The Rosemary Spell (15 page)

I wake to the glorious gift of a snow day, which means it's winter break now. No school for three weeks! And that's an eon of bonus time for our poetry project. I call Adam, but he doesn't pick up. The snow still falls steadily. Mom reports that we may get as much as two feet.

I curl up with a book, one I know well, and reading words I could recite from memory is like snuggling under a warm blanket. Mom is reading too, and we hang out all day in a happy silence, broken only by grilled cheese and tomato soup at lunchtime and tea later in the afternoon.

In the blue of dusk, the snow finally stops. I go to my room and shift the diary off my bed. It opens to a page in the middle. Adam's handwriting. Messy and desperate.
Rosemary, that's for
. . .

I read the whole line out loud, and waves of memory break over me. Shelby and Wilkie and I need to talk to Adam. I can't believe I forgot! And he hasn't called, which can only mean he forgot too. The rosemary and the rhyme weren't enough.

I struggle to steady my shaking fingers enough to call him.

“Yeah?”

“Adam!”

“Hey, Rosie.” He couldn't sound more normal. “Isn't this snow awesome?”

“Do you still have the bookmark?” I ask. “Or the paper?”

“Huh?”

“The rosemary,” I moan. “The bookmark and the verse. You had them yesterday.”

“I did? Sorry. I don't have them. Hey, you want to go sledding tomorrow? Micah and some people are meeting in the morning. At the grove.”

“Adam,” I beg. “Listen:
Rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.
”

“Okay.” He still sounds completely unconcerned. “That's the
Hamlet
line your mom took your name from. Are we playing Rosie trivia?”

My stomach hardens into a knot. It doesn't work over the phone.

“Please, Adam,” I plead. “Will you check your pockets? Please? It's really important.”

“For the bookmark? You can get another one,” he says, exasperated. “It's no big deal.”

He doesn't even remember that he made it for me. That it was a gift. That he picked rosemary in the summer and kept it and pressed it for almost three months. For me.

“But it is a big deal!” Tears blur my vision. “Please. Just look for it.”

“Okay. Whatever. I'll look for it later.”

“Now!” I sob. “You have to look for it now.”

“Jeez, Rosie. What's up with you?”

“It's about Shelby,” I whisper.

I already know what he'll say.

“Who?”

“Shelby is your sister,” I say firmly, swallowing a sob.

Adam barks a laugh. “I don't have a sister, dork. Is this some sort of joke? It's not actually very funny, Rosie. You're kind of creeping me out.”

“Can you come over?” If he hears the verse in person, then he'll remember Shelby. And he'll remember our friendship. “Or I could come there?”

“Nah. My parents are actually home 'cause of the snow, so we're having family game night. Scrabble!”

I screech the rosemary verse at him, willing the spell to do its work over the phone.

“Rosie. Get a grip. You're being really weird.”

“Sorry.” I can't stand him being so annoyed at me.

“Whatever. You coming sledding tomorrow?” He asks, but he doesn't care whether I come or not.

“Maybe,” I manage to croak. “Bye.”

I set the phone on my windowsill. Stare at
Shelby Shelby Shelby
in my handwriting in the codex. I make a decision. I tear a page from my spiral notebook and print the
Hamlet
line. I fold it and put it in my pocket.

But like Adam, I'll forget it's there, and it won't do me any good. I have to remember. I cast around my room for something that makes noise. A bell! I tug a jingle bell necklace off a stuffed bear, one that Shelby carefully arranged on my dresser, and shove it in with the paper. The noise will remind me. I hope.

I race down the stairs and tug on my boots. Grab my warmest coat from the closet. Gloves. A hat.

“I'm going to Adam's!” I shout.

“Okay.” Mom's voice wafts from the family room, where she's lost in her book. “Call me when you get there.”

“Sure.” I clomp back to my room, grab my phone, check the time, and jam it into my coat pocket. I walk briskly away from the guilt that prowls behind me.

I turn uphill and tramp through mounting snow to Main Street. Sweat beads along my hairline underneath my wool hat. Maybe this isn't a good idea, but it's the only idea. I have to get there.

It usually takes about five minutes to get to Adam's. I check the time on my phone. Seven minutes. I stop, catch my breath, call Mom.

The pale yellow streetlight catches at the snow crystals.

I hug myself against the cold.

“Hey, I'm here,” I lie, sort of.

“Okay. Don't stay too late. Do you want me to walk over and get you in an hour or so?” she asks.

“No! They're playing a game. I may be a while. I'll be fine. Bye.”

I put the phone back in my pocket. I wasn't actually lying. I am here. They are playing a game. I may be a while. I don't know about the being fine part. Of course she thought “here” meant Adam's, so basically I did lie. But I didn't have a choice.

I trudge across Main Street and up North Second. It's going to take me almost an hour to get there. The same to get back. I won't have much time.

With each step, the bell in my pocket tinkles. There's paper in my pocket. Paper with a spell on it. A spell in my pocket. A spell in my pocket. The words become a chant that I mutter under my breath as I march through the snow. Four blocks and on to River Road. Here there's no sidewalk, and I have to walk in the road, but there is no traffic. No one is out. No one is out because it's stupid to be out. Dangerous, probably. A spell in my pocket. Trudge. A spell in my pocket.

The lights of the nursing home twinkle into view as I round the curve. I'm nearly there.

They've already plowed the parking lot, and I trot toward the glass doors. The bell tinkles. A spell in my pocket. I pull the wad of notebook paper out. Unfold it.
Rosemary
. . . and memory wells up. Shelby. I'm here for Shelby. And Adam. And myself.

The doors slide open. No one is at the desk. A little plaque says to please sign in, but I don't. I follow the corridor to the sunroom, dim and subdued in the night. Wheelchair man is not there.

Constance's door is shut.

I knock.

No answer.

I can't have come all this way for nothing! Desperation rises up.

I knock again, more of a pound this time.

“Yes?”

I open the door. “Hello, Constance,” I peer into the room. The light is off. “I'm sorry. Did I wake you?”

“Oh, no. I turned off the light, the better to look out, you know. If you look out at the night with the light on, you just see yourself reflected back.”

I resist the impulse to flick on the light as I enter, and I cross over to the window. She's sitting in the chair, so I perch on the bed. The snow catches light from somewhere and glows in the darkness.

I get right to the point. “The poem makes people disappear.”

She doesn't look away from the window. She doesn't respond. Did she hear me?

“Constance.” I try again. “The poem. In the codex. It makes people disappear.”

“It conjures nothing,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Right.” I understand those words for the first time. “It makes something into nothing.”

“It conjures nothing,” she repeats.

“It makes people disappear. Like my friend. Like your brother.”

“No. I don't have a brother. Just Father and me. Mother died when I was only five. The flu pandemic, you know.”

I say firmly. “You did have a brother. Wilkie. Only the poem disappeared him.” I clutch the paper in my pocket and recite, “
Rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.
”

“Wilkie,” Constance murmurs. Delight bursts on her face. She looks around her, and the delight curdles into a frantic, bewildered searching.

“Please,” I say. “Isn't there a way to get them back?”

The soft blankness of the snow holds her gaze, and her face reflects the blankness, worry and delight both smoothed away.

“There must be,” I insist. “The verse only brings them back on the page and in memory. And then they're gone again. There has to be a . . . like, an antidote.”

“Father says we must look in all the plays.” Her voice is small, like a child's. “We don't need to read them. It's just sifting words.”

“You wrote a poem called that! Is the answer there? Does your poem say what we need to find?”

She looks steadily at the snow.

“Is it a word? A rhyme? An herb? Constance, what am I looking for?” My face is damp with tears. I don't know when I started to cry.

“I sift words like sand,” she says. “Looking for a single grain.”

“But that's impossible!”

“That's what everyone always says, but Father is simply magical with rosemary.” She settles back in her chair and stretches out her legs a little. “He always says he could grow rosemary at the North Pole if given the chance, and I'm quite sure he could. Quite sure!” Her smile is kind, gentle, but not deep. It doesn't extend to her eyes. She squints at me. “I'm sorry, do I know you?”

“It's funny, actually,” I sigh, getting up to go. “My name is Rosemary.”

“Ah, then, you may just have a chance.” She turns back to the window, and I slip away.

I may have a chance.

I stomp snow from my boots and hurry upstairs to my room, to Constance's book of poems. I have to start sifting.

Mom meets me in the hallway. “How's Adam?”

“Fine,” I say, because I'm sure he is. I finger the folded paper in my pocket. He shouldn't be fine. He should be wading through grief and regret, but he's fine because he's forgotten. “We're going sledding tomorrow,” I add, shifting my weight from foot to foot, anxious to get into my room.

“You'll have to go in the morning,” she says. “It's going to warm up quickly.”

“There's, like, two and a half feet of snow out there!” I exclaim.

“Warm air is coming in fast,” she says. “With all the rain we had, and the rapid snowmelt, the river will likely flood. So you should go sledding early, while you can.”

“Okay,” I agree. “Well, good night.” I can't stand here chatting about the weather.

“Night, Rosie.”

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too.”

I step into my room and gently close the door behind me, careful not to seem to be shutting her out.

The thin book of poems sits on my desk. I find “Sifting Words.” It's almost a sonnet. It has thirteen lines, with an eight-line part and then just a five-line part, like she forgot the last line. Maybe she did.

I read the first stanza slowly. It's actually pretty straightforward, for a poem. She talks about how words make the different parts of a poem:

Words join up with armies of phrases, lines

That march on iambic feet, singing rhyme.

They enjamb boldly, aspire to meaning.

Then it's about the parts of plays, like soliloquys and scenes. The poem is about what Constance described—sifting through the words in Shakespeare's plays—but it doesn't tell me what I'm looking for.

I move on to the second stanza:

But play, act, scene, speech mean nothing for me.

Rhyme and meter are immaterial.

Only words matter. Only one word.

I rue the day I learned to seek, knowing

I could never catch a word so well hid.

A hidden word is exactly what I need, but what word? She says “only one word,” but she doesn't say what it is. Maybe she didn't know.

Despair flattens me. I crumple back onto my bed. The bell in my pocket tinkles and jars something loose in my mind. I pull out a folded paper and whisper the words written there.

Shelby! Love for Shelby, for Adam, for Mom vibrates through me, but even love disappears into the void. Love can't fight this awful, grasping forgetting. I hang on to Shelby with all my might and read “Sifting Words” again.

It doesn't have lots of nooks and hidden places like some poems have. It seems to say what it means, but it must have double meanings somewhere. I take the poem's advice and sift the words. I ignore meaning and just look at the letters on the page.
Sift. Words. Armies. Enjamb.

I stagger from the bed and wake up my laptop. I type
enjamb
into the search box. It means when a sentence carries over from one line of poetry to the next, which I already knew, but maybe it has another meaning as well. The definition includes the phrase “mixed message.” That's what I'm looking for. Something that can mean more than one thing.