In Search of the Rose Notes (2 page)

Chapter Two

May 21, 2006

I drove up to Waverly on Sunday. It would be an ideal evening for me to arrive, Charlotte had said, since she would be around and her mother wouldn’t. That same day her mother was leaving to visit her sister in New Jersey for a week.

I’d explained it this way to Neil: that Charlotte had gotten in touch, that someone we both used to know—someone older than us—had died, that it just seemed the right time to reconnect. Neil was aware of Charlotte’s existence—remembered snatches of childhood stories that contained her name, had signed Christmas cards I’d addressed to her. And he remembered her from our wedding.

“I didn’t think you were that close, though,” he’d said.

He was right about that—we weren’t close. We hadn’t even been close in high school. While I steeped in my own shy gloom for most of those years, Charlotte was relatively popular from all her various clubs and athletics. But Charlotte had made sure we’d never lost touch. We sort of reconnected right around our high-school graduation, had coffee a few times. Then Charlotte had written me letters in college—beautiful letters, her small but sweeping script always in blue felt-tipped pen. I’d been uncertain of what to write back, and I couldn’t seem to make my college life sound or look so elegant on paper. I felt guilty for my sporadic response, but also relieved to have my last connection with Waverly dwindle to nearly nothing. Soon after, our relationship became a series of sporadic e-mails and a very occasional coffee in Hartford on the rare occasions I visited my mom in Connecticut.

Neil’s eyebrow had also arched at my plans to head to Waverly for a few days. My mother had moved out of town the year after I’d gone to college, and he knew I didn’t have much affection for the place. I quickly explained that it was just about getting away, really. I wouldn’t be teaching that glaze-chemistry class for another month. My plan, as he knew, was to throw all early summer to build up my stock for the summer and fall markets and shows. But last year I’d gone overboard and made more than I could sell, remember? And a whole month alone in the garage with my wheel? Was that really healthy?

Neil had agreed with that sentiment. Finding him satisfied, I decided not to explain to him about Rose—that she’d been Charlotte’s baby-sitter, that she’d disappeared one day on her way home from Charlotte’s, that I was probably the last person to see her alive.

As I drove up I-95, I considered why I’d never told Neil about Rose. I’d met him in college, where I always tried to be the opposite of whatever I’d been in Waverly. The Last to See Rose Banks Alive was one of my few distinctions in my hometown, so I naturally wanted to forget it. And soon after that, it seemed I’d gone without telling him too long to change my mind.

The drive from D.C. to northern Connecticut took all day. It was overcast by the time I’d made my way over to I-84, and raining by the time I reached the exit that eventually led to Waverly. It was mostly a scenic drive, through the generous-size properties that used to be farms, before coming to the police station, Waverly Elementary, and then downtown. It was Waverly’s quaint quality that had made it popular in the eighties, when a few developments went up around the edges of town, giving it its now-suburban feel. That was, coincidentally, when my mother had moved out to Waverly with me when I was five. She wasn’t attracted to the expensive new homes—she certainly didn’t have the money for that. We were living in the bigger, grittier town of Fairville before then, which I barely remember. She was working as a nurse with Charlotte’s mom at Fairville Hospital. It was Charlotte’s mom who tipped my mother off about the rare apartment available on Fox Hill Road, upstairs from Mrs. Crowe in her two-family house. My mother often talked about what a stroke of luck that had been and how kind it was of Charlotte’s mom to put in a good word for us, because it happened just in time for me to start kindergarten in Waverly’s reputably superior school system. Charlotte and I started on the same day—I remember her mother coming home from her night shift in time to snap pictures of us boarding the morning bus.

Waverly’s main strip hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen it a decade earlier. Its landmarks remained where I remembered them. St. Theresa’s, where Charlotte and her family attended church, still looked obnoxiously large and modern a block up from the older Congregational church and its accompanying town green. A few buildings down was the bank. Charlotte’s dad still worked there as far as I knew—weathering its many incarnations from Manchester Valley Savings to Fleet to Bank of America. No one in Waverly got a loan unless Mr. Hemsworth said it was okay, my mother told me once.

Farther up, I parked in Waverly Plaza, our glorified strip mall. There were two women’s clothing stores now instead of one—one for larger women, one for regular-size ladies. The Stop & Shop where I used to bag groceries was a now a Super Stop & Shop. The mom-and-pop cleaners was a Subway, and the liquor store appeared somehow less derelict than it had in my youth. It had a new sign, a new name—changed from Stompy’s Liquor Locker to Waverly Wine and Spirits.

I parked and ran into Super Stop & Shop to pick up something to bring Charlotte. I selected a bouquet of lilies and spent a few minutes considering a brownie mix. Brownie mixes had been an important source of entertainment in our girlhood together. But it seemed a little awkward to hand someone a brownie mix upon entering her home, whatever your history together. I nixed the mix and figured I’d find a nice bottle of wine at the newly gentrified Stompy’s.

I went out through the automatic doors to discover that the rain had picked up. A few people were standing under the store’s awning. I stood with them for a couple of minutes, listening to their grunts of “Cats and dogs” and their murmurs of deliberation—“Looks a little better now—should we run for it?” I didn’t make eye contact with anyone. If I shared a smile or a look of frustration with these people, I’d be a part of this crowd indefinitely. I’d have to wait for consensus to run to my car or, worse, justify myself if I ran before the rest of them.

I stepped out from under the awning, raced around the largest puddles, and reached my car just in time. A moment after I’d closed my door, the sound of the rain on my roof turned from steady to thunderous. Water came down in heavy sheets that rippled across the parking lot and blurred everything beyond my windshield. I imagined someone in the crowd under the awning remarking,
Wow, she got lucky. It’s
really
coming down now.

The thought of those other people watching me in the rain made me remember it—walking home from school on a day like this, about thirteen years ago. I was fourteen, a freshman, about a month into high school. I’d stayed after school for help in geometry, which I was already practically flunking. When I’d left the school, it had looked a little drizzly, but nothing terrible. When I was about five minutes along the two-mile walk home, the sky opened up and dumped gallons of water on me. It was the sort of rain you can barely drive in, and walking in it felt absurd—like pushing against a wall of water. But there was nowhere for me to go except home, so I kept trudging along.

My skirt stuck to my legs, and my boots made squishing noises with each step along the flooded sidewalk. I was wearing my favorite of the back-to-school outfits my mother had bought for me—a flowing navy skirt delicately flowered with maroon and cream buds, with cream-colored tights and maroon socks peeking over the edge of soft brown ankle boots. For the last few weeks, though, I’d been starting to think the boots were all wrong. They had pointed toes and flat, balletlike soles. And a lot of the kids were starting to wear heavy black shoes with thick soles and round toes—Doc Martens and the like. Next to them my layered legs and pointy toes had the sad look of imitation eighties rock star.

When I was about halfway home, a black hatchback pulled over next to me. I tried to ignore it. I looked so ridiculous, I just wanted to be left alone.

“Hey!” a young male voice yelled from the car, which accelerated to catch up with me.

I finally turned but said nothing in response. Water dribbled off my nose and chin. The car was filled with a bunch of kids from the boys’ and girls’ soccer teams. Charlotte was likely the youngest in the car. She was sitting by the backseat window on the side farthest from me, craning her neck to look at me.

“Hey, Nora,” she called. It was kind of her to acknowledge me. By then we’d barely spoken in two years.

“Don’t you want a ride?” yelled the kid in the driver’s seat.

“What?” I said, looking down at my drenched clothes. The car was already packed, and the soccer kids were all dry. If I tried to squeeze in with them, water would pour out of me like a wrenched sponge.

“Do. You. Want. A. RIDE!” the girl behind the driver yelled at me, as if I were retarded.

I shook my head and kept walking, saying, “No thanks,” so softly that they likely didn’t hear me. I almost stopped to say it again, but I didn’t want to extend the encounter.

The car didn’t move until I was several paces ahead. Then finally the driver gunned it and sped away.

A couple minutes later, another car stopped for me—this time a brown Chevy Suburban, and its driver didn’t give me a choice about a ride.

“Get in,” Mrs. Banks ordered.

She always scared the hell out me, Rose’s mother. Ever since I was a little kid. She usually wore oversize round sunglasses with brown-tinted lenses—even in the rain. She reminded me of a fly wearing too much lipstick. And when she zoomed up and down Fox Hill with the Suburban’s windows open, you could always hear her braying along to her Joan Baez tapes—at least before Rose disappeared.

“What on earth were you thinking?” she demanded as she put her blinker on and pulled back into the flooded road. “You must’ve seen when you left school that it was about to pour.”

I shrugged.

When she turned to me, the stare of her big plastic fly eyes filled me with a self-conscious guilt. “Well? You going to say something?”

“No one could’ve come to pick me up anyway. My mom’s not home.”

Mrs. Banks’s ketchup-colored lips wrinkled up tight. “I see. And you couldn’t have just sat in the library for a while, done some homework, waited it out?”

I said nothing.

Mrs. Banks pulled in to Mrs. Crowe’s driveway. “My Rose told me once you were psychic.”

“She was joking,” I said, but immediately regretted it. Rose was three years gone by then, rendering all her words and intentions sacred and mysterious. It wasn’t for me to say what she ever meant. Especially to her mother.

“I guess so.” Mrs. Banks scoffed. “Because if you were psychic, you would’ve known how hard it was going to rain.”

When I got home, I peeled off the boots and the new socks to discover they’d bled maroon into the tights. The tights were ruined, as were the boots, soaked and misshapen beyond repair. Not that I cared to wear them anymore. I sat cross-legged on my bed and cried for at least an hour, clutching my clammy feet and trying to keep the sobs low so Mrs. Crowe wouldn’t hear them downstairs and ask my mother about it later. The tears weren’t for the tights or the boots or the geometry homework I didn’t know how to do, but for the four high-school years ahead of me. It still surprises me to think of how hard I cried that day, when I was too young and unimaginative to conceive of how miserable those years would actually turn out to be.

Now, sitting in the grocery store’s parking lot, I turned the key. The rain had let up a little.

The Hemsworths’ house was the crisp yellow raised ranch at the foot of Fox Hill, squeezed awkwardly between two older, more traditional, farm-style houses. I turned in to the driveway and parked behind a dirty silver Saturn.

It was still raining. I sat in the car for a minute or two, just then remembering that I’d forgotten to stop for wine. The strong, sweet scent of the lilies I’d bought for Charlotte began to relieve the sinking feeling I’d had in the Stop & Shop parking lot. I thought I saw a curtain flutter behind the picture window of the house, but I didn’t move.

I didn’t much like the house, looking at it now. Oddly, as a kid, I’d envied its wall-to-wall carpeting, its built-in basement bar, its general seventies-style comfort and convenience. It had seemed so much cooler to me at the time than the old mansard-roofed two-family where I lived, farther up the hill. Surely that house would look different to me now, too.

I closed my eyes and waited for the rain to slow a bit. I couldn’t quite believe that Charlotte still lived in this neighborhood. She’d spent years away—college, and then a couple of years in an apartment in nearby Fairville when she was working for the newspaper. But then she’d moved back here after she’d quit the paper and started an intensive teaching-certification program—a move that hadn’t made complete sense to me when she’d written me about it. I knew that the move back home was largely due to her mother’s declining health. Mrs. Hemsworth, who had divorced Charlotte’s father while we were in college, had been diagnosed with MS a few years ago. Charlotte wasn’t comfortable with her living alone. I think the idea was for Charlotte to help out for a little while and maybe build a nest egg for a nice place of her own once she began teaching—but she’d simply stayed. It wasn’t clear to me if her mother truly needed live-in help or if Charlotte was being overly protective.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard a thumping on my window. I waited a beat before opening my eyes to see Charlotte’s tall, willowy figure looming by my car door.

“Nora! Hi! C’mon!” she shouted through the glass. “What’s taking you so long? What, you’re
napping
?”

“Of course not,” I said into the glass. Charlotte shook her head to indicate that she couldn’t hear me. “I’m just… thinking.”

She had a black umbrella in her hand but was holding it awkwardly to the side so she could stick her face up to the glass. The heavy rain was hitting her right side, and the hair along the side of her face was getting soaked. Her hair was that enviable auburn, gathered into a beautiful mess behind her ears. What surprised me were the lines around her mouth. Laugh lines already. I’d forgotten how much she’d smoked the last time I saw her. It looked like she hadn’t ever stopped. Aside from that, her skin still had the perfect alabaster quality it had when we were kids.