“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 ea
rly, 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.
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.
Twelve
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.
The Rosemary Spell Page 11
