The Rosemary Spell

by Virginia Zimmerman

  “It’s not fair,” Adam says.

  “No,” I agree. The wheelchair man who wants Maud, Anna and the Hello Kitty lady with their cards scattered under the table, Constance with her broken memory . . . none of it is fair.

  Adam leans against the wall. “So we know the poem made Constance forget someone, but we don’t know who.”

  “Was it only Constance?” I ask.

  “What do you—? We didn’t forget anyone . . . or, I guess, I mean . . . did we?” Adam’s horrified now. “How would we know?”

  “After Constance read the rosemary line from Hamlet, she remembered, didn’t she?” Gears in my head grind toward the next step.

  “You wrote the same line in the codex,” Adam remembers.

  “And writing appeared!”

  Adam recites, “Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.”

  And all in a flash I do. Shelby teaching me how to pirouette, back when she still took dance. Shelby rowing the boat like she was Pelagia saving the world in Pelagia’s Boats. Shelby not picking up her phone. Shelby. Shelby. Shelby.

  Wilkie Wilkie Wilkie staining the page.

  Adam sits utterly still. All color has drained from his face. Sweat beads on his upper lip, and his eyes dart. He’s remembering too.

  “Maybe if we write the line. In the book.” He staggers away from forgetting, toward his sister. “Rosemary, that’s for . . . Shelby!” he sobs.

  “Try it.” My voice comes out hoarse but hopeful. I shove the book at him. “Maybe the rosemary line is a spell too. Maybe writing it in the book will bring her back.”

  Adam leans over the codex and writes the remembrance line.

  The words sit on the page like a promise. I hold on to Shelby in my memory, but she doesn’t magically appear.

  “It was a stupid idea,” he sighs.

  I say the line out loud.

  In my mind, Shelby hands me a copy of When You Reach Me. “This. Is. The. Best. Book. Ever.” She stirs cookie dough and pretends to be Swedish. She lends me a sweatshirt because she knows I’ll be cold.

  Adam recites facts about Shelby as if they might pull her back from the void. “Michelle Sarah Steiner. Born April twelfth. She hates hard-boiled eggs. She loves the sound of the cello. She used to dance. She was sixteen.”

  “She is sixteen,” I protest. “She’s not dead.”

  And we tumble into each other in a messy hug. My forehead presses against his collarbone.

  “How do we know?” he whispers into my hair.

  The solidness of him grounds me. I pull back from him and grasp his arms. “We would know if she was dead. We would remember that.”

  I look down at the codex. The page is crowded with words. “Look!”

  The writing is cursive, slanted and a little sloppy. Constance’s writing.

  Adam starts deciphering. He reads aloud with a fierce desperation, underlining the words with his finger.

  Mother would never have stood for it. That’s what Wilkie says. I don’t know because I don’t remember her. Not much anyway. Just a white dress with a lacy bit that was nice to run my fingers over, and part of a song she used to sing, and how when she got sick they sent me away and then she was dead.

  Adam stops. “This doesn’t help. There’s no information. Just sadness.”

  “She doesn’t remember her mother,” I say. “But she remembers that she’s forgotten. I mean, she knows she had a mother.”

  Adam shifts so he’s a little farther from the book. “Still, how can you forget your own mother?”

  I shrug and swallow the thickness that gathered suddenly in my throat. “Constance was little when her mom died. How much do you remember from when you were five?”

  “My birthday party at the park, you dropping that heavy bottle on your toes, signing up for the reading program at the library.”

  “I don’t really remember my father,” I confess in a low voice.

  “That’s different.” Adam flushes.

  “How? How is it different?” The old anger flares up. Kids whose parents die get sympathy and a grieving process. Kids whose parents just wander away get puzzled frowns and question marks.

  Adam’s gaze softens, but his words are hard. “It’s different because your dad chose for you to forget him.”

  He has actually said the thing no one else has said or will ever say to me. Emptiness stretches all around me, a desert of not having a father that reaches as far as the eye can see.

  Constance’s mother probably tried desperately to hold on to life, to her children. She would have wanted to stay with them, but was dragged away kicking and screaming by death.

  Like my mother would be. The happy warmth of curling up together on a cold day, the companionable banging around in the kitchen, the gleeful thrill of entering a bookstore.

  Some people don’t deserve to be forgotten. Constance’s mother and . . . who else? We weren’t upset about her mother or my father. It was something else. Someone else.

  I trace Adam’s handwriting in the diary, murmuring the words. Rosemary, that’s for . . .

  An image of a Barbie smiling blankly next to the empty space where Shelby had been bursts into my mind. “We said the poem,” I remember.

  “And it made her go. The poem made Shelby go,” Adam says. “Will she come back?”

  I can’t bring myself to say that I don’t know, that I don’t understand any of this, that nothing in my life or even in all the books I’ve read has prepared me for this. I cling to the one bright spark in this hideous dark. “The line from Hamlet makes us remember her.”

  “But she’s still gone,” Adam cries. “And we keep forgetting. What if we forget and never remember again?”

  “Constance said . . .” I struggle to recall her words. “She said, ‘You need the other one.’”

  “The other what?” Adam wails.

  I shake my head. I have no idea.

  His hand trembling, Adam slowly turns to the beginning of the book and scrawls Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember on a blank page. He snaps out the words as he writes them. Turns the page. Scrawls. Snaps. Turns. Scrawls. Snaps. Again and again and again. I reach out a hand to calm him, but he doesn’t even seem to know I’m here. And on some pages words appear, always in Constance’s slanted cursive. He doesn’t stop to read them. He just writes around them and recites. Over and over. Rosemary . . . Pray . . . Remember.

  Then he stops.

  “You!” He looks up at me, his eyes red.

  What did I do? And then I see. It’s my writing on the page. I rise up on my knees to read what I wrote: We need to remember Shelby. Shelby. Shelby. Shelby. Shelby. Shelby. Shelby. Shelby. Shelby.

  Thoughts pile up quickly. “The codex . . . the answer has to be here.”

  I turn pages, looking for a clue. Until I come to a page only half filled with writing. The words stop suddenly just past the middle of the page. And the blankness holds the answer. Whatever made Constance stop writing is what we’re looking for.

  I read quickly, paraphrasing for Adam as I go. “Her father’s all haunted and trying to find the book, and she gets him to admit that it can’t really be Shakespeare’s, that it’s a false codex, but then she feels guilty. She says, The fragment troubles me. Do you think that’s the poem?” I don’t wait for an answer. I keep reading and fear rises into my throat. “She’s waiting for Wilkie, and she knows he’s coming because she can hear him whistling.” My hand flies to my mouth. “She recites the poem.”

  I bite my lip and read aloud:

  I have tried to understand why father believes so absolutely that the fragment is magic. I know it by heart, this verse that has so preoccupied my father. I recite it, and the rhyme drifts over the river and dies.

  “That’s it. That’s all she wrote.”

  “She disappeared Wilkie,” Adam whispers.

  “We disappeared Shelby,” I say, the horrible truth rising like bile in my throat. “It was us. We’re the bad guys.”


  “The book doesn’t say how to fix it.” Adam sounds numb now. “She didn’t know how. If she did, she would’ve done it. Wilkie wouldn’t be gone.”

  “We can’t give up!” I protest. “Maybe she did know, but she didn’t do it right or she ran out of time. Maybe she put the answer someplace else.”

  “Where?” Adam cries. “We can’t sift through all the words in the world.”

  Sifting words. Constance’s poems. “Maybe she put the answer in a poem.”

  I shove the diary away and grab the volume I got at Eliot Books. The black-and-white Constance on the cover watches me. “Let’s start with ‘Moon Mangled Memory.’ If she wanted it printed in all her books, it must be important.”

  “Okay,” Adam agrees. He sounds defeated. I suspect he would agree if I said “let’s stand on our heads,” but we need to do something, and maybe there will be an answer in the poem.

  I read the first line. “We mark time by the moon. So, that means how the phases of the moon are a way of telling time, right? The next line is Our shadow casting dark.” After the easy clarity of the first line, this one’s a puzzle. “Maybe shadows are darker because of the moon?”

  “No.” Adam sits forward. “I think our shadow means the shadow of the Earth. You know, how it’s the Earth’s shadow on the moon that makes a half moon or a crescent or whatever.”

  “Yes!” I read on. “The light left over fills / Our night and lends us sight. The light that isn’t blocked by the Earth’s shadow is the moonlight.”

  “Keep going.” Adam looks more hopeful now.

  “The next verse is also about the phases of the moon,” I say. “It goes through all of them and ends with A new moon is nothing. Didn’t Constance say something about the new moon?”

  “Did she?” Adam cocks his head to one side. “Maybe. Keep reading.”

  “It kind of elaborates on the idea of the new moon. A beginning that is / Absence, blankness and void.”

  “The new moon is the beginning?”

  “It’s the new moon, so I guess that makes sense,” I say. “But it seems more like an end, if it’s absence and blankness . . .”

  “And void,” Adam and I say together.

  A circle of only two people. Absence and blankness.

  “The poem,” I whisper.

  “The poem is the void, or it opens the void,” Adam says.

  “Maybe the poem is only magic at the new moon?” I suggest.

  “But it wasn’t the new moon when we went to the island,” Adam counters. “Read the last verse.”

  A new moon is nothing.

  No light. No sight. Recall

  Only darkness. Absent

  Souvenir. All is lost.

  My voice hangs in the room.

  “All is lost when souvenir—memory—is absent.” Adam works backwards through the lines. “And memory goes dark when the moon dies.”

  “But we have memory as long as we have the rosemary line.”

  Adam murmurs the line like a prayer, and I remember Shelby leaning against the V tree, holding a handful of dangling willow branches in her hand.

  My own hands go numb as I figure out the piece Constance’s “Moon Mangled Memory” adds to the puzzle.

  “I think once the new moon comes, the magic is irreversible,” I say. “The new moon seals the spell.”

  “All will be lost.” Adam paraphrases the last line.

  “But not yet.” I grasp at hope and possibility. “How long do we have?”

  Adam’s thumbs fly as he searches for the answer. He stares at the phone and then at me. “Just three days,” he reports.

  In my mind, in my unmangled memory, Shelby looks at me steadily, willing me to fix this.

  But I don’t know how. A sob rises. “All we’ve learned is that we don’t have much time.”

  Eleven

  ADAM STANDS UNDER the streetlight. He holds the rosemary bookmark in one hand and, in the other, a piece of paper with the rosemary verse printed in big letters. Snow falls on his hair, on his shoulders.

  “What if I forget?” His face is pinched with worry.

  I shiver on the doorstep.

  “Rosie!” Mom calls. “Shut the door. It’s freezing!”

  “You won’t,” I promise. “Between the actual rosemary and the rosemary spell, you’ll remember.” I don’t add that I’m just making this up or that, not long ago, I was pretty sure the idea of a spell was ridiculous.

  He clings to the sprig and the paper. He turns away.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I call after him.

  I take the steps two at a time and lunge across my bed to the window. Adam is only a dark shape against the moon-white snow.

  Something drops from his hand. The rosemary! I smack my hand against the windowpane. He doesn’t hear, but he bends, picks up the tiny branch, shoves his hands with their precious mementos into his pockets, and lopes out of sight.

  I study the shape of my face in the bathroom mirror. My broad forehead, wide cheekbones, and pointy chin. The same as Mom’s. Maybe Constance looked like her mother. Maybe her mother lived on in that way.

  I look for traces of my father in my eyes, the curve of my mouth, the tip of my nose, but I don’t find him. I can’t find the image of him in my mind.

  Mom appears in the doorway and smiles at me in the mirror, but her eyes are sad.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You’re as tall as me now.” She leans forward to rest a hand on top of my head.

  The warmth and pressure of her touch steady me. “Is that bad?”

  “No, but the smaller you is gone, and that’s—well, it’s just a little bit of a loss. That’s all.”

  I meet her gaze in the mirror. “I don’t remember Dad. I mean, I can’t picture him.”

  The hand on my head moves to stroke my hair. She says softly, “Sometimes forgetting is easier.”

  “How?” I’m not protesting. I’m just asking.

  She studies me. “Trying to hang on to what’s gone just causes pain. It’s better to focus on what we have.”

  “I have a father.” It’s a simple statement of fact, but even as I say the words, they strike me as false.

  Mom reads my mind. “Not really, Rosie. Not in the way you deserve.”

  I turn to look at her for real, but even without the mirror, I’m gazing at a reflection. We share the same speckled brown eyes, the same cheekbones, and the same dry lips, chapped from biting them.

  I hug her. She hugs back. I want to tell her about the void poem and the new moon, and I want her to help me understand this horrible aching loss at my core, but I don’t know the words to describe what’s happened.

  “Good night, my love.” Mom releases me and strokes my hair one more time before padding down the hall to her room.

  “Night,” I say to her back. I stand for a minute, wanting to say something more, but finding only uneasy silence.

  I collapse onto my bed and read Adam’s scrawl, angled at the top of a page in the codex. I breathe out the words: Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.

  And memory rises out of the void. Constance and Wilkie and Shelby. I cling to Shelby, wrapping my mind around her, holding her, and lining up memories of books and boats and plays and talking or just sitting not talking. I hold on to her as tightly as I can, but she slips away. I have just space enough in my head to wonder why the spell doesn’t summon my father.

  I wake to the glorious gift of a snow day, which means it’s winter break now. No school for three weeks! And that’s an eon of bonus time for our poetry project. I call Adam, but he doesn’t pick up. The snow still falls steadily. Mom reports that we may get as much as two feet.

  I curl up with a book, one I know well, and reading words I could recite from memory is like snuggling under a warm blanket. Mom is reading too, and we hang out all day in a happy silence, broken only by grilled cheese and tomato soup at lunchtime and tea later in the afternoon.

  In the blue of du
sk, the snow finally stops. I go to my room and shift the diary off my bed. It opens to a page in the middle. Adam’s handwriting. Messy and desperate. Rosemary, that’s for . . .

  I read the whole line out loud, and waves of memory break over me. Shelby and Wilkie and I need to talk to Adam. I can’t believe I forgot! And he hasn’t called, which can only mean he forgot too. The rosemary and the rhyme weren’t enough.

  I struggle to steady my shaking fingers enough to call him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Adam!”

  “Hey, Rosie.” He couldn’t sound more normal. “Isn’t this snow awesome?”

  “Do you still have the bookmark?” I ask. “Or the paper?”

  “Huh?”

  “The rosemary,” I moan. “The bookmark and the verse. You had them yesterday.”

  “I did? Sorry. I don’t have them. Hey, you want to go sledding tomorrow? Micah and some people are meeting in the morning. At the grove.”

  “Adam,” I beg. “Listen: Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.”

  “Okay.” He still sounds completely unconcerned. “That’s the Hamlet line your mom took your name from. Are we playing Rosie trivia?”

  My stomach hardens into a knot. It doesn’t work over the phone.

  “Please, Adam,” I plead. “Will you check your pockets? Please? It’s really important.”

  “For the bookmark? You can get another one,” he says, exasperated. “It’s no big deal.”

  He doesn’t even remember that he made it for me. That it was a gift. That he picked rosemary in the summer and kept it and pressed it for almost three months. For me.

  “But it is a big deal!” Tears blur my vision. “Please. Just look for it.”

  “Okay. Whatever. I’ll look for it later.”

  “Now!” I sob. “You have to look for it now.”

  “Jeez, Rosie. What’s up with you?”

  “It’s about Shelby,” I whisper.

  I already know what he’ll say.