In Search of the Rose Notes (17 page)

When the phone rang that night, I jumped but then let my mother get it.

At around the same time the night before, we’d had a strange call just as we were sitting down to dinner. I’d picked it up and heard someone breathing funny on the other end. Whoever it was had sounded scared and had hung up after just a couple of seconds. When my mother asked me who it was, I’d said it was a wrong number.

This time I held my breath as my mother picked up and said hello.

“Oh, hi, Richie,” she said. “How are you?”

After a couple of
Uh-huhs
and an
Oh, my God,
she disappeared into her bedroom and closed the door. I knew that
Richie
was Charlotte’s dad. And the few bits of conversation I heard through my mother’s door made me lose my appetite:
And what are the police doing? Jesus. How is Wanda holding up?

“That was Mr. Hemsworth,” my mother said after she’d emerged from the bedroom.

I nodded.

“He told me Rose didn’t come to baby-sit today. Apparently Rose is missing. She’s been missing since yesterday.”

“I saw her yesterday,” I offered. “She came and baby-sat us yesterday.”

“I know. Mr. Hemsworth said that. But she didn’t come home for dinner last night. She never went home.”

“She didn’t even go home to sleep?”

“No, Nora. They haven’t seen her at all. She just didn’t come home.”

“Did they call the police?”

“Of course. They called them late last night.”

“But I
saw
her go home.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. She walked home with me. We walked together.”

“And you saw her walk up the hill?”

“Yeah. Well, not
all
the way up the hill. I can’t see that far from here. But that’s the way she was going.”

My mother was silent for a moment, nibbling at her thumbnail.

“Eat your cutlet,” she murmured.

I tried to. I cut a small square out of it—one of those tiny, bite-size pieces she used to cut for me when I was a little kid.

“Her parents say she didn’t come home,” my mother said. “But then they don’t get home till fairly late themselves. Maybe she got home and then left again.”

“Where would she go?” I asked.

My mother was still biting her nail. When I did stuff like that, she’d slap my hand away from my mouth.

“I don’t know, honey. That’s what they’re hoping the police will find out. It sounds like they’re thinking she might have run away.”

“I don’t think she ran away,” I said firmly. I considered mentioning how intensely Rose had been talking about aliens lately, but I decided against it. My mother would think I was trying to make a bad joke.

“We don’t know what’s happened yet, Nora. We just don’t know yet. It’s really terrible for her parents.”

I cut another tiny square of chicken cutlet and put it in my mouth. I chewed and chewed and chewed but wasn’t much in the mood to swallow it.

“She walked you home yesterday? What time was that?” My mother wanted to know.

“Same time as always. When Mr. Hemsworth got home.”

“But what
time
was that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if anything unusual happened? If someone stopped their car and talked to Rose? If you saw any strangers?”

Strangers.
They’d always talked about them in school. I’d always imagined them as gangly, ill-shaven men in black leotards, leaping out from behind trees and shimmying under cars, hissing. Would that I’d ever see anything that interesting on Fox Hill.

“Yeah,” I said. “We didn’t see anything weird.”

“Are you
sure
?”

“Well,
yeah,
” I said, a little defensively. How could I not be sure of something like that?

My mother reached across the card table and pushed my bangs out of my eyes. I thought she was going to look at me sharply and tell me not to speak to her in that tone. Or at least tell me I needed a haircut. But she just combed her fingers through my bangs a few times and then stopped, resting her hand on my temple.

“Are you sure?” she said again, softly. She was staring at me now like I was from another planet. Her eyes had grown big, her mouth open and uncertain.

“Yes…” I said slowly.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, stroking my head. She wasn’t saying it to me. She wasn’t saying it to anyone. Not even to God, who I was pretty sure she didn’t really believe in. “What Wanda and Lewis must be thinking.”

She still wasn’t talking to me—otherwise she’d have called them Mr. and Mrs. Banks. She finally took her hand away from my head and stuck her fork into a piece of overcooked broccoli.

She examined it for a moment, then put her fork down and told me that Mrs. Shepherd had agreed to meet Charlotte and me at the bus stop and walk us to Charlotte’s after school. She’d keep an eye on us until Mr. Hemsworth got home. At least for tomorrow. After that, my mother said, we’d play it by ear.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay awake thinking of my mother’s question.

Are you
sure
? Are you
sure
?

Well, yes. I was.

But did confidence have anything to do with the truth? Did confidence in something mean it was real or right? Rose had been sure, in daylight, that no werewolves or vampires existed. And yet something had reached out from those trees along Fox Hill, somewhere between my house and hers, and snatched her away. She wasn’t afraid, so she’d let her guard down, forgotten to hurry or hold on to her throat. Whatever it was, it had seen her walking home without a care or a worry and had taken advantage of her confidence.

I shuddered and got up to turn on the bathroom light. But it didn’t make me feel any better. Light only covered up fear, I decided. It didn’t get rid of it. The dark hid werewolves and ghosts, but light was maybe worse. Light tricked you into thinking you weren’t afraid.

I remembered Rose reminding me that my not watching a documentary about aliens wouldn’t make aliens any less real. Dark was the same way—it would be there whether I chose to face it or not. I got up and shut off the bathroom light again, feeling my way back to bed. Light couldn’t trick me. And I had to remember this tomorrow. I had to remember how scared I was. I wouldn’t let the daylight trick me into forgetting.

Chapter Ten

May 23, 2006

I spent the half-hour drive to my mother’s sucking down Gobstoppers.

When I arrived at her modest apartment building, I found a spot in its tight parking lot. I decided to eat one more candy before ringing her bell, crunching down the last of it as I contemplated the building’s neglected landscaping.

My mother really could afford a nicer place. She simply didn’t need one. And my mother rarely wanted things she didn’t need. When I was growing up, she was always telling me what we didn’t need. I didn’t need Fruit Roll-Ups in my lunch box because they were expensive glorified candy. We didn’t need cable television because we watched plenty of TV already. So it stood to reason that we didn’t have a father around because we didn’t need one. I operated on that assumption until I was eight.

But one day—when Charlotte insisted that biologically I must have a father—I started asking questions. So my mother sat me down and told me that she had never been married to my father and that he had died when I was very little. He’d been sick, and the doctor had given him the wrong kind of drugs by mistake, she’d explained. He was living in Florida at the time.

Did I have any questions? she wanted to know.

Of course I had quite a few questions. How come she hadn’t told me before that I had a father? Where had he been all these years? Florida? What had he been doing there? All I knew about Florida was Disney World. Why hadn’t he ever invited me?

“Did he have leukemia?” I asked after some thought.

It popped into my head because it was one of the few names of diseases I knew. It was what had taken Toby’s mother when he was very small, so somehow the word had stuck in my head as the evil sickness that killed kids’ parents.

My mother frowned, then reached out and stroked my hair.

“No, honey,” she said. “He didn’t have leukemia.”

“That’s good,” I replied. I didn’t know what else to say. My opening question seemed to make her so sad I thought it best to skip the others. At least for the moment.

After dinner that night, she showed me a picture of him. He was wearing a Red Sox cap, squinting against the sunlight, holding a thermos. He looked way younger than Charlotte’s dad.

“We had a picnic that day,” she explained. “And did some fishing.”

I nodded as if this explained everything. That pretty much closed the subject until I was in high school and my father came up again when I least expected it. If I’d known it would be that long, I’d probably have asked a question or two more.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” my mother said after I’d explained the circumstances of my sudden appearance—that I was visiting Charlotte on a whim. And that I was going to call her tomorrow and set something up, but Charlotte crashed early after work tonight, so I decided to see what she was up to this evening.

“I wish I’d known ahead of time you were going to be around, though.” My mother sat next to me on her couch and lifted her cat, Bilbo, into her lap. “Bill would have liked to see you, but he’s away till next Tuesday.”

Bill was the guy my mom had been dating for about a year. He’d come with her to our last Thanksgiving in Virginia. It had been a surprise, since she’d never, to my knowledge, dated anyone seriously since my father. Very occasionally, when I was growing up, she’d have dinner with someone, but she’d usually come home and tell me what a bore the guy had been or what a poor movie selection he’d made.

“Sorry about that,” I said. “It really was a last-minute thing.”

My mother nodded, petting down the fluffy hair around Bilbo’s neck. He had long gray fur and yellowish eyes and a smudge of dark gray next to his nose. I’d always thought he was incredibly ugly. And now the shape of his skull and the tiny line of his mouth reminded me of the drawings of aliens in Charlotte’s books. I’ve never cared that much for cats anyway. Their daintiness embarrasses me.

“So I guess you’ve heard about Rose, too,” I said.

“Of course,” my mother replied, scratching Bilbo’s ears.

We couldn’t have pets at Mrs. Crowe’s, but my mother adopted Bilbo from the shelter after I left for college. She got him fee-free because he was already kind of old and no one had wanted him. He was apparently a day away from euthanasia.

“I wasn’t sure if I should call you when I heard,” she said now. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to be dragging all that out again.”

I tipped back my box of Gobstoppers and dropped one of the candies into my mouth. The candy rattled noisily as it slid down the half-empty box.

“Want one?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

My mother shook her head, making a face.

I hesitated. “Well, I heard anyway. From Charlotte.”

“Interesting that Charlotte would call you after all these years. You visiting anyone else? Or just Charlotte?”

“Well, and you.”

“That’s all?”

“I saw Toby Dean. We had a beer.”

“I’ve always liked Toby. How’s he doing?”

“Good. It seems like he knows everyone in town.”

“That’s what happens when you fix everyone’s car.”

I nodded. “I guess so.”

“He’s had it kind of hard. What with his father dying. And that flaky brother of his. Toby’s like his father was. Takes care of everyone.”

I nodded again.

“Poor Walter,” my mother said, referring to Toby’s dad. “He really had it rough when Toby’s grandmother died. Had never taken care of the boys himself before. He was at his wit’s end some days. I think he was drinking some then, and the shop was in trouble. But he really pulled himself together and made it work. Always managed to keep it afloat somehow. And Toby’s really done a splendid job taking it over. My understanding’s the shop’s doing quite well these days.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

Maybe my mother heard a bored quality to my voice, because after a moment’s pause she said, “Hey—how about we go out for an ice cream or something? Would you be up for that?”

I said sure and told her I’d be happy to drive.

Later I tossed and turned on my mother’s couch—the blue one with the navy flecks that she’d bought when I was in third grade. It wasn’t quite as comfortable as Paul Hemsworth’s old bed. When I curled up against its mushy back, I could smell Mrs. Crowe’s place somewhere deep in the velour.

We’d lived thriftily and relatively harmoniously at Mrs. Crowe’s for so long. So when I tried to kill myself at the age of sixteen, it was an outrageous indulgence. A desperate bit of frivolity of the kind my mother usually despised. Still, she did all the right things for the first week or so of my hospitalization. She brought me chocolate bars and told me she loved me and chatted with Dr. Petroff and came for the family-therapy sessions but gave me my space, as he likely instructed.

And then, on the eve of my last day there, when my obligatory ten days were up and my release day had been set, they let her take me out of the ward, down to a corner coffee shop for a hot cocoa.

“The doctor asked me about your father,” she told me.

I took a big, greedy sip of my cocoa and burned my tongue. I didn’t reply.

“I’m going to tell you the truth, Nora.”

And that’s when she proceeded to tell me that my father had died of a drug overdose. It was clear to her by the time she was pregnant that he had a problem, she said. She’d always thought the drugs might have been self-medication for depression, but she didn’t stick around to find out.

She told me that his parents had sent her money the first couple of years after I was born and that they’d met me when I was three but I probably didn’t remember it. At the time there was talk of my meeting my father, but it didn’t work out. He was still having problems, and her communication with the family faded after that, especially after she got her nursing license. When he’d overdosed on pills a few years later, no one was sure if it was intentional or not.

“They think he killed himself?”

“There was no way to know. He didn’t leave a note. I’d like to think it was an accident.”

“Now,” she said, after giving me a few minutes to let all this sink in. “Dr. Petroff asked me about mental illness or suicide in the family.”

I looked into my cocoa. I couldn’t enjoy it anymore. It was too sweet for this conversation.

“I didn’t tell him about your father.”

“You lied?”

“Yes, I lied.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s nobody else’s business.”

“God, Mom. You’re a
nurse.
”

“Yes, I’m a nurse. So I know what kinds of things these doctors pull. They find out about your father and they’ll insist on keeping you for a few more weeks. Or send you to one of those adolescent facilities. They’ll want to cover their asses. They’ll start making assumptions about you. Taking shortcuts. I don’t want them putting all that on you when it has nothing to do with you.”

“It
doesn’t
? I’m not sure if that’s true.”

“You want to be mentally ill, Nora?” She was now gesturing so wildly with her hands that she practically knocked her coffee cup off the table. “Is that how you want to distinguish yourself? Is that the privilege you want out of your life?”

I looked around the empty coffee shop to see if anyone was listening. The guy behind the counter was sorting tea bags. I wondered if this shop’s proximity to a psych ward meant he heard conversations like this all the time.

“No, I just—”

“If you want to claim him,” my mother said, taking a breath before she continued carefully, “you go ahead. You want to claim this history that you’ve known about for only the past ten minutes, you march right back up there and tell Dr. Petroff everything I just told you. That’s why I’m telling you. So you can decide for yourself what you think he should know.”

I stared at her. I hated everything about her in that moment. I hated the way her gray-streaked hair flipped the wrong way away from her face, always refusing to curl under correctly. I hated the visible pores on her nose and the way her lip twitched when she tried to talk sense into me. Her life’s work. And I hated the way those words came out of her mouth, stinking of sour saliva and coffee combined with some foul old-lady smell that was already beginning to develop deep inside her.

“Umm… okay,” I said skeptically.

“But before you decide, honey—” She said the word “honey” not with affection but contempt, the same way she addressed female drivers who got in her way (
Are you going to turn or not, honey?
). “Before you decide, there’s something I want to say to you. I’m sorry you were hurting so badly you felt you had to do this. I’m sorry I didn’t see it coming, and I’m sorry if I don’t understand it.”

She reached for my hand, but I pulled it away, again glancing around the shop for witnesses. She continued anyway.

“If there are some changes we need to make to help you feel better, we’ll work on them. But.
But.
I want you to go back in there tonight and look around you. Look at the people there. Look at the people who are paid to care for them. You can have that for the rest of your life, if you want it. The pills and the group therapy. I’m not sure whether your father had a choice, but I believe that you do. And if I turn out to be wrong about that, forgive me.”

I started tearing little bits off the rim of my Styrofoam cup, avoiding her eyes. But she stuck out her hand and nudged my chin up with her knuckle.

“You, my dear, have a choice, I’m pretty certain. You can let them tell you that you need them to make you like everyone else. But they’ve known you for ten days. I’ve cared for you and watched you carefully your whole life—more carefully than you can imagine, and you may not be the happiest or the most predictable young woman I know, but I
know
there’s nothing wrong with you.”

And I hated her for using the word “woman,” as if we had something biological in common. I hated that she had essentially called me normal without even using the word—as if to declare that she knew better than the rest of the world what I was. As if this were a game and she had outsmarted me—outsmarted everybody—and won.

We finished our drinks without another word. I let her walk me back to the ward and clenched my jaw as she hugged me before they buzzed me in.

Less than forty-eight hours later, I was out of the ward. Dr. Petroff never heard a thing about my father. I hated my mother for putting it on me to tell him, but somehow telling him didn’t seem like the appropriate revenge. After my mother had signed the last of the papers at the front desk, she walked me toward the big sliding glass doors.

“What have you got there?” she asked, pointing at the white plastic bag hanging from my arm. It was full of little soaps and bottles of shampoo and hand lotion that they gave us in the ward. I’d always thought it was fun to keep this sort of thing, on the very rare occasion we stayed in a hotel.

I opened the bag and showed it to her.

“We don’t need those,” she said.

She grabbed the bag from my hands and shoved it into the tall silver trash bin just before the doors. The doors slid open, and she swept her hand out before her, grandly allowing me to step out first.

But now there was nothing left of those days. I curled up tight and squeezed my eyes against them. Nothing but a faint scent from these sinking couch cushions that now folded me in like a lumpy blue bosom.

Search for the Soul:

November 1990

After we’d finished drawing our Dogon grid in the dirt, we surrounded it with Whisker Lickin’s to encourage Phil to go near it. We’d agreed that putting them in the actual boxes might break his concentration or distract him from his instincts.

Toby carried him out of the house for us, grimacing as the little orange beast swiped at his chest and arms. The struggle worsened as soon as the smell of the outdoors hit Phil.

“Where do you want him? WHERE DO YOU WANT HIM?” Toby screamed as he started to lose his grip on the cat.

“Here. Right at the edge of it,” Charlotte said sharply, pointing.

Toby stepped to the edge of the grid. He knelt down.

“Awwww!” He winced as Phil clawed over his left shoulder and leaped out of his arms behind him.