In Search of the Rose Notes (13 page)

“Why not?”

“We need to have a full set.”

“So make a new one. You’ve got plenty of cardboard left. You got any yarn or anything?”

“Those are the originals,” Charlotte insisted. “You should make your own to wear.”

“Come on, now. Don’t be like that.
I’ll
make the replacements, okay? But we should wear the ones we actually pulled, right? The ones we pulled are the ones that mean something.”

Charlotte sucked air through her teeth. I wasn’t sure if Rose was right, but at least she was taking this seriously.

“Can you find something to string them with?” Rose continued. “We’ll put a little hole in the top and—”

Charlotte stomped back to her bedroom.

“Does your rune scare you, Nora?” Rose asked me when Charlotte was gone.

“Huh? No. Why?”

Rose turned her piece of cardboard over in her fingers. “No reason. I thought for a second there you looked a little scared.”

“Nah, I’m okay,” I said, hoping Rose would think me cool for it.

“Good for you,” she said, staring at her rune.

To my surprise, Charlotte came back with some pink gimp from her jewelry-making set.

“You haven’t made the replacements yet,” she observed, practically throwing the gimp at Rose.

“I will,” Rose assured her, sounding a little tired.

And then we set to making our simple jewelry, reluctantly tying to our wrists these awkward fates that Rose had imposed upon us.

Chapter Eight

May 23, 2006

I awoke on Tuesday to my cell phone ringing. It was Neil.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I just wanted to say hi, since I didn’t call yesterday. You having fun?”

“I’m not sure, actually.”

“Then come home. I miss you. And Stanley misses you, I think. He was barking for no apparent reason last night, and this morning he was sniffing around your chair. Probably he was wondering where you went.”

“I think he’s just still smelling that bacon grease I spilled last week. Probably there are still a couple of tiny drops on the floor.”

“Oh. I forgot about that. Never mind, then. Don’t come home.”

“I miss you,” I said.

“I miss you, too. What’ve you been up to up there?”

“Not much. Visiting old landmarks, grocery stores. I saw this guy Toby last night, someone else from the neighborhood. I went to prom with him.”

“Oh, really? Is he handsome?”

“I can’t tell. I’ve known him too long.”

“Right. One of those. Well, when are you coming home, did you say?”

“Soon, I think. Charlotte’s been a little swamped. We should maybe try to have one more nice dinner together and leave it at that. I guess I should have come with more of an exit strategy, or just come for the weekend.”

“Have you seen your mom yet?” Neil wanted to know.

“Oh… no, not yet. You know, Bristol’s like a half hour from Waverly.”

“Half hour south, though, right?”

“Um. Sort of. Basically.”

“Well, then you’ll at least see her on your way out. I’d think she’d want you to stay for a night, huh?”

“Probably.”

“So tell her I said hi when you see her. I should probably let you go. This traffic’s getting a little hairy.”

“Okay. I’ll call tonight,” I promised.

Not half a minute after I’d hung up, the phone rang again—this time showing a Connecticut number.

“Hi, my name is Tracy Vaughan,” a woman said after I’d picked up. “I’m investigating a case in Waverly, Connecticut… .”

I recognized her name from the newspaper articles—Detective Tracy Vaughan of the Connecticut State Police—but let her explain. About Rose, about the newly opened case. About how they were questioning many of Rose’s old neighbors and friends. About how my name came up in the file as the child who’d been walking with Rose on the afternoon she disappeared, so they just wanted to touch base with me. And she’d gotten my cell number from my home voice-mail message.

When she was finished, I said, “I happen to be in Waverly, actually.”

“Oh.” There was a long pause. “I thought you lived in Virginia.”

“I do. I’m… um, coincidentally visiting someone here in Waverly.”

“Well, then. How about that? In that case would you mind coming in to chat with us? We just had a couple of questions for you.”

“How’s this afternoon?” I asked.

“That’s perfect. I’ll be at the Waverly station all day.”

Perfect,
I told myself. Might as well get that out of the way sooner rather than later—the depressing exercise of explaining again—officially, once and for all—how unremarkable that day, and that walk home, had been.

I stretched and then wandered into the living room.

Several Time-Life books were scattered across the couch cushions, the coffee table, and the floor. I searched through the books and made a small stack of the ones that had papers stuck in them. I wanted to check out Charlotte’s old notes from when we were kids. For entertainment value, it probably beat
Good Morning America.

After the coffee was brewed, I settled on the Hemsworths’ front steps with a mug and a few of the books. In the first one,
Mind Over Matter,
there were several slips of small, notepad-size paper stapled to a piece of purple construction paper.

“After several minutes of dillydally,”
read the first note,
“the subject now finally appears to be under. She is describing the missing person’s outfit on the day of the disappearance. Purple sweatshirt. Jeans.”

Leave it to Charlotte to secretly refer to me as “the subject.” I closed that book and moved on to
Psychic Voyages.
It said,
“Not sure if the subject has the capacity for astral projection. Must have a sleepover to experiment with this possibility.”

I snorted, then folded up the faded pink paper and set it on the step next to me. I was definitely going to call Charlotte on that one. I flipped through the rest of the book. No further notes. Apparently the young Charlotte had no interest in near-death experiences or reincarnation. Probably for the best.

I sipped my coffee and picked up
Dreams and Dreaming,
which was so stuffed with papers that the binding of the book had come loose
.
When I opened the front cover, one of several paper-clipped piles of notebook paper fell into my lap.

I recognized my own eleven-year-old handwriting on the top pile—awkward cursive slanted to the left.
“Nora
Nora
NORA”
was scribbled across the top—in cursive, then bubble letters, then an odd lettering than I think was supposed to resemble leaves, with a freaky-looking owl peeking out of the
O.

Under that:

Last night I dreamed that a huge McDonald’s hamburger floated down into my room. I tried to bite it, but when I did, it made the sun come up, and I woke up before I could taste it.

A few blank lines skipped. Then in pencil:

I dreamed a witch was chasing all of us with a bulldozer. We all ran and hid under Charlotte’s trampoline. She got off the bulldozer and chased us but didn’t see us under there. She started jumping on the trampoline. The trampoline kept poking down at us whenever she landed. We could all hear her cackling up there while she was bouncing up and down. We were scared, but she never caught us.

I remembered that dream. I’d had it a few times, actually. But I’d had it when I was about seven or eight. I’d probably written it here to avoid having to supply a more recent dream. My dreams went on for a number of pages after that. An inordinate number of them were about junk food. We’d recorded our dreams for a couple of weeks but hadn’t discussed it much, as Charlotte had lost interest.

I put my dreams aside and picked up the next stack. It didn’t have a name on it, but I could tell from the maturity of the handwriting that it was probably Rose’s. It was round and girlish, with delicately curved tails coming off the lowercase
a
’s and
d
’s. Sure enough, the first paragraph began:

I was in gym class, and Mrs. Powers was making us do endless headstands on those gross old gym mats. When she wasn’t looking, when she was spotting someone else, I got off my head and scooched to the end of the mat. I pulled the end of it up like it was one of those curly plastic sleds, and it took off, zipping me around the gymnasium and then, after a little while, into the air. Suddenly my gym mat was a magic carpet, and I was flying up and out of the gym, away from the school. Soon I was flying so high I couldn’t see the ground. I’m not sure where I was, but I knew I was probably pretty far from Waverly.

A few lines down, another paragraph:

I was running through a field of flowers, and a car was chasing me. I got away just in time. I ran into the woods that came after the field. They were guarded by a round stone, sort of like Nora’s favorite megalith. The car couldn’t get through it. I stood right at the entrance of the woods for a while, watching the car try to get through. It never would. Then I started crying, because even though I’d gotten away from the car, now I was in the forest and I couldn’t ever get out.

My mug crashed on the second step of the Hemsworths’ stoop, shattering and sending coffee splattering onto my feet and down the cement steps. I yelped and hopped up, knocking two of the black books down the steps. I swung the screen door open and stepped back into the kitchen for a rag. Then I picked up the shards of the mug and mopped up the coffee from the yellowed pages and the cement steps, feeling foolish. What had spooked me so badly? If Charlotte was going to write a poem about one of Rose’s dreams, it wasn’t such a big jump that she’d write about another.

I settled back on the steps with the stack of papers. Below the car dream, dated a few days later, was this:

I was hanging on clothesline somewhere up high. It was so high I couldn’t see the ground. It was sort of fun at first. Until I realized I was hanging from only my mother’s underwear and a dinky clothespin. I tried to get to the end of it. Hand over hand, rushing from this piece of clothing to that, but there was no end in sight. This clothesline went on forever. I stopped and laughed at how ridiculous it all was. I couldn’t believe this was happening, and I started to suspect that I was dreaming. That’s when the shirt I was hanging on snapped off the line, and I fell. I woke up just before I hit the ground.

Okay, so this was the inspiration for that poem Charlotte had read to me the first night. Why had she chosen to tease me with that one? I wondered. Was that dream of Rose’s supposed to be memorable to me for some reason? I flipped to the next page and found a couple of familiar-looking typed pages attached to it:

You

The gym mats are a painfully cheerful blue

but hold the sweat from a decade of asses and forearms.

Probably swirled with an invisible ringworm… .

It was one of the poems from the
Looking Glass,
apparently photocopied. It was the 1996
Looking Glass,
same as I’d seen yesterday—same type, same layout, and with the name of another girl in our class on the poem below Charlotte’s.

And after that, another:

You

You are running through a sunlit field.

A red Datsun is chasing you,

revving its engine, plowing through

grass and wildflowers… .

And then, clipped behind that:

You

A giant clothesline in the sky—

so far up you can barely see the ground.

You’re hanging on to a thin T-shirt.

It’s about to tear…

In each case the 1996
Looking Glass
content was essentially the same as one of Rose’s recorded dreams, pimped out with line breaks and slightly more flowery language.

Charlotte had gone in and attached her
Looking Glass
passages to Rose’s corresponding dreams. Recently? Or just after she’d written them, when we were in high school? A little creepy, perhaps, but not out of sync with Charlotte’s obsessive attitude toward Rose when we were kids. Maybe that attitude had extended into high school. I certainly couldn’t begrudge anyone a little unhealthy teenage behavior.

I riffled through the remaining papers. The next page was another notebook page, with Rose’s handwriting—this time scrawled relatively sloppily:

Last night I dreamed I was in a room where the wallpaper came to life for a moment. But then it went back to being paper. And then everything was dull again. And I was alone again.

Then, after that, pulled from the
Looking Glass:

You

In his bedroom,

beneath the blueberry wallpaper,

you kiss till the sun goes down…

The final page, behind that, was also from the
Looking Glass:

You are knocking on his door this time—

a perfect cabin on a lush green hill

with fruit trees and sunshine

and pinafored children hugging smiling lions…

On top of that page, Charlotte had drawn a thin, light question mark in pencil. So nearly all of Charlotte’s writings were based on Rose’s dreams. But this last one—with the question mark on it—apparently wasn’t. Either that or Charlotte had simply lost the corresponding dream.

That was the last page in the stack of Rose’s dreams. The last set of papers was Charlotte’s. Her neat, round, eleven-year-old handwriting confessed:

In my dream last night, I knew how to play the violin. But no one except Nora could hear it. Whenever I tried to play, Mom and Dad and Rose just kept saying, “There’s nothing coming out.” But Nora could hear it. After a while she couldn’t hear it anymore either. But then Brownie could hear it, and Mr. Cook’s dog could, too. All these dogs came running, barking at our door. And Dad finally said, quit playing that stupid thing! We’ll never get these dogs out of here!

And then:

I had five backpacks that were five different colors: turquoise, purple, pink, blue, and I think the other one was yellow. One for each day of the school week. I had matching notebooks and pens each color, one for each day of the week. And in the dream it was Tuesday, purple day. But when I got to school, someone had switched everything. The pink notebook was in there. And the blue pen. I walked out of the class and started walking all the way home. When I got home, Paul was there, and I knew he did it. I said, Why did you switch everything? And Paul was like, Yeah, I switched your notebooks. So what? Was it really worth cutting school for? Now you’re in big trouble. In the dream I got very upset about that and didn’t even think about why Paul was home from school, too, which was pretty weird.

I set the dreams aside. Part of me missed the young Charlotte of those dreams. That Charlotte was sometimes annoying but always direct.

I sighed and stretched my legs down to the lowest step on the stoop. My foot hit
Psychic Voyages,
which had tumbled down the front steps when I’d spilled my coffee. The book was open to a series of photographs of a thin, naked man lying on a bed. His shadow appeared to be getting up and walking away from his body. I smiled as I picked it up, remembering how Charlotte and I had giggled over the sideways view the photos offered of his genitals. I turned the page.