They pull me out. The wheels make a high-pitched squeak as they rush me toward the door.
“Rosemary?” Mrs. Steiner is hurrying alongside. “Was Shelby with you?”
We pause at a desk, and she leans over me.
“Do you know where Shelby is?”
My voice comes out in a whisper. “We found her, but . . .”
I can’t say the next words.
Mrs. Steiner’s face crumples. My heart breaks.
Nineteen
I STRUGGLE THROUGH THE FOG of anesthesia into consciousness. There’s a dull throb in my elbow, but the stabbing, breathtaking pain is gone. A splint cradles my arm, and a tidy blue sling rests against my chest. I’m warm and dry.
Mom’s sitting beside me, a book unopened on her lap.
“Adam?” I croak.
She leans forward and rests her hand on my cheek, the way she did when I was little and had a fever.
“He’ll be fine.” Her voice is low, cradling me in its calm. “He has a concussion, fifteen stitches, but he’s all right.”
She sets her book aside.
I steel myself. She will tell me now that Shelby is dead. My fingertips and my kneecaps are numb, already crushed under the weight of the grief that’s coming. Stabbing grief and rushing guilt.
Mom won’t know it, but I’ll know and Adam will know that it’s our fault Shelby is dead. We rescued her from one void only to send her into a different one.
“Shel . . .” I whisper, because I don’t have enough air to say her name.
Mom looks down at her hands. “They took her by helicopter to the medical center in Lionville.”
Dead people don’t get taken to medical centers.
“They don’t know how long she was unconscious,” Mom continues. “She nearly drowned. You all nearly . . .” The words choke off.
Adam and I didn’t drown. We held on. To the branch. To each other.
But not to Shelby. Her hair floats through my fingers. Horrible pink foam bubbles slowly from her blue lips.
I force out the question. “Will she live?”
Mom doesn’t look at me. Her hands clutched in her lap tell me that she doesn’t know.
I turn onto my side and curl my knees to my chest.
Mom’s voice is far away. Broken and garbled.
“ . . . brain function . . . medically induced coma . . .”
Void and nothing. Void and nothing. Void and nothing.
To void and nothing, turn life.
The one-legged Barbie grins crookedly. Shelby’s headphones disappear.
The poem won after all.
I must have fallen asleep. I don’t know how much time has passed.
“Rosie.” Mom sets down her book when she sees I’m awake. “How do you feel?”
“Sleepy.” I stretch.
“It’s the pain medicine,” Mom says. “And the trauma.”
Her hand on my cheek again. I raise my good arm and press my hand on top of hers.
She makes a small, strangled sound. She’s crying. “Oh, Rosie. I love you so much. I don’t know what I’d do . . . if I ever . . . if you ever . . .” Her head drops on to the side of my bed.
I try to stroke her hair the way she does mine, but I’m clumsy with my left hand, and all I manage is an awkward pat.
A hand reaches into my chest and twists my heart. She’s so emotional because Shelby’s . . . because Shelby . . .
“Is Shelby . . . ?” a voice asks. My voice. I ask.
Mom shakes her head. “There’s no change.”
She’s still alive.
Mom grasps my hand. “Don’t you ever . . .” she begins.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
I’m sorry I wrote in Shakespeare’s book. I’m sorry I said magic words out loud. I’m sorry I went to the island. I’m sorry I didn’t think about life preservers. I’m sorry I didn’t hold on to Shelby.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but no one cares that I’m sorry. Sorry doesn’t make any difference.
Mom squeezes my hand too tight. My knuckles grind against each other. It hurts, but it’s the opposite of dislocated. She assures herself I’m here. She assures me she’s here.
I look right into her red-rimmed eyes. “I love you.”
“I know.” She smiles through the fury and the relief. “I love you too.”
“When can I leave here? Can we go to Lionville and see Shelby?”
Mom manages to hold her voice steady. “She’s still in a coma. They’ve brought her body temperature back to normal, which is good . . .” She hesitates, then says, “They’re running some tests on her brain.”
“What for?”
She sighs. “To determine if she’s suffered any brain damage.”
I go cold. Not brain damage. Not Shelby.
Brain damage and Constance is bad enough. She gazes out at the falling snow. She gives me a vacant smile. She stretches her arm out toward the candy dish. She asks, “Do I know you?”
It’s too late for Constance. The damage is done. But not Shelby. Please, not Shelby.
“We just have to wait now.” Mom rests her hand lightly on my good arm.
We have to wait to see if Shelby’s brain is in the void.
“Where’s Adam?” I whisper.
“He’s here. In the hospital. They kept him overnight for observation, but he’ll be discharged today. You both will.”
“It’s tomorrow?” I frown.
She smiles, a tired, tight smile. “As Macbeth says, ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and—’”
“Don’t.” I cut her off. “Just . . . don’t.”
When I surface from an uneasy sleep, Mom’s texting.
“Shelby?” I ask.
“No news. I’m sorry.”
“Who’re you texting?”
“Your father,” she answers as she returns the phone to her bag.
“Why?”
She shrugs. “I thought he should know what’s going on.”
It makes sense that she would tell him when something major happens to me, or because of me. I try to imagine him caring, but I can’t. He forgot about us so long ago that I can’t possibly be more than a nagging memory at the edge of his life.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“He’s glad you’re all right,” she says.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
I’m just one more book he started to read and then left behind, unfinished. He doesn’t miss me, which is fine. I don’t miss him, either. How could I? I don’t even know him. But Mom . . . they were married. They had a kid.
“Do you miss him?” I ask.
She answers slowly. “I miss the idea of what he was a long time ago, when we were younger and he seemed so easygoing, willing to let me shape our lives. It seemed generous, and I was grateful. And he is a good person . . . but do I miss him now? No, I don’t. The void he left in my life was filled up long ago with my work and my friends and my daughter.” She smiles at me.
But her smile is a knife in my heart. What if Shelby leaves us? If she dies or if her brain dies, what will ever fill the void?
Tears come, and sobs rip upward from my gut.
Mom holds me and loves me, but she can’t help Shelby.
I collapse into hiccups, and Mom lays me back against the pillows. Her hand rests on my cheek again.
A light tap, and Adam pushes open the door. A line of Frankenstein stitches jags across his forehead.
I sit up. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” He runs his fingertips over the stitches and lets out a breath, like he’s been holding it since we were in the river. “I’m fine, and so’s Shelby.”
“She’s fine?” I don’t trust the words.
“Her brain is fine,” he says.
His eyes are full of tears. “She’s still in a coma, but it’s, like, artificial. I mean, they put her in it, so her body could focus on basic stuff. Like being alive.” He grins at me, looking a little crazy and a lot relieved.
“My dad said he’d drive us to Lionville. So we can see her.” He looks at Mom. “If Rosie’s ready to check out.”
“She’s supposed to be discharged this morning,” Mom answers. “I’ll try to hurry them along.”
She presses the red call button, and a nurse bustles into the room.
We have to wait for them to pull out my IV, and a different nurse has to check my vital signs one more time. Mom goes off with an administration person to do paperwork. It doesn’t seem like we’ll ever be able to leave.
Adam and I alternate between uneasy smiles and somber stares. Sometimes he looks away. Sometimes I do. Neither of us can face what happened head-on. Not yet.
Finally, we load our battered bodies into the back of Mr. Steiner’s car. Adam has to buckle my seat belt because I can’t do it one handed.
“We’re a mess,” I observe, but I’m grinning as he reaches across me.
He looks up, his face close to mine. A black thread sticks out through his bangs. I feel an urge to pull it, to unravel everything that’s happened over the past two weeks.
We ride in a silence thick with all the questions Mom and Mr. Steiner must want to ask, but no one says anything. The countryside flashes past. And the river flows south. It carries silt and branches and broken bits and maybe Barbie.
But not us.
Adam and Shelby and I survived.
Lionville is all sterile corridors and bright lights. Nurses and doctors stride past us as Mom and I wait for the Steiners to come back from wherever the doctor took them.
My elbow throbs faintly, and an ache presses between my eyes.
“I brought you these.” Mom opens her bag to show a handful of my books. “I had them when you were in Cookfield Hospital, but you weren’t awake long enough to read. Maybe now? To pass the time? They were the ones nearest your bed, so I thought they’d be the ones you’d want.”
Pelagia’s Boats, with its battered spine, is sandwiched between two other books, almost as worn.
Tears fill my eyes. I can’t quite see the book, but my fingers recognize the feel of it. I pull it from the bag and clutch it against me.
Finally, the Steiners come through a swinging door. Only three of them, but everyone knows now that there are really four. I’m sure their kitchen table is scooted out from the wall.
Mrs. Steiner gives me a big hug. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” she murmurs into my hair.
I can’t speak. I nearly killed her daughter.
When she releases me, the back cover drops off my book.
Mr. Steiner bends to pick it up. “This is one of Shelby’s favorites,” he says with a sort of numb surprise.
Mrs. Steiner tells us, “The doctor says she’ll probably suffer some memory loss, and she may have trouble with disturbances to her vision for a little while, but they think she will be okay.”
“Her brain will be okay,” Adam adds.
“It seems she was not unconscious for long,” Mr. Steiner says. “You two pulled her from the water in time.”
Adam and I lean into each other. I’m sure we’re thinking the same thing: She was only in the water because of us.
“Can we see her?” Adam asks.
“They say only family—” Mr. Steiner begins.
“Rosemary is family,” Adam protests, and no one argues.
We enter a dim room. A machine attached to Shelby beeps, a steady, regular beat. Her color is normal, almost. Someone brushed her hair, and it fans out neatly behind her head. Her eyes are closed. She could be sleeping. Her chest rises slightly. And falls.
I shove away the memory of Adam trying to give her mouth-to-mouth, trying to help her breathe. I focus on now.
Shelby is lying in front of me, alive.
She is here.
We pulled her out of the void.
After a long moment, Mom suggests, “Why don’t you read to her?”
“She’d like that,” Mr. Steiner says.
“Can she hear us?” Adam asks.
“They don’t know,” Mrs. Steiner answers. “But if she can, listening to you two read her favorite book would be nice for her.”
So Adam and I sit together in chairs drawn up close to the bed. My knees bump into the metal frame. I hold the book open in my lap.
Tears swim in my eyes again, but I know how the book begins. I say the words from memory.
Epilogue
WHEN THEY WAKE SHELBY, Mr. and Mrs. Steiner report she remembers nothing from that day, but her brain is working fine. The doctors say over and over how lucky she is, how lucky all of us are.
She’ll want us to fill in the gaps in her memory eventually, but for now, she’s content to just hang out. We tell her that we read her Pelagia’s Boats while she was in a coma. We talk about everything and nothing, and it’s like it used to be, except we’re all older now. Pam and Maria and John come visit, and some of the other kids from the musical, and two of Shelby’s teachers. And even Mr. Cates.
I realize for the first time how wonderful it is that Adam and I aren’t the only people who love Shelby. Having friends and being busy after school means she’s here. And Shelby’s worth sharing.
When she’s well enough, we take her to see Constance. We all wear the slim silver bracelets we had made at a kiosk in the mall. A computer etched the words onto the silver: Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.
We talked about getting one for Constance, too, but we decided not to burden her with the memory of Wilkie’s loss. The rhyme can only cause her pain, but it keeps Wilkie alive in our memories, at least a little. Maybe when Constance and her mangled memory die, Wilkie will slip away, but for now, we hold on to him. And that’s not nothing.
For Constance, the void poem isn’t the real enemy now. It’s the Alzheimer’s. We brought the little book of her poems and a huge stack of library books, and I think every poem she wrote is with us in the room. Maybe all these rhymes will remind her of her own long life.
It was Shakespeare who gave me the idea. He says you live in this. The poem is a living record of your memory, and Constance wrote lots of poems. She may have forgotten her own life, most of it, but it lives in these books, in the words she wrote.
“Constance?” I call to her.
She turns her head and smiles, that soft, gentle smile. “Hello. Do I . . . ? I think I know you. Don’t I?”
“This is Adam. I’m Rosemary. And this is Michelle.”
Shelby puts an arm around me and murmurs, “Shelby’s fine.”
“Rosemary,” Constance echoes. “Father always says he could grow rosemary at the North Pole, if given the chance, and I think he could. Do you know he planted rosemary in our garden? On the island?”
“Constance,” I say. “We brought you your poems.”
“Poems?” she repeats. “I won the recitation prize in the third grade for that lovely Wordsworth poem about the daffodils. Shall I say it?”
She recites:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
She pauses but this time she continues, with confidence in her voice:
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
She hits the stressed syllables with a cadence her body knows even though her mind has lost so much. I wonder what I’ll remember when I’m old and my memory fails. I’ll be lucky if I hang on to a poem, like Constance has.
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
The words dance in the room, a miracle of memory.
“How . . . ?” Adam begins.
“She can remember it because she knew it when she was young,” I whisper. “That part of her is still there. That’s why she remembered the void poem.”
“This one’s about memory too,” Shelby says. “Wordsworth remembers the daffodils.”
Con
stance nods. “They flash upon that inward eye.”
“You have the poem in your inward eye,” I tell her.
She laughs, a soft, wispy sound. It wafts away, as her focus fades.
We read her a few of her own poems, and she listens. Maybe she remembers.
When we finally finished our poetry project, we printed it on crisp white paper, bound it in a bright rainbow-striped folder, and handed it in to Mr. Cates.
We didn’t use the codex. It had to be someplace safe. Not to protect the book from harm, but to protect the people who might read it.
So we locked it up. In the cupboard in my room where Constance had hidden it.
I used pliers to twist the metal J of the hidden release back on itself. I made it impossible for anyone to open the door.
Adam tested it.
I pried at it with a crowbar.
Shelby tried “Open Sesame,” and she made it sound like a joke, but it wasn’t really, because we know now that magic words are real.
The door wouldn’t budge.
The cupboard is shut. Forever, I hope.
When we got our project back from Mr. Cates, he told us he loved it and said we’d definitely found our muse.
Today we’re giving it to Constance.
“This is for you,” I say. I set the binder on her night table next to the candy dish, filled with new peppermints in shiny wrappers.
“It’s poems,” Adam explains. “Some of yours and some we wrote, kind of inspired by yours. By you.”
She smiles. “Thank you.”
“You were our muse.” I say the words lightly, but they’re true.
As we leave the room, she reaches for the binder, another living record.
We follow the corridor past Jonas, the man who misses his wife, Maud.
“It’s not fair that she doesn’t get Wilkie back,” I say. “And Wilkie gets nothing. He didn’t get to live his life or to write poems or make art or leave anything behind.”
“There are all kinds of loss,” Shelby muses. “Didn’t Constance’s mom die when she was young? She doesn’t get her mom back, either.”
The Rosemary Spell Page 17
