In Search of the Rose Notes (29 page)

10/15

So now Mr. H is suddenly paying me even more. Afraid of me and my mouth? Probably he doesn’t need to worry. I’m just tired now. The first time, I didn’t realize till I got home that it was way more than it should be. I told him the next day, and he said not to worry about it. Then this week he did it again. And I was too tired of all of us to care anymore.

10/16

Joe kissed me tonight. Kissing Joe is nothing like kissing Aaron. With Aaron the kiss was always a means to an end. Aaron was always trying to move us both efficiently into a frenzy, or like he’s driving a car with his lips. I can see how amused Joe is. The girl down the street going through a bad-boy phase. It could end as easily as it started. He’ll take what he can get. A kiss or more. It doesn’t need to go anywhere.

10/17

Shouldn’t be kissing anyone. Remember? What do you deserve?

10/21

Would it kill them to know what I had done? Or would it just kill me to have them know? Why am I so selfish that this is what I care about? What about him? Forget me, what about Brian? He even slips my mind some days now. What’s wrong with me?

10/25

How do you let fate decide? Stand far in front of a train and see if it stops? Stand in a river and see if it takes you? But there is no train and no river in Waverly. Where is the nearest train? There’s the Metro North out of New Haven. And where does the Amtrak run, from New Haven to Hartford and up through Massachusetts? I know it exists, but I don’t even know where else it runs. Several towns west. Nowhere near here. I can’t imagine hearing the train coming and standing your ground. All of that noise and metal coming closer. Maybe it hypnotizes you. But I can’t imagine. Maybe if you didn’t know it was coming, closed your eyes, put on headphones and played music on the highest volume. Would that be loud enough that you wouldn’t hear it coming?

10/28

Toby saw me. I pretended I didn’t see him, because how to explain? Poor kid. What would I say if he asked?

10/29

Stood out in the tennis courts last night instead. With headphones again. But for what? For aliens to land and claim me? For the werewolves to stalk me while I obliviously listen to Peter Gabriel, only to open my eyes just before they rip my heart out?

10/30

Forget pills, forget aliens and all that silly shit. Quit with the drama. Get serious here. Real sin—real punishment.

11/2

Kiss 95.7 on my Walkman last night, like I used to listen to when I was the girls’ age. The third song was Madonna, “True Blue.” I knew this song from before I was even their age. I’d liked it—it was so cheesy. I didn’t know anything then. Seems like even Madonna was innocent back then. I had to stop after that song. Because the song made me think of my parents and how to them I’m still that age. For all they know, I could still love such a song.

11/3

If not this, what?

11/5

Simon & Garfunkel tonight. Their first album. Wednesday Morning, 3 AM. Over and over. “Bleecker Street” is my favorite. Sometimes, peace.

November fifth was the last entry. Rose had disappeared on the eighth. I read and reread. It did sound as if Rose was sometimes thinking about suicide. It was hard for me to tell if she’d been at all serious. When I was sixteen, I never would’ve written about it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d known that committing my intentions to paper would give away their fraudulence.

And there were, of course, other interesting aspects to this journal besides the suicide musings.

There was the stuff about Mr. Hemsworth, for one. I wasn’t entirely confident the extra pay had nothing to do with her silence about the accident. Charlotte maybe wanted to tell herself that, but Rose certainly
perceived
the money as something more than generosity.

And kissing Joe? Somehow I wasn’t surprised. But was that a big secret to the Dean boys? Had Joe mentioned that to the police? And what had Rose been doing when Toby had seen her? Screwing around with Joe? Smoking herb with Joe? Taking pills from Joe?

The Deans’ front door opened, and I jumped.

“Toby—” I said, standing.

But it was Joe at the door.

“I didn’t hear your car,” I said.

“Hey,” Joe said. “Nice to see you. Wasn’t sure you’d stick around this long. You come for some BBQ? Tobe and I were talking about getting some ribs.”

“No…” I said. “Toby still in the yard?”

“Nope. He supposed to be?”

“I thought he went… outside.”

I realized after I’d done it that I was gesturing with the notebook. Without thinking, I clapped it against my chest, which caught Joe’s attention.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing with his chin.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Looks old,” he said, smiling. “Old love notes from good old WHS?”

“No,” I said, clasping my arms around it tighter.

“You don’t fool me,” Joe said, giving me a playful nudge on the arm. “I know you and Tobe were hot and heavy. Guess that’s why you keep showing up here, huh?”

“Joe,” someone snapped behind us. I whirled around to see Toby standing there, glaring at both of us. As I did so, Joe yanked the notebook out from under my arms.

“Let me see here,” Joe said, opening it.

“No!” Toby yelled, lunging for Joe.

“ ‘Rose Banks,’ ” Joe read from the inside cover, stepping backward away from him. “ ‘American history.’ ”

The expression on his face reminded me of Elvis again. This time the young Elvis, the side of his lip pulled up in a good-natured but half-witted smile.

He turned to me. “Wow. Where’d you get this? Rose leave it at Charlotte’s house when she was sitting? Anything good?”

Toby snatched it from Joe and handed it back to me.

Joe sincerely had never seen this notebook before. Either that or he was drunk again, but it didn’t seem or smell like it.

“Yeah,” Toby said to me, recovering his breath. “Anything good?”

“Nothing good,” I said. “Just history notes. Toby, you ready for that walk we talked about? To the tennis courts, for old times’ sake?”

As we headed out the door, Joe called after us, “We still grilling, Tobe?”

“Yup!” Toby yelled back.

Chapter Nineteen

Psychic Voyages:

December 1990

I ignored Toby as he shouted after me. Running as fast as I could, I almost slipped in the snow a couple of times but managed to recover and stay on my feet. I forgot to breathe till I was halfway down the hill, then ran right past my house. My mother wasn’t due home for a couple of hours. I couldn’t imagine sitting with Mrs. Crowe, politely watching her soaps with her, swallowing this feeling over and over until it maybe bubbled out of my stomach and barfed itself all over her imitation Oriental rug. No, I could not go home. I circled Charlotte’s house a couple of times, hoping she would get back from Toby’s soon. I squinted up the road, relieved to see a figure coming down the hill. But as it came closer, I saw that the figure was wearing a puffy brown coat. It was Toby, not Charlotte.

I crept back into Charlotte’s backyard and stared out onto the whitening lawn, vegetable garden, and trampoline. I remembered the time Charlotte had dropped one of Paul’s soccer cleats down under the trampoline to drive him crazy looking for it. I’d wondered how deep the hole was.

Right now I didn’t care how deep it went, as long as it got me out of this snow and away from Toby. I squeezed between the corner springs and crawled halfway across the width of the trampoline.

I pulled my knees to my chest and tried not shiver too hard.

I breathed in and out carefully, and after about a minute I managed to stop shivering altogether.

I’d learned to breathe like that from Charlotte. She taught me one night in August, when I slept over at her house just a few days before the start of school. She had been trying to get me to have an out-of-body experience, which she’d expertly referred to as an OBE. The list of tips in her black book was easy enough to understand. She’d stood by the window of her bedroom, using the remaining evening light to read them as I’d lain on her bed, eyes closed, imagining, just as she’d instructed, that I was floating. And concentrating on a single image—I’d decided on Charlotte’s old stuffed unicorn, which had caught my attention just before I’d closed my eyes.

“ ‘Breathe rhythmically,’ ” she’d read, “ ‘keeping your mouth slightly open.’ ”

Easy enough. But why would you
want
to leave your body? I’d wanted to ask Charlotte when we’d read the book together over dinner.

We’d looked at some pictures of the shadow of a man getting up and leaving his sleeping body. The pictures were dark, and the man was naked and skinny—and when you looked closely, you could sort of see the lump between his legs. If that was why Charlotte kept lingering on those pages, she didn’t say so. But I wondered.

When she’d finally turned the page, there was full-page picture drawn by a woman who’d had an OBE. A tunnel of trees and leaves, all drawn in delicate silvery lines. That was what she’d seen when she’d left her body.

I held that image in my head now as I scrunched under the trampoline, breathing carefully in and out. Although I hadn’t any wish to leave my body—whatever that meant to Charlotte or anybody else—the spot drawn in that lady’s picture seemed a place I wouldn’t mind going to. A tunnel, but a gentle one, with little round leaves carpeting the ground. If I could just disappear there for a while, I could forget everything.

“Nora?”

I jumped. Toby’s head was poking down between two of the trampoline springs.

“I knocked on Charlotte’s door,” he said. “Then I followed your footprints in the snow. What’re you doing down here?”

I thought about the question. Probably the answer was that I was just hanging out alone. I thought of saying,
I want to be alone.
But I wasn’t sure that was true.

“I’m astral-projecting,” I said, watching Toby climb into the trampoline pit. He huddled right beneath where he’d appeared and didn’t come any closer.

“What’s that mean?” he asked.

“It’s when you get your mind to float away from your body,” I explained.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I dunno. You can fly above New York City. Or go to another planet.”

“Isn’t that just, like, using your imagination?”

“No
.” I scoffed, channeling Charlotte. “You
really
go there. Not just in your head. Your… um…
soul
really goes.”

“What happens to your body while you’re gone? Does it die?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Well,” Toby said, considering this, “I wouldn’t risk it.”

I closed my eyes.

“Everything is going to be okay,” he said after a moment.

I opened my eyes and stared at him. He was trying to talk like someone on TV. People said that all the time on TV, but it had no place in real life.

“Shut up,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because nobody says that.”

“But I thought we should—”

“You can stay here,” I interrupted, “if you’re quiet.”

“Okay,” Toby said after thinking about it briefly.

I closed my eyes. I breathed in and out carefully. After a few minutes, I could hear Toby doing the same. He was breathing so deeply I started to wonder if he was sleeping.

I decided to shut him out, along with everything else. I made the space in my head white and slowly tried to redraw in that space the tree tunnel I’d seen in Charlotte’s book. Arching silver trees forming a delicate wooded tunnel. But however I imagined them, they kept looking, eventually, like the woods between the Cooks’ place and Larsons’ house. The space that had swallowed up Rose. It seemed just yesterday I’d thought of it like that.

Maybe I couldn’t fly away to New York City or another planet. But I could get back to yesterday. I could draw and redraw those trees between the Cooks’ and the Larsons’ in silver lines till they formed a swirling, leafy tunnel for Rose to wander into and disappear.

I listened to the almost-snoring of Toby’s breath and stared down into that beautiful silver-lined, leaf-strewn tunnel. It went on forever. Back to yesterday—way back beyond yesterday, really. Back to when Rose had wandered up into those trees and disappeared. Back to before I’d been afraid of her dying. Before I’d seen Toby’s father’s face and it made me think of skeletons.

Before all that she’d simply wandered into this endless shining passage of trees and never stopped walking. I just had to take myself out of this space and time and put myself there. I could think back past today and yesterday, the days before, and quiet myself into it. I let my sighing breath match Toby’s and let everything behind my eyes go soft silver and white.

Silver branches and leaves curling in on themselves, embracing Rose till I could no longer see her. A nest, really, for her to sleep in. Nothing more. Nothing scary. Just a nest. For us both to sleep in, Rose and me.

Chapter Twenty

May 27, 2006

We didn’t say anything at first—not till we were a good distance from Toby’s house, walking past the wooded area that had seemed so vast when we were kids. The bright green maple leaves seemed to glitter as they fluttered in the breeze.

“What did you see, Toby?” I asked after we’d passed Mrs. Crowe’s. “When she says, ‘Toby saw me.’ ”

“You really have no idea?” he asked quietly.

“No.”

“Because for a long time, I thought you knew. I thought you knew about Rose somehow, and that was why you were so messed up.”

“What? What did you think I knew?”

“I even thought, when you tried to kill yourself, you were trying to be like her.”

We were both quiet as we passed the Hemsworths’.

“Except she had a reason,” Toby added. “You didn’t, really.”

“I had a reason,” I said once we’d reached the bottom of Fox Hill and began crossing Adams Road toward the tennis courts. “I just explained it to you.”

“Didn’t sound like a very good one, though.”

“I don’t recall saying it was a good one. What would be a good one anyway?”

We crossed over the small gravel parking lot for the courts, then down the tree-lined path that led to them. Toby stopped walking for a moment.

“How about knowing you’d helped paralyze someone for life, maybe?”

“But, Toby…” I said. “How could she have… ?”

Toby just shook his head. “God, sometimes I wished it was you. Everyone thought you had some deep, dark secret. Poor Nora. So scared. So silent. What did she see that was haunting her? If you were the one who got to run from here and never come back, why wasn’t it you who had to bear it? It wasn’t fair.”

We’d reached the courts now. Toby lifted the rusted latch and held the metal gate open for me. As always, there was no one playing tennis, despite the perfect weather for it. The wind picked up as we began to walk around the edge of the court. Waves of green leaves billowed in the space just beyond the court’s fence.

“What did you see?” I asked him again. “I really want to know, Toby.”

He ran his finger along the cyclone fence as we walked. “I saw her a few nights before… I saw her. It was after dinner, it was already dark. My dad had me take the garbage out to the end of the driveway. And when I got there, I heard this singing, this humming. I followed it. I found her there at that blind curve, just after Fox Hill Road turns into Fox Hill Way. She had her eyes closed. She had her arms and palms spread out by her sides like she was waiting for the Rapture or something. She was humming that song ‘Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.’ You know that song?”

I nodded, shuddering for some reason at this detail.

“When I got closer, I saw she had headphones on. That’s why she didn’t hear me coming.

“I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. Was she on her way to see my brother again? Waiting till a little later, when my dad would probably be zonked out on the couch after a couple more beers? So she could suck face with Joe some more? But why was she right the fuck in the middle of the road? I wondered. Well, not
right
in the middle. If she was right in the middle, someone would be able to see her before they turned. But no, she was just a little off to the side, where they wouldn’t.

“But it wasn’t till I read what she wrote that I understood. She was playing chicken, like. Playing chicken with herself, ’cuz she thought she maybe wanted to die. Thinking nothing about
who
would hit her, of course. Thinking of nobody but herself and her own drama. Like someone hitting her would fix Brian. Like it would fix anything. Who thinks that way? Who’s that selfish? Who’s that crazy?”

It wasn’t a real question, but I had a real answer. A confused kid, of course. A kid faced with a very adult guilt she’d been unable to handle. So she’d started doing desperate—although strangely juvenile—things. Practically drinking herself to death. Asking Joe for pills. Playing pedestrian chicken on a blind curve, willing fate to take her. Like what I’d done, but with a riskier calculation and, apparently a different outcome.

The desperation of it was painful, the stupidity of it familiar. Suddenly I felt weak in the legs. I stopped walking and grabbed onto the cyclone fence to keep myself standing.

“Someone hit her, Toby?”

“Not the night I was out. Not that night. And I didn’t know for years. I didn’t know exactly what happened. But a couple of days later… she must’ve been doing it again.”

“Toby?” I said slowly.

The waves of green leaves were now making me dizzy. They swelled with a particularly strong gust of wind, and I half expected them to wash over us like a tidal wave.

“Yeah?” Toby said.

I felt his arm on my elbow, steadying me.

“Was it Joe?” I managed.

“Joe didn’t have a car yet,” Toby said, then lowered himself down to the clay, sitting right in the sun. “He walked home from work in the dark most nights, or my dad picked him up, depending.”

“Oh,” I said, getting to my knees, then sitting next to him.

He squinted at me, waiting for my next question.

“Was it your dad?”

Toby’s face was stone. He glanced around at the trees before answering.

“Yeah,” he said.

We sat together for several minutes before he spoke again.

“A couple of days later, after I saw her, the day she disappeared—she came to our door when she was done baby-sitting you guys. Asking for Joe. I was the only one home. When I said he was working, she left. And then, an hour later, my dad comes home. It was dark by then. And he comes in the house screaming,
Toby, don’t go outside! Don’t go outside, Toby!
Then,
Call Mrs. Reed!
And I dialed your number. And then he was like,
No, don’t call her! Never mind, Toby! Don’t call!
So I hung up. And then he says to call 911, and then he changes his mind before I do it. And then he starts saying,
Don’t go outside, Toby.
Says it over and over like a crazy man. But after a half hour, he stops saying it. And a few hours later, he’s back to normal again, just staring at the TV like almost any other night.

“And later I asked him what was wrong and why I couldn’t go outside. And I let him tell me there was something in his truck for Christmas he didn’t want me to see.
Something in his truck for Christmas.
Do you believe that, Nora? Do you believe what a bonehead kid I was? But come Christmas there
was
a new dirt bike for me. A new used dirt bike. So it was possible, wasn’t it? It was possible?”

Toby stared at me.

“Yeah,” I choked out. “It was possible. And you were only twelve.”

“I was so thick I let myself believe it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that something was wrong, but I managed to put it out of my head. But then, when I was seventeen, I found the backpack with the notebook. Still, though, it was just a notebook. It scared me, but it wasn’t enough to condemn anyone. I managed to rationalize it away. She left some shit at our house. So what? She’d been sneaking over and seeing my brother. It was possible. And all that stuff she’d written—I sent some of it to Brian, I put some of it in Charlotte’s box. And no one did anything. Nothing happened. It started to feel like I’d been stupid to let it scare me. Who cared? No one, apparently. Maybe it was all in my head.

“But then, right before my father died, he told me the whole story. Just opened his mouth two days before he died—between one morphine haze and another. He needed to clear his conscience before he died. He’d turned that corner coming home from happy hour in the dark. And there she was. He’d hit her, and she’d died instantly. And he panicked.”

“Why didn’t he call the police? An ambulance?”

“Like I just said. Panic, I guess. Why didn’t he leave her there, drive those last few yards home, call 911, and come back? I’ve asked myself that so many times. But he was drinking in those days, the year or so after his mom had died. Made good use of happy hour. I guess he’d had quite a few that night, wasn’t thinking straight. Didn’t really know what to do. Maybe thought he’d go to jail and there’d be no one to take care of us. We didn’t have a lot going for us. We lived by the dump, and we smelled funny, and we didn’t have a mother. Maybe he thought the straw that would break the camel’s back would be when we were also the kids whose dad killed that pretty blond girl. Whatever he was thinking, once he hid what happened for a few hours—even if he realized later what a terrible mistake he’d made—it was too late to go back on it. I don’t know if all that went through his head when he stuck her in the cab of his truck and drove her that tiny little stretch of road between the corner and our house, but that’s what he did. Probably none of that crossed his mind. Probably he was just in total shock at hitting her, total shock from taking that curve and smacking right into a stupid-as-fuck teenager with her eyes closed in the road, not to mention a little fuzzy from a bunch of beers, and did something crazy stupid. For a few minutes, I think, his first thought was saving her. Which is why he was gonna have me call your mom. He’d gotten used to calling her for emergencies with his mother. But then he realized that Rose was already dead. She’d died instantly.”

Toby looked at the trees as he talked, refusing to meet my gaze. I held still. I held my breath.

“Maybe she hoped my brother would see her when he was walking home. See her and figure it out and feel bad for her. Ask her what the hell was wrong with her. Because I can’t imagine she was thinking there was a good chance if she got hit, it would be by my dad. I can’t think she would’ve been that cruel to us.”

I wanted to respond to this, to assure Toby that Rose simply hadn’t been thinking at all. That she was too deeply involved in a game with herself to think of anyone else. But a more pressing concern came to mind before I could say so.

“Her body,” I whispered. “What did he do with her body?”

Toby watched the wall of leaves as it fluttered in the wind again.

“He’d shoved her in the root cellar for a few months at first. Then he moved her that summer when Joe and I were camping. Buried her deep under one of the dirt mounds of the cellar, wrapped in plastic. And she’d been there since.”

“But…” I said. “But then how did her body—”

“I’m getting to that.”

He stood up and paced a few circles around me before speaking again.

“After he died, I looked. I dug. Even then—despite everything, despite the notebook—I had this tiny hope it was just the raving delusion of a dying man. But there it was. There was a dead body in our house. Someone we knew, for God’s sake. Someone we liked. Rose had been there alone all that time. If I moved her someplace where someone would find her, at least her family could know, could bury her. And the pond, at least she’d liked it there. We’d all been happy there once.

“So you see now why you’ve asked me too late. I was innocent for a long time. You could’ve helped me, once. Even after I found that notebook, I was innocent. Even prom night, when you were drunk and almost let me tell you what I was afraid of, it wouldn’t have been too late. But in the end I panicked. I’d never thought it could be real, and I panicked when I saw that it was. Looks like I have some of my father’s stupidity in me. Looks like panic brings it out in the Dean men.”

Toby stopped pacing and sat with me on the clay again. He stared at me expectantly, one eye begging me to respond, the other looking noncommittal. I put my hand on my stomach, trying to ignore the bile rising in my throat.

“Toby, you dug her up? You saw her?”

“I didn’t see anything. Not really. I couldn’t stand it. I knew enough to know what it was. Everything was already all wrapped up in an old sheet of plastic. I just rolled the whole thing into this big basket and brought her somewhere they’d find her.”

My hand started to move toward Toby, but something stopped me from touching him. Then he turned away from me and buried his head in his hands.

Phantom Encounters:

December 1990

Charlotte couldn’t fool me. I knew she’d probably listened to the whole tape last night by herself. She’d probably already memorized every slight tap or scratch in the ninety minutes of tape hiss and was now ready to watch me listen. She probably knew exactly when to watch for my ears to perk up, my psychic sensitivities to give something away.

“I hope we find something,” she said theatrically, setting a bowl of freshly popped popcorn between us and pressing “play.” “I hope we can prove old Tom Edison right.”

Old Tom Edison.
I rolled my eyes. There’d been something in her books about Thomas Edison in his golden years trying to capture ghost voices on recording devices. Kind of interesting, but I didn’t appreciate Charlotte’s tone. Like we knew Mr. Edison well enough to call him “Tom,” like we were all characters in one of my mother’s PBS mysteries—jolly and clever even though someone was dead.

Charlotte crammed a handful of popcorn into her mouth, crunching it noisily as we listened to her announcing the first address where we’d done our outdoor recording. As the tape moved steadily to the part where Toby had interrupted us, Charlotte sat at her desk and examined her bottles of nail polish. I expected her to fast-forward through Toby’s “shenanigans,” but she didn’t. I ate some popcorn, pulling the best buttery pieces off the top of the bowl.

The early recording was over fairly quickly. Then there was a break in the tape, then Charlotte announcing,
“We are at the Dean residence, on the top floor. The Deans do not use this space for anything but storage, according to resident Toby Dean. This may be because of fears of… possible paranormal activity. I’m positioning the recorder on a box… .”

There was some shuffling, then the sound of Charlotte’s footsteps pacing the creaky floorboards, then silence.

Charlotte opened her bottle of pearly-pink nail polish and began painting her left thumbnail with it. Figuring I needn’t go through the charade of listening super carefully either, I grabbed
Mysterious Lands and Peoples
out from under her bed. Now that we were investigating nearly full-time, Charlotte kept the black books more readily available than she had before Rose had disappeared. I turned to my favorite Easter Island picture and stared at it as the tape hissed on.