Emily Arsenault - In Search of the Rose Notes

In Search of the
ROSE NOTES

EMILY ARSENAULT

Contents

Chicago.

A man is about to get on a routine flight.

Suddenly, he pauses. He doesnt know whybut hes got to walk away.

An hour later the plane goes down in flames.

Its dismissed as chance....

Time-Life Books commercial, circa 1987

When I was a kid, I used to stop cold whenever one of those commercials came on. If I was drowsing to my mothers game shows, Id jolt awake, sit up straight, and listen. If I was playing with my Spirograph on the floor, Id stop, stare, and let my colored pen go loose in my hand. If I was getting a snack in the kitchen, Id run back to the living room to watch. Like the Pied Piper, the spooky synthesizer music drew me in, and the stories told by the priestly sounding narrator gripped me long after the commercial was overusually past bedtime. Id lie awake thinking of the woman with the prophetic dream of schoolchildren dying in an avalanche. The matching drawings of aliens produced by abductees whod never met. The man who points a clover-shaped wire at Stonehenge, feels an inexplicable surge throughout his body, then faints. And I couldnt dismiss any of it.

There are so many hints of a world more remarkable than we ever imagined, and of abilities that we barely suspect. Send for your first volume on a trial basis and see if you can explain these things away....

It wasnt until we were eleven that Charlotte and I learned that her older brother, Paul, had had several of the books in his bedroom for years. All this time wed been passing his room, holding our noses against the smell of dirty shirts and rotting dregs of milk shakesand this treasure had been buried there. It was like finding a sacred scroll in the Dumpster behind Dennys. Turns out hed bought a subscription with some paper-route money but eventually canceled it when he got tired of the books, which werent actually that great, he said. And now he was cleaning out his bedroom, making space for a stereo he planned to buy, and was going to chuck the books if Charlotte didnt want them.

Charlotte kept her fifteen treasured volumes at the bottom of a cardboard box in her closet, covered with a stack of Highlights magazines. The books were beautiful. The textured black covers with the silver lettering made them feel very official and adult, like a high-school yearbook. And the smell of the thick, glossy pages reminded me of new textbooks at schoolwhich confirmed the seriousness of their contents. Besides, it seemed that Paul had barely cracked them. The text was difficult, but Charlotte used her top reading-group skills to decipher a few pages nearly every night. She found the most important and interesting bits for me. Plus, there were lots of pictures. Almost every day after school, we pored over the books, boring Charlottes beautiful teenage baby-sitterRose, with the dirty-blond hair and even dirtier mouthpractically to death.

But then Rose disappeared in November of our sixth-grade year, making the books even more vital to usno longer a mere source of entertainment but an investigative guide. By then we knew better than the neighbors who whispered runaway and the police who let her trail go cold. We knew better than to stop at what people arent willing to talk about. The commercials had explained that there is much that is unknown but promised that the books would tell us at least what could be known. And Charlotte and I took them at their word.

Visions and Prophecies:

November 1990

After Rose disappeared, Charlottes parents never found a replacement baby-sitter. Either they were hoping that Rose would return any day or theyd finally figured out that Charlotte was old enough to take care of herself for a couple of hours each afternoon before Paul arrived home from soccer practice.

Im still worried about Rose, Charlotte told me about a week after the disappearance had hit the news. We were sitting cross-legged on her bed, playing a halfhearted round of Rack-O.

Everybody is, I said.

Her picture was in the paper again this morning.

I know, I replied, a little annoyed. Sometimes Charlotte acted like I lived in a cave.

I dont think we should just be sitting here playing games. I think we should be helping them find her.

I wasnt surprised when Charlotte went to the corner of the closet where she kept her black books. Sighing, I reshuffled the Rack-O cards. I wasnt in the mood for the black books just now. And I wasnt sure I could handle the darkness of their contents without Roses sarcasm there to lighten it up.

But the picture Charlotte held out to me was a beautiful one, unlike anything shed ever shown me in the books before. An African woman was sitting in deep orange sand, her shadow extended behind her. Before her were two long rows of flattened sand, each about three feet wide. Within each row was a symmetrical series of boxes, drawn with raised sand borders. Some of the boxes had sand symbols built in themsmall spherical mounds, clusters of craters, finger-drawn horseshoes and crosses. Some boxes were left blank. Little sticks stuck out of a few spots on the grid. It looked like a hopscotch court, except more delicate, more beautiful, and far more important.

Its used to predict things. Its used by a tribe in Africa called the Dogon, Charlotte explained, pronouncing the tribe name like doggone. They leave it like that at night and wait for a sand fox to come and walk over it. They read the footprintswhich boxes he walks in.

What if a different animal comes? I asked, not so much because I cared but because it seemed like something Rose would have said if she were around.

Im not sure, Charlotte admitted. But the sand fox is sort of magical.

I nodded and looked back at the photo. I wished theyd also included a picture of a sand fox.

I thought we should do one for Rose, Charlotte said. We should do one to help find out where Rose is.

Yeah, I agreed. That sounds good.

In the backyard, dont you think? Theres the spot under the tree where the grass never grows.

Sure. Wherever.

Or in your yard, maybe? Charlotte suggested. Theres lots of patches that dont have grass.

Mrs. Crowe would kill me, and then my mother would kill me again. Mrs. Crowes really weird about her yard. She has dreams about dogs in her yard and then wakes up in the morning and goes out to look for the imaginary poops she thinks they left.

Youre so weird, Nora.

Im not. Its her. Charlotte didnt understand the politics of living in a two-family house. She knew nothing of grumpy old landladies. Im not making that up.

Well do it in my yard, then.

It doesnt say here what the different symbols mean.

Well have to think up our own, Charlotte said. Ones that say stuff about Rose.

And since we dont have any sand foxes around, what do we do? Wait for a dog to come by? I asked.

Funny that our roads called Fox Hill and there are no foxes around.

Probably there used to be foxes, I said. Probably they shot them all.

Who? Charlotte asked, taking the book from me.

I dont know. The Pilgrims. The pioneers.

Oh. Yeah, probably. Well, I was thinking we could try to get Roses cat over here to walk on it. Wouldnt that make more sense than Brownie, or just any old dog or cat? Roses cat probably senses things about Rose.

I dont know if Rose was very close with her cat. She never talked about him.

Teenagers dont talk about their pets, Charlotte snapped at me, as if this were common knowledge. It doesnt mean she doesnt love him.

Charlotte and I bundled up and went outside to the grassless patch wed discussed. Charlotte had brought a sketch pad for practicing symbols. She sat scribbling beneath the big maple tree while I started digging in the dirt with a garden shovel that Charlotte had found in the garage. I scratched at the ground to loosen it and in some places shoveled scoops of dirt around to even out the area.