In Search of the Rose Notes (5 page)

“Nice big words, Charlotte.”

“I’m just saying they’re all connected.”

“So maybe I’ll get a poltergeist?”

“No. I don’t know. I understand now, though. That’s why you did so much better than me. On the Zener cards.”

I stared at Charlotte. I was frustrated with her in a way that I didn’t recognize. Not like the anger we had toward each other in third grade, when we’d fight over who cheated at spit or who jumped farther off the swing or who’d bought purple jeans first and therefore who was copying whom. I was angry at her for thinking—and making everyone think—that she was smarter than me, when she was actually incredibly stupid. Too stupid to understand what was so scary about the movies she liked to watch. Too stupid to see I didn’t want to talk about
puberty.

“You’re
developing,
” Charlotte said.

My cheeks burned furiously at this second uncomfortable word—“develop.” It was as bad as “puberty.” God, Charlotte was a moron.

“It might be hard to believe, but it’s true,” Charlotte continued, mistaking my wide-eyed expression for wonderment. “Your psychic powers are probably developing right now, and who knows how strong they’ll get?”

I was quiet for a long time.

“Maybe soon,” I said, “yours will develop, too.”

Charlotte looked wistfully at the girl with the jumping telephone. “I don’t think so,” she said softly.

“Why not?”

“Because what are the chances of two girls on the same street being gifted psychics?”

I recoiled at the word “gifted.” She probably got it from school—TAG, the Talented And Gifted program she’d recently begun based on some testing we’d had the previous year. I wasn’t surprised that I hadn’t turned out to be gifted, but I hadn’t expected Charlotte to be either.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

Charlotte closed the book, put it back in her closet, and went quietly to bed.

“Should I turn the light out?” I asked.

“If you want.”

Right before I did, I saw that Charlotte was sucking on a piece of her hair.

“Good night,” I said, and ignored the sad tone of her reply as I got back into my sleeping bag.

Just as I started to nod off, I heard her whisper, “Nora? Are you still awake?”

I was awake enough that I should have admitted,
Yeah.
But I didn’t. Some small part of me wanted her whisper to go unacknowledged. I wanted her question to go unanswered. Whatever it was, I wanted her to have to wonder about it alone in the dark.

Chapter Four

May 22, 2006

I woke up the next morning to the sound of Charlotte bumping her way to the bathroom. I met her at the doorway of Paul’s old room.

“Don’t even think about it,” Charlotte said when she saw me peering out the door. “Go back to sleep.”

“I want to see you off.”

“Now you’ve seen me. It’s five forty-five. I’m going to get dressed.”

“You want me to make you some coffee?”

“I’ve got it covered, Nora. It’s already brewing.”

I wandered into the kitchen and fell into one of the chairs. It was the least I could do—keep her company for a few minutes before she headed off to face a bunch of nasty teenagers for seven hours. I nearly dozed off at the table, but a clunk at the front door jolted me awake—the paper boy sticking the
Voice
in the Hemsworths’ screen door.

I crossed the kitchen and pulled the paper inside, rummaging through for more Rose news. There was a second-page story that mostly repeated the same information that had been in the article Charlotte had sent me. There were, however, a few additional details about the case. The article mentioned that when she disappeared, Rose had had over eight hundred dollars saved in a bank account that her parents hadn’t known about. This had led police at the time to believe that she might have planned to run away—except that no money was ever withdrawn from the account. The article also made mention of Rose’s boyfriend—Aaron Dwyer, a star soccer and baseball player at Waverly High, a year older than Rose and a senior at the time of her disappearance.

Next to the article was Rose’s picture—the same one they’d always run when we were kids. It startled me to see it. In some ways she didn’t look how I remembered her. Her blond hair was blown out dramatically, rather than in her usual ponytail. She seemed to be straining to maintain a toothy, squinty smile. It was a facial expression I associated with cheerleaders.

Charlotte
click-clacked
into the room in thick black heels, a long black skirt, and a snug short-sleeved lilac sweater that showed how trim she still was.

After she had poured herself a cup of coffee, I pushed the Rose article toward her.

“Do you remember much about Rose’s ex-boyfriend?”

“Aaron Dwyer?” Charlotte said. “A little. Paul was sort of friends with him. They had soccer together. And I remember always asking her if she liked kissing him. I was such a brat.”

“What’s the story with him?”

“Well, as I understand it now, mostly from the chitchat in the teachers’ room, they had broken up a few weeks earlier. But he claimed to be as shocked as anyone that she’d disappeared. And he had a very, very solid alibi.”

“Which was?”

“The entire soccer team, plus the coach. They had a game in Fairville and had pizza afterward. They were out pretty late together that night. I mean, it at least vouched for the window of time when she’d disappeared.”

“Why’d they break up, though? Anyone know that?”

Charlotte shrugged one shoulder slightly. “They were only sixteen… did there need to be some big reason? And whatever it was, the rumor was that he was angry at her. That she was maybe interested in someone else, and he didn’t like it. But that sounds like the sort of thing people say as an afterthought.”

“Has anyone questioned him recently, I wonder?”

“If the police have, we don’t know about it. He’s still around. He worked in insurance for a while but got laid off. I heard he’s been bartending lately, for extra money to support his family. I kind of hinted to Porter that he should find Aaron and talk with him, but Dave told him no. Didn’t think it would be appropriate. The
Valley Voice
is still pretty lightweight.”

I skimmed over the article again.

“He didn’t quote anyone from the neighborhood here,” I observed.

“He’s still working on
that
story… the neighborhood in disbelief. Will probably run tomorrow. I’ve suggested he come to the high school and chat with some of the teachers. They’ve had some stuff to say about Rose.”

“Like what?”

“Well, Cheryl Griffin claims that Rose came in in September as bright and cheeky as ever, but by November, when she disappeared, she seemed withdrawn. Wasn’t herself. Something was up.”

“Mrs. Griffin. French teacher, right?”

“Yeah. Of course, something like that could just as easily be like what you were saying with Aaron. Something someone sees after the fact, that might or not be real.”

“I think that part might be real.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I was only a kid, so I wouldn’t have used a word like ‘withdrawn.’ But I remember thinking that Rose was more fun in the summer than she was during the school year.”

“Sorry. Again, maybe projecting. You were a kid. Everything was more fun in the summer. During the school year, she had homework and shit. So did we. And
I
don’t remember feeling that way about her at all. But, you know, I think I’m going to do some more digging in the teachers’ lounge. They knew her so differently than I did. It’s kind of weird, actually.”

“Do they know how
you
knew her?”

“Some do, some don’t.”

The toast popped up—brown on the edges and nearly black in the middle. Charlotte slapped the slices onto a glass plate and carried them to the table.

“I didn’t ask you yesterday,” I said. “How are your parents doing these days?”

“My mom’s okay,” Charlotte said before taking a crispy bite of toast. “She has good days and bad days with the MS. Like, right now she feels well enough to take a train out to see her sister. But how will she feel next month? Hard to know. And it’s recently started to affect her eyesight, which is scary.”

I nodded. Charlotte’s mother had stopped working at the hospital a few years ago—when she’d grown too sick to manage it. I was about to ask a little more about her mother’s health, but Charlotte continued speaking.

“And my dad’s the same. You know he has a condo in West Hartford?”

“Oh, really? West Hartford? I didn’t realize.”

“Works at the bank branch there now,” Charlotte said.

I waited for more, but she didn’t add anything.

I buttered my toast in silence, trying to scrape off some of the burned parts discreetly, so as not to appear critical of Charlotte’s offerings. She watched me for a moment before continuing.

“How’s
your
mom, by the way? Did you see her on your way up yesterday?”

“No. She actually doesn’t know I’m up here.”

I caught Charlotte’s eyebrows twitch ever so slightly as she sipped from her coffee cup.

“You planning on letting her know?” she asked.

“When I feel like it,” I mumbled.

She shrugged and got up to stick more bread into the toaster.

After Charlotte left for work, I parked myself on the Hemsworth couch with my coffee cup and turned on the television. The early-morning weather report held my attention for about ten seconds, and then I found myself scanning the contents of the coffee table for objects of interest. There were two wineglasses, still dirty from last night. I made a mental note to wash them. A remote control, an ashtray, and a typed document Charlotte had left there.

“You” was the first word on the page in bold. Below it a poem: “A giant clothesline in the sky— / so far up you can barely see the ground…” The poem Charlotte had read me the night before. I was surprised to see it typed on a paper that was starting to yellow with age, with several staple marks in one corner.

Oddly, I’d been under the impression that this year’s
Looking Glass
wasn’t finished yet, that Charlotte and the kids were still working on it. But here it was all typed up, with the number eleven on the right-hand corner of the page, as if it had already been printed up in a booklet. The torn edge indicated it had been ripped out of something bound already. I skipped to the next piece halfway down the page. “Dandelions” by Jennifer Glass. This poem began with the line “Thick grass tickles my bare feet.” Yawn. I turned the page over. A number ten in the upper-right-hand corner and, below that, “Pink-Fingered Heart” by Kelly Sawyer.

Kelly Sawyer.
That name was definitely familiar. You never forget the name of the biggest drip in your school. You always remember it pronounced with a mocking whine to it (Kel-
leee
SAW-yerrrr). Years afterward it still sounds like a disease you pray you’ll never catch. Kelly was in the same class as Charlotte and me. In high school she was even further down on the social ladder than I was, which was difficult to manage. While I hid behind my hair and my closed mouth, Kelly put herself out there in the most painful and embarrassing ways: singing “Sometimes When We Touch,” off-key at the school variety show freshman year, submitting vaguely sensual love poems to the school literary magazine.

I even remembered “Pink-Fingered Heart.” How could I forget a gross title like that? The question was—what was it doing on Charlotte’s coffee table a decade later? She’d implied—or at least I thought she’d implied—that the clothesline thing had been written by a current student of hers. But this clearly wasn’t the case. This page was probably from an issue of
Looking Glass
from when we were in high school, and maybe Charlotte had written the clothesline piece. Either that or she and the other English teachers kept “Pink-Fingered Heart” on file to use as
Looking Glass
boilerplate—a notion that was only slightly less bizarre than Charlotte’s digging up our old school literary magazine to read to me upon our reunion.

I threw the paper back on the table and placed my coffee cup next to it. It was way too early. I headed back to Paul’s old room. Maybe it would all make sense after a couple more hours of sleep.

Transformations:

October 1990

Charlotte was busy making a diorama of
The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
I was annoyed with her for picking that book, which she obviously chose only because it was the sort of thing teachers liked—it was long, historical, educational, and it took place in Connecticut. This was our first book report of the year, and we were allowed to read whatever we wanted. I’d picked
Blubber
by Judy Blume and had already finished my diorama of construction-paper girls gathered around Blubber in the bathroom, with little white paper bubbles vomiting out of their mouths, saying cruel things in big, imposing Magic Marker letters. As I watched Charlotte fashioning cloth Puritans in an elaborate aerial-view court scene in a boot box her father had given her, I was starting to wonder if my own diorama might need some last-minute enhancements.

“Hey. How come we never read this one?” Rose was flipping through one of the black books Charlotte had left scattered on her bedroom carpet.

“Because that one is written for little kids,” Charlotte explained, tying a bit of string around a scrap of black cloth to create a waistline for one of her Puritans.

“Are you sure?” Rose licked her finger and turned a page. “It looks like the rest to me. Long, boring articles and gross pictures.”

“It’s about vampires and werewolves.”

“And you’re not into that?” Rose asked.

“Not really,” Charlotte replied, producing five small wooden spheres. “These are for the heads. Do you think they’ll need superglue to stay on?”

“Maybe,” I said, watching her begin to pencil-sketch a face onto one of them. “Where did you get those?”

“My dad took me to the craft store in Manchester last night.”

“Huh,” I said, trying to swallow my frustration. My mother didn’t believe in spending lots of money on a school project.

“Do you want to know how to spot a werewolf?” Rose asked from behind her black book.

“Pretty easy,” I said. “It’s the big, hairy snarly animal that jumps out and eats you.”

“No, I mean a werewolf in its
human
form. Let’s see. They have bushy eyebrows that are grown into the middle.” ’

“Like Toby’s brother?” Charlotte suggested.

“Joe’s got dark eyebrows,” Rose pointed out, “and they’re thick, but not exactly
bushy.
”

Charlotte shrugged and went to work on her second tiny wooden head.

“Their ears are low and far back,” Rose continued. “They tend to have a lot of scratches and scabs on their bodies from running around the woods all night. And they’re a little hairier than most people.”

“Sounds like Joe could be one,” Charlotte said.

“Well, Joe’s scratches are from when he works with metal.”

“So he says,” Charlotte replied, dotting a second eye onto the head.

Rose frowned, looking irritated at Charlotte but at a loss for a reply.

“Charlotte’s dad is the hairiest man I’ve seen,” I offered.

“Ew!” Charlotte said, looking up. “You’re not supposed to say that about someone’s
dad.
”

“And how many men have you seen without their shirts anyway?” Rose asked.

“Lots,” I answered. “At the beach.”

“Oh, okay. And you’ve made a study of it?”

I ignored the question because I wasn’t sure what it meant. “Isn’t he, though? Isn’t Charlotte’s dad hairier than your dad?”

Rose hesitated. “Um… I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never seen him in a bathing suit or anything.”

“You don’t need to,” I said. “You can see it just from his arms and neck.”

Charlotte threw one of her little heads at me. “I
said
you’re not supposed to—”

“Charlotte’s right, Nora,” Rose said.

I was supposed to shut up now because they understood about fathers and I didn’t. But I felt I’d hit some nerve, and I wanted to keep pressing it to see what else they would do. So what if there were certain rules about dads? Those were
their
rules, not mine.

“There’s even some hairs sticking out of his nose,” I observed.

“Okay, Nora, knock it off,” Rose said, sighing and turning a page.

“Okay,” I said, shrugging.

Charlotte went back to work. I plucked the head she’d thrown at me out of the carpet and slid it quietly into my pocket.