The Rosemary Spell

by Virginia Zimmerman

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Thanks

  Rosemary’s Bookshelf

  About the Author

  Clarion Books

  3 Park Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 2015 by Virginia Zimmerman

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhco.com

  Cover photograph © Robin Macmillan/Trevillion Images

  Cover design by Kerry Martin

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Zimmerman, Virginia.

  The rosemary spell / Virginia Zimmerman.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Best friends Rosie and Adam find an old, magical book that has the power to make people vanish, even from memory. When Adam’s older sister, Shelby, disappears, they struggle to retain their memories of her as they race against time to bring her back from the void, risking their own lives in the process”—Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-544-44537-6 (hardback)

  [1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 3. Memory—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.1.Z57Ro 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015001343

  eISBN 978-0-544-44540-6

  v1.1215

  For Kristen

  One

  FOR TEN YEARS, my father’s furniture and books lurked in the study he abandoned. I don’t remember a time when we thought he might come back, but his belongings were like a bookmark, holding a place in our lives, until Mom found out he’d moved to London. She decided to reclaim the place his absence had haunted all these years. In that brisk, decisive way of hers, she said, “Well, that’s that. The room is yours, Rosemary, if you want it.”

  Of course I wanted it. It was twice the size of my old room, with three big windows that looked out on the river. Mom made phone calls, and men stomped up and down the stairs, and tape squawked out of its dispenser and over boxes. Then my father’s possessions were gone, replaced by my bedroom furniture, its bright colors catching light that hadn’t found this room for a long time. The big second-floor room at the front of the house was mine.

  After the movers got the heavy stuff in place, Adam and Shelby came over to help lug armfuls of my life down the hall.

  Adam kept pausing to reorganize my boxes. “Why would you put socks and colored pencils together?”

  “I was just trying to make it easier to carry stuff.”

  He snatched the pencils from the box.

  Shelby chattered easily about this book and that one. “Oh, I remember when we all read this.” She pointed her chin at the battered book on top of the tottering stack she was carrying. “Don’t you? It was summer, and Adam thought it would be boring and didn’t want to read it, but then he did, and he couldn’t put it down, and then we all read it again. And a third time, I think.”

  “I didn’t think it would be boring!” Adam was sitting on the floor refolding my shirts.

  “You did!” I remembered. “You didn’t want to read a book with an old guy on the cover.”

  Shelby set the books on the floor between my bed and a broad bookcase, the only piece of my father’s furniture I had kept. The stack slumped against the wall, the familiar covers fanned out in a welcoming display.

  We must have done stuff other than read and reread that book, but when I reach into my memory, the book frames the hot, lazy months of that summer, the first one when Shelby was old enough to be responsible for us and we didn’t have adults trailing us everywhere. Adam and I were nine, so Shelby was twelve, a year younger than we are now.

  Adam squared a box of school supplies against the edge of the desk. “I didn’t have a problem with the old guy. I just wanted to read different stuff from Shelby.”

  “Michelle,” Shelby corrected, pulling her long hair into a messy knot on top of her head, which made her look older. She’d lately been insisting we use her full name. “It really is a great room,” she said, but her attention was on her phone, and her thumbs flew as she texted.

  I was suddenly exhausted. “Now that everything’s here, we can set it up tomorrow,” I said. “If you want to come back.”

  Shelby stretched, her side arcing in a graceful curve. “I think I’m going to a movie with some people . . .”

  I wondered if “some people” was John, but it would have been weird to ask. A stabby ache filled in the space where Shelby used to be when it was the three of us all the time, before Shelby, or Michelle, was always busy with John or Pam and Maria or people I didn’t even know.

  Shelby called one of her friends as she and Adam started down the stairs, and annoyance flicked across his face, but by the time they got to the front door, he was listing his ideas for how to organize my stuff. Shelby was changing, but Adam remained the same as when we were little and he always wanted to sort Legos—not build anything, just sort them by size or color or whatever. As they stepped out into the crisp December twilight, I knew he was mentally categorizing all my things into the color-coded bins that live in his head.

  So now I lean against the door frame, waiting for Adam, not quite letting myself hope that Shelby will come too. I’ve put away my books and most of my clothes, but I can’t face doing any more on my own. Something inside me tries to shuffle out of the way so I can feel at home here, but the room isn’t mine. Not yet.

  Now that most of my dad’s stuff is gone, I miss it. I really only know him through the things he left behind. He liked a big, heavy desk, and he kept a lot of books from English classes in college, and he put up a big copy of that annoying Escher print with the stairs that go around and around forever. Those things defined him once, giving me something to latch on to. But now I understand that those are the things he didn’t care enough about to take with him.

  He probably has a new desk and new books now. Maybe even a new copy of the print. Maybe he gets a new one every time he moves. Endless copies of endless stairs.

  I wasn’t sorry to see the print tossed into the charity truck, which was overflowing with naked baby dolls and sagging couches. My father’s well-made Scandinavian desk looked sad and exposed in that truck.

  Then there were the books. A battered hardcover Norton Anthology of English Literature with thin, translucent pages and a big, brown Riverside Shakespeare had stood like guards at either end of a long shelf. In between was a group of Dickens novels with black covers. Each one had a crease in the spine less than half an inch in, like he read around a hundred pages and then gave up.

  I can’t imagine having once loved certain books and not loving them anymore. In a way, you are what you read, so abandoning books is the same thing as abandoning a part of yourself. And the truth is that his leaving the books behind baffled me more than his leaving Mom and me behind.

  So, when Mom said
she’d pack up the books for the library book sale, my heart clenched, and I replied without thinking, “No. I want them,” but I didn’t really want them. I just wanted them to be wanted.

  Now his books sit like intruders in the familiar landscape of my books. Saving them was the right thing to do, but they keep my father’s absence present in the room.

  Downstairs, the front door opens, and Adam calls, “Hello?”

  “Come on in, you two,” Mom answers. “Rosie’s up in her new room.”

  Two?

  “Thanks, Claudia.”

  Shelby came!

  I stop myself from bounding down to the foyer. Instead, I inspect the arrangement of the furniture and hope that Adam and Shelby will help me make the room my own. My bed stretches under two windows, and my dresser sits below the third window. The huge bookcase runs all the way from the bed to the far wall, where it meets a built-in cupboard. Maybe a room is like new shoes—it’ll be a little uncomfortable until I break it in.

  The three of us cluster together, filling the door frame. On either side of me, their arms press into mine, like they’re holding me together.

  “I didn’t think you were coming, Michelle.” I’m careful to say Michelle instead of Shelby, even though the name is awkward in my mouth and doesn’t match this person who will always, always be Shelby in my head.

  She puts an arm around my shoulders. “Moving to a new room is like graduating or getting married. It’s a big deal.”

  “It’s not that big of a deal,” I murmur, but I’m glad she thinks something having to do with me is a big deal.

  She glides into the room and starts rummaging through a laundry basket overflowing with stuffed animals.

  I cringe and say quickly, “I meant to put those in the attic.”

  “Why?” Adam sounds wounded.

  “They’re little-kid things.”

  “You can’t put Sheepy in the attic!” Shelby holds up a sheep that’s faded from a baby pink to well-loved gray.

  Of course I can’t. Of course she wouldn’t expect me to. Why was I even worried?

  Shelby starts to arrange the animals on the dresser at the foot of my bed.

  Adam cries, “You did the books without me!”

  “Don’t worry. We can redo them.” I cross to the bookcase. “I kept some of my father’s, but . . . I don’t like them mixed in with mine.”

  He doesn’t ask why. He just trots forward and starts pulling books off the shelves and piling them on my desk. He knows which ones are mine and has no trouble picking out the intruders.

  Shelby kneels with her head cocked to one side, reading titles.

  “I love your books,” she sighs.

  “That’s because they’re the same as yours,” Adam points out.

  He’s right. So many of my books are ones she recommended. If you are what you read, then Shelby’s been a big part of making me who I am.

  “Are these organized in any way?” Adam frowns at the shelf.

  “Well, they’re together by author—”

  “Of course.”

  “Yeah, and then the ones that are most important are nearest my bed at pillow level, you know, so I can get them quickly.”

  “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 b
ack 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.