The Rosemary Spell (13 page)

Her look is polite and bland. She doesn't seem to understand.

“You wrote some poems about memory,” Adam reminds her. “Like, uh, the one about the daughter looking out over the river, and also one about a ruined house and how it still holds all the memories from before it was ruined.”

“Good job remembering the titles,” I say under my breath.

He glares at me. “Do
you
remember them?”

I fish the thin volume of Constance's early poems out of my bag. Constance watches me with mild interest.

I hold the book out to her, and she squints at the photograph on the cover. Her brow collapses into deep furrows. “Do I know that woman?”

She doesn't recognize herself.

“That's you,” Adam answers, his voice gentle.

She smiles uncertainly. She takes in a breath, the start of a laugh that doesn't follow, then catches herself with her mouth open and quickly presses her lips together in a pale line.

I find “Moon Mangled Memory” in the book and read the first verse out loud. “Do you remember this one?” I ask.

Her smile is detached. “No, I'm afraid I don't know that poem. I won the recitation prize in the third grade for Wordsworth's ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.' Do you know it? Shall I say it for you?”

She clasps her hands together like a schoolgirl and begins:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

that floats on high o'er . . .

I recognize the words. “That's one of Mr. Cates's poems of the day.”

Constance frowns and wrings her hands. “
I wandered lonely
. . . I can't . . .” She looks up as if she might find the words written in the air.

“She doesn't remember that she wrote the moon poem,” I murmur.

“Constance.” Adam pulls her attention to him. “You were a poet, like Wordsworth. Do you remember?”

She nods solemnly. “Father says I am quite the poet.”

“You wrote this book.” I hold it up again. “
We mark time by the moon.
You wrote that. Do you remember?”

Constance hugs herself and says softly, “The new moon.”

“That's right!” I congratulate her. “That's in the next verse:
The new moon is nothing.
”

“Nothing and everything.” Constance fingers a button at her waist.

“Does it say that?” Adam asks, reading over my shoulder.

“No . . . I'll try a different poem.” I flip ahead to one called “Dead Echo” and read:

Listen to the stones that have no voice

Only silence echoes back my choice

“Constance? You wrote that. Do you remember?”

She smiles. “Hello. Do I know you?”

“He's Adam. I'm Rosemary. We came last week, and you told us about the false codex.”

“Did I?” She frowns. “I hate that horrible book. A nasty thing. Full of nothing.” She clutches the button now, and the fabric of her dress puckers at her waist.

“
Void and nothing,
” I quote.

Her head whips back like I slapped her. The button snaps off her dress. “What did you say?”

“It—it's from, uh, a poem. It was in the diary. I mean, the codex,” I stammer.

“It conjures,” she whispers.

“Yeah, the poem has
conjure
in it.” I sit forward.

“It conjures nothing.” Her hands are idle on her lap now. Her dress gapes where she pulled the button off.

“Nothing,” Adam echoes. His gaze darts around the room.

“What's wrong with you?” I hiss.

“That poem . . .” he begins. “The void poem . . .”

“You too?” Constance whispers.

Adam twists the notebook. The metal spiral detaches from the paper and pokes out.

I blaze ahead. “We wanted to talk to you about memory.”

“Would you care for some candy?” Constance gestures toward the dish.

“No, thank you,” I reply.

She frowns at the button in her hand.

“We should go,” I whisper. “This is just sad.”

Constance smiles. “Hello. Do I know you?”

“This is Adam. I'm Rosemary.”

She nods. “Yes. That's right. Father is magical with rosemary. Truly. Have you seen the patch on the island? He says he could grow rosemary at the North Pole if given the chance, and I think he could. I do!”

She thinks he's still alive. She doesn't remember the poems she wrote because she doesn't remember that she grew up and lived a whole lifetime.

The patter of the freezing rain suddenly quiets, and outside, heavy snow drops past the window. “It's snowing,” I point out.

“So it is!” Her face lights up. “Do have a candy,” she urges, as if snow demands a celebration.

I take a cellophane-wrapped peppermint.

In the dish, a slip of paper curls, released when I removed the battered old candy. I unfurl it, and there the phrase is again:
Rosemary, that's for remembrance.

I call her away from the window. “Constance, why do you have this?”

I thrust the slip of paper into her hand. It shakes in her frail claw. She whispers the words aloud. “
Pray, love, remember.
” She looks up, but not at me. “Wilkie.” She's pleading with him to stay, with her memory to hold on to him. A tear meanders along the wrinkles etched in her cheek.

“Shelby,” Adam whispers. “Michelle?”

Shelby emerges from a fog in my head. She draws a map of a made-up island country called Marat. She shows me how there are two rivers and when they flood, they join together. I point out how the two branches look like the V tree, and Shelby laughs. “You're right, Rosie!” The fog rises. I clutch at Shelby. At her map. Her laugh, faint and fading.

The silence in the room presses against me.

Constance releases the scrap of paper. It drifts to the ground, keeping pace with the snow falling outside. She twists her black headband, and her eyes move slowly from her own hands to Adam's. She gazes at the notebook screwed up in his hands.

She raises her eyes to his face. “Hello. I'm Constance. Do I know you?”

“No,” I snap. “You don't.”

“Rosemary!” she cries suddenly.

I'm shocked and flattered that she finally remembers my name.

“You need the other one,” she whimpers, and then she shouts, “Rosemary is not enough!”

And from down the hall, the wheelchair man answers, “But you're not Maud!”

She doesn't mean me. Of course she doesn't. These people are all lost in the nonsense of their failing brains. I never, ever want to lose my mind, but something nags at me, something I've forgotten. Maybe I'm already losing my mind.

I pull on Adam's sleeve. “My mom'll be waiting.”

He nods, defeated.

“Goodbye. Thanks,” I say. “We'll bring you the poems that we write.”

She smiles like I said something friendly sounding in a foreign language. “Yes. Yes. Poems are a good way to remember.”

I go back and kneel in front of her. “To remember what?”

“To remember who?” Adam echoes behind me.

Her mouth opens. No sound comes out. Her eyes catch at something and then go blank. “Why ever are you down there on the floor? Have you lost something?”

I take her hand. It feels like a tissue, like the first one in a new box still pulled tight in the package. “Look, Constance. It's snowing.”

“Why, so it is!” She gazes out the window.

I place her hand gently on her lap and look away from the embarrassing gap in her dress. Adam and I slip into the hallway and walk in silence through the too-bright corridor.

The automatic glass doors seal behind us.

“It's worse than dying.” Adam forces his voice to be steady. “Dying is the end of life, but Alzheimer's undoes life, like the life never even happened.” His voice is muffled by the blankness of the snow.

“Her poems are a record of her life,” I point out.

“But she doesn't know that.”

I try to hold on to what Constance said. “What do you think she meant about rosemary isn't enough and we need the other one?”

He shakes his head, grief tugging at his face. A snowflake drifts onto his eyelashes and clings there for less than a second before dissolving to nothing.

A
DAM AND I
sit on my bed, trying to organize what we know.

“The poem is the only thing that stays in the codex,” I say.

“And the list,” Adam adds. “And the stuff we wrote.”

“But the poem is the problem. The void . . . It's dangerous.”

“Read it,” Adam suggests.

I unfold the page and speak the strange verse:

Ah, treble words of absence spoken low;

For ears of fam'ly, friend, or willful foe.

Speak thrice to conjure nothing on the spot.

Who harkens here will present be forgot.

I don't say the last two lines out loud. The snow falls outside, and it softens the night, like the universe sighing with relief.

“If it's a spell,” Adam begins, “then it seems like those first four lines are sort of an introduction. Because it says about speaking three times for the ears of family, friend, or foe, and then the last two lines are what you speak.”

“Void and nothing,” I say. The phrase begins strong and glaring with the harsh
oi
sound in
void
and then trails away into the softer sounds of
nothing.
I remember Mr. Cates talking about sound in poems, the words performing what they describe.

Then Adam says the thing that's been resolving into clarity ever since we followed Constance's skeletal hands to the folded page. “The poem makes the person listening disappear. Constance said what it does, but we didn't understand. She said it conjures nothing.”

“It sends people into the void. It makes them disappear even from memory,” I add, and a raw feeling of panic rushes into the space left by someone I've forgotten.

“Do you think that's why Constance has Alzheimer's?” Adam asks.

“Lots of people have Alzheimer's,” I answer. “The poem is supernatural, and Alzheimer's is, you know, biological. Constance is the victim of both.”

“It's not fair,” Adam says.

“No,” I agree. The wheelchair man who wants Maud, Anna and the Hello Kitty lady with their cards scattered under the table, Constance with her broken memory . . . none of it is fair.

Adam leans against the wall. “So we know the poem made Constance forget someone, but we don't know who.”

“Was it only Constance?” I ask.

“What do you—? We didn't forget anyone . . . or, I guess, I mean . . . did we?” Adam's horrified now. “How would we know?”

“After Constance read the rosemary line from
Hamlet,
she remembered, didn't she?” Gears in my head grind toward the next step.

“You wrote the same line in the codex,” Adam remembers.

“And writing appeared!”

Adam recites, “
Rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.
”

And all in a flash I do. Shelby teaching me how to pirouette, back when she still took dance. Shelby rowing the boat like she was Pelagia saving the world in
Pelagia's Boats.
Shelby not picking up her phone. Shelby. Shelby. Shelby.

Wilkie Wilkie Wilkie
staining the page.

Adam sits utterly still. All color has drained from his face. Sweat beads on his upper lip, and his eyes dart. He's remembering too.

“Maybe if we write the line. In the book.” He staggers away from forgetting, toward his sister. “
Rosemary, that's for
. . . Shelby!” he sobs.

“Try it.” My voice comes out hoarse but hopeful. I shove the book at him. “Maybe the rosemary line is a spell too. Maybe writing it in the book will bring her back.”

Adam leans over the codex and writes the remembrance line.

The words sit on the page like a promise. I hold on to Shelby in my memory, but she doesn't magically appear.

“It was a stupid idea,” he sighs.

I say the line out loud.

In my mind, Shelby hands me a copy of
When You Reach Me.
“This. Is. The. Best. Book. Ever.” She stirs cookie dough and pretends to be Swedish. She lends me a sweatshirt because she knows I'll be cold.

Adam recites facts about Shelby as if they might pull her back from the void. “Michelle Sarah Steiner. Born April twelfth. She hates hard-boiled eggs. She loves the sound of the cello. She used to dance. She was sixteen.”

“She
is
sixteen,” I protest. “She's not dead.”

And we tumble into each other in a messy hug. My forehead presses against his collarbone.

“How do we know?” he whispers into my hair.

The solidness of him grounds me. I pull back from him and grasp his arms. “We would know if she was dead. We would remember that.”

I look down at the codex. The page is crowded with words. “Look!”

The writing is cursive, slanted and a little sloppy. Constance's writing.

Adam starts deciphering. He reads aloud with a fierce desperation, underlining the words with his finger.

Mother would never have stood for it. That's what Wilkie says. I don't know because I don't remember her. Not much anyway. Just a white dress with a lacy bit that was nice to run my fingers over, and part of a song she used to sing, and how when she got sick they sent me away and then she was dead.

Adam stops. “This doesn't help. There's no information. Just sadness.”

“She doesn't remember her mother,” I say. “But she remembers that she's forgotten. I mean, she knows she had a mother.”