In Search of the Rose Notes (24 page)

The thought that Rose had died was the same. To tell Charlotte would be like cutting myself open and showing her my dark, disgusting insides. But to keep it from her was to lie, which made it even uglier, as did pretending alongside her that a mug or a banana clip would help us bring Rose back. I couldn’t help but be angry at Charlotte for making me feel even more twisted and rotten each time she talked about it, each time she made me pretend for her.

“What’re you doing?” Charlotte asked as she came back into the bedroom.

“Just looking at one of your books.”

She slid the book across the carpet to look. I let her. I was interested in what she’d say about this book, which was mostly about dead people. Maybe she’d give me some kind of opening.

She flipped a few pages past where I’d been looking. She stopped at an article called “Tuning In the Departed,” which had a black-and-white picture of an elderly man in front of a few television sets.

“Oh, this guy,” Charlotte said, as if seeing an old friend again. “Klaus Schreiber. Thinks he sees dead people in his TV static.”

I noticed the word “thinks” and waited for more.

“Sad,” Charlotte continued. “See, his daughter died, and I guess that’s supposed to be her on the TV screen. Some people think it’s real. Some people think it’s not a ghost, really, but some psychic connection between what the person
wants
to see and the TV. Like, maybe Klaus’s mind is somehow making that picture of his daughter on the screen.”

I watched carefully as Charlotte gazed at the picture for a moment more, then closed the book with a soft, undecided “Hmph.” Then she turned to her backpack and pulled out her math textbook. We were supposed to be doing homework together, since we both had a lot today. As she opened to a fresh notebook page, I glanced down at
Spirit Summonings
by her knees, and the pretty sleeping girl on its cover caught my eye again. It was comforting to think of Rose that way, if I had to think of her dying.

But, looking at it, I also realized that this gentle picture would be lost on Charlotte. It wasn’t comfort that she needed. Charlotte required a complication, a task, and, if possible, high-tech equipment. If I wanted her to understand how I felt, I had to help her—I had to give her what she needed.

Chapter Fifteen

May 25–27, 2006

On Thursday evening, Charlotte and I drove to the elementary school after dinner for a walk around the playground. We didn’t talk about Rose. Instead we talked playground memories: How Sam Allison used to wear sunglasses at recess and charm all us girls by telling us Helen Keller jokes while he pushed us on the swings. How Amy Priest—now possibly the most famous person in our class, since she’d appeared for a couple of weeks on
The Bachelor—
had cried inconsolably when a bird pooped on her shoulder during a kickball game. And how the kids used to tease Toby, accusing him of wanting to “do it” with Little Debbie, the wholesome gingham-clad girl who appeared on those cheap snack packages he practically lived on.

When we’d exhausted that topic, we’d talked about the cookout that Charlotte’s mother seemed to so desire. We’d have Paul and his wife and kids over, maybe a few of the neighbors. I offered to shop for the food on Friday, and Charlotte didn’t protest.

I was slicing up chicken breasts for kebabs when she came home on Friday evening.

She got home late, looking a little disheveled. Her eyes were red, and a big piece of hair was hanging out of the prim knot at the back of her head.

“Rough day?” I said.

She grunted, threw her bags down, and immediately extracted a cigarette from her purse.

“Beyond rough,” she murmured.

“Are you okay? The kids crazy today?”

I didn’t want to say so, but it looked like she’d been crying.

“The kids are crazy every day. Either that or I am.”

Charlotte’s gaze met mine again. Her eyes were glassy, with little purple-gray streaks beneath them. She looked exhausted.

“Porter called. The lab results are in. Confirming it’s Rose.”

A slippery piece of chicken breast fell out of my hand.

“Oh,” I said, putting down my knife.

“It’ll probably be all over the local news tonight.”

“Probably,” I said, uncertain of what else to say.

I wasn’t sure if either of us really needed to say how sad it was. And it wasn’t a surprise. We both already knew—everyone did. But maybe, in spite of all the evidence, part of Charlotte had remained hopeful, as she’d always been when we were kids.

“I’m really sorry, Charlotte,” I said softly.

Charlotte nodded, then stared at her cigarette for several minutes without smoking it. I turned to my raw chicken breast, suddenly sickened by its moist pink flesh. I dumped the remaining breast uncut into the marinade and stuck it in the fridge.

“Imagine my surprise,” Charlotte said as I sat next to her, “when I got an e-mail from Sally Pilkington saying she was sorry she missed me for coffee.”

“Oh—that,” I said.

“Yes. That. What were you doing contacting her? Seeing her?”

“Is it really such a big deal? We just kind of… caught up.”

“But why
her
? And why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, we’d talked about how maybe she’d know something about…” I hesitated. I didn’t really wish to bring up the
Looking Glass
again after what had seemed like a truce the last couple of days.

“About what?” Charlotte folded her arms.

“The
Looking Glass,
” I said sheepishly.

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Bullshit, Nora.”

“What?”

“Can you explain to me, then, why now she wants us all to have coffee with her brother tomorrow?”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Charlotte said.

I studied Charlotte’s sad eyes, confounded. Was she really this upset with me for contacting dorky old Sally Pilkington? Or had the test results thrown her somehow? Maybe Rose’s death was, at long last, sinking in.

“Is that a… problem?” I asked.

“We’ll see, I guess, won’t we?”

“You said we’d go?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Charlotte finally lit her cigarette, taking an eager drag. “I didn’t feel I had much choice. We’re on for tomorrow at ten in Fairville.”

“What are you not telling me, Charlotte? I don’t get it. Doesn’t sound like the most fun Saturday morning I’ve ever had, but you could’ve made some excuse, and I don’t understand why you’re so mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you!” Charlotte yelled, mashing the barely smoked cigarette in the tray. “Why is everything about you anyway? Has it occurred to you I’m just having a shitty week?”

She got up and stalked into the living room.

I followed her and found her standing by the goldfish tank, staring into it.

“Nora,” Charlotte said, “is there anything you wanted to ask me? Is there maybe something you were asking Sally that you should’ve been asking me?”

I puzzled over this question for a moment. Should I have asked Charlotte first if Sally might’ve written the
Looking Glass
poems? Should I have asked Charlotte first if Brian had dated Rose?

“Umm… no,” I said slowly.

Charlotte picked up the can of fish food and began sprinkling it liberally into the tank.

“Did you have something specific in mind?” I asked.

She stopped sprinkling for a moment, watching as a couple of the fish swam to the surface.

“No,” she said, sighing as she continued to pepper the water with fish food.

“You know, those fish are going to explode.”

Charlotte slammed the can down next to the tank.

“So
let
them explode. We’ll just buy more, like we’ve always done!”

With that she collapsed on the couch next to me and buried her face in her hands. She didn’t speak for several minutes.

“Did you want to talk more about it?” I asked.

Charlotte rubbed her eyes, stood up, and headed back into the kitchen to grab her tote bag.

“There’s nothing more to say,” she muttered.

And she apparently meant it literally. We barely spoke over dinner, which she suggested we eat in front of the television. A couple of hours later—before the news came on— she excused herself for bed.

Sally and Brian had arrived before us. Brian appeared pretty professorial despite the wheelchair. His face looked even younger than Sally’s, but his slightly overgrown hair was just starting to go prematurely gray. A neat little goatee failed to mask the boyish roundness of his cheeks. His baby nephew sat in his lap, pawing at Brian’s crisp black polo shirt with his tiny wet hands.

Charlotte seemed stunned at the sight of Brian, and paused before heading to their table. But then she took a breath and approached them, greeting them before ordering her coffee.

After the initial small talk, Brian put one hand carefully on the table.

“I wanted to talk to you two because I thought you could explain something for me. Now, I know we are talking about a few years ago here. Nearly a decade. But would either of you remember sending me something when you were, say, in high school? Does that ring a bell?”

“You’re asking if one of us
sent
you something?” Charlotte asked, screwing up her face.

“Yes,” Brian said evenly.

“No… I can’t imagine,” she said softly. “Something… in particular?”

“I’ll put it another way,” Brian said, taking in a breath and glancing at Sally, who was nervously tapping the tabletop. “How much do you know about my car accident? About who was involved? Did anyone talk to you about that? Rose? Your brother?”

“Not at the time,” Charlotte murmured.

“Not at the time?”

“No. Then when? Around 1996, by any chance?”

“No,” Charlotte said, shooting me a confused look. “In 1996? No. Paul didn’t tell me what happened till a couple of days ago.”

“I see.” Brian looked skeptical. “Because of everything with Rose these past few days, I guess?”

“Yeah,” Charlotte said, turning red as she turned away from me.

“Would you mind telling me what he told you about it?” Brian asked.

“I think maybe it’s best you call him. Probably the two of you should talk. I can call him and have him—”

“No. No, if I’m going to talk to Paul, I think I’d prefer he initiated it.”

Charlotte nodded. I could feel Sally’s eyes on me, watching me look from Brian to Charlotte and back. She cocked her head. My confusion clearly interested her.

“Do
you
know what happened?” she asked me.

“No,” I admitted.

“So when you contacted me, you didn’t—”

“No,” I repeated. “I really contacted you about the
Looking Glass.
”

Brian shifted his gaze from Charlotte to me. “The
Looking Glass,
1996? Correct?” he said.

“Yeah,” I admitted, uneasy that he kept stressing that year.

“But you don’t know the full story of my accident? You have no knowledge of that?”

“No,” I said. His accident was in 1990. I didn’t understand the connection. “And I think I’m the only person at this table who doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”

Charlotte stiffened, and Sally looked very sad. Max the baby hiccupped.

“Would you mind telling me?” I asked Brian.

Brian studied me carefully, moved his nephew into Sally’s lap, and took a long, thoughtful sip of coffee before speaking.

“Well,” he said, watching me as he began, “I couldn’t remember the accident. I knew that I’d been out proselytizing. Everyone said I’d been driving too fast. And I could never imagine that could be right. I never drove fast. I was never in a hurry to get to the next house. I hated having to knock on people’s doors. And I certainly wouldn’t have been in a hurry to get home. I was never in a hurry to get home.

“On one hand it seemed important to remember. The story that people were telling me couldn’t have been true. They said I’d been speeding like a maniac. It was as if I’d awoken in this alternate universe, paralyzed, with a story behind it that I couldn’t believe. It was frustrating—no, torture, actually. To have this terrible thing happen and to have to believe this crazy, impossible story about myself speeding home. It seemed important to remember, to prove it wrong. It wouldn’t fix the injuries, but it would at least prove I didn’t deserve them. The harder I tried to remember, though, the more impossible it seemed. My mind was blank. The memory was gone. And after a while it seemed like trying to remember was a way of avoiding the reality. This was my life now. I had to go forward. Maybe it would come to me someday. But I couldn’t focus on it anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” I said stupidly. I felt ashamed for looking up his accident in the town library, treating his tragedy like a trifling factoid in my relatively mundane quest to figure out a couple of weird poems from our old school lit magazine.

“So you can imagine,” he continued, ignoring my interjection, “how disturbed I was in 1996. When I got a letter in the mail, describing—confessing what happened.”

“What?”
Charlotte said. “Was it from Aaron?”

“Maybe I
was
driving like a maniac,” Brian said, ignoring her as well. “Maybe I
was
showing off. But I wasn’t the only one. There was a car behind me. Chasing me, you might say. Or just fooling around. Depending on how you look at it.”

“And who was in that car?” I asked.

Brian studied me again, perhaps trying to determine if my question was genuine.

“Aaron Dwyer, Rose, and my brother,” Charlotte said softly.

“Why?” I asked. “Why would they do that to you?”

Brian glanced at Sally. “Good question. But it’s explained in the note I received.”

He reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a folded wad of notebook paper, and spoke directly to Charlotte.

“I thought for a while your brother might have sent this. But the postmark was from Waverly, and when I tried to contact him, I was told he was in D.C. for graduate school. Still possible he sent it, but it didn’t seem likely somehow.

“Seemed sort of a sick thing, really. I thought maybe Rose’s parents? Rose’s sister? But again, it didn’t fit somehow, and I didn’t want to bother her family, under the circumstances. Eventually, though, I thought maybe a
kid
—maybe a kid would do this, thinking it was the right thing. A kid who’d somehow gotten her hands on some information from Rose, or maybe from Aaron or Paul.”

Brian watched Charlotte carefully for her reaction.

“Can I see that, please?” Charlotte said, extending her hand.

“I put it out of my mind till just yesterday,” Brian said, still gripping the note, “when my sister calls me up and tells me you two have contacted her out of the blue—you two, who not only are close to Paul, of course, but it appears were close to Rose when you were kids, too.”

“
And
the
Looking Glass
stuff you wanted to talk about was from 1996,” Sally put in, her face tight. “And it turns out, when I went looking, that in spots they seem to be about my brother. We don’t care so much about the
Looking Glass,
but sending this kind of thing to my brother, now, that’s… that’s another story.”

Charlotte crossed her legs and shifted in her chair, her cheeks still red—with anger, frustration, or embarrassment? I couldn’t tell. Brian unfolded the note, which consisted of two yellowed sheets, written on both sides, jagged-edged from being torn out of a notebook.

“So my question to you is whether one of you sent this to me, when you were kids,” Brian said, handing the note to Charlotte. She tucked her arm and elbow around the paper as she read it.

“I’ve never seen this,” she said once she’d finished.

“We’re all grown-ups now,” Brian said with an unconvincing breeziness. “If you sent it, it’s okay. I’m not mad. You would’ve been, what—sixteen? I wouldn’t be angry. I simply would like to know. What with their finding Rose, it’s just become a little—I don’t know—raw, again.”

“I’m really sorry,” Charlotte said. “I’d tell you if it had been me. Really, I would.”

Sally sighed and bounced Max lightly with her leg.

“Then give it to Nora,” Brian said. “Because I wanted to ask her, too.”

Charlotte hesitated, folding the paper. “I’m sure she didn’t—”

“Give it to her, please,” Brian said sharply.

Charlotte placed the note on the table and pushed it over to me. I opened it and read the first few lines: