The Rosemary Spell

by Virginia Zimmerman

  I climb up two steps. A little stack of paperback books sits on the platform at the top of the ladder. Constance’s name leaps out at me from one of the paperbacks. Constance Brooke—Early Poems. I extract the slim book from the stack.

  A black-and-white photo of a young Constance looks out solemnly from the cover. She must be in her twenties or so. Her hair is light and curly—wispy, even, as it is now—and she wears a headband. It’s uncanny how much she looks like her aged self; wrinkles already line her forehead. She’s framed by rows and rows of books, just as Shelby would have been if I’d taken her picture earlier.

  I lean against the ladder, my elbows alongside the stack of paperbacks, and turn to the table of contents. “Moon Mangled Memory” is there.

  “Can I get this?” I hold it up for Mom to see.

  She smiles. “Sure!”

  In the car, Shelby and Mom chatter about the musical. I didn’t know that Shelby has a good part. She even has a solo. Mom was in the same show once upon a time, and they’re deep in the details of the staging.

  Adam and I flip through the book of poems. The pages are cool, with the slightest hint of damp.

  A lot are about nature. Many are too abstract to make much sense to me.

  When we get to “Moon Mangled Memory,” I read it aloud.

  “I still don’t get how it’s about memory,” Adam says.

  “Souvenir,” Mom tosses over her shoulder. “Souvenir means memory.”

  Adam reads the last stanza again:

  A new moon is nothing.

  No light. No sight. Recall

  Only darkness. Absent

  Souvenir. All is lost.

  “So, like, absent memory,” he paraphrases.

  “You were right,” I point out. “It is about forgetting.”

  The poem on the facing page is called “Sifting Words.” I’m starting to feel carsick and need to look away from the book. “Read that one,” I suggest, and close my eyes.

  I sift words like sand. They run through my mind.

  “Lovely image!” Mom exclaims.

  Ink strokes form letters bundled into words.

  Words join up with armies of phrases, lines,

  That march on iambic feet, singing rhyme.

  They enjamb boldly . . .

  “What’s enjamb?” Adam asks.

  “When the sentence doesn’t stop at the end of a line,” I say. “Right?”

  “Very good.” Mom must think she’s died and gone to heaven.

  Adam continues reading:

  They enjamb boldly, aspire to meaning.

  They make speech and song and soliloquy.

  Gather into scenes and acts, renowned plays

  Famous from their day, unforgotten still.

  “Is it about Shakespeare?” Shelby asks.

  “Maybe,” Mom says. “Sounds like it. And she was certainly familiar with Shakespeare through her father.”

  We’re almost to Adam’s house, so he just paraphrases the rest. “It says that plays and speeches and stuff aren’t important. Only words matter. And then it’s like she’s looking for a certain word but can’t find it.” He reads:

  I rue the day I learned to seek, knowing

  I could never catch a word so well hid.

  Mom pulls up in front of Adam and Shelby’s house. They say thanks as they climb out of the car.

  “We’ll do the thing tomorrow,” I call after them, and at least Adam knows what I mean.

  Mom and I make dinner together and read a little on the couch before bed. I nudge her toes with mine. She looks up, in that daze of being lost in a book.

  “We’re sifting words.” I echo Constance.

  Delight breaks her daze. “Together.”

  Finally, Adam and I again lie on our stomachs with the book open in front of us, and Adam’s graph paper tucked under his hand. I reread the first two lines:

  Ah, treble words of absence spoken low;

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

  And we figure out the next line pretty quickly:

  Speak thrice to conjure nothing on the spot.

  But the next one is really hard. We get parts of it, but we’re missing key words.

  Adam reads, “Who blanks here will present be blank.”

  I squint at the line. “Banters? Barters?”

  “I think that’s an h. Oh, and that’s a k. See?”

  He’s right.

  “So . . .” I try again. “Hankers?”

  “Harkens!” Adam declares.

  “Yes!”

  “Who harkens here will present be . . . uh, forged?” Adam puzzles.

  “The first two lines rhyme,” I point out. “So, if these ones do too, then the word has to rhyme with spot.”

  “Forgot!” we say together in triumph.

  “Who harkens here will present be forgot,” Adam reads. “What do you think he means by harkens?”

  “He Shakespeare?” I ask. “We don’t know if—”

  Adam lights up. “I know! It’s like ‘Hark, who goes there?’”

  “Maybe, but what does hark mean?” I scramble off the bed and type harken into the dictionary on my laptop. “Listen,” I report. “It means ‘listen.’”

  “So the person who listens will be forgotten?” Adam asks.

  “I guess so.”

  “Read the whole thing,” he says.

  I sit up and read what we have so far:

  Ah, treble words of absence spoken low;

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

  Speak thrice to conjure nothing on the spot.

  Who harkens here will present be forgot.

  The words hang in the room.

  “Any clue what it means?” Adam asks.

  “Nope.”

  “Okay,” he sighs. “What’s next?”

  “There’s a lot of repetition in the last two lines. Look, there are three ands, and that word and that one both repeat three times too.” I point to two different words, one short, the other longer, neither immediately legible.

  “Treble words . . .” Adam says. “Speak thrice, which also means three. It’s saying to repeat something three times, and now the last two lines are the something, and it’s repeated three times. Treble. Thrice. Just like it says!”

  “You must be right.” I grin at him. “So what’s the something? Is that a V?”

  “I think so,” he nods. “And an n? No, an o-i, right?”

  “Yeah.” I’ve got it. “It’s void.”

  “Yes! Void and nothing?” he suggests.

  “Constance said that,” I remember. “Void and nothing. Void and nothing. It repeats. And then a dash, and . . .”

  “All . . . strife.”

  “That’s it! We’re so close!”

  Adam squints at the last line. “Third’s the . . .”

  “Charm,” I read.

  Adam nods. “And then it repeats again, To void and nothing . . .”

  We read the last words together: “Turn life.”

  “So the last two lines are . . .” We read them aloud.

  Void and nothing. Void and nothing—all strife!

  Third’s the charm. To void and nothing turn life.

  I shudder. “What does it mean to turn void and nothing into life? It sounds kind of awful.”

  “Maybe the sentence is sort of backwards.” Adam studies the graph paper. “It could mean to turn life into void and nothing.”

  “That’s worse!” I exclaim. “Is it about killing someone? That’s what turning life into nothing would be, right?”

  “I don’t think so.” He looks at me. “It’s a poem, right, so it doesn’t have to mean exactly what it says. I think it’s a spell—”

  “Adam—”

  “No. Let me finish. I think it’s a spell, and when you say it, it makes something disappear. That’s what happened to the words in the book. They disappeared. Because of the spell.”

  “But—”

  “Conjure!” He hurls t
he word at me. “Conjure means a spell!”

  “But you said yourself . . . it’s a poem, so it doesn’t mean exactly what it says.”

  I never imagined that I’d be the person in the story who doubts the magic. I reach deep inside myself and grasp on to a fragment of belief.

  “The writing did disappear,” I concede.

  “Right!” Adam sits up. “And maybe the poem somehow made the writing go into void and nothing. Maybe the book isn’t magic. Maybe the words are.”

  “Maybe.”

  So much of what I’ve read has prepared me for this moment, but still, I can’t quite believe.

  We walk downstairs in silence. He says lightly, “It’s supposed to be really warm this weekend. Shelby thought maybe we could go to the island on Sunday.”

  “That would be great!” I gush. And it would be. No creepy books. Just the boat and the ruins and the Rosie patch and Adam and Shelby and me.

  I clomp slowly up the stairs. Emily Dickinson chirps at me, “I dwell in Possibility.” Good for her, but it seems I dwell in Doubt.

  “Everything okay?” Mom calls from her room down the hall.

  “Yeah.” I force a cheerful tone, but . . . maybe . . . “Mom?”

  I stride down the corridor. She sits in the rocking chair in the corner, a book in her lap.

  “Do you know anything about Shakespeare and, like, um, magic spells or anything?” I ask.

  She closes her book. “That’s precisely the subject Arthur Brooke worked on. Maybe you know that already. From your research on Constance?”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t know, but now I do. “But isn’t that, you know, kind of a stupid idea?” I sit on the edge of her bed.

  “Well, of course, but scholars have put forward some evidence that Shakespeare may have been using words that others believed to be magic. The best example is in Macbeth. You haven’t read that one yet, I don’t think.”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, there are three witches who make a prediction about what will happen to Macbeth, and it seems like it couldn’t possibly come true, but then the words don’t quite mean what he’d understood them to mean, and they do come true in a different way,” she explains. “So the theory is that the magic words the witches speak—Double, double toil and trouble; Fire, burn, and cauldron, bubble—are actually magical. And, they say, that’s the reason productions of Macbeth are cursed.”

  “What do you mean, cursed?” I ask.

  “Oh, there are accidents, peculiar injuries. There have even been some deaths,” she answers.

  “Then why did you say the spell?”

  “Don’t be silly, Rosemary.” She laughs. “It’s just a superstition. More like a hoax. You know perfectly well there is no such thing as a magic spell.”

  The diary in the cupboard. The vanished words. To void and nothing . . . There is such a thing. Adam’s right. Belief vanquishes doubt.

  Mom goes on. “Anyway, Arthur Brooke started with the Macbeth idea and went looking for other spells in other plays and also in the sonnets. He claimed to find several examples, although when pressed to offer proof, he never had much to show for all his labor.”

  “Huh. Okay. Thanks.”

  “Maybe you could use the theory in your project,” she suggests.

  “Maybe,” I murmur. I slide off her bed and head back to my room.

  “You have plans for the weekend?” she calls after me.

  “Adam and I are going to the island,” I answer. “Shelby, too. I mean, Michelle.”

  “Oh, good. I don’t like you two going on your own. The river’s unpredictable this time of year.”

  I don’t point out that Shelby’s what’s unpredictable. And also magic. And words, too, it turns out.

  I call Adam.

  He answers halfway through the first ring. “Sorry, Rosie, I—”

  “No. I’m sorry,” I cut in. “I think you’re right. It’s a spell.”

  Seven

  ADAM AND I don’t know how to move forward, or don’t want to, so we actually work on the poetry project. Hunkered in my room, we skim the book I got, along with a couple from the library, looking for poems about memory or houses or ruins. It turns out that “Moon Mangled Memory” and “Sifting Words” are in every book of Constance’s that we read. In fact, a footnote explains that Constance insisted the two poems appear together in all of her collections.

  Each of us tries writing a poem about a house. Adam writes about the cupboard in my room, and I make him tear it up, and he’s mad at me, but only a little, because it was a stupid poem. I write about the ruins on the island, and it’s an even stupider poem, so I tear mine up too, in solidarity.

  “We suck,” he says cheerfully.

  “Yup,” I agree. “What rhymes with river?”

  “Giver,” he offers. “Liver.”

  “Oh, that’s good.” I laugh. “I love living on the river, I love it from my head right to my liver.”

  “Brilliant!”

  We give up trying to write good poems and pass the afternoon writing the worst poems we can and laughing until we cry. The diary hovers at the edge of my brain, but I avoid looking right at it. Writing bad poetry with Adam is so much easier than figuring out whether or not the codex is false, and before we have a chance to face the thick, yellowed pages, it’s gotten dark and Adam has to go home. As he gets ready to leave, we settle our plans for our trip to the island. I can hardly wait.

  It’s not as warm as it was supposed to be, but it’s definitely not mid-December cold. I should have worn a heavier jacket, though, and I wrap my arms around myself and bounce on the balls of my feet. The diary is in a canvas bag slung across my shoulder that smacks my thigh as I bounce.

  Shelby and Adam walk toward me. They both have on their heavy winter coats, and Shelby is carrying an extra sweatshirt. I should go get a better coat . . .

  “Here!” She tosses me the sweatshirt.

  “Don’t you—” I start.

  “It’s for you,” she says, heading toward the river. “I figured you’d be cold.”

  Adam takes in my bag and raises his eyebrows. I give the slightest nod to confirm we’re on the same page. In a flash, I see the rest of the day—Shelby and me in the V tree, looking through the diary together. Making the diary part of a group with Pelagia’s Boats and The Golden Compass and The Giver and the other books we shared there settles my anxiety, partly because they’re all books about kids who overcome impossible situations, but mostly because I love those books.

  We fall into our usual roles. While Adam undoes the ropes, I stand in the wooden boat, and Shelby positions herself to launch us into the water.

  “One.” She braces her hands against the back of the boat.

  “Two.” Adam hurdles aboard, and I grasp the oars.

  “Three.” Shelby vaults over the stern.

  I pull the oars and guide us across the current. Shelby takes the other set, and we stroke in sync, as if we do this every day, as if there’s never been a time when Shelby didn’t pick up my call.

  The current is slow and careless today, easy to get across.

  Our talk is slow and careless too. Shelby’s part in the musical. Our poetry project. Other trips to the island.

  Shelby’s earbuds dangle, forgotten, around her neck. This weird techno-scarf is like a badge of high school. It says, I could tune you out if I wanted to. But she doesn’t tune us out.

  “Is this the first time we’ve gone in winter?” I ask.

  “Maybe it’ll look different,” Adam says.

  “The rosemary might be dead,” Shelby warns.

  “It grows year-round,” I protest. “Constance said her father could grow rosemary at the North Pole.”

  There’s no response to that, and we make the rest of the journey in comfortable silence.

  Adam grins at us as he starts to twirl the rope.

  Shelby rolls her eyes. “Showoff.”

  In a flash, Adam lassos his sister.

  “Hey!”
She squirms to free her arms.

  “You said show off,” he says. “I thought it was a command.”

  Only mildly annoyed, she throws the rope back to him. Lazily, like he doesn’t even have to try, he tosses it toward our regular anchor, a dead tree, toppled long ago. It falls short.

  Shelby laughs. “Ha!”

  “I can’t believe you missed,” I exclaim.

  “You guys messed me up,” he grumbles, pulling the rope back in. He focuses on his mark this time and hurls the rope in a careful, graceful arc. The loop falls neatly over the limb.

  Adam walks along the fallen tree trunk and ties the rope to a sturdy branch.

  I climb out, Shelby right behind me. My foot slides off a mucky patch of something green. I pitch toward the water. Shelby grasps my elbow. And I’m steady.

  “Let’s check on the Rosie patch,” she suggests.

  We struggle through the tangle of broken branches and thick bushes that marks the perimeter of the island. When the river is fast and when it floods, lots of debris gets hung up here. In the summer, people come often enough that it gets cleared out, but the trash caught in the brush is a reminder that no one comes here this time of year. I pluck a broken Barbie doll from a pile of leaves and sticks. She wears a tattered sparkly pink dress and has leaf fragments in her hair. She has only one leg.

  “Look!” I call to Adam and Shelby, who are ahead of me.

  “Creepy,” Shelby replies.

  It seems wrong to leave the Barbie, so I bring her along.

  We scramble through the crumbled house, piles of gray stone and low walls. The only substantial thing is a fireplace, which looms over the ruins like a guard. I store the image in my mind for our project. Maybe I’ll write a poem about the fireplace resisting the flood and the passage of time. My cupboard that used to be a chimney could go in the same poem. I chant under my breath: Books in chimney space. Ruined fireplace.