The Rosemary Spell (16 page)

I scan the poem again, looking for any word I don't know well, or any that might have a double meaning.
Rue
?

I type
rue
on my laptop.

“To feel regret or sorrow.” That makes sense. Constance wrote, “I rue the day I learned to seek,” which means she regrets that she has to sift words. She regrets losing . . . I struggle for the name . . . Wilkie. She rues his loss, though she doesn't know, in the poem, that she's lost him.

I scroll down to the second definition.
Strong-scented woody herb used for medicinal purposes.

Shelby nods encouragement.

Wilkie whistles.

Hope dares to sit up.

Rue is an herb.

I
HESITATE IN FRONT
of the cupboard in my room, take a breath, and lift up my father's gigantic
Riverside Shakespeare.
It weighs down my arms with the density of about two thousand hair-thin pages. I turn to the table of contents. There are so many plays!

“Rosie.” Mom sticks her head into my room. She registers what I'm holding. “What on earth are you doing with that? Are you reading Shakespeare?”

She's constantly trying to get me to read this play or that one. I can tell she's pleased I'm following her advice, but she wishes I wasn't clutching my father's old book like it's a life preserver. She wants Shakespeare to come from her.

I go for a vague version of the truth. “Constance Brooke said something about one of the plays, so I thought I'd look at them. You know, see if Adam and I want to include some Shakespeare in our project, which won't be due till after Christmas now, because of the snow day, so we have more time, and . . . well, yeah.”

She beams at me. “Which play? I have most of them in single volumes, you know. That'd be much easier to read.”

“I'm good with this.” I hug the
Riverside Shakespeare
to my chest. “It has all the plays in one place, so that seems kind of more efficient.”

“But you must have a particular play in mind,” she insists.

“There are a couple, actually. I'm just going to kind of browse around for now.”

“Okay. I'll leave you to it. But I'm here if you need me.” She retreats to her room.

I do need her. She might know where I can find rue, but why am I even looking for references to a random plant? I shake my head to clear the rising fog. What possessed me to drag this enormous volume out of the cupboard? I don't want to read Shakespeare! Certainly not my father's Shakespeare.

I drop the book on my desk with a dull thud and reach for an old favorite instead. Something tinkles in my pocket.

I pull out the old jingle bell necklace from my teddy bear and a piece of paper.
Rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love . . .

I do! I do remember! Rue. Rosemary and rue. I have to find the antidote spell. In Shakespeare. I rest my hand on the big book. That's why . . . but I mustn't keep forgetting.

I snatch a pen from my desk and write in thick black ink on the back of my left hand.
Rosemary
. . . It almost doesn't fit, and the last word,
remember,
snakes up my thumb.

As long as I can see my hand, I should remember what I'm doing.

I sit on my bed, the enormous book open in front of me to the first play.
A Comedy of Errors.
It begins with a list of the characters—the
Dramatis Personae.
Then ACT I, Scene I. A stage direction says who enters, and a guy named Egeon gets the first lines:

Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall,

And by the doom of death end woes and all.

Doesn't seem like much of a comedy. Ending woes would be good, but he says death is the way to end woe, which is not so good. I keep reading. A long speech by a duke about merchants and some sort of disagreement. This is going to take forever.

Maybe I don't actually need to read the plays. Like Constance said. I just need to look for the word
rue.
Don't read. Just hunt.

I scan the lines of text, sifting words, not trying to make sense of what I'm reading. Sense is a distraction. I just need those three letters.
R-U-E.

A. Heavier. Task. Could. Not. Have. Been. Imposed.
The meaning hovers over the words on the page. I have to agree. This is certainly a heavy task. It gives whole new meaning to “Word Search.”

Search. Oh! How could I be so dumb?

I grasp my laptop and type
Shakespeare and rue
in the search box.

The first thing that comes up is the definition of rue and then a guide to what different plants mean. Rosemary is associated with memory. Rue with regret. Two different ways of holding on to the past. Regret is like a curdled version of memory.

The next search results are about Ophelia's speech in
Hamlet,
the same one my name comes from but a different part.
There's rue for you, and here's some for me.
Could this be what I'm looking for?

I say the line aloud, but nothing happens.

It turns out there's a bookstore in Paris called Shakespeare & Company, and the word for street in French is
rue,
so a bunch of the results are for the bookstore.

A knock on the door, and Mom hovers awkwardly on the threshold. “Sorry to interrupt,” she murmurs. “I just wondered . . . Did you pick one?”

“One what?” I keep clicking, not getting anything useful.

“Play?” She looks at the volume abandoned on my desk.

“Oh, actually . . .” She must know a better way to do this. “I'm trying to find stuff, writing I mean, about rue.”

She cocks her head to one side. “Rue? As in regret?”

“Um, yeah. But also, isn't it, like, a plant?”

“It's an ornamental plant. Of course, rue is one of Ophelia's flowers . . .”

“I already found that one.”

She smiles at me. “Of course, you know the best part of that speech:
Rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.
”

Shelby bursts into my brain. She reaches to pluck something from my hair. She puts out an arm to stop me crossing the street as a car speeds through the red light. She and Adam look up at me, their eyes bright, their smiles warm, as I walk into their kitchen.

“Rosemary!” Mom raises her voice. “Goodness, you're lost in your head!”

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“Why do you want rue?”

“Constance made a connection between rue and memory,” I explain, hoping fiercely that she won't ask me to cite the poem.

She doesn't. She gets all chipper in that my-daughter-is-interested-in-my-world way and says, “You need a concordance.”

“A what?”

“A concordance. It's an index to an author's work. A list of each usage of a word.”

“Are you kidding?”

She smiles. “Nope.”

“Do you have one?” Please say yes. Please say yes.

“Anyone with the internet has one.” She leans over me and types
Shakespeare Concordance.

A site opens up. The portrait of Shakespeare with earrings is there, and on the other side of the screen, a search box waits.

“Wow!” I hold my thumb with the word
remember
against the palm of my hand. I'm close. I'll find it—the antidote spell—I will.
Shelby. Shelby. Shelby.

Mom stands up, reluctantly. “I don't want to crowd you,” she says. “I'm going to take a bath. Tell me what you find.”

“Thanks.” I'm already typing.
Rue.

Mom stands in the doorway. “How many?” she asks.

My heart sinks. “Nine hundred forty-two.”

Her eyebrows arch. “That's a lot. You need a way to narrow the search.”

I sigh.

Mom pads down the hall. Water starts to fill the tub with a roar.

I stroke
remember
on my thumb.
Remember. Shelby.

Shelby who is Adam's sister. My friend. My mind pushes me toward the past tense: Shelby was Adam's sister. She was my friend. But I hold Shelby in the present tense. She lies in the Rosie patch, her hair puddled around her head in a blond swirl. She looks at the sky, encouraging Adam and me to describe what we see in the clouds. A bee lands on my cheek, and I squeal. She sits up and says, “It's just a bee! You're thousands of times bigger than it.” The bee flies away, and I relax into the calm that Shelby creates around us.
Shelby. Shelby. Shelby. Remember.

I focus on the screen. Number one is from
All's Well That Ends Well.
Just the title brings tears to my eyes.

The text is tight, small. The search term is highlighted in a pale maroon. It says,
true.
Oh! Because
rue
is part of
true
! I page down.
True. True. True.
They're all
true
s! The burden lightens. I just have to look for
rue
in the midst of all the
truth.
How poetic! I smile at myself.

Constance wouldn't have had the internet with its search boxes blinking encouragingly. She would have had thousands of pages of plays. She would have run out of time. She did run out of time.

But I won't. I can't.

Page down. Page down. Page down. There's also
truer
and
untrue.
Page down. Also,
cruel.
And here's
misconstrues.

Finally, on page eight, here's
rue
! It's the
Hamlet
one.

There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference!

Ophelia. She was crazy. It's always bugged me that Mom took my name from a crazy person's ravings, but maybe Ophelia really knew something about herbs. Maybe Shakespeare did.

The sonnet Mr. Cates read said poems are a living record of memory. Shakespeare wrote about people to make them last forever. Constance tried to use the codex to hold on to Wilkie. Words make things real. Words remember people.

I'll write each possible rue rhyme in the codex and let the words do battle against the void. My hand shakes as I carefully copy Ophelia's words. I don't want to make a mistake.

I write the last word from the passage.

Nothing happens.

I read the whole thing aloud.

Nothing.

I read the rosemary words off the back of my hand. I read the rue words and try to wrap them around the idea of Shelby.

Nothing.

My mom calls down the hallway. “Any luck?”

“Not yet,” I answer, hoping she can't hear the despair in my voice.

“You want any help?”

Yes. Yes, I want help.

“No, thanks, Mom.” I call back. “I should do this on my own. I love you.”

“Love you too, Rosie.”

The lines from
Hamlet
aren't the right words. I need to collect all the passages with rue and try them all. But what am I even trying? How do I know that reading the words aloud will do anything? Maybe I have to, I don't know, brew a potion, or turn three times and spit, or . . . Even if I find the right words, how will I know?

It's strange and sad to be doing this on my own. Adam should read the words while I write them down. Or the other way around. He should help me think of ways to test the words, to figure out which ones will work. He should wield his graph paper like a sword. But he doesn't remember, and he won't come. It's late now, anyway, nearly midnight. I have to keep looking.

I find the next
rue
on page fourteen, but it's not the right kind. It's from
Henry VI: And, in thy closet pent up, rue my shame, And ban thine enemies, both mine and thine!
This is regret, not the herb. But I write it anyway, because forgetting is our enemy, and maybe the words will ban forgetting. But they don't.

The next one, also from
Henry VI,
is the same meaning, more regret. And another one about regret from a play called
King John.
So far,
Hamlet
is the only one where the rue is a plant, but I'm not even halfway through the results.

Page twenty, and I'm almost at the midpoint, 400 out of 942. But . . . there's no “next” button to click! Where are the rest of the results? I scroll up.
Because there are so many results, only the first 20 pages will be displayed.
But I need the rest! I need all the results!

I click on Advanced Search, and there's a way to search for the exact word only. I should have checked this before, but it doesn't matter. It should get me to the right rue now.

Only sixteen hits on
rue.
Not
true
or
cruel
or
misconstrue.
Just rue.

The first seven are ones I already found. The next is from
Macbeth.
My heart breaks into a trot. That's the play that has a witch's spell in it. Mom laughed and doesn't believe it, but I know better. Adam knows better. Or he would if he remembered.

I copy the words:
You'll rue the time that clogs me with this answer.
It's regret again, but it's
Macbeth.
I have to hope. I study the words on the page. Whisper them out loud.

Nothing. Nothing. And more nothing.

Okay. Next is the same meaning from
Richard II.
All these forgotten kings . . .

Another one from the same play. Oh! Here's the plant. I copy out the whole passage:

Poor queen! so that thy state might be no worse,

I would my skill were subject to thy curse.

Here did she fall a tear; here in this place

I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:

Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,

In the remembrance of a weeping queen.