In Search of the Rose Notes (3 page)

Charlotte danced from one foot to the other.

“C’mon, c’mon!” she shouted. “C’mon out of there and give me a hug! I’m getting wet!”

I opened the car door and pushed the lilies into her outstretched arms.

Dreams and Dreaming:

September 1990

“Freud said dreams are the ‘royal road to the unconscious,’ ” Charlotte informed us. She’d marked a page in her book that said so.

“Freud was a jerk,” Rose said. She reached into Charlotte’s box of animal crackers and pulled out a fistful.

“What makes you say that?” Charlotte wanted to know.

“You’ll find out when you’re older.”

I wanted Charlotte to pursue this, but she didn’t.

“This section here gives tips on how to figure out your dreams,” she continued, looking at Rose for approval. Rose nodded and popped a buffalo into her mouth.

“The first step is recording your dreams. I think we should all keep a dream log.”

“We? All three of us?” Rose examined the hippo-shaped cracker in her hand, then bit its head off.

“Don’t you want to understand what your dreams are telling you? What they mean?”

“Where does that come from?” Rose asked. “Where does ‘what they mean’ come from?”

“What do
you
mean?”

“I mean, if you think that they
mean
something, you believe that it comes from somewhere. Where does the message come from, then?”

Charlotte stared at Rose, openmouthed and breathing through her nose. I could tell she was straining not to roll her eyes.

“It’s a mystery,” I said softly.

“It’s not a
mystery,
” Charlotte hissed. “The message comes from your subconscious.”

“What is that, exactly? Where does
that
come from?”

“From your brain.”

Rose looked at me. “You know what I’m saying, right?”

I hesitated. “Wherever it comes from, it probably helps to record your dreams.”

“How’s that?” Rose asked.

“Maybe by recording them,” I said uncertainly, “you can figure out where they’re coming from.”

Charlotte nodded her agreement. “That’s really what these directions are saying. The more you write them down, the more you remember, the better you’ll put the pieces together and learn what they’re trying to say.”

Rose smiled. “What
who
is trying to say? What
what
is trying to say?”

Charlotte twisted her ponytail into a bun, then let it fall back onto her neck. “Never
mind,
” she said.

Rose dusted animal-cracker crumbs off her hands.

“Don’t get mad. I’m just asking. Go get some paper, will you?” She grabbed a pen from the middle of the kitchen table. “I actually had a pretty interesting dream last night.”

Charlotte dashed off to her bedroom. Rose and I sat in silence. She perched her elbow on the edge of the table, clicking the pen.
Chick-a chick-a. Chick-a chick-a.
Her restless thumb gave her away, clicking maniacally like that. She was actually interested in writing down her dreams—I could tell.

Charlotte returned with a sheet of wide-ruled notebook paper for each of us, but when it came time to start, Rose was the only one writing. I doodled around the middle notebook hole, making it into a fiery sun. Charlotte gazed at Rose. Rose quickly produced a few round-lettered lines, then looked up.

“Done,” she said, and pushed her paper across to Charlotte. I looked over Charlotte’s shoulder, reading it along with her:

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 flying dream!” Charlotte grabbed her book and flipped pages excitedly. “There’s a section in the book about those. I’ve never had one. Have you, Nora?”

“No,” I answered. “Only falling.”

“Here it is! Let’s see… hmm… well, it says they’re common in people who’re ‘forced to endure unhappy circumstances.’ People who want to get free.”

Rose wrestled the book from Charlotte. “That’s bullshit.”

Charlotte frowned. “You shouldn’t say that word.”

“Sorry. I meant to say ‘That’s garbage.’ Okay?”

“Okay,” Charlotte said reluctantly. Then, after a moment’s thought, she asked, “Did you crash through the ceiling of the gym?”

The front kitchen door swung open just then, and Charlotte’s older brother, Paul, sauntered into the room, looking sweaty. He was home early from soccer practice.

“Hey,” he said, sitting with us uninvited, grabbing a banana from the bowl on the table.

“Hey,” Rose echoed.

“Hi,” I said softly. Charlotte ignored him.

“No,” Rose answered Charlotte. “All of a sudden I was above it. You know how sometimes stuff just magically happens like that in dreams?”

“Yeah,” Charlotte said. She read over Rose’s words again. “So is that all you remember?”

“It got fuzzy after that.”

Charlotte nodded knowingly and took her book back.

“What’re you guys doing?” Paul asked as he peeled his banana.

“Dream analysis,” Charlotte answered, then turned to Rose again.

“You should read this page,” she said, flipping back to a bookmarked section. “It tells you how to get better at remembering. You should jot down the dreams right after you wake up. Keep a pen and paper by your bed. And you shouldn’t try to make them sound like they make sense. Just write exactly what you remember.”

Taking the book back again, Rose raised an eyebrow and glanced at Paul over Charlotte’s head. They smiled in mutual amusement at Charlotte’s tone. Rose and Paul were friends, sort of. Rose was dating Aaron, a guy from Paul’s soccer team. According to Charlotte, Aaron was really handsome. Charlotte was always trying to get Rose to talk about him—to tell us about kissing him.

“I’ll take a look,” Rose said, glancing at our blank papers. “But you two ought to get to work.”

I made my notebook-hole sun larger and stared at the blank lines of my paper, trying to block out the squishy sound of Paul chewing his banana. My most vivid dream in recent memory was something about Play-Doh spaghetti. Ribbons and rainbows of it noodling out of unexpected places, like electrical sockets and air-conditioner vents. Finding little worms of it in the corners of my bedroom and on my pillow, and not knowing if I should feel delighted or disgusted by it.

My mother never let me have store-bought Play-Doh. She thought it was gross and hated its smell. Regardless, I was now too old to be thinking about it, and I therefore probably shouldn’t write about it in front of Rose and Charlotte—certainly not in front of Paul. I sighed and peered at Charlotte’s paper. She’d written
“Dream Work Log”
across the top in neat, dark letters, and the date below that. Her elbow and forearm hid whatever else she’d started to write.

“Did you read this all the way to the end?” Rose asked Charlotte.

“Yeah.”

“ ‘In fact, some authorities believe true dream interpretation should only be pursued with the help of a trained professional.’ ” Rose scoffed, then continued. “ ‘The messages of the unconscious can be upsetting or frightening, they believe, if revealed too rapidly or without proper guidance.’ Woo-hoo. Charlotte, do you know what that means?”

Another glance between Rose and Paul. Paul grinned at her, unaware, probably, of the little banana string stuck to the corner of his mouth. His eager, toothy smile always made me think of an overly enthusiastic camp counselor. I wondered when he’d date someone, too. Probably not for a while. He wasn’t nearly as cool as Rose.

“Yeah,” Charlotte said.

“Yeah? Pretty serious stuff.” Rose clicked her pen rapidly again, holding it loosely next to her ear. “It means it’s really dangerous, what we’re doing.”

“I
know,
” Charlotte said, glaring at Rose and then Paul.

Rose ignored Charlotte’s snotty tone and clicked her pen once more, smiling just slightly as she gazed down at the paragraph she had written. Seeing her expression, I wondered if the dream had been a joke. She could have made it all up just to make Charlotte and me look silly. Magic carpets, after all, were not what I’d imagined a sixteen-year-old would dream about. Sixteen-year-olds probably dreamed about the things that occupied their lives, like kissing and blue eye shadow and algebra. Maybe her dreams were full of things we were too young to hear about. Or maybe Rose was a little like me. Maybe her dreams, too, were full of things she didn’t want other people to understand.

Chapter Three

May 21, 2006

We didn’t mention Rose at all during dinner, which consisted of pizza and red wine. (“I haven’t had time to grocery-shop yet,” Charlotte explained. “Sorry.”)

Instead we caught up on the most innocuous of topics. Charlotte’s job—two years now teaching at Waverly High, where we’d gone as kids—was it still weird? And me—my pottery, the community college, the aging hippies in my night classes. Neil—how he’d finally finished his master’s and was really happy to be with U.S. Fish & Wildlife, which he’d always considered a sort of dream job.

As we lingered over our pizza crusts, I gazed around the room, marveling inwardly at finding myself in this kitchen once more. It had been updated somewhat. The ugly mauve wallpaper was gone, replaced with a simple cream paint. Sometime along the way, someone had painted over the dark cabinetry with a dusty-blue shade. Still, that color retained the kitchen’s shadowy feel. There was a thick canopy of trees on the kitchen side of the yard, so this room had never gotten any light—and still didn’t. The old smell of the Hemsworth house—cigarettes, imitation maple syrup, and dryer sheets—was still there somewhere, just discernible under the floral-cinnamon mix of someone’s attempt to cover it with scented candles.

Charlotte sighed, trying to follow my gaze around the room.

“So,” I said, sensing that my silence had grown uncomfortable for her. “What made you leave the paper for teaching anyway?”

Charlotte sighed again. “You mind if I have a cigarette?”

“Of course not.”

“It wasn’t so much that teenagers inspire me.” She fished a pack of Camels out of her tote bag and grabbed a lighter off the coffee table. “You don’t smoke, do you?”

I shook my head.

“It was that there’s only so much you can do with an En-glish background, and things went a little sour between me and the
Voice
management. You know I was the general-assignment reporter for Waverly and Fairville, right? Everything was going pretty well until I had to do this story about the fire department’s radio transmitter. This was years ago, now. Hard to believe. Anyway, there was a new fire chief, and he had this bee in his bonnet about the radio transmitter. The frequency assigned to the fire department is really close to the one assigned to the police department, so apparently for years there’s been interference and they’re always hearing blurbs of each other’s communication, sometimes blocking up the line. So this new fire chief started writing to the FCC, asking for a new frequency, but the frequencies are so filled up he had to get the state senate involved. It’s a safety issue, he says. They can’t be blocking up each other’s communication.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Yeah.” Charlotte sucked on her cigarette for a moment. “So I’m chatting with the fire chief about this, and he says, ‘Just last month one of my guys was putting out a call to verify an address, and he had to wait almost a minute for the PD to finish putting in their coffee orders.’ Apparently the police sometimes radio out from the office, giving coffee-and-doughnut requests to whoever was patrolling the streets. The fire department was often getting blips of that.”

“Uh-huh. So you quoted that in the article.”

“Hell yes. But that was the problem. Everyone was amused except for the police department, especially the chief. But did he get pissed at the fire chief for saying it? No. They’re old buddies, they go way back. He gets mad at
me
for quoting it.”

“That’s dumb.”

“Yeah. Well, it gets worse. Everyone was so tickled by that line about the coffee orders that there were a few pranks. Someone built a big pyramid of Styrofoam cups on the front lawn of the Waverly Police Department. Someone else filled up the chief’s car with cups. Frankly, I think that one was an inside job. But anyway, the chief got
really
mad then. Writes a couple more letters to the editor. What if he’d been running out to respond to an emergency call? And his car was filled with coffee cups? What then? Someone could have
died.
It’s all about
safety,
and it’s all
my
fault. Suddenly Charlotte Hems-worth’s a public menace. Charlotte Hemsworth’s writing her stories in blood.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, trying not to laugh.

Charlotte picked up the wine bottle, pouring herself more and then poising the bottle over my glass. “You?”

“I still have a lot left.”

“Get busy, then. We may as well finish the bottle. This stuff doesn’t age well.”

I nodded, pushing my glass toward her.

“So my editor, Dave, he ended up having lunch with the police chief to smooth things out.” She dumped a generous amount of wine into my glass. “Promised him we’d do a few stories over the next few weeks about all the positive work the WPD does. Blah, blah, blah. Like we’d put them down so then we had to give them a few put-ups, like we’re all in kindergarten or something. Such total bullshit.

“Dave even had someone else do those stories, just to give the police chief a chance to cool off on me. Didn’t work. Even after that he was tight-lipped with me, and so were most of his guys. It was like pulling teeth trying to do my crime and accident stories. Eventually Dave didn’t feel like dealing with it.”

“So he fired you? For that?”

“Well, no. He put me on a different beat for a while. But that was the beginning of the end. It was clearly time to start something else.”

“And so teaching?”

Charlotte flicked her cigarette into her ashtray and took a sip of wine. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. God, would I like to be on Rose’s story.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Porter keeps me posted, but it’s not the same.”

“Porter was your replacement?”

“Well, he was there when I was there, covering the schools. They gave him my beat when I left. No hard feelings. He thought I got a raw deal.”

“So you’re friends?”

“Friends.” Charlotte blew smoke sideways. “And possibly more.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“We’re sort of dating.”

“Oh. That’s… nice.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said unenthusiastically. “Funny thing about the news coverage of the case. They’re not saying everything about how her bones were found. They’re leaving out some fairly big information.”

“Like what?”

“Like that the kids who found it—these two boys, around twelve years old, I heard—found the bones in some wicker trunk. Not just, like, scattered by the pond or in plastic or something.”

“
What?
How do
you
know that?”

“One of ’em’s older sister is in my study hall. She was telling another girl.”

“And you didn’t cut in and tell her maybe she shouldn’t be spreading that sort of thing around?”

“You kidding me, Nora? Of course not. Then I wouldn’t get to hear the whole scoop.”

“Wicker?” I repeated. It just sounded very odd to me.

“Yeah. Part of it was sticking out of the ground. The kids started digging it up like it was, you know, a buried treasure or something. Got kind of a surprise, unfortunately.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s awful young to be seeing something like that.”

“Yeah,” Charlotte agreed. “Something like that at that age can really fuck you up.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

Charlotte shifted her position, letting her cigarette hang loosely from her fingers.

“Yeah, well,” she continued, “I don’t think the kids were supposed to be talking about it. I imagine the police didn’t want that to get out. Maybe the wicker is secret evidence.”

“Or maybe it’s just kids talking,” I suggested.

“Maybe,” Charlotte said before taking another drag. “But there’s usually a shred of truth in the shit that kids talk.”

“Hard to know what shred you’d find in ‘wicker trunk.’ ”

“Either way, Porter’s apparently not gotten wind of it. I mentioned it to him, and he said he hadn’t heard anything like that, doesn’t want to touch it. Past few days he’s been taking the personal side of the story. Trying to talk to a few folks from the neighborhood, getting people’s feelings on Rose and the case. So far the only one Porter’s really gotten to talk is Mrs. Shepherd, the old gossip.”

I nodded. Mrs. Shepherd had paid me to feed her cats when I was a kid. I secretly hated her back then, ever since I was ten and I overheard her telling someone at a block party—in a louder voice than any remotely sensitive person would have used—why she’d chosen me over Charlotte to feed the cats. Sure, everyone knew that Charlotte was smart as a whip, but I seemed like such a gentle little girl, and she wanted to build my confidence. Build my confidence? As if feeding a couple of stinking cats was going to do that for me.

“Tried to chat with the Millers, and Toby Dean, too,” Charlotte continued.

“Eyeball?”

“Yeah. Jeez, I forgot we used to call him that.” Charlotte flung her hand out backward, again letting the cigarette hang casually between two fingers. “Anyway, no one wanted to say much. Don’t want to offend the Bankses, I think. But I think I could’ve done a pretty good portrait of a neighborhood grieving, questioning what they once thought about this girl. The runaway they should have taken more seriously. People would talk to
me.
”

“I don’t know how many people
really
thought she ran away,” I said. “How
is
Eyeball?”

“Toby’s okay. I don’t talk to him much. You know he’s in charge of the body shop now?”

“What? No. How would I have known that?”

“I wasn’t sure if you two kept in touch.”

“Why would we?”

“You guys were friends for a little while, right?” Charlotte looked at me coyly, flicking ashes into her brown glass ashtray. “Or… dating?”

“Umm. We really just went to the prom. We weren’t officially, you know, together.”

“Well, he asks about you sometimes. Not as much as Mrs. Shepherd. But once or twice, when I’ve brought my car into his shop.”

“So it’s his shop now?”

“Didn’t you know his dad died?”

“
What?
No. Jesus.”

“I guess I thought you’d know. It was six or seven months ago.”

“What happened?”

“Cancer. Colon, I think. They caught it way too late. Once they knew, it happened pretty fast.”

“That’s really sad. Is Toby married now? Kids?”

“Nope. It’s just him and his brother living in the house together.”

“Now, why isn’t Joe in charge of the shop, then? I’d think that would go to the older brother.”

“You kidding? Not his thing.”

“I suppose he was a bit on the artsy side for a mechanic’s son. He still do those weird metal-scrap sculptures?”

Charlotte laughed softly. “Naw. You mean like those wire wizard people he used to make us? He stopped doing that kind of thing when we were kids, Nora.”

Charlotte’s laugh turned into a long cough. I looked away quickly, trying to hide my surprise. She had an awful smoker’s cough. It sounded just like her mother’s.

I was about to ask her more about Toby and Joe, but she opened her mouth first.

“You know…” she said slowly, “the Waverly police might be interested to hear that you’re around. They just might want to talk to you. Last to see her and all that.”

“I know. I did think of that.”

“And would you talk to them?” Charlotte studied me for a moment, looking a little glassy-eyed from the wine and cigarettes. “If they asked?”

“Sure. But I can’t tell them anything new. She walked me home from your house that day like she had a hundred times before.”

“And then kept on walking home.”

“Yes. Then kept on walking home,” I repeated after a sip of wine.

Charlotte took a final pull off her cigarette, then let a puff of smoke out the side her mouth. We both watched the smoke linger between us, then disappear above our heads.

“Well. I’ve got to do some correcting,” she said, mashing out the butt. “Now that I’m sufficiently soused. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

Charlotte picked up her tote bag again and yanked three piles of notebook paper out of it, each clipped with a different-colored paper clip.

“Did I tell you about the time,” she asked, “that I spilled a glass of wine on a kid’s term paper?”

“I… don’t think so.”

“I made a photocopy of the stained page and threw away the original. The ink was all smudged from when I tried to blot it out, but at least with a photocopy you couldn’t ever smell that it was wine or see the color of the stain. And you know what he said when I handed it back to him like that?”

“What?”

“He gets this funny look on his face, and before I even had a chance to apologize—I was going to say it was coffee—he looks horrified, and he says, ‘Omigod. Did I hand it in like that?’ I guess I got lucky. I wonder what kind of dope that kid was smoking.”

Dope.
The word always reminded me of my mother, or more generally of people who’ve never smoked it.

“It kinda reminds me of a story Don likes to tell,” Charlotte continued, “about how he was almost finished with his
Diary of Anne Frank
unit once and some kid looks up during a class discussion, all wide-eyed, and says, ‘Wait. Anne Frank was
Jewish
?!’ ”

“Don?” I said.

“Mr. Hauser.” Charlotte scanned the page in front of her, then put a big red check-plus at the top.

“Christ,” I said, startled to hear Charlotte calling our old high-school English teacher by his first name. “You mean Pizza Nose?”

“Yeah. Don’s really nice, actually.”

“Pizza Nose?” I’d actually found the guy pretty dismissive, but maybe I’d been overly sensitive at the time. “Nice, huh?”

Charlotte smiled stiffly, turning back to her correcting. “Yeah.”

At that, my heart sank a little for Charlotte. It was one thing to be living in the same house all these years and now in a sense attending the same high school. But to think she was now seeking solace from old Pizza Nose, with the pickly breath and the chalk fingerprints around his fly—that really brought it home. And not in a good way.

“That reminds me,” Charlotte said after reading through a few more papers. “I’ve taken over for Don advising the
Looking Glass.
”