The Rosemary Spell

by Virginia Zimmerman

  Adam taps my arm, jarring me away from my morbid thoughts. “What?” I snap.

  He thrusts his jaw at Mom’s newspaper. At the brightly colored weather map on the back page. A big yellow blob that looks like a quotation mark, half dot and half curvy arrow, sits over Pennsylvania. In the middle of the blob it says “mild” in a friendly font. In the corner, just by Florida, a chart shows the phases of the moon. Tomorrow night is the new moon.

  All warmth and patience drain out of me. I press Constance’s hand. She has to wake up.

  She stirs. Her eyelids are still heavy, and she doesn’t seem aware that anyone is here.

  I lean in and whisper in her ear. “Tomorrow is the new moon.”

  She blinks and focuses on me.

  “All is lost,” she murmurs.

  “What’s that?” Mom sets the paper on her lap.

  “It’s from her poem,” Adam says quickly. “‘Moon Mangled Memory.’”

  Constance sits up taller and speaks firmly. “I want to talk to the girl and boy. Alone.”

  Mom turns to look at the nurse. “I don’t know . . .”

  “It’s fine.” The nurse holds the door open. “She’s calm now.”

  “Rosie—” Mom begins.

  “We’ll be fine,” I assure her.

  Mom hesitates, then follows the nurse into the hallway. The door clicks shut.

  Constance searches my face and Adam’s. “I don’t know you. Can you help me?”

  I recite the rosemary verse.

  Her hand spasms in mine. Her eyes shift out of focus. “Wilkie. Wilkie.”

  “Constance”—I lean in again—“the new moon is tomorrow night. We have the rhyme and rue and rosemary. What do we need to do? Please. You have to remember.”

  “I ran out of time.” Her voice is small, constricted by grief.

  “I know.” I choke back a sob. “But we still have time. Please help us.”

  Her throat spasms. Her eyes dart from side to side as if watching the memory play out in her mind. “I had to get home. For . . . for . . .”

  “Rosemary?” I prompt.

  “Wilkie!” Her face screws up in silent anguish. She makes no sound, but loss contorts her expression.

  There is nothing we can do for her. I sit with her hand in my lap, my body heavy and awkward with its uselessness. Adam hovers behind me.

  Finally, she closes her mouth. She looks from me to Adam. “Hello. Do I know you?”

  The blankness on her face is a heartbreaking relief. Sometimes forgetting is better. Mom was right.

  And I don’t want to tell her my name, because rosemary might make her remember, and the loss will burst over her again.

  Adam whispers, “Wilkie is lost, but Shelby isn’t. We have to go.”

  I turn to tell Constance we’re leaving, but she grabs my wrist, and now her grip is strong, each one of the bones in her hand pressing into my flesh.

  She speaks slowly and clearly:

  Ah, treble words of absence spoken low;

  For ears of fam’ly, friend, or willful foe.

  Speak thrice to conjure nothing on the spot.

  “No!” Adam and I gasp at once.

  She doesn’t hear us.

  Who harkens here—

  “Stop!” I twist out of her grip. “Constance, you have to stop!”

  I grasp her shoulders and shake her once, trying to make her look at me, but her gaze just slides away.

  —will present be forgot

  Adam tugs on my arm. “We have to get away. If we don’t hear it, it won’t . . . it can’t . . .” He drags me to the door. “Rosie, c’mon!”

  Void and nothing. Void and nothing—all strife!

  “Please stop!” I sob.

  Adam fumbles with the door knob.

  Third’s the charm.

  “Rosemary!” Adam grabs me around the waist and lifts me to the doorway.

  “Rosemary?” Constance’s voice lilts upward. She sees us. Smiles. “Why, hello. Do I know you?”

  Adam sets me down but keeps hold of me, and I cling to his arm across my middle.

  My legs tingle, and my heart races.

  “I’m Rosemary,” I choke out. “And this is Adam.”

  Adam releases me, and I drop into the chair. He crosses to the bed.

  “What were you thinking?” He asks, sounding wounded.

  Constance studies him. Closes her eyes for a moment. “What were you thinking?” she echoes. “Father asked the same question. He pulled me from the water. So cold. What were you thinking?” She opens her eyes. She looks sad and worried and bewildered. “What was I thinking? Do you know?”

  Remembering will hurt her, but I recite the spell. She needs to know, and she’ll forget again.

  “Rosemary is for remembrance,” she echoes, her voice tight. “And rue is for regret. Yes. I remember. Father might have made it to the island, even in the flood. He might have made it in time. But he had to save me. He chose me. He chose me. And then there was only me.”

  I clap my hand to my mouth. Wilkie might have been saved, and Constance . . .

  She looks at me dully, waiting for the relief of forgetting to kick in.

  This is too cruel. I stand quickly, and my chair squeals against the floor.

  The door opens. Mom sticks her head in. “Everything all right?” she asks.

  “Fine,” I lie.

  “And how are you?” Constance gazes at us, her head cocked slightly to one side, like a bird’s. Her voice is light, her face relaxed.

  “Fine,” Adam answers.

  “Would you care for a peppermint?” She raises a skeletal arm to the candy dish on the table. Offers a gentle and empty smile.

  “No, thank you,” I reply. Already, Wilkie is gone.

  In the car, Mom peppers us with questions about our conversation with Constance. We give her vague half-truths.

  She sighs. “Dementia is a dreadful thing. So much worse than a physical disability.”

  “It must be awful at the beginning.” I look out the window at the rising water. “When you’re with it enough to realize that you’re losing it.”

  The car lurches to a stop.

  “Sorry,” Mom mutters. “River Road is closed.”

  Yellow lights flash on either side of a big sign. ROAD CLOSED. FLOODING.

  I bite the inside of my cheek. Look at Adam.

  Mom swings the car around in a tight U-turn and takes the long way home.

  She chatters about some kind of cookie she wants to make, and Adam and I take turns making interested noises, but we’re both preoccupied. I keep hearing Constance’s steady voice. Void and nothing. Third’s the charm.

  I try to drown her out with the rosemary verse. I whisper it, and Adam joins in.

  I reach into my pocket and rub my fingertip along the rue stem. We have rue. We have rosemary. We have the poem. It’s not yet the new moon. It’s going to be okay. In my mind, Shelby’s laugh sounds and drifts away.

  Adam and I sit cross-legged on my bed, the codex open between us. The stolen rue, golden brown and dried, lies across Mrs. Steiner’s rosemary, which looks like a tiny branch from a Christmas tree. The herbs make an X across the page.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  He reaches for my hand but recoils. “What’s that?”

  I follow his stare down to angry red blisters on my fingers. “Ew.” The rash is on the pads of my index and middle finger and also on my thumb.

  “The rue,” I say. “I was touching it in my pocket.”

  Adam raises his eyebrows. “I guess it’s still poisonous, even though it’s dead.”

  “It keeps savour all winter long.” I extend my other hand. “That means it should work.”

  We hold hands across the book, because it seems like what you should do when you’re performing a magic spell. I don’t mean to, but I squeeze Adam’s hand. He squeezes back.

  I look down at the open page. My writing looks back at me. For you there’s rosemary and rue. Shakespeare wrote tho
se words, and then I did. And I wonder what happened in the four hundred years in between. How many people needed these words? Needed this magic? Needed to rescue someone from the void?

  Adam’s voice catches as he begins, and I hold his hand tightly. I match the pace of my reading to his. Our voices in unison sound like church.

  For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep

  Seeming and savour all the winter long:

  Grace and remembrance be to you both,

  And welcome to our shearing!

  My tongue sticks on the thickness of the th sound at the end of both. And then the silence in my room presses on me.

  Nothing happens.

  We wait, Adam gripping my fingers until they hurt.

  Still nothing.

  I can’t meet his eyes. It didn’t work. Because the rosemary was from the store, and we didn’t shear it, or because the rue is too dry, or because the time is wrong, or because the place is wrong. Or because magic isn’t real.

  “Do you think we need to hold the herbs?” Adam asks.

  The hope in his voice makes me wince.

  I let myself sink into memories of Shelby. I let them wash over me like waves, and they sting against the rawness of my heart because I know I’ll soon forget. This is how Constance must have felt when she first learned she had Alzheimer’s.

  Shelby and I lean against the branches of the V tree and talk about how we want to travel when we grow up. When we get back to her house, we open a map of Europe and plot our journey.

  Shelby helps me and Adam pick our classes for eighth grade. Her whole face lights up when she talks about Mr. Cates.

  Shelby gives me a bag of clothes she’s outgrown.

  Shelby and I sit on her bed, a pile of books between us. She explains a little bit about each one, little blurbs specially crafted for me, because she knows what I like.

  Shelby can’t come with me and Adam to the library because she’s hanging out with Maria and Pam. She can’t come play Scrabble because she’s going out with John.

  Shelby can’t come help set up my room . . . but then she does. She carries my books, and it’s like she drags bound bits of me down the hall.

  Tomorrow it will be too late. Shelby will be gone. Into the void. And unless we remember to remember, we won’t even know we’ve lost her.

  Tears well up and tumble down my cheeks.

  Adam looks down at the plants and the book. “We have the rosemary and the rue and the rhyme.”

  “This powerful rhyme,” I murmur.

  “What’s missing is the place.” He looks up. “We have to go to the island.”

  “We can’t.” I look out the window. Mean hunks of ice and clublike branches course past, carried by the racing, muddy water.

  Adam watches the river too. “It’s like algebra,” he says in a low voice. “We have solved three of the variables. We have to plug in the fourth one.”

  “X equals the island?”

  “It has to, doesn’t it?” he says.

  The river’s like a stampede, rushing forward, trampling over everything in its path. It’s too dangerous—my brain and the animal instinct part of me both know this—but if Shelby were in the water, being carried along with all the debris, waving, sputtering, drowning, we wouldn’t just watch. We would do something.

  “Okay,” I say softly.

  Adam’s eyes are wet with tears, and his throat spasms as he swallows hard. “Thank you.”

  He scrambles off the bed, dragging the codex after him, along with the afghan wrapped around his ankle. It thuds to the floor. He untangles himself and stumbles to the door.

  “I’ll be back,” he grumbles.

  He disappears down the hall. I hear the water running in the bathroom.

  I watch the river. Something blocky races by, a piece of wood or metal, carried by the current. Hunks of ice hurtle downstream.

  Adam returns. He sits next to me on the bed. We watch the river in silence, our knees pressed together. Another manmade thing hurries past.

  “Was that a cooler?” Adam asks.

  “Maybe.”

  A memory breaks over me. Adam and me in a kiddie pool in his backyard. Someone spraying us with a hose. His dad? It must have been. And us laughing and laughing and laughing. And then lying on our backs looking up through the branches of the big pine tree in his yard. Just breathing.

  But some part of the memory escapes me. Me and Adam and Mr. Steiner? That’s not quite right. Absently, I rub the rash on my fingers. They feel hot and swollen.

  Something pokes my hip. A wadded paper in my pocket. I fish it out and toss it into the wastebasket.

  “Two points!” Adam sings out, but his voice makes me flinch. His easy tone jars me. I don’t know why.

  Sixteen

  WE WATCH VIDEOS online until Adam has to go home. He gets up to leave and trips over a book on the floor. He bends to pick up the old diary we found in the cupboard.

  He holds it loosely in one hand.

  The pages arch around something stuck inside.

  I reach for the book.

  The angry welts on my fingers make my hand look like it’s not mine. I watch this stranger’s hand, swollen and red, take the old diary with its cracked burgundy binding that feels like skin.

  The book opens eagerly. Two plants—one dry and brown, the other moist and green—wait on the page.

  “Rosemary,” I murmur.

  Adam stares at me, but he’s looking at something, someone who isn’t here. Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.

  “Shelby!” I cry.

  Adam’s jaw is set, his face grim. “We have to go now. Tomorrow is the new moon, and if we forget again . . .”

  I finish. “It will be too late.”

  Adam takes the plants and clutches them tight.

  “The rue,” I caution. “You’ll get a rash.”

  “I don’t care. I have to hold on. I have to remember.”

  I don’t point out that the rash didn’t help me remember.

  “Let’s go,” he says, moving quickly toward the door.

  “Wait,” I say. He stops. “It’s suicide to go in the dark. We can’t save Shelby if we kill ourselves. You saw all that debris. We’ll get knocked over. We’ll drown.”

  “But if we wait until morning, we might forget.” Adam’s eyes fill with tears. “We will forget. And Shelby will be gone. Forever. And we won’t even know.”

  “Constance almost died trying to save Wilkie,” I remind him. “And her father had to rescue her. He probably nearly died, too. We can’t let the poem take all three of us. We just have to remember,” I say with a firmness I don’t feel. “We’ll write the rosemary line everywhere.”

  I take a thick black pen from my desk and hand Adam a blue marker. I write on the back of his left hand and the palm of his right. Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

  I hold out my hands, and he writes on me. Pray, love, remember. He murmurs the words over and over as he writes them.

  We both lean over the desk, writing the lines on scraps of paper. We fill our pockets with the words.

  I copy the lines onto a stack of sticky notes and put them around my room. On each window and each dresser drawer. On the green cushion of my chair. On the closet door, and my headboard, and a whole bunch all over the desk. I stick them on my bookshelves next to the labels Adam made—Pray, love, remember ROSIE’S SPECIAL BOOKS. I place the last note on the cupboard door.

  Adam stands at the front door, his temporarily tattooed hands limp at his sides.

  I hug him and say into a mouthful of his hair, “We will remember. The words won’t let us forget.”

  I feel him swallow, his throat pressed against the side of my face.

  “We’ll meet at the launch first thing in the morning,” I say.

  He pulls back and walks away from me. I watch him go, but I hold him in my mind. He stands there with Shelby, both of them solid and sure, and when the edges of Shelby go blurry, I hiss, “R
osemary, that’s for remembrance,” and hold forgetting at bay.

  I chase dreams all night, or they chase me. When I wake up, a hot metal taste fills my mouth. I run my tongue over the raw inside of my cheek.

  I rub the exhaustion out of my eyes and stare at the thick blue writing on my palm. The y’s have little loops on their tails, like Adam’s y’s always do. Something about seeing his writing on my skin grounds me and holds me together.

  Outside, the snow is gone. All except those icy, gray mounds that won’t melt until spring. And the river still runs dangerously fast. Going to the island is a bad idea. A really, really bad idea. But it’s the only idea.

  I hurry into leggings and a long shirt. Somewhere in the back of my mind is a warning about how heavy jeans get when they’re wet and the grim certainty that I’m going into the river today.

  I tell Mom I’m going to Adam’s. He’ll tell his parents he’s coming over here. Before anyone realizes, we’ll already be on the island.

  I jog down the road to the boat launch, or what is usually the boat launch but is now overflowed river, creeping all the way up to the road. Another one of those big signs with lights blinks nearby. ROAD CLOSED. FLOODING.

  Adam rounds the corner with glaring orange life vests hanging over his arm. Life preservers meant to preserve life. I teeter between panic that we need them and relief that he brought them.

  We don’t speak. There’s nothing to say.

  The boat is still tied to its post, but the rope is taut, and the boat strains downstream like a dog pulling on its leash. We step into the murk to wade over to the boat. The water slices into my skin, so cold that it burns. My lungs tighten, and my blood races, trying to keep me warm, trying to warn me. Screaming at me to get my body out of danger.

  “Adam, I . . .” But my protest dies before I shape it into words. We are Shelby’s life preservers.

  My legs are numb. I smack my thighs to get the blood flowing, and pins and needles shoot down toward my knees. My lungs are still tight, even though I don’t feel the cold now.