In Search of the Rose Notes (18 page)

Before we even had a chance to coo Phil toward the Whisker Lickin’s, he’d crashed into the brush behind Charlotte’s house and bounded out of our view.

“Crap!” Toby yelled.

“Try not to swear in my yard,” Charlotte said.

“ ‘Crap’ isn’t really a swear word,” I pointed out.

Charlotte ignored me. “Now what do we do? Do we try and catch him again?”

“That’s not gonna be easy,” Toby said.

“Maybe we don’t need him,” I said. “Maybe he’s already told us what he knows.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Charlotte challenged.

“Nothing. Maybe he knows nothing.”

I didn’t bother to try to suggest that maybe Phil sensed that our symbols were inadequate—to imply again that there was at least one symbol missing.

We stood there for a couple of minutes, staring into the Whisker Lickin’s–framed grid, silently contemplating what Phil had just done to us. None of us moved or spoke as Mr. Hemsworth’s blue minivan rumbled into the driveway.

“What’re you kids doing?” he demanded, getting out of the van.

I thought it was odd that he’d yell at us for this, because the day before, when Charlotte and I were drawing it, he’d gotten out of the van and walked right by us with only a “Hi, girls.” Maybe it was the presence of Toby that aroused suspicion. Toby’s overgrown bangs and smudged T-shirts always seemed to put grown-ups on alert. And now he looked
really
bad, all cut up like he was in a gang or something.

“It’s a chart,” Charlotte began to explain, “for telling us what—”

“You’ve ripped up all this grass here. What were you kids thinking? You want to play hopscotch, you draw on the driveway. Charlotte, I know you’ve got some chalk because I bought it for you a couple of weeks ago. What did you do, lose it somewhere in your room?”

“It’s not hopscotch.”

Mr. Hemsworth clutched at his belt buckle and pulled his pants half up his belly. He always did this when he didn’t have any change in his pocket to jingle.

“Well, whatever it is, you know better than to tear up the lawn like that. And what are these little things? Candy?”

“I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for a good cause,” Charlotte said nobly.

“Charlotte, I don’t want to hear it.”

“It’s for Rose,” she continued. “It’s to help us find Rose.”

Mr. Hemsworth’s hand fell from his belt buckle to his side. His lip curled up as he squinted at Charlotte. He claimed he didn’t want to hear it, but he couldn’t help but wait for more.

“It’s not candy, it’s cat treats. We got Rose’s cat and tried to send him running over it, and whichever boxes he stepped in were supposed to tell us about where she is.”

Mr. Hemsworth stared at Charlotte, his mouth and nose twisting up like he’d just smelled something terrible. His gaze shifted to me and then to Toby.

“We weren’t making a joke by putting this alien symbol in,” Charlotte said, pointing. “We weren’t making a joke of her. It’s just that she was talking really serious about aliens and stuff, right before she disappeared.”

Mr. Hemsworth breathed in and out noisily, like a cartoon bull about to charge. I thought he might ask us which boxes Phil had stepped in, but instead he turned away, without saying anything, and stomped into the garage. Just before he disappeared into the garage, I saw him put his hand on his head and clutch at his wiry, thinning hair.

“Shit!” he yelled.

There was a crash of shovels and rakes falling. Then a clanging I couldn’t identify. Maybe a shovel against a wheelbarrow.

First I looked excitedly at Toby. I thought he’d feel vindicated by Mr. Hemsworth’s “shit,” which was far worse than Toby’s “crap.” But Toby didn’t seem to notice. His head was tipped backward, and he was staring into the sky. I thought for a second he might be praying, but I couldn’t figure out why.

“God
damn
it!” Mr. Hemsworth yelled.

I looked at Charlotte. Her face was puzzled but calm. She tapped her foot, as if waiting for the moment to pass.

Mr. Hemsworth finally emerged from the garage. His hair looked messy, his shirt had come half untucked, and he was holding a rake.

I couldn’t figure out what he was going to do with the rake, and it didn’t seem like he knew either. All the leaves had been raked a couple of weeks ago—I remembered because he let us jump in the piles a few times before he bagged them up. Now he stood and leaned on the rake for a moment, his shoulders sagging. Then he casually raked it once, lightly, over our Dogon grid. He seemed to change his mind, carried the rake over to the back of the yard and started raking out the few leftover leaves that were still tangled in the brown remains of his vegetable garden.

“Let’s go inside,” Charlotte suggested.

I nodded and followed her. Toby shuffled after us.

Charlotte opened the storm door to her house, kicking it as she entered so I could catch it. I did the same for Toby.

Charlotte called behind her, “Bye, Toby!”

Toby caught the door with his hand and closed it gently. Through the thin pane of glass, I watched him blow his bangs out of his face before he walked away.

That night, in bed, I still worried about what was missing from our Dogon grid. It wasn’t a good sign that Phil had refused to step on any of Charlotte’s optimistic symbols. It seemed to me that instead of the scarier symbols I’d thought of the day before, we could at least have added a bird. A bird flying away might be a nice way to put it.

I’d gotten the idea from one of Charlotte’s black books—one of the ones we almost never talked about. It was called
Search for the Soul.
Charlotte had explained to me once that it was pretty boring and that it wasn’t really about searching for souls. The whole thing was about what the soul
was,
which Charlotte thought was a stupid question. Everybody knew what a soul was. The whole book was about philosophers asking if a soul
thinks
and if a soul
feels
and if the universe has a soul and all kinds of weird questions that made the topic way more complicated than it really needed to be.

I’d had a feeling that Charlotte hadn’t actually read the book, so I’d looked at it once to see for myself. I didn’t get far, but I’d lingered on the page that said a soul was like a bird, flying away from the body. There was a cool picture of an Egyptian bird with a lady’s head. It was supposed to symbolize the soul. But then, a couple of pages later, there was a drawing of shirtless Aztec men having their guts ripped out on an altar. The description next to it explained the belief that the sacrificed men’s souls would turn into eagles that would guard the sun. I’d closed the book then and there. It’s wasn’t just all the blood in the picture that bothered me, but the fact that they didn’t show the beautiful eagle souls that were supposed to result from the ritual.

A bird symbol would tell us if Rose had left us for “a better place,” as I’d heard Charlotte’s mom say of people who died. Maybe Rose was in heaven—if there was a heaven. I had trouble thinking of heaven as anything but the blue-sky-and-clouds place you saw on sitcoms when someone had a lighthearted brush with death. I couldn’t imagine Rose in that sort of heaven. What would she do there? Float around all day? And was there sarcasm in heaven? I suspected not. But if not, who exactly would Rose
be
in heaven, and what would be the point of her being there? Would I meet up with her there eventually, when I died as an old lady? What would we talk about? Would she be polite to me because I was old, all sweet and fake the way I was with Mrs. Crowe? Would we have small talk together every couple of days, whenever we met up in heaven,
forever
?

It just didn’t sound quite right. But the alternative—that Rose had simply come to an end, her body rotting somewhere, worms licking at her eyeballs—was definitely worse. Or was it?
Never again
was a dull kick in the stomach, but
forever
was a spinning nausea. Which would Rose rather have? Which would I rather have? Not that it really mattered which I preferred, because it wasn’t up to me. But maybe I should at least hope for one or the other. Dead and gone. Wait—no. Forever. In heaven forever. Everyone I knew, every day. Until what? Why? Dizzy again. Dead and gone. Never again. Over and done with. But that was so awful and cold and cruel. For Rose and for me and for my mother and everyone.

I couldn’t decide which was worse, and the back-and-forth between the two made me feel sick in my bed. I buried my face in my pillow and cried quietly and tried to think of something fun, like categorizing dog breeds or frosting a cake. I thought of waking my mother and telling her how scared I was, but seeing her awakened in the middle of the night, squinting and tired, would only remind me of how old she was. And she was not a person who could answer this question for me, so what was the point? No person could answer this question for me. The fact that my mother was older meant only that she had less time to think about it than I did. It made me feel sorry for her.

I fashioned yellow frosting flowers and green frosting leaves in my head until I fell into a hungry sleep.

Chapter Eleven

May 24, 2006

My mother had risen at the crack of dawn to buy me a Boston cream doughnut. When I got up and stumbled into the kitchen, it was perched on a flowered tea saucer on the dining table, along with a cheerful bowl of strawberries. My mother sat at the table reading the paper, her bran muffin untouched beside her on an identical saucer. I wondered how long she’d waited for me like this, sitting patiently by her muffin for her degenerate daughter to roll out of bed.

“Thank you,” I said groggily, sitting at the table.

“You remember this?” my mother asked. “Boston cream doughnut and strawberries?”

“Yes,” I replied. “This is great.”

The night before she’d driven me to college, she’d asked me—casually, while we’d watched television—
What do you consider a perfect breakfast?
Her intention to provide it was obvious, since she never asked questions like that. On the following morning, the appearance of the items I’d mentioned was unsurprising but bizarre—like a last meal before the electric chair. I’d forced them down, smiling. Every couple of years, when we’re together, my mother produces these two items together and asks me if I remember.

“Sleep well?”

“Not bad.”

I bit into the doughnut. The familiar, comforting doughiness of the standard-issue Dunkin’ doughnut. Dripping with an imitation vanilla custard I no longer had much of a taste for.

“Mmm,” I said.

“Coffee?”

“Yes, but please. Don’t get up. I’ll get it.”

“Don’t be silly.” My mother said, already up and pouring.

I put down the doughnut and watched the yellow cream begin to ooze onto its pretty plate.

“Do you remember about Rose’s mother and the package of pecan sandies?” I asked, taking the mug from my mother’s hands.

“Yes. You mean how she left them on the table for Rose, and Rose hadn’t come home and opened them?”

“Yeah.”

“That was very sad. Say what you want about Mrs. Banks, she loved her girls.”

My mother wrinkled her eyebrows, studying me over her coffee cup, then continued. “You know, I’ll always remember this one time—it must have been our first year in Waverly, because you were still little, and Rose must have been eleven or twelve then. I think it was the first time I saw her, actually. I was helping Mrs. Crowe with some of her flowers in the front. I think it was Memorial Day. The Bankses came driving by. Mr. Banks was driving slow, distracted, I think, because Mrs. Banks was screaming at him. Just the most awful, shrill screaming. Rose and her sister were in the back. And I remember Rose hanging out the window with a badminton racket. Just twirling it around, whooshing it back and forth, looking happy as a clam. They didn’t seem to notice that their daughter was hanging halfway out of the car. And she didn’t seem to notice them screaming. She was always like that. Casual, I mean.”

“You never really did like Rose,” I said.

“Why would you say that?”

“I always begged you to have her baby-sit, but you were never into the idea.”

“Well, for one, there was no need. I never went out at night. And Mrs. Crowe was always around, always willing to keep an eye on you for an hour here and there. But as I said, Rose was a little on the casual side. I didn’t say I didn’t like her. She just wasn’t what I’d look for in a baby-sitter. Remember that time all of you kids went to Adams Pond and were skating on the ice? And Toby fell through?”

“It wasn’t just Rose. Paul and Joe were there. Besides, Toby was fine. He only fell in up to his knees.”

“But Rose was the oldest. Rose was about thirteen then. And she knew better.” My mother hesitated. “She was the oldest
girl,
I mean.”

“And yet you had her baby-sit me once.”

“Yes. Well, she was older by then. And just that one time, because you kept begging. It was more like a treat for you than anything else. I don’t think I really had a commitment that night. Just went out to give us both a little novelty. Even that one time, I felt a bit odd hiring her. To be honest, it didn’t seem to me she much liked baby-sitting. She just seemed to me the sort of girl who’d invite her boyfriend over as soon as the parents left… that sort of thing.”

“She never did that at the Hemsworths’,” I said.

My mother nodded and put her hand at the back of her neck, feeling the bottom of her hairline absently. “Well, true…”

“True… but?” I prompted.

“Well, after that one time she sat for you, something… happened. Something that made me vow never to let her sit for you again. The thing is, she disappeared just a couple of weeks later, so it was never an issue.”

“Something happened?”

My mother hesitated. “Well. At the hospital.”

“Oh.”

This was familiar. Occasionally, as a kid, when I’d mention this or that classmate or teacher, I’d see a passing shadow in my mother’s eyes that told me she’d encountered that person at the hospital, that she knew something about him or her that I wasn’t allowed to know. I almost never asked.

“What did you see?”

“Well, it’s not really fair of me to talk about it. You know that.”

“She’s dead,” I reminded her. “And you brought it up.”

My mother shrugged, conceding. “Well. She ended up in the ER one night. She’d gotten so drunk at a party that a couple of the kids who were with her were afraid she’d drink herself to death.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s weird. I just don’t remember her that way at all.”

“What? Drunk?”

“Just… I don’t know. I hate to say it. That kind of kid.”

“Well, we can give her the benefit of the doubt if you’d like. Maybe she’d never drunk anything before and didn’t know when to stop. Maybe one of the other kids kept feeding it to her. Or maybe her boyfriend. That pretty boyfriend of hers wasn’t exactly Mr. Sensitive. She was lucky someone thought enough to bring her in.”

“Who brought her in?”

“Paul, actually. Paul Hemsworth.”

My mother noticed my surprise.

“I didn’t say
he
was drunk,” she said, maybe thinking that this information didn’t jibe with Paul’s squeaky-clean reputation. “It was smart of him to bring her. Conscientious. It was so soon after that other boy’s accident—the one who was paralyzed. Maybe the kids were a little more on edge after that, a little more cautious.”

I nodded. I remembered the accident she was talking about. Brian Pilkington was the brother of Sally Pilkington, a girl in my grade. He was around Paul’s age—in his class or maybe the one below it, like Rose.

“Did anyone ever tell the police about her doing that?” I asked. “How close was it to when she disappeared?”

“A couple of weeks. Her parents picked her up. They knew about it. I’m assuming they told the police anything they could they thought would be useful. That night included.”

“Oh.”

“It was really terrible, the way those two things happened so close to each other. Rose and, before that, that poor boy—what was his name—Pilkerton?”

“Pilkington,” I supplied. “Brian Pilkington.”

“Two of the worst tragedies for Waverly, same year, same class. Well, maybe not the
worst.
But the most dramatic. One kid paralyzed, then another disappears. That’s a lot for the sheltered little Waverly kids, all in the span of one or two months.”

“I wonder if Brian Pilkington still lives around here,” I said.

“I don’t know. I think his parents do. I think I’ve heard that name mentioned.”

“They still Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“Were they?” my mother asked.

“Yeah. I remember that his sister couldn’t dress up on Halloween.”

“Huh,” my mom said with a shrug.

But I’d surprised myself, remembering that the Pilkingtons were Jehovah’s Witnesses. I hadn’t thought about the Pilkington family in years. When I was a kid, I’d known nothing about the religion, except that it involved knocking on doors and not getting Christmas presents. And I still didn’t know much, but I knew that the common joke about their leaflets was that they always showed people petting lions or leopards and antelopes and people all frolicking together. What startled me was that it immediately brought to mind one of the
Looking Glass
writings—one of the two without a corresponding Rose dream to match it:
You are knocking on his door this time… / with fruit trees and sunshine / and pinafored children hugging smiling lions.

“Were you there the day of his accident?” I asked my mother. “When they brought him in?”

“No,” she said. “I’m glad I wasn’t. The way Ruth Hemsworth tells it, it was terrible. He was unconscious for quite a while, his mother was screaming when she first came in—”

“Right,” I said, not wanting to hear any more.

I wondered if Mrs. Hemsworth talked about it a lot at the time. It seemed to me Charlotte had brought it up frequently, in that morbidly curious way she had—at least until Rose disappeared.

“Nora? You all right?” my mother asked.

I was trying to go over all those old
Looking Glass
passages in my head. I couldn’t remember them word for word. I hesitated just long enough for my mother to repeat the question.

“Yeah,” I assured her. “No worries.”

After we said our good-byes and my mother left for her shift, I decided to drive back to Waverly and head to the library again. One thing my mother had said stuck out:
So soon after that other boy’s accident—the one who was paralyzed.

I wanted to reread the
Looking Glass
passages and look up Brian Pilkington’s accident, if possible. I’d forgotten that the accident was so close to Rose’s disappearance. I’d forgotten about it completely once she disappeared.

I went to the
Looking Glass
binders first and turned to the poem I’d thought of while talking to my mother:

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.

When he opens the cabin door,

his face is warm and his eyes forgiving,

and he touches you softly on the face.

But then his hand moves up your chin and into your mouth

and pulls out one of your eyeteeth.

He holds it up for you to see, and you say,

“You can keep it. You can have as many as you want.”

He pulls out a front tooth, too,

and drops both teeth on his welcome mat

as if to say

You can keep your stinking teeth,

and slams his bright red door in your face.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this one. Rereading it, I felt that the connection to Brian Pilkington was more tenuous than it had been in my memory. Still, I tucked the whole
Looking Glass
binder under my arm and asked the Cone Lady about old issues of the
Valley Voice.

It didn’t take long to find something on Brian’s accident. I knew it had been at least a few weeks before Rose’s disappearance but sometime that school year, which put it in September or October.

I found it in the issue for September 21, 1990:

Waverly Teen in Critical Condition

After Route 5 Crash

Brian Pilkington, 16, was traveling east on Route 5 when he swerved to the right and drove off the road. His Datsun sedan crashed into the ravine and struck a tree. Police believe he was traveling at a very high speed and may have swerved to avoid a deer or a dog. His condition is listed as critical.

The word “Datsun” made me dizzy. I flipped back in the
Looking Glass
till I found this one:

You are running through a sunlit field.

A red Datsun is chasing you,

revving its engine, plowing through

grass and wildflowers.

You’re breathless and sweaty

as you reach the end of the field,

where a round stone entranceway guards a thick wood… .

Now, could
both
connections be coincidental? Probably not. I reread all the other
Looking Glass
poems, searching for some subtle mention of Brian or his accident. I couldn’t find anything that stuck out, but my knowledge of both was limited—it was possible that more references were there and I just wasn’t seeing them.

The connection to the
Looking Glass
and Rose’s dreams was too close to be coincidental. It seemed someone had taken their basic content and then inserted some embellishments—and, in at least a couple, embellishments that had to do with Brian Pilkington and his accident. But who would be thinking and writing about the accident in 1996—six years after it had happened? Maybe for Charlotte the weight of both tragedies was jumbled up in some confused adolescent memory. Despite her denial and her eagerness to blame the passages on me, Charlotte still seemed the likeliest writer. Who else could it be?

Just as I asked myself the question, though, another possibility popped into my head: Sally Pilkington, Brian’s sister. Why hadn’t I thought of her before? Of course she would still be interested in her brother’s accident several years later. It had left him paralyzed from the waist down. (I remembered Charlotte constantly using the word “paraplegic,” until I finally had to give in and look it up.) Sally was smart enough to be in honors classes with Charlotte—but for many subjects she was in regular old college-prep classes with me. Maybe she’d been after the easy A’s—I was never sure. But I could visualize her clearly even now. She’d always looked the same throughout our school years together: curly brown hair, shoulder-length and frizzy, pulled into a half ponytail at the back of her head. Her face had reminded me of a queen on a playing card—heart-shaped, always serene, with a tiny mouth that was usually pinched into a calmly unreadable expression. She rarely smiled, but when she did, there was a cute, childish-looking gap between her two front teeth.