In Search of the Rose Notes (28 page)

“That’s a lot,” I observed.

“We’re four people,” he pointed out, then opened the refrigerator. “Do you like root beer?”

“Yup.”

Toby pulled a three-quarters-empty bottle of Stop & Shop root beer out of the refrigerator and set up two glasses. Then he filled one glass about halfway.

“It looks flat,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. I like it flat. It’s sweeter that way.”

Toby started to hand me the bottle but stopped himself, then poured my root beer for me. I pretended not to notice, but I could feel a sensation of goose bumps traveling up my forearms. Pouring for me. It was just a few steps away from kissing me. Kind of gross.

A moth from the cabinet fluttered by Toby’s hands for a moment, and he flicked it away. He did it so naturally that I was pretty sure he was used to having moths around. I wondered if this was what it was to not have a mother around—to have moths in your kitchen. I felt, suddenly, like I understood Toby just a little better. But that probably didn’t mean I’d ever want to kiss him.

“I wonder if Charlotte wanted you to go up there with her,” he said, leading me back into the TV room.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged and made a place for the cheese curls on the coffee table in front of Joe, pushing away newspapers, a broken soldering iron, and a pile of empty movie cases.

“I mean she’s not afraid?” Toby asked.

“She’ll scream if there’s any trouble, I guess,” I said, sitting on one side of Joe as Toby plopped himself on the other.

Joe stared at the TV and said nothing. Donahue kept talking to the housewife who worked part-time as a stripper. Toby and I ate cheese curl after cheese curl. I tried to suck the orange cheese dust off my fingers, but that just made it soggy, mashing orange crud into my fingernails.

Toby announced he was going to check on Charlotte. Then he thumped up the stairs, leaving me with his brother.

“Don’t you want some?” I asked Joe, offering him the bowl of cheese curls.

Joe turned and gazed at me in that stupid, sad-eyed way that Toby sometimes looked at teachers in class. Like he didn’t even know what the question was, much less the answer. Then he plucked a single cheese curl out of the bowl and said, “Thanks,” smiling for a split second and then returning his attention to the TV.

I noticed that the cheese curl stayed in his hand. We watched
Donahue
together for a few more minutes. When Toby returned, Joe got up and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving his cheese curl on the couch cushion between Toby and me.

On the TV a husband of one of the housewife-strippers came out and answered Donahue’s questions. The subject hadn’t felt so embarrassing while Joe was around. Now, watching it with just Toby, it was unbearable. I grabbed one of the black books off the arm of the couch where I’d left them.

“You ever look at these before?” I asked Toby.

“They Charlotte’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Charlotte’s never shared anything with me.”

I tossed him
Phantom Encounters.
“Go for it.”

On the very first page of my book,
Hauntings,
Charlotte had circled and starred a few sentences in green ink:

The physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, for instance, proposed in 1908 that hauntings were a “ghostly representation of some long past tragedy.” Lodge and others believed that violent emotions might somehow imprint themselves on their environment for later transmission to people sensitive enough to tune them in.

I wasn’t sure why this passage would interest Charlotte. I didn’t totally understand it, except for the phrase “violent emotions.” Did Charlotte really know what that meant, somewhere deep down? Or was it something that just made her curious? Like almost everything else she circled and underlined?

I flipped past a few dog-eared pictures of haunted English castles. Charlotte had been heavy into the haunted English castles for a while, but not so much lately. I skipped a chunk of pages.

“Hey, look at this,” Toby said. “ ‘Reports of naked ghosts are rare.’ Charlotte underlined that, looks like.”

I shrugged. “It’s probably true, right? Ghosts are usually wearing clothes when people see them.”

But Toby kept laughing, which annoyed me. Weren’t we too old to be laughing just because a word like “naked” or “gas” came into the conversation? I rolled my eyes, moved farther down the couch, away from him, and looked out the window.

“Hey, Toby,” I exclaimed, “it’s snowing.”

Toby didn’t close his mouth as he looked up. “Cool,” he said, dropping
Phantom Encounters
on the couch.

He grabbed his puffy brown jacket and headed outside. I followed him. It was coming down pretty fast, in a thick white slant. This was no gentle dusting. This was no-school-tomorrow snow.

“Wow,” Toby said, jumping down the stoop, skipping all three steps, sticking out his tongue.

I went after him, feeling the flakes land on my cheeks. I liked that this was a feeling you forgot every year, till winter came around and hit you in the face again and helped you to remember.

Toby tried to skate on the driveway, but there wasn’t enough snow built up yet.

“Remember that time at the pond, when we were little?” he asked.

“At least here you know you won’t fall in,” I said.

“Not as fun this way, though. Part of the fun’s knowing the ice could break.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I agreed.

Mr. Dean’s truck rumbled up the road and into the driveway. He got out of the truck with a gallon of milk hooked on his thumb.

He seemed startled to find Toby and me on the front lawn.

“What’re you two doing?” he asked.

“Just tasting the snow,” Toby answered.

Mr. Dean handed him the milk. “Put that in the fridge for me, will you, Tobe?”

It seemed odd to me that he’d send Toby back into the house when he was going there himself. Toby grabbed the milk and went inside with it.

“How long’ve you two been out here?” Mr. Dean asked me.

I tried to look him in the eye to answer him. I’d been trying to do that more with parents. But something about his appearance distracted me. A greasy chunk of bangs was practically in his eye. His face was bony and grayish. His cheekbones and Adam’s apple looked sharp and painful. Looking at him now reminded me of when Toby’s grandmother was dying, when my mother used to come and help him.

“Since it started snowing,” I said, glancing away again.

“Just came out to the yard, just now?”

“Yeah.”

Mr. Dean did a 360-degree turn, gazing around the yard, eyeing our footprints in the thin layer of snow.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” he said.

Mr. Dean was the sort of guy who knew better than to use a word like “ain’t” but used it anyway to make things friendly and fun.

“Yup,” I answered.

The front door of the house creaked open, and Toby came bounding down the steps. His dad gave him a quick smile and a nod and then trudged over to the lawn chair between Joe’s rickety shed and the condemned root cellar. Without wiping off the snow that had already begun to accumulate in the chair, he collapsed into it with the same satisfied sigh with which one might fall into a living-room recliner.

Toby didn’t seem to notice my quizzical gaze. I was supposed to accept it, I guessed, because this was one of the wacky things dads did that I didn’t understand. It wasn’t much weirder than some of the stuff Mr. Hemsworth did.

“Come here,” Toby said, leading me to a hillier area of the yard around the right side of the house. “We could almost sled here.”

He positioned his feet in a skateboarding stance and slid a couple of yards down the slick grass. He stumbled at the steepest part and slid into the grass as if it were home plate.

“You okay?” I asked, even though his fall had looked pretty intentional.

“Yeah,” he said.

I put my hand out to help him up. He yanked at it, pulling me down next to him. I giggled as I hit the grass but quickly let go of his hand. It felt too weird touching his thick, cold fingers, even for a second. Too close to kissing.

Toby didn’t seem to notice. He lay back on the frosted grass and opened his mouth to catch more snowflakes. I felt awkward sitting there watching him, but I didn’t want to do the same. I’d never much liked the taste of snowflakes.

Wondering when Charlotte was going to come out of the house, I got up and walked back to the front of the yard. I looked around the yard and noticed Mr. Dean still sitting in the lawn chair. He sat motionless, a soft cap of snow piling on his head.

Toby followed close behind me. “Look at his hair,” he said, laughing.

I didn’t laugh back. I stood up and stepped closer. Mr. Dean’s motionlessness perplexed me. It was almost like he was dead. A chill shot through me. Then Mr. Dean crossed his feet. So he wasn’t dead. But the chill remained in my arms and legs. His face was blank. Not goofy blank like Joe’s in the house. Blank blank. Dead blank. He didn’t seem aware that it was snowing.

No, I reassured myself. Mr. Dean wasn’t dead.

But Rose was.

I knew it. I still didn’t know how I knew it, but it was as real now as it was in the middle of the night. Rose was dead.

I took another step closer to Mr. Dean.

“He’s pretty tired,” Toby informed me. “He’s been shorthanded at the shop. Probably we shouldn’t bother him.”

“I’m not bothering him,” I murmured, staring at Mr. Dean. His cheeks looked especially white, his skin thin and grayish. His eyes were still expressionless, like a dead person’s would be.

Mr. Dean blinked, which startled me. You don’t expect to see a skeleton blink. Not that Mr. Dean was a skeleton. But Rose was. I just knew that Rose was.

I heard Toby stepping closer to me.

“He’s always liked the snow,” he said softly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he fell asleep like that.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, moving just a little closer.

But Rose was.
A gust of wind blew by us all, moving the direction of the snow briefly. It hit me cold in the eyes. I squeezed them shut, and when I opened them, Mr. Dean was actually looking at me.

Just for a moment, and then his eyes were blank again. But that moment was enough. The pain in them made me feel like I was alone in my bed in the dark.

“I think my sled’s in the shed if you want to—” Toby started to say.

I tried to push by him, but he grabbed my jacket and then stared at me with both his good eye and his crooked one.

“What is it?” he asked.

But his voice was more defeated than surprised. As if he saw what I saw. As if he hadn’t wanted me to see it. I stared back at Toby. Even with the one lazy eye, his eyes were warmer, more alive, than his dad’s—but just as painful to look at. I saw Charlotte’s black books in his eyes. Pictures from Charlotte’s awful black books. A screaming captive burning in a Druid’s hanging prison cage. A sheep’s heart full of nails. A young Aztec warrior with his heart ripped out, but with no bird soul to free him.
Violent emotions.

I looked away. I wrestled myself from Toby’s grasp, and I ran down the lawn to the sidewalk. I raced away from the house.

“Where you goin’?” Toby called after me, his voice sounding almost normal again, but not quite.

I nearly slipped on the snow that was quickly collecting on the sidewalk. But I didn’t fall. I ran.

Chapter Eighteen

May 27, 2006

Toby opened the door before I knocked.

“I didn’t think you’d come. It’s been an hour.”

“I was thinking, like you asked me to.”

“Good,” he said, leading me to a cheerful green IKEA couch that seemed completely out of place in the dusty old Dean living room. He’d opened all the windows, and a pleasant spring breeze floated through the room, softening the mildew scent.

“And what were you thinking?” he asked, sitting next to me.

“I was thinking I may not have understood everything I felt when we were kids. I was thinking I want to understand it now.”

Toby looked around the living room, his gaze bouncing from the window to the torn leather recliner to the blank television screen and finally back to me.

“You do, do you?” he said, his eyes flat.

“Yes,” I said.

“You asked me if I read the letter,” he said slowly. “The letter Rose wrote about the accident.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t just read it. I sent it.”

“In 1996?”

Toby thought about this for a moment, doing the math. “We were in high school. Yeah. That’s about right.”

“Where the hell did you get it?”

“Out of a notebook of Rose’s.”

“And how did you get that?”

Toby hesitated. “I found it.”

“When we were kids?”

“No. That year—1996.”

“Where did you find it?”

“In the attic room. In a pile of junk. In a backpack.”

“A backpack? Jesus, Toby. A backpack of Joe’s?”

“No.” He pressed his fingertips into his hairline, wiping away a droplet of sweat. “Rose’s.”

“In the attic room?” I repeated, disbelieving.

“Yeah. And I didn’t know how it had gotten there. I didn’t know what to do with it. But Rose had written a bunch of shit in that notebook, I’ll tell you. It was her history notebook. But it didn’t seem like she was much interested in history.”

“What else was in the backpack?”

“Couple of her textbooks. Couple of pens. Some ancient hard candies. Six-year-old Jolly Ranchers.”

“And in the notebook was the letter about the accident.”

“Yeah. I didn’t know what to do about it. Sent the letter to Brian. Seemed like he should have it if he wanted it. In case he ever wanted to call Aaron and Paul on what they’d done or whatever. Seemed like what Rose might have wanted.”

“But—” I said, stopping at one word to try and check the quaver in my voice.

“But what?” Toby stared at me.

“But… that wasn’t all the notebook had in it.”

“No,” Toby said, looking away from me and attempting to rub a grease spot off his thumb. “No, it wasn’t.”

“The
Looking Glass
. Those poems in the
Looking Glass.
Did you write them?”

“No. Rose did. I found them in her notebook. I submitted them.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“I was seventeen. I was a kid. When I found it, I wasn’t sure what it all meant. I didn’t know what to do. I was confused. I think you can understand that, huh, Nora? Not everything you did back then made sense either. At the very least, I thought they’d catch Charlotte’s attention. Charlotte who was so desperate to figure out what happened to Rose. And I didn’t want to keep it to myself.”

“But didn’t you wonder how Rose’s backpack got into your house?”

“Yes, I wondered!” Toby snapped. “What do you think? Why do you think I did such stupid things, sending her warped scribblings here and there? But who did I have to talk about it with? Who could I have talked to? My brother? My dad? I was afraid of what I might find out. There was only one person who I’d ever considered talking to about Rose, and she was really fucked up that year. She couldn’t handle something like this.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Toby didn’t seem to hear me. He stood and began to lumber up the stairs. A few minutes later, he returned with a tattered notebook in his hands.

“Have you asked your brother about it since?” I asked.

I stared at the notebook as he sat on the couch again. Its purple cover was worn white around the corners, and the paper had brown spots on the edges. It had once been a three-subject notebook, but one of the divider pages had been ripped out, the other tab mashed down. Someone had written
“History”
across the front in black pen. Below that, someone had erased the cover hard to form the word
“HI”
in the purple cardboard.

“No,” Toby said, tracing the
“HI”
with his finger. “What she wrote in here was enough. Or at least enough for me to know I didn’t want to ask anything else. It said enough to make me afraid to ask.”

Toby looked up at me. “Before I show you this, I need to ask you. Did you really come to me because of a Datsun and a Dodge? Was it about sleuthing that one out, or was there something more to it?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I’m asking is… was it my imagination that you always kind of knew that something wasn’t right?”

“I didn’t
know
anything.”

“You didn’t know any details. But there was something in your face, more than once… . You knew you should be scared of something.”

“But I swear, Toby, that’s
all
I knew.”

“That was
something,
though. And sometimes I wonder how you even knew that.”

A gentle breeze blew through the Dean living room, lifting its dusty smell into my nostrils for a moment.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes I wonder that, too.”

“And because you knew that—that’s why I never expected you to come back. Nora, what are you doing back here? Don’t you see it’s too late to come back and ask?”

“How could it be too late?”

Toby flipped the notebook over and stared at the back of it. Someone had scribbled
“He’s so gross!!!”
on it in pencil, and someone had agreed
“Yeah”
in black pen. I wanted to yank the notebook out of his hands but knew I could never beat Toby in a wrestling match.

“Do you remember that night, when I asked you why you tried to kill yourself?”

“Yeah. What does that have to do with Rose?”

“A lot. You’ll see when you read this.”

“Are you going to
let
me read it?”

“Yes. If you answer the question.”

“Okay…” I said skeptically.

The notebook seemed almost a tease into a conversation that might never end—because this was one question for which I’d never have a satisfactory answer.

“I did it,” I said, “to set myself free. I’d been so quiet for so long. No one noticed I was even there anymore. Sometimes I wondered how much there was left of myself. I did it to see what I could make happen.”

“Fancy way of saying you did it for attention, then?”

“No. Well, yes—if you’re one of those people who needs to call it one thing or the other. Death or attention. The first being noble and tragic, the second being loathsome and pathetic. Then yes, I’m in the loathsome-and-pathetic category. But I think you know it was more complicated than that. You knew me. You remember.”

“Yeah.” Toby seemed to relax a little, his grip loosening on the notebook. “But that’s still not an explanation. To say it was complicated doesn’t explain.”

“Okay. Well. I felt trapped. I mean, no, I didn’t want to die. But I didn’t want to feel trapped anymore. And
that
wasn’t about anyone else. That was just about me.”

“Trapped by what?”

“Trapped in my own sad, small view of myself, I suppose.”

“Uh-huh. And did it work?”

“Yes, actually. It did. It was a terrible, pathetic thing to do, but in a twisted way it did work. It made me see how desperate I’d gotten. And that no one was ever going to care how sad I looked or how silent I’d become. That I could take it that far and discover that the world kept turning and everyone mostly just kept about the business of making themselves happy, which of course is exactly what they should be doing. That the best way to stop being desperate is to stop waiting for other people to see it and take care of yourself instead. However the hell you can. Even if that means shutting out old parts of yourself or people who are used to those parts. Even if you have to be a little cold about it. Get the hell out and into a situation where you can have better ambitions for yourself than someone finally caring to ask what’s wrong with you.”

I caught my breath, surprised at some of the words that had just come out of my mouth.

“Some touchy-feely therapist at the hospital help you figure that out?” Toby asked, sounding skeptical.

“No. It took me years to figure that out. By myself.”

“You ever regret it? Regret hurting your mother like that?”

“I regret hurting my mother. But I don’t regret figuring that out. So on some level I don’t regret it. I hate to say it like that, but it’s true.”

“So you’ve made peace with it. That what you’re saying?”

“No. I wouldn’t go that far. But not everything needs to be made peace with, don’t you think?”

Toby rolled his eyes—at me or at the idea of making peace, I couldn’t determine. Then he ran his finger along the metal spiral binding of the notebook.

“But what if you had died?” he asked.

“I knew I wouldn’t. Even if I didn’t admit that to myself. In the back of my mind, I knew I was being way too careful for that ever to happen.”

“What if you’d been wrong?” Toby asked, his voice rising.

“I wasn’t.”

“But what if you
WERE
?”

He threw the notebook at me. It bounced off my shoulder and landed right in my lap.

“Toby…” I said, picking it up and holding it tight, in case he changed his mind. “You think Rose killed herself?”

I couldn’t read the frustrated look on his face. Immediately after I’d said it, it felt ridiculous. A suicide can’t bury herself in a wicker trunk.

“Why don’t you read what she wrote?” he said, getting up and taking a step away from the couch.

“Are you going back to work?”

“No. Just outside. Just for some air. I hate the smell of this house.”

“Can I—”

“No. Just stay here and read it. The last section was where she wrote all that dream crap. Plus the letter about the accident. She kept writing it over and over, adding stuff. The second section is her journal. Read that part.”

Toby went outside. I stayed on the bright green couch and read.

9/4

Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of Aaron and me. It feels weird for it to have been so long. When it started, I didn’t think anything serious would happen. Six months is serious, I guess. It makes me feel owned sometimes, and I don’t like it. When other guys talk to me now, it’s different. It’s like I’m married. I don’t like feeling married. Especially when I think we’ll break up once he graduates at the end of this year. Do we pretend all year? Do I have to be married all year? I suppose this is my role. To go with him to homecoming and prom. To cry a tear when he leaves for college. To give him some practice so he doesn’t make a fool of himself when he meets the love of his life.

9/7

I think I was too hard on Aaron last time I wrote. He really isn’t as selfish as I made him sound. I’ve liked having a boyfriend, having someone to do things with. I’m not saying he uses me—at least any more than I use him—but sometimes it feels like we’re going through the motions of the high-school relationship, nothing more. He’s nice to me. I just get sick of the role, that’s all. That’s all I was trying to say. And I guess in the end I am jealous of him—of having only one year to go. What would that feel like? Two years seems so much more than one. This is the year that really matters for college—blah, blah, blah. I don’t know. I guess I can try to care about grades—I mean, really care, like Paul does. I could probably do just as well as him if I did.

9/23

Thought I would, but I haven’t. Thought I could, but I can’t. “Sorry” is a word you say after your parents catch you scratching your sister, a word you don’t mean. “Apologize” is the word you replace it with when you’re old enough to pretend. Neither is ever enough.

10/1

Paul responded pretty much as I expected. He’s a good kid, but robotically so. Don’t copy off other kids’ papers. Listen to the teacher. Say please and thank you. Doesn’t know how to figure out his own right and wrong outside of that. Like a kid who knows how to add, multiply, and divide but can’t figure out which to do in a word problem. Doesn’t know how the rules apply to real life. He knew he shouldn’t be doing it at the time. But now that there’s a problem with no clear rule or solution, he doesn’t have a clue.

10/2

But then, do I have a clue either?

10/9

I can’t believe he told. But, more unbelievable, nothing’s happened. And they all want me to wait. Not shut up—they don’t say that. Just wait. Wait and see. Even Mr. H. Wait till what? Till Paul gets into Tufts? Till Jesus arrives and waves his arms to restore Brian’s severed nerves? Maybe we’re just waiting for time to pass? Maybe, years and years from now, people will soften because what happened will be past. But I couldn’t stand those years in between. Years and years of knowing he can’t have what I have and I could have stopped it. Year after year of normal life I don’t deserve.

10/11

Starting to wonder if any of these things I’ve been telling myself are true. If I’m so much braver or better than Aaron or Paul or Mr. H, why haven’t I said anything yet?

10/13

I went to Joe’s late last night. His father was sleeping, and so was Toby. He let me up into his room. I went to ask him what kind of pills he could get me. He laughed. What did I think, he was some kind of candy man? And what did I think this was, the ’70s? And I thought of telling him why. What would he do if he knew? Not sure, but I think at least he wouldn’t judge me. Joe’s already seen and done some things. But he has never hurt anyone. That’s the thing about Joe, no matter what people think of him. He’d grow ’shrooms, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. And I guess that’s why I couldn’t tell him. He thinks I like him now, and I guess I do. As much as I can like someone right now. He at least is honest. He at least doesn’t pretend to be better than he is. He doesn’t pretend his future is sacred.