it writing?”

I open the book to the notes Adam made in class.
Rosemary remembers. Rosemary is an herb . . .
And back again to my handwriting, the line from
Hamlet
perched neatly at the top of a page, a page that is otherwise blank.

I look up at Adam. His mouth is open slightly, as if he's forgotten what he was going to say. He faces front and runs a hand through his hair.

“I can't look while I'm driving, Rosie,” Shelby says. She steers around the curve on River Road, her eyes straight ahead, her hands perfectly positioned on the wheel.

I keep a hand on the book, waiting for a chance. Maybe at a traffic light. I look past Shelby to the island. The bare trees of winter make it look forlorn and incomplete.

Last time the three of us went there, we paddled through the leaves drifting on the water. Shelby and I worked the oars while Adam lounged in the front of the boat and sang loudly and badly in made-up Italian.

We tied up the boat and carried our picnic to the rosemary patch, which Shelby calls the Rosie patch. While we ate, we plotted a play version of some book we were reading. I don't remember what it was. We were always planning plays and casting them and collecting costumes and props and then the actual play would only take about three minutes, and the Steiners wouldn't be able to make it, and Mom would gush about how we'd done such a great job, and we'd start in on the next one.

“Do you guys have Mr. Cates today?” Shelby asks.

“Yeah. We're meeting in the library.”

“For biography research,” Adam adds.

Shelby sighs. “I loved that class. It was way better than ninth-grade English. Who're you doing for your project?”

“Constance Brooke,” I answer.

“Really?” Shelby glances at me in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, because of the diary,” I explain.

She swoops into the drive in front of the school. Adam's already climbing out of the car.

“I really want to show you—” I start, but the person behind us honks.

“Sorry.” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “Later, okay?”

We stand together and watch Shelby pull away.

Mr. Cates is waiting with Mrs. Wallace in the reference section. The rest of our class is already scattered around a handful of square tables for four.

“Welcome!” Mr. Cates beams at us. He explains how we'll research the poets we've chosen and then tomorrow, we'll start assembling our poetry projects. Working with our partners, we'll put together a binder of poems by our poet but also poems we write that are inspired by the poet. “A conversation in verse,” Mr. Cates explains.

Mrs. Wallace leads us to a bank of computers and shows us how to find this online thing called the
Dictionary of Literary Biography.
She demonstrates how it works by looking up Shakespeare. I study the portrait of him while she talks about the different kinds of information we can find.

“He had earrings!” I whisper to Adam.

He grins. “Like a pirate.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Wallace,” Mr. Cates says. “All right, folks, we only have about forty minutes before the bell, so get to work.” He hands out half sheets of blue paper with the assignment printed in a medieval-looking font.

Adam reads the instructions while I pull the diary from my bag. “For the biography part, we're supposed to learn about our poet's life and pick some detail that interests us. Then we're supposed to read poems by the poet that might be about that detail and also write our own poems about it. Like, if we pick the fact that our poet had a dog, we could write about our own dog.” He looks up at me. “Except neither of us has a dog, so a different detail than that. Obviously.”

“Mr. Cates?” I raise my hand. “Adam and I want to do Constance Brooke. Is that okay?”

“I thought you jaded citizens of Cookfield felt overexposed to the celebrated Constance Brooke,” he replies.

“Yeah.” Adam shrugs. “But since Rosemary lives in her house and all, we thought, you know, it could be, uh, interesting.”

“Indeed!” Mr. Cates smiles and pushes his curls back. “You may certainly research whatever poet you find ‘uh, interesting.'”

He winks at us and goes to help Josh and Alex, who are pretending they don't know how to get off YouTube.

I set the diary next to the keyboard, where its ancient, cracked cover looks just plain wrong.

Adam clicks through to the biography site and types
Constance Brooke
in the search box. The first thing that comes up is an entry from
Twentieth-Century American Poets.

“Wow!” I say as Adam scrolls down the list of publications. “She wrote a lot more than twenty poems!”

He gets to the actual biography part, and we read together. She was born in Cookfield in 1914. Her father, Arthur, taught Shakespeare at the university.

“Like your mom,” Adam points out.

Constance lived with her parents on an island in the river. We already know this. I start skimming. Her mother died in the 1919 flu pandemic when Constance was five.

“That's sad!” I exclaim.

“What?” Adam catches up. “Oh, that sucks. So it was just her and her dad, I guess.”

Now we're both skimming. The 1924 flood destroyed their house. They moved into town. Into my house. Early writing, which they call juvenilia.

Maybe I should write
juvenilia
in the diary—it is our poetry journal after all—but I don't want to open the book. I try to pin down whatever is making me uneasy, but it skitters away.

“Maybe we shouldn't . . .” I begin.

Adam glances at me. “It's too late to worry about writing in it, Rosie. Just go ahead.”

“Okay,” I agree, but my stomach churns, like when I have to do a presentation in front of the whole class. I find the page where we jotted notes yesterday and write
juvenilia
at the top and then =
writing she did when she was a kid.

“Does that mean our poems are juvenilia?”

Adam cocks his head. “I think it's only juvenilia if you become a famous writer. It's, like, retroactive.”

Mr. Cates appears out of nowhere and squats next to us. “Have you selected your detail?”

“Not yet,” Adam replies, his eyes still on the screen, his finger on the scroll button.

Mr. Cates looks at me. “Perhaps the house? An obvious choice, I'd think.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe both houses. You know, the ruin on the island and my house. Her house, I mean. But also memory . . .” I try to put together a thought about the stones of the ruined house and monuments and memory.

“Look up her poem ‘Moon Mangled Memory.' It may speak to you. Let the muse do her work . . .” His voice goes slightly spooky, and he wanders off to Kendall and Aileen, who wouldn't know the muse if she smacked them in the face.

“Is the muse speaking to you?” I whisper.

Adam looks me in the eye and raises one eyebrow. I love that he can do that and hate that I can't.

He opens a new window and searches for “Moon Mangled Memory.” It comes right up. I lean in so we can both read it off the screen. It begins
We mark time by the moon.

I read the first line of the second stanza aloud.
Math of shadow and light.
“That's cool.”

Adam picks up farther down:

A new moon is nothing.

A beginning that is

Absence, blankness and void.

“Kind of creepy,” he says.

I read the last stanza:

A new moon is nothing.

No light. No sight. Recall

Only darkness. Absent

Souvenir. All is lost.

I'm puzzled. “I don't really get how it's about memory.”