In Search of the Rose Notes (22 page)

“That’s cute,” I said.

“Yeah,” Joe agreed. “It’s not the whole story, though. She got bored of it pretty fast. But then, a few months later, we were all at the bus stop and she said to us, ‘Where were you guys last night? I was SOS’ing you for like two hours.’ As if we’d been sitting up there every night, just on the off chance she’d be blinking her lights again.”

“That’s weird. You think she was in some kind of trouble?”

“Trouble? No. She was a little sad because her parents were fighting, but no real trouble. Rose liked to dramatize sometimes.”

You’re such a drama queen, Rose. Do you know that?
I thought of Aaron and Rose at the fork in the road.

“Well, it’s still a nice story,” I said.

“Yeah,” Joe said, frowning. “I think I need another cigarette.”

And with that he turned from the window and started back down the stairs.

“He used to spend a lot of time up here,” Toby whispered. “Right after Rose disappeared. Thinking maybe that light in her living room was going to magically start blinking some night.”

“Jesus, Toby. That’s really depressing.”

Toby gazed out the window for a moment before moving toward the stairs.

“Yup,” he said. “It is.”

“Toby?” I said, and he turned to me.

I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You think Joe and Rose were ever… more than friends?”

Toby stepped closer to me again. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, maybe a little.”

“A little?”

“Well. They never dated. That wouldn’t have worked, since she was so popular and all. And she was dating that Aaron guy for most of high school, right? But there was a little crush, I think, yeah. A mutual one. It was fairly obvious.”

“Huh.”

“Why do you ask?”

“It was just a thought. Just the way he talks about her, is all.”

Toby’s gaze met mine. “Have the police talked to you yet?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“They ask you about my brother and Rose?”

“No. Honestly, they didn’t ask me much of anything.”

He nodded, slapped me amicably on the shoulder blade, and then headed for the stairs.

I followed him down into Joe’s room. Just before we walked out of the room, Toby lifted his hand up instinctively to turn off the light. Finding it already off, he pulled it quickly away. The way he hovered his hand over the switch made me notice the wallpaper above it. The cream color was blotchy from years of cigarette smoke. Looking closer at the purple-blue bunches that decorated it, I saw that they weren’t flowers at all. They were blueberries.

“Blueberry wallpaper,” I mumbled, following Toby to the hallway but stopping there.

“Yes,” he said. “Someone must’ve gotten a good deal on it. They used it there, in my room, and in the downstairs bathroom. And inside the linen closet.”

I went farther down the hall and peered into his room again. Of course he was right. I glanced over at the bed, where we’d fooled around so many years ago.

“I didn’t remember that,” I murmured. “That it was you who had blueberry wallpaper.”

“Yeah?”

I stepped into the room and touched one of the tiny blueberries. I thought of the blueberry wallpaper in one of the
Looking Glass
poems. The more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed Sally Pilkington could’ve had anything to do with it.

“I’ve been in this room. How could I have forgotten that?”

“The one time you were up here,” Toby said, “we were a little drunk. And not drunk enough to sit staring at the wallpaper.”

“Could I have been that crazy?” I said, looking at Toby. “Could I really have forgotten?”

Toby reached out and touched the top of my hand gently, just for a moment. “What’re you asking? Crazy for forgetting the wallpaper?”

“No. Not only that. For everything. Everything I did back then. High school, I mean. Everything I remember and maybe a bunch I don’t.”

Toby shook his head again, then gave me his gentle one-and-a-half stare.

“You weren’t crazy. You were fucked up. There’s a difference.”

I struggled to hold Toby’s gaze. Just a few minutes after he’d suggested—however innocently—that I could crash at his house, there was maybe more in this gaze than I knew how to handle. I’d wondered a few times what would’ve happened if I’d chosen to stay with him on prom night. Would anything be different now if I had?

I pulled my hand to my side.

“I know,” I said. “Thanks for recognizing the difference. Listen—I ought to get back to Charlotte’s.”

I needn’t have rushed back. When I returned to the Hemsworths’, Charlotte’s car was gone. She’d left a note for me on the kitchen table:

Nora, So sorry. Paul called. Wanted to talk again, so I’m meeting him for coffee. Hope to be back soon. Charlotte

I turned on the TV and watched a couple of reruns. I called her cell phone. No answer.

I fell asleep on the couch waiting up for her. When I awoke after midnight, her bag was back in the kitchen, her car back in the driveway, her bedroom light shut off. She apparently hadn’t wanted to wake me.

June 7, 1997

Toby and I weren’t invited to any post-prom parties, but we didn’t much care. Toby’s gearhead friends weren’t prom types, and I didn’t really have any friends anymore. Toby and I hung out on the swings of the elementary school, getting buzzed on drinks we’d mixed in his dad’s Ford pickup: vodka and lemonade in innocent-looking soda bottles that could be dumped quickly if someone caught us on the playground. It was my first taste of alcohol, and I was happy to be experiencing it alone with Toby rather than with a bunch of people throwing up and passing out around me.

When we got tired of the swings, we walked back together to the old Ford. I was carrying my shoes, enjoying the feel of the grass against my feet. I allowed myself to press closer to Toby as we walked to the truck, feeling I was luckier than the girls at those parties. Held tightly against Toby’s tuxedoed chest during the last slow song at the prom, I’d peeked around at the other girls and their dates and felt that Toby was actually one of the more attractive guys there. He certainly looked more mature than most of the others anyway, with his muscular physique and dark facial features. I felt older and wiser than the other girls for looking past our stupid primary-school judgments and seeing this about him. I felt freed somehow, noticing this. One month left at Waverly High, but I was already essentially free. And the vodka only accentuated this feeling.

As we’d approached his house, Toby assured me that once his dad was passed out on a Saturday night, he’d never wake up. Our late-night encounter with Joe lessened my giddiness somewhat, weighing me down with embarrassment as we mounted the stairs to Toby’s room. But by the time we were sitting together on the bed, listening to Joe’s car pull away, the feeling started to return. I liked Toby. And I didn’t care what anyone else thought anymore. That was the best part of it.

“Are you going to kiss me?” I asked, letting the buzz say what it wished.

“It’s easier if you don’t ask,” Toby admitted.

“Uh-huh. I see,” I said, laughing. “But I’m not so sure I want to make it easier.”

He tilted his head and touched his lips to mine. I pulled away for a moment, surprised by the moisture of his mouth and the wormy feel of the tip of his tongue.

“It’s okay,” he said, looking alarmed by my reaction.

“I know,” I said, mostly to hush him. “Okay” was one of the least romantic words I could think of, and it was awkward on his lips.

I turned to him resolutely, and we sank back into the pillows. We kissed until it didn’t feel weird anymore.

“Nora,” he said, stopping to brush my hair away from my face.

“Be careful,” I said, giggling. “You’ll flatten out the curl.”

“You don’t need that curl anymore, do you?”

“I’m not sure. Are we all supposed to still have our hair done when we go for breakfast at Friendly’s?” I asked.

“I don’t think it matters. Since neither of us is invited.”

I laughed as if this statement were hilarious, then kissed him again, wondering if I was pushing this new vodka personality beyond its reasonable limits. Was it the vodka talking, or had I just always wanted to act this way? Maybe, behind the hair and deep down beneath all this thick silence, I was the happy-hooker type.

We rolled around for a while, our hands moving only up and down each other’s hair and backs.

Toby stopped again, propping himself up on an elbow.

“So, Nora.”

“Yeah?” I replied, trying for a coy smile.

His own smile faded. “Do you think my house smells funny?” he asked. He’d apparently mistaken my expression for wrinkling my nose.

“Well… no,” I said, unconvincingly.

“It’s the dirt cellar that makes it smell that way,” he said. “No matter how much you clean the house upstairs, there’s all that moisture down there. Big mildew problem.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Well, that’s okay. It’s an old house, you know?”

He was a little drunk, too. I don’t know why I’d assumed he’d have an iron tolerance when I’d never heard of him ever drinking. Maybe because his brother and his dad were both known to pack it away pretty well. But here he was talking about mildew when we were supposed to be kissing. I kissed him again.

“Nora,” he said.

“Yup?”

“Why have you been so quiet? I feel like you used to talk more when we were kids. When was it you stopped, exactly?”

“I don’t remember now,” I said, feeling the happy hooker slip away. “But I’m talking now, aren’t I?”

“Yeah,” he said, moving closer to me again. I could feel his breath on my face.

“Yeah,” I repeated.

“When you don’t talk, people start thinking you’ve got a bunch of secrets.”

“No,” I said, gazing at his muscular arm and beautiful hand. “They stop thinking about you at all. That’s what they do.”

“Not me,” he said.

“Okay. Not you.”

“Can I ask you something?” he said. “I mean, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want.”

“Okay.”

“Why did you do it? Last year? When you took those pills?”

My face was already red from the alcohol, so I didn’t need to blush. I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking about it. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Yeah? I’ll bet.”

I thought for a moment that he was being sarcastic. I sat up.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean that like it sounded.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said, shrugging. “You’re actually the only one who’s really bothered to ask me straight out.”

“Is there some secret?” he wanted to know.

I wasn’t sure I understood the question, so I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “There’s no big secret. I was depressed, I guess. Or… that was part of it.”

“Depressed why?”

I gazed into his slightly crooked eye and tried to ignore the other one, which was studying me with unaccustomed intensity.

“I don’t know if I can explain—”

“Well, there must’ve been
something.
Something specific that made you do it.”

I stared at him, then reached behind his neck and pulled him toward me. I let him kiss my neck, hoping it would help him forget his question.

He tightened his arms across my back. “I wanted to tell you when it happened. I wanted to tell you I get it.”

“Get what?”

“I think I get it about sort of half trying it and seeing what happens.”

“That’s what you think I was doing?”

“You’re still here, right?”

“Don’t do that,” I said, pushing his arms away. “You don’t get anything.”

“Okay,” he said, pulling back from me. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

We lay facing each other for a few minutes, not touching.

“I do get it, though. I get it that something could eat at you like that. Slowly, till you’re not sure how the hell you’re going to get away from it.”

“ ‘Eat at you’?”
I said, offended that such prosaic language was being applied to my heretofore very, very serious mental breakdown. Even my mother didn’t talk about it like that.
“ ‘EAT at you’?”

“Umm, yeah,” Toby said, shifting his eyes nervously, as if he were dealing with a crazy person. “Umm. That’s what I said. ‘Eat at you.’ ”

He put his hand on my back, pulling me close once more. He felt warmer now than he had before. He was starting to sweat a little. “I think we both know. We both know what that’s like.”

And just as he said it, I thought I caught a familiar odor rising from him, of mothballs or monkeys or both. I pushed his hand away again. This was Toby, I remembered suddenly. Toby with the dumb laugh. Toby whose big, strong hand could pull me back into the muck of my pathetic Waverly youth, from which I was just now barely starting to emerge. With or without his knowledge, that hand wanted to pull me back into a darkness from which I probably couldn’t escape twice.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what I mean?” he said pleadingly. “I think you would know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t understand anything. Everyone thinks if you’re quiet, you’re sweet and sensitive. Or if you’re fucked up, you can understand everyone else’s problems. Well, it’s not true.”

I stood.

He sat up and stared at me. “What’s the matter? You’re taking off on me?”

“I don’t think I want to do this.”

“We don’t have to do anything. Who said we’re doing anything?”

“I think I need to go home now.”

“I never asked for anything… . You know I wouldn’t. I just want to talk.”

“I don’t like talking about it—the pills, the hospital.” This was a lie, as I’d felt oddly relieved when he’d asked me about it. I’d wished for a while now that someone would allow me to explain—
really
explain. But it was the closest thing to a real excuse I could think up for my panic.

“We don’t need to talk about that. I’m sorry. Stay, Nora. Please stay.”

I shook out both my hands nervously, as if flicking off water. “I can’t, Toby. I can’t.”

As I said it, I realized it was I who was about to start crying, not him. It had been me all along. I started to back out of the room, mortified.