In Search of the Rose Notes (6 page)

“Werewolves tend to have an appetite for children,” Rose informed us.

“Okay,” Charlotte replied in a bored singsong. “Whatever you say.”

“And they eat people in the most gruesome ways. Devouring their still-beating hearts. Ripping out their throats.”

“Really?” I said, feeling the lumpy part of my neck. “How do you rip a throat out? You just bite off the front part of it?”

“Don’t ask her stuff like that, Nora. She’s only trying to scare us.”

“Scare
you
?” Rose replied. “I’m sort of scaring myself. You’re not even looking at these pictures.”

“Is someone getting their throat ripped out?” I asked, rising to take a look.

“No.” Rose closed the book before I reached her. “I shouldn’t be reading this stuff.”

“I told you it was stupid,” Charlotte said.

“It’s not that it’s stupid. It’s really that it’ll scare me to death. I already get scared enough walking on Fox Hill Road at night. There’s that spot right after the Cooks’ place, you know, where it’s all just trees and stuff? Right before the turn for the transfer station. And there’s no streetlights or house lights for that whole turn, you know?”

I nodded. I hadn’t walked there at night. I’d never had any reason to. But I knew where she was talking about. Charlotte didn’t look up or reply.

“Whenever I’m walking there at night, I’m always scared to death for that minute it takes to get past it. The littlest noise in the trees and I take off running. My heart pounds like crazy till I can make it back to my house.”

“What’re you afraid of anyway?” Charlotte wanted to know.

“Well… everything. When I’m walking up that little bit of road, I believe in anything scary, even if it’s stupid. Ghosts, vampires, Freddy Krueger…”

“Werewolves?” I said.

“Not before,” Rose said. “But
now. Now
I’ll think about it every time. Now I’ll have to hold my throat while I walk by those trees.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “The werewolf will just rip your arm off anyway.”

There was a knock at Charlotte’s door.

“Come in,” she called.

The door opened, and Paul poked in his head. My face burned red. It was several minutes before that I’d pointed out how hairy his dad was, but maybe he’d heard. I’d die if he’d heard. Having Paul hear it was totally different from having Charlotte and Rose hearing it.

“Rose,” he said, “can I talk to you a second?”

“Yeah,” Rose replied, leaving the black book on the carpet as she got to her feet.

Paul closed the door behind them. Charlotte smiled to herself as she drew a delicate pair of red lips on one of her wooden heads.

“Maybe we ought to try to see what they’re talking about,” she whispered.

“Maybe.”

“You go,” she ordered, still whispering. “You go out to the bathroom and—”

“No,” I said.
“You.”

“They’ll
notice
me,” Charlotte pointed out.

Her reasoning was mean. They’d notice her but not me. Unfortunately, it was also correct. I stormed out of the room to show my annoyance, but as soon as I was out the bedroom door, I realized I’d made a mistake. It would look to her like I was following orders.

I slammed the bathroom door to show her I wasn’t doing what she asked—and to ruin any plan she might have to sneak around behind Paul’s and Rose’s backs. I blew my nose, flushed the toilet, and washed my hands. On my way back to Charlotte’s room, I heard Paul and Rose talking in his bedroom.

“But it’s better for
us
to say something. If we wait till
he
does—” Rose was saying.

“
You
aren’t thinking of
me,
” Paul interrupted. “Why should I fuck my life up—”

I stiffened at the F-word. I’d never heard Paul say it before—he was just as strict about that stuff as Charlotte. It would have surprised me less if Rose had said it. Rose loved to swear.

I crept quietly by Paul’s half-open door. They were sitting close to each other on Paul’s bed. As Charlotte had predicted, they didn’t notice me. Or didn’t care that I was there.

“It’s not about you or me,” Rose argued as I moved away from the door.

“Would you like someone to go to jail?” Paul whispered. “Would
that
make you happy?”

“Happy?” Rose said, her voice breaking as if she might cry. “How could
happy
have anything to do with it?”

I returned to Charlotte’s room and closed the door hard.

“Whadya find out?” she whispered.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just went to the bathroom. I’m not a spy.”

“I think they’re getting together.”

I said nothing.

Rose returned a few minutes later, settled back onto the carpet, and picked up her black book as if nothing had happened.

“What were we talking about?” she asked, in way that seemed to me a little fake-cheerful.

“Werewolves,” I reminded her.

“We were talking about how Joe Dean is probably a werewolf,” Charlotte chimed in.

“All guys are werewolves,” Rose said, staring into the book.

“My mom sometimes says men are pigs,” I said, because it seemed sort of related.

“Hmm,” Rose said. “Pigs and wolves are very different.”

“So which is right?” I asked.

“Boys aren’t pigs
or
werewolves,” Charlotte said, curling her lip at us in disgust. “That’s
discrimination.
”

“Fine, Charlotte,” Rose snapped. “
People
are pigs.
People
are werewolves. People in general are awful, disgusting, shitty animals.”

Charlotte’s mouth hung open for a moment, but she quickly recovered. She seemed too rattled to bother to scold Rose for her language. A moment later she went back to fashioning her little Puritan people.

I bit my nails for a couple of minutes, bored but not wanting to bother Rose or help Charlotte with her A-plus diorama. Then I rummaged through Charlotte’s box of black books till I found the one with my favorite picture—of seven fat, squat statues standing in a row on Easter Island. They all had flat, squarish heads and no mouths. I loved this picture, and I loved those statues. They were so mysterious, but so peaceful, too. They surely guarded a very old secret. What was it? I felt I could look at them for a long, long time and not need anything else to keep me busy. Not TV, not music, not Charlotte’s chatter about what they might mean. As far as I knew, Charlotte had only flipped through this book once and then tossed it aside in favor of the ones about psychics and ghosts. But I’d spent a little longer on it, and I knew that if you sat with them and stayed as quiet as they were, you could start to feel you might understand them, just a tiny bit. If you stared at them long enough, you started to smile without knowing why. I knew that Charlotte had never looked at them long enough to know this, and I wasn’t going to tell her.

Chapter Five

May 22, 2006

When I woke up, it was past nine. Charlotte had been gone for several hours. She’d probably discussed the symbolism of
The Scarlet Letter
a few times before I’d even gotten up. I imagined a class full of fourteen-year-olds: some pimply, some obnoxious, some sweet, one with hair in her eyes, and one chewing gum with a self-satisfied smirk. The only unsettling thing about this picture was that I couldn’t imagine Charlotte in it.

But that’s where she was. And it was just starting to dawn on me that I’d no idea what I was going to do all day—for several days—without her. I’d start with going out for coffee. I threw on some jeans and a peasant top and scuffed into my clogs. Before heading out, I grabbed the typed page off the coffee table, folded it, and shoved it into the back pocket of my jeans. I didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but I felt that Charlotte had, in good teacher fashion, left me something to do.

I parked at the Dunkin’ Donuts next to Deans’ Auto Body. After I got my coffee, I sat in a booth sipping, watching cars roll through the intersection, wondering if any of them were driven by people I used to know.

It was in this very Dunkin’ Donuts that Charlotte and I had last talked right before I left town. I’d been slightly surprised when she’d invited me out for coffee a couple of weeks after we graduated high school.

Charlotte had dumped a few tablespoons of sugar into her cup, but I took my coffee black.

“You really like it that way?” she’d asked, watching me skeptically as I took my first sip.

“Yeah. I like bitter-tasting things, actually,” I explained.

“Hmm. So… Syracuse, huh? You excited?”

“Yup,” I said.

“Kind of a party school. I was surprised when I heard where you were going.”

“It also has a pretty good arts program.”

Charlotte nodded. She was going to the University of Connecticut—about twenty minutes away from Waverly. She’d gotten a near-full scholarship that was offered statewide to kids with high test scores and grades in the top 10 percent of their class.

“You get good financial aid?” Charlotte wanted to know.

“Really good,” I said. My mother and I looked relatively poor on paper.

Before we’d finished our coffees, Charlotte had brought up Rose.

“You sure liked her, didn’t you?
And
she liked you. Rose really liked you.”

“I never got that sense.”

“She did. She liked you better than me.”

I wondered how that could possibly matter now.

“Oh, I don’t know…” I mumbled.

“Why do you think that was, Nora?”

“I… don’t know. Doesn’t matter much now, though, does it?”

“It does to me. You know, Nora, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about her. I’ve had a feeling, lately, that maybe we should talk about her.”

“Lately?”

“Well, yes. I thought maybe there was something you wanted to say to me about her.”

I waited for her to continue, sipping my coffee and trying not to grimace at its strength. But she just gazed at me expectantly.

“What?” I said.

“I thought you’d want a chance to talk about it,” she said. “Before you go. Am I wrong?”

“Umm…” I said, perplexed. “Maybe.”

Apparently this was Charlotte’s strange way of saying good-bye. We’d been such close friends as little kids, and now we suddenly wouldn’t be near each other anymore. We’d never live on the same street again. There was something sad about that, but maybe this conversation proved that Rose was the only thing we’d had in common for a very long time.

“I don’t think about her that much anymore,” I admitted. “I try not to.”

“You try not to? Why not?”

“Because of what happened to her.”

Charlotte narrowed her eyes. “What happened to her?”

“I don’t know. But I mean it was probably pretty terrible, whatever it was.”

I hesitated, staring into my coffee. I’d drunk only half of it but was already feeling shaky. Coffee in the afternoon didn’t agree with me. I was going to have to work on that for college.

“Like I said,” I explained, “I really do try not to think about her. It’s too… sad.”

Charlotte nodded, perhaps finally understanding. She avoided my gaze for a moment. I wondered if it embarrassed her, my talking about what made me sad. Of course, I meant “sad” in the regular way, not in the aspirin-overdose, psych-ward-stint way I’d become famous for. But I didn’t know how to ensure her of this distinction without making us both even more uncomfortable.

“So… are you as crazy to get out of here as I am?” I asked, trying to relieve us both with a change of subject.

Charlotte bit her lip, then smiled. “Almost, I’m sure.”

“It’s going to be nice to start over with a whole new group of people. I can hardly believe it some days—I’m going to get up in the morning and go to class and look around and
not
see the same faces around me I’ve seen since I was six.”

“It’s a little scary, actually,” Charlotte said.

“Is it?”

“To me anyway,” she added.

“A lot scarier would be sticking around,” I pointed out.

“Mmm-hmm,” Charlotte said, watching me carefully as I took another sip.

A tiny smile crossed her lips as I failed to suppress a pucker from my black coffee. Then the smile faded, and her light green eyes avoided mine again.

“I’ll miss you, though,” she said, so softly I wasn’t sure I was even supposed to hear it, or to reply.

As my coffee now grew cold, I found myself squinting into Deans’ Auto Body, trying to discern if Toby Dean was one of the men tinkering about in the shadows of the large garage.

It had been a surprise to hear his name come out of Charlotte’s mouth yesterday—I’d forgotten to think about him for years.
Toby Dean.
That boy with the name like a sausage,
my mother used to call him. Since he was a boy and a whole year older than us, Charlotte and I didn’t pay him much attention when we were little kids. On the rare occasions when we did come in contact with him, he was usually doing something that didn’t make much sense—like carrying a dead garter snake around in a greasy brown paper bag or whacking at his father’s overgrown hedges with a golf club.

When we were really small, everyone called him Eyeball. He had a lazy eye and was always wearing the same crusty disposable eye patch on which his older brother, Joe, had drawn for him a hairy, oozing eyeball. I doubt that patch ever did much corrective work—it was usually loose, allowing Toby to peek out with his good eye.

Toby became more familiar to Charlotte and me when he was left back in the fourth grade and we caught up with him in school. If you were left back, it was generally thought that you were seriously stupid or seriously badass. I wasn’t sure which he was, but I wasn’t thrilled to be seated next to him. There was a whiff of Frito in his breath and a hint of mothball in his clothes and a low, stupid quality to his laugh. He was much bigger than the other kids, and he was interested in dirt bikes and Axl Rose. And by the end of fourth grade, he would come in from recess with dark pit stains on his shirt and a mysterious, monkeylike odor that always distracted me from my long-division worksheets. I remember trying to pull my nostrils together using just my face muscles—rather than my hands—so as not to tip off the poor stinking Toby. He already had enough problems that he didn’t need the girl sitting next to him holding her nose on top of it all.

Sometimes my mother used to stop by and check in on Toby’s dad, who occasionally needed help with the care of Toby’s grandmother, who lived with them until she died of cancer when we were around ten. I’d usually stay in the yard or the car. If it was really cold, I’d wait for my mother in the Astroturfed mud room of Toby’s house. I was afraid if I ever sat at his kitchen table or saw his bedroom, someone might end up calling us friends.

In junior high, Toby started to seem much older than the rest of us—and not just physically. When kids would giggle and squirm in class, he’d check them with a growled, “Hey, guys, c’mon.” Or just an exasperated shake of his head as he folded his meaty arms. By then he’d discovered deodorant and even cologne, and kids at least respected him for his size and gruffness, if nothing else. He was never very smart in school, but teachers would promote him for his efforts, his kindness to them, his stoic good sense.

I didn’t really think of Toby as a person until late in high school, when I worked down the street from his dad’s garage, bagging groceries at the Stop & Shop. The first time Toby offered me a ride home, I declined. I flattered myself that he liked me and I shouldn’t lead him on. It didn’t dawn on me until much later that he was probably doing it as a favor to my mother, in return for her kindness to his father and grandmother. Toby did stuff like that—extended favors to adults as if he were one of them. I refused those rides for months, until September of senior year, when it occurred to me that no association could damage my status any worse than I’d already done on my own. Whatever devastating social judgments I’d thought I’d been avoiding had already been made long before. I was a senior, I was tired, and there was no reason to walk when Toby would happily drive me.

And it took only a few rides with him for me to realize that I actually liked him better than most of the kids in our class.

I grabbed my coffee cup, left Dunkin’ Donuts, and headed for Deans’. I didn’t think to be self-conscious until I was already inside the door.

“Can I help you?” said the beefy guy behind the counter.

“Umm,” I said, stepping closer. His dark hair was cut closely to his head, almost a crew cut. His eyes were big and brown, the left eye just slightly crossed. Yes, this was Toby Dean.

“Hi,” I said, giggling the end of the word like an idiot.

“Hi,” he replied, cocking his head with a bewildered smile. “Can I help you?”

“Toby?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You remember me?”

He scowled for a moment, and then his eyebrows went up in surprise.

“Nora,” he said.

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

“Okay.” He crossed his arms, hooking his thumbs beneath his upper arms, where his undersize green T-shirt met his thick, pale biceps. “It’s been sort of a rough year. I don’t know if you’ve heard.”

“Yeah. I was really sorry to hear about your dad, Toby.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding just a little.

I felt I should say something more but couldn’t think of what. I hadn’t known his dad well at all. He’d worked crazy hard at the shop when we were kids, and he always seemed worn out on the rare occasions I’d see him. Kind of like Charlotte’s mother.

“You visiting your mom?” Toby asked.

“My mom? No. She lives in Bristol now. Works at a different hospital.”

“I know it. She came in here once to get her oil changed. About a year ago. When she came for coffee with some of her old Waverly buddies.”

“Oh.”

“What are you doing in Connecticut, then, if you’re not visiting your mom?”

“I’m… visiting Charlotte Hemsworth, actually.”

“I didn’t realize you guys were still in cahoots.”

“Well, it’s a recent thing, us getting back in touch.”

“That’s interesting. I remember you two were like this.” He crossed his index and middle fingers. “Back in the day.”

“Yeah. Listen, Toby. I didn’t want to bother you at work. I just wanted to say hi. I thought maybe sometime we could have coffee or something. Before I go back home.”

“How long are you here for?”

“Actually, I don’t know. Probably a week.”

“You here with your husband?”

Interesting that he knew I was married. I wondered who’d told him—Charlotte or my mom. And I wondered how often my name came up.

“No…” I said. “He’s… um, working.”

“Well, today’s out. Since you’ve already had your coffee,” he said, looking at my Dunkin’ Donuts cup. “Maybe we ought to make it a beer. How’s tonight for you?”

“Umm… I don’t know. I’ve gotta see what Charlotte’s got planned. We haven’t actually visited that much yet.”

We left it open—we’d meet at Atkins Tavern one of these nights. He gave me his card in case anything came up, and then I started for the door. Once I’d reached it, I turned and looked at Toby again. He was stepping closer to the grease-smudged computer behind the counter and reaching out to click a single button. The slow, determined motion of his arm startled me, reminding me of him pushing my hair out of my face on prom night.

Nora,
he’d said.

Be careful,
I’d protested.
You’ll flatten out the curl.

You don’t need that curl anymore, do you?

Toby looked up just as my face began to burn at the memory.

“Hey,” I said, embarrassed to still be in the shop, extending the awkward silence. I tried to recover by saying the first thing that came to mind. “Do you remember the
Looking Glass
?”

“The
Looking Glass
?” Toby squinted at me. “What’s that?”

“It was the lit magazine at Waverly High.”

“Oh, yeah.” He picked up a rag from the counter and started wiping his hands with it. “I forgot it had a name.”

“Everybody got a copy every year,” I said dumbly.

“And yet almost nobody ever wanted one,” he said, grinning.

“I guess that means you didn’t keep yours.”

Toby twisted his ring and pinkie fingers into the rag. “Umm… is that what you
really
came in here to ask me, Nora?”

I looked away, examining my fingernails for a moment. I felt pretty stupid. Toby had a
real
job, and he had workers and customers relying on him. Why was I bothering him with this? The school
literary
magazine, of all things? Toby had barely graduated from Waverly High. Who exactly did I think I was?

“You’re kidding me,” he said, not unkindly.

But his jaw tightened a little, and I wasn’t sure if it was annoyance or amusement.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “It was a stupid question. It was just a random thought. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”