The Rosemary Spell (2 page)

“In a reading emergency.” Adam grins at me, but his eyes are serious. We've both experienced those times when only the right book will anchor you.

“The books on the top shelf are ones people've given me that I haven't read yet but mean to, and in between is kind of everything else. The bottom is poem books and my dictionary and atlas and stuff.”

He nods. “Reference and nonfiction.”

At some point in the near future, he will volunteer to make labels for my shelves, and I'll let him. It'll make him happy, and I like the idea of Adam putting his personal stamp on my room.

Shelby pulls her phone from her pocket. She leans forward, and her hair sheets across her face, so I can't see it.

“What do you want to do with these?” Adam rests a hand on the stack of my father's books.

“I don't know.” I bite the inside of my lip. “It seemed wrong to give them away, but I don't exactly want to keep them, either.”

I want Shelby's input, but she's texting.

“The attic?” Adam suggests.

“That seems cruel.”

He frowns. “To your dad?”

“To the books.”

“Sorry, guys. I've gotta go!” In a heartbeat, Shelby's up and in the doorway.

“Okay. Thanks for coming.” I manage a neutral tone. Happy she was here. Fine with her leaving.

“At least I got these guys all set up.” She smiles in the direction of the stuffed animals. She's not being condescending, but she's leaving to meet a boy, and I'm such a child. How can she possibly want to be my friend?

“See ya!” And she's gone.

There's a pause during which Shelby's absence is the biggest thing in the room.

“How about the cupboard?” Adam tugs me back to business.

The shallow cupboard sits expectantly in a corner space that used to be a chimney. “Okay, I guess.”

Adam opens the top door. “His books will fit here, and then you'll have them, but you can close the door and, you know, out of sight out of mind, right?”

It only takes a few minutes to arrange the books in the cupboard.
The Riverside Shakespeare
leans to the left, holding the others in place.

Adam shuts the door. “There!”

He collapses into my papasan chair and surveys the scene.

I plop down on the bed and look out the window at the river racing past the island.

“Can you see Constance Brooke's house?” Adam asks.

“Yes,” I answer. “And a kind of dark place that must be the rosemary patch. From here, you can see how close the rosemary is to the ruins.”

In the summer, Adam and Shelby and I row to the island and climb on the broken walls. We play hide-and-seek and dig in the ruins like archaeologists. Shelby found a button once, which led to a long elaborate game about magic buttons like the ones in a book she'd recommended. In the weird light of summer evening, the magic seemed real.

Sometimes we just hang out. Adam practices lassoing with the boat rope. Shelby and I climb the V tree and lean against the strong branches and talk. It's a willow tree with smooth gray bark. We each take a big step up to plant a foot in the crevice where the trunk splits in two, and then I take the right side of the V and Shelby takes the left. In summer, the branches hang around us in light green ropes that enclose us and cocoon us. This is where she told me about
Pelagia's Boats,
and then we all read it, and it was the best book ever. Pelagia and the young king have to do their best when all the experts say everything is hopeless, and then they sail off to a new world and hope blossoms off the page. I reread the end every time I'm even slightly sad. It sits now, its spine all cracked and shredded, on the shelf right by my bed.

Now that Shelby is spending less and less time with us, how will I know what to read? Mom suggests classics, but she's too eager for me to love them. Shelby always discovered books that were just perfect. Does
Michelle
even like to read?

I turn away from the island and back to my room. It's in the old part of the house with wide floorboards and carved molding around the door and windows. All the corners and edges are muffled by layers and layers of paint. Layers and layers of people who've called this room their own.

“It was someone else's room before it was my dad's,” I blurt out.

“Huh?” Adam looks at me, puzzled.

I fumble to explain. “I just mean it feels weird to take over my dad's room, but the house is two hundred years old, so it's not his room, really, in the whole big history of the house. Lots of people have lived here, like, you know, Constance Brooke.”

“Sure. She lived here for seventy years or something, right? From after the flood wrecked the island house until you moved in. So it's way more her room than your dad's.” He leans back against the green cushion and smiles at me. “Mr. Cates said he'd make poets of us all by the third marking period, so it's totally appropriate for you to take over a poet's room. It's passed from local poet Constance Brooke to local poet Rosemary Bennett.”

“I hardly think one creative writing elective makes me a poet,” I protest, but I warm to the idea that I'm somehow more connected to Cookfield's local poet than to my father.

“Every poet starts with a creative writing elective,” Adam says sagely.

We digest that nugget of wisdom in silence. I sit on the bed, trying to fall in love with the room. Adam studies the space, reorganizing my stuff in his head.

“What are you going to do with the lower cupboard?” he asks.

“It doesn't open, remember?”

I have no idea what the lower cupboard contains. The small white door, maybe two feet high, has never opened.

We're both remembering that rainy day—two summers ago?—when we spent a long afternoon trying to break into the locked cupboard. Mom discovered us and said, “You know you're not supposed to play in here.”

“We're not playing!” Shelby was indignant.

We were very serious about opening the door, but Mom stood watch until we shuffled out of the study. I hate the feeling of getting caught doing something bad, so when Shelby suggested we try the door another day, I deflected her.

Adam launches himself out of the low chair. “Let me just try . . .” He drops to his knees and tugs at the small metal knob, painted over many times like everything else in the room.

“We did this already,” I protest. “You know it's stuck.”

“We were younger then. We didn't know what we were doing,” he mutters as he examines the door.

“Shelby tried to use a credit card,” I remind him.

“She also tried ‘Open Sesame,'” he replies.

“Neither worked.”

“Well, Shelby isn't a thief or a magician,” he says. “So maybe we weren't trying the right things. We just need to be systematic . . .” His tongue pokes just slightly out of the corner of his mouth, the way it does in algebra.

“It's never opened.” I speak slowly, as if enunciated syllables might make him stop messing with the door.

“But that's stupid.” He doesn't look at me. His back flexes as he pulls. “It's a door. It has to open. Or at least it did once, so it can . . . Or. Should. Now.” He smacks the small door with each word. Nothing happens.

“Adam!” I hate when he just won't let something go. “Leave it. It doesn't matter.”

He's shifted from smacking to gently twisting the knob.

“I've lived in this house my whole life.” I raise my voice, trying to pull his attention away from the door. “And that cupboard has always, always been locked or stuck. Even when my father lived here, he never opened it.”

“Maybe he didn't try.” Adam looks up at me.

Of course he didn't try. I bite the inside of my cheek.

The overwhelming desire to not be like my father propels me across the room, and I kick the little door. Hard. I expect it to spring open, in response to my sudden fury, but nothing happens. I kick it again. And again.

Adam shifts a little to the side and waits for me to stop.

After four kicks, I'm spent. I drop to my knees and grip the knob. It moves left and right, but the door doesn't budge.

Adam leans in with me. “It's like it's locked somewhere else. You know what I mean? The knob turns, but it doesn't open the door.”

“Well, there's no other handle,” I sputter as I twist harder.

He reaches over me and tries to grip the edge of the door, but the crack is too small. “Do you have a crowbar?” he asks.

“I don't know. Is that something people have?”

“I think so. Usually.”

“I'll get the toolbox.” I push myself up, and the wide floorboard shifts underneath my hand.

Adam's eyebrows arch. We slide off the board. He presses it with the palm of his hand, and it rocks, just slightly.

“Do you think . . .” he starts.

But I'm already there. I stick a finger into the pinky-size hole where a knot used to be and lift the board. Adam grasps the end, and together we set it to the side. The space underneath is cluttered with a ragged gray cotton I recognize as the same insulation that's in the attic. Nestled in the cotton are a puzzle piece and a marble, dimmed by dust.

Adam pulls out the puzzle piece and blows it clean. “It's wood,” he observes. “It has flowers or maybe leaves . . .”

I pluck it from the flat of his hand. Whatever was once pictured here has faded to an unrecognizable smudge of ferny green. I set it next to the rectangular opening in the floor and reach for the marble, which manages to glint through the dust.

“What was that book?” Adam asks. “The one where the mean mother person traps kids' souls in marbles?”

“
Coraline,
” I whisper, and I dump the marble into Adam's hand.

“No souls here,” he says lightly. “Just dusty glass.”

Just the forgotten toy of some kid who lived in this house fifty or a hundred years ago, then grew up and grew old and probably died.

I look away from the abandoned marble to the empty space beneath my floor. Filling it will push away the creepiness, and my mind darts across my belongings, in search of items I could hide here.

Something black catches my eye. A small J-shaped piece of metal hangs down from the base of the cupboard.

I grasp the crook of the J. It's a handle. I'm sure.

Adam leans in again. “Is it—”

“Wait,” I breathe.

I push the cool metal to the right. For a heartbeat, the small handle resists, and then, as if with a sigh of relief, it gives.

The cupboard door swings open.

T
HERE'S ONE SHELF.
On the shelf is a book. An old book.

A secret, ancient book! Authors I love appear in my mind. E. Nesbit leaps up and down with excitement, and J. K. Rowling raises an eyebrow.

Adam nudges me with his elbow. “Pick it up.”

I lift the book. It's heavier than I expected, and I have to catch it with my left hand to keep it from thunking to the floor.

The cover feels like skin. Thick skin. A coating of dust clings to the cracked and peeling burgundy leather.

“What is it?” Adam asks, his arm pressing against mine as he leans forward.

I check the front and the back. The spine. “There's no title.”

I open the cover, and a sweet, musty smell escapes. “I wonder how long since anyone touched this,” I muse. “It could be fifty years or a hundred. Or more.”

A forgotten toy is sad, but a forgotten book makes all sorts of promises.

“There's a name!” Adam points to the inside cover.

In the upper left corner, letters loop into each other in a slanted, old-fashioned cursive.

“Constance Brooke,” Adam and I read together.

“It
was
her room!” he exclaims, shoving my shoulder for emphasis. “I told you!”

The first page is blank. I turn it, and my fingers, so familiar with books and their pages, find themselves in a foreign country. The paper is the color of sand, and it's stiff, like it got wet and then dried out.

“Do you think this is parchment?” Adam asks in a low, library voice.

“Parchment is way older than Constance. I mean, parchment is Bible old, or at least Declaration-of-Independence old.”

Mom would know if this is parchment, and she could probably guess the book's age too, but I don't want her to see it and make it hers. She's always buried in books. This one is mine. Mine and Adam's.

Adam runs his fingers reverently down the page. “Shelby'd love this,” he says. “What was that story you two read about the kids who find a magic book in the library?”

“
Seven-Day Magic,
” I answer, pulling my phone from my pocket. I try to call Shelby, but she doesn't pick up.

Adam shrugs. “We'll show it to her later.”

I set my phone on the floor next to the book. “They're both communication devices, really,” I point out. “But from different universes.”

“Different times,” Adam says.

“Right.” I lean back. “Like Constance is from a different time than parchment. I mean, if it is parchment, then it must be hundreds of years old, so why is her name in the book?”

“Hmm,” Adam begins. “If only we could find—I don't know, like, an English professor to ask . . .”

“We are not asking my mother!” I glare at him. “If this is actually really old, then she'll take it away. She'll hurry it off to the library to be preserved in a vacuum-sealed vault, and she'll organize us into little field trips to visit the book in its sterile, soulless book prison. She'll probably find some way to write an article about it too, and then it won't even be our discovery anymore. We found it. In my room. It has nothing to do with her.”

He puts out his hands in an okay-okay gesture. “Fine, Rosie. Fine. We won't ask your mom.”

I slide my fingers under the next page and lift it, using only the pads of my fingers and the gentlest movement. Mom's not the only one who can treat an old book with care. It has to be parchment. It's heavy in a different way than paper.