Tangled in Time Read online

  If anyone wanted Rose to settle in, it didn’t help that she had to ring the bell to be let into the house. It sure didn’t make it feel like home. Her mother had trusted her with a key to their house back on Sylvan Lane.

  Everything was wrong here. She walked up the three steps and rang the bell. At the same moment, a cat leaped onto the broad top step. Its fur was tawny bronze, just the color of the changing leaves.

  “Now where did you come from, cat?” Rose whispered. She noticed it had only three legs. The cat cocked its head to one side and looked her up and down as if to ask Rose the same question. Its limpid green eyes flashed with a slit of gold light. On this crisp day, the creature seemed to be the essence of fall. September, that’s what you should be called, Rose thought. Then there was the loud click of the lock being turned in the door. The cat was gone! Betty stood in the doorway.

  “Oh, hello, Rose.” Betty blinked as if Rose were a stranger trying to collect money for some cause or asking that a petition be signed to protect the habitat of an endangered toad. Or maybe Betty had a fleeting moment of thinking that Rose was simply an unexpected guest, which was exactly what she had been just twelve days before.

  “Betty, there was a pretty cat here just a second ago.”

  “Oh, that three-legged one. Yes, it hangs around. I don’t believe in feeding cats. They can become a nuisance.” She pursed her lips and shook her head in disapproval.

  Rose believed in cats—in feeding them and cuddling them. She did not find cats a nuisance in the least. She found them soft, quiet, gentle, and for the most part accepting. She loved the feeling when a cat plopped in her lap. She often wondered how they could be so comforting without ever saying a word. How they could seem to listen, to understand. Her mom had bought a cat for her when she was quite little and Rose had named it a rather stupid name, Moon Glow. But hey, she was four. They had called her Moony. But Moony had died three years ago. It turned out she had feline epilepsy. Her seizures became worse and worse, and finally one day she staggered into the kitchen, started shaking violently, and keeled over, dead. Rose hadn’t been there to see it, but she dragged every single word of how it had happened from her mom. Then they collapsed on the couch in the den, her mom folding Rose in her arms, and they cried and cried.

  Her mom had made a big deal out of Moon Glow’s funeral. She had invited Rose’s friends over and served lemonade and cupcakes. There were pictures of Moony on a table with a bouquet of flowers. They had buried her in the backyard with a stone marker that her mom had found someone to engrave. It read “Here lies our friend Moon Glow. Indeed a bright light in our lives. RIP.” Rose had actually made herself a mourning outfit. All black, of course, it was made from a slip of her mom’s and part of a witch costume she had worn the previous Halloween. All very drapey and topped off with a black straw hat she had found in a thrift shop with her mom, to which she had attached a black veil. She wore it for three days and then got tired of it. Her mom had taken a picture of her standing by Moony’s grave. She remembered her mom saying something about her looking like a teensy Jackie Kennedy at President Kennedy’s funeral.

  Then, just three years later, all the lights in Rose’s life went out. And here she was at 4605 North Meridian Street in Indianapolis, Indiana.

  There was no funeral for Rose’s mom, because there were no remains. There was a memorial service. She could not even remember what she wore to the service. Rose was barely conscious during it. She felt as if the minister was speaking about a stranger.

  “Your grandmother is in the greenhouse,” Betty said. “Why don’t you go out and visit her? Or do you want to go to your room first and freshen up?”

  Freshen up? Who used words like that, except old people? Rose nodded, not an answer so much as a dismissal, and then stepped into the large, shadowy entrance hall. From the tall windows, the occasional shaft of amber light fell on the polished wood floors. A staircase rose majestically with a lovely curving banister that cried out for a kid to slide down it. But here was another hope dashed: there was a stair lift fitted to the banister that made it impossible to slide down. That was how her grandmother ascended to the upper realms of the house where her bedroom was, as well as various guest bedrooms, a study, and a small library devoted mostly to books about plants and horticulture.

  “You know, dear, your grandmother is often at her best when she’s in the greenhouse. Very alert when she’s fiddling about with her plants,” Betty said as she closed the front door behind Rose.

  “Don’t call it fiddling, Betty.” Her grandmother appeared in the arched doorway beneath the stairs, leaning on her walker. “It’s anything but fiddling.” She was swathed in shawls. A pair of reading glasses dangled from a ribbon around her neck, and her thin, white hair looked as if it had been tossed with salad tongs, then pinned with what appeared to be chopsticks. A calligraphy of wrinkles creased her cheeks. Her eyes were a pale, almost colorless blue. She was neither thin nor fat but seemed rather shapeless. It was her feet, however, that fascinated Rose. She wore old-lady shoes that were black and laced up tight. Her feet were puffy, oozing over the edges of the shoes like rising bread dough in a small pan.

  “Come along, dearie. Betty can have Cook send in a snack.” Rose had noticed that the live-in cook was only ever called Cook—she wasn’t sure if it was actually her name or not.

  For the past twelve days, Rosalinda hardly seemed to acknowledge Rose, let alone the death of her mother, and now she wanted her to “come along”? Rose shook her head. “I have homework to do,” she said, wondering: Why is she asking me now? She had spoken of Rose’s mother as having been misplaced, not dead. Had she grieved at all? There was certainly no sign of grief. Did being eighty years old with dementia give one a pass on feelings?

  Rosalinda was already pivoting with her walker to return to the greenhouse. “Oh, come along, we’ll only be a minute.”

  But it wasn’t a minute. For that was the first instance that time started to go a bit catawampus, as her grandmother would say. It was there in the greenhouse that time would begin to strangely warp.

  Chapter 2

  Dirt Memory

  “It’s a Tudor greenhouse,” Rosalinda said, emphasizing the “Tudor” like it held some special meaning for Rose. She lifted her walker over the sill of the door, and then together Rose and Rosalinda entered the balmy glass space. The warm, humid air was laced with scents. It seemed as if she were untangling a skein of fragrances. There was definitely a rose fragrance, but as she followed her grandmother, she detected an exotic, spicy smell that began to nip at the sweetness of the roses.

  As she stood beneath the soaring glass roof, she felt as if she had entered a crystal castle. Indeed, there were three intersecting roofs, as there were three different areas of the greenhouse. Large cupolas floated like bubbles at the junctures where the roofs met, their glass panes tinted different colors. There was a calendar propped on an easel indicating which plants, depending on the time of the year, were to be hoisted on a rope-pulley system into the cupolas for exposure to the light. But there were winding staircases to these lofty realms as well. “This is amazing,” Rose said in a hushed voice, forgetting herself. “What are those?” she asked, pointing up to one of the cupolas where vines with white clusters of star-shaped flowers swayed in a spectral breeze.

  “Jasmine, a tropical.”

  Rosalinda was now perched in her planting chair, which was adjustable so that she could raise or lower it a foot or so, depending on which table she was working at. The tables ran for thirty feet down the center of the space and held tray upon tray of small plants and seedlings. Rosalinda explained that when they grew big enough, these plants would “graduate” to another area. This explanation began their longest conversation to date.

  “Uh . . .” Rose was not quite sure what to call her grandmother. Granny? Grandma? Her best friend back in Philadelphia had called her grandmother Nana. Cook and Betty called her Mrs. A. Surely she shouldn’t call her that. She supposed
Grandmother would be okay.

  “Grandmother, why do you call it a Tudor greenhouse?”

  “Because that’s what it is. It was an architectural style back then. And it’s not a kit, mind you. I designed it. After I built mine, they stole the design and made build-it-yourself kits. But none are like mine. Never could be. You can’t stuff a century into a kit.”

  “A century?”

  “Sixteenth,” Rosalinda mumbled. Her reply was barely audible.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” she snapped. “I need you to thin out those ragged robin seedlings over there in that tray.” She pointed. Her finger was gnarled and bent, the knuckles swollen into knobs. “But before you do that, get me one of those pie tins and put some water in it from that pitcher. I have to soak some seeds overnight. Gives them a good start. Then you can do the thinning out.”

  “Thinning out?”

  “Yes, pluck out some of the little ones. The bigger ones need breathing space. Survival of the fittest, you know.”

  But if she was ripping out the weaklings, was it survival of the fittest or murder of the frailest? She looked at her grandmother again. She was over eighty and seemed pretty frail, but something had changed since her grandmother was in the greenhouse. She seemed more alert. Even her eyes had lost that vague look they always had. For the first time, Rose could see a resemblance to her mom.

  “Ragged robin—funny name.” She began pulling out the weaklings. It was an oddly restful activity. She felt as if she were allowing the other ones to breathe a bit.

  “Nothing funny about the plant,” Rosalinda replied. “The leaves make a fine tea, and their flowers are delicate and lovely. With any luck they’ll be in bloom by Christmas. Let others have those hideous poinsettia plants.”

  “You don’t like them?”

  “I loathe them,” Rosalinda snarled. “Their immodesty offends. Wanton showgirls!”

  Rose almost giggled. She sneaked a look at her grandmother, who had a most determined expression in her eyes now. She continued thinning out the ragged robin. Within a few minutes she had finished. The notion of studying for the upcoming spelling games dissolved. They no longer had spelling tests but games where you did stuff like rearrange the letters in a word to get a new word, like “carouse” out of “discourage.”

  “Is there something else I can thin out, Grandmother?”

  Rosalinda looked up. The trace of a smile played across her face and something halfway between a snort and a chuckle escaped. “Try that seedling tray next to it—the love-lies-bleeding.”

  And from there Rose went on to another table where there were more plants with names like heartsease, cupid’s dart, scarlet snowcaps. Rose felt as if she were walking through a poem, or perhaps the shadows of very old legends. Stories swirled about her. Cook came and brought tea and small cakes. The afternoon faded into evening and Cook came again, this time with two trays of food, but neither Rose nor her grandmother was particularly hungry. Rose had learned how to take the seedlings that had become “plantlings,” her grandmother’s word, and move them into larger pots. It was a delicate operation. “Always let some of the old soil cling to their roots,” Rosalinda instructed.

  “Why is that, Grandmother?”

  “Memory—dirt memory. Nothing comes clean into this world. It shouldn’t. Spick-and-span, pristine, perfect—ridiculous notions.” She had held up a young fern. “You see this fern here?”

  “Yes, Grandmother.”

  “Ferns are among the oldest plants on Earth; older than time, they are. Now just think if I had cleaned off all these roots. It would be as if I had sliced them from their history. From their great-great-grandmamma’s and grandpapa’s spores.”

  “Spores?”

  “One-celled little bitty things. They’re found on the underneath part of the fern frond. They’re in charge of reproduction. No romance. They can do it all by themselves. But still there’s a history. So you always start them in a nice little mixture of vermiculite, peat, and some soil that their ancestors have grown in. People always say that when you die you can’t take it with you. But with plants, especially very old plants, you can take it with you. So old dirt is good dirt. Let the soil cling—otherwise they’ll wither and die.” She paused and inhaled sharply. “It’s almost as if they get lonely.”

  Rose shut her eyes. An ache swelled within her. Rosalinda reached out and touched Rose’s hand. Above, a flash of moonlight filtered through the glass ceiling. And outside she thought she heard the meow of a cat.

  “You know, my dear, I’m too old, but that staircase winds up to the central cupola. It’s lovely on the night of a full moon. When shafts of moonlight fall through the tinted panes, it’s as if there’s a garden of light blooming up there. Go see for yourself. And say hello to the queen’s petticoat. It’ll have to be lowered tomorrow. We don’t want the poor thing moon-blinked. You know too much moonlight can do that.”

  “What’s moon-blinked?”

  “Slight confusion and then . . .”

  Rose was already starting up the spiraling staircase. She felt the pools of colored light falling down on her. An intensity of scents swirled through the air. There were cinnamon and rose fragrances, then the spicy scent again mingled with something like lilies.

  “And then what, Grandmother?” she asked over her shoulder as she climbed the stairs.

  “Won’t bloom in its proper season—it will make a surprise appearance, too early or maybe too late,” her grandmother was saying from below as Rose ascended the staircase. “It will go catawampus. Plants can do that when confused.”

  The blossoms of the petticoat plant were lovely, tiny bells no bigger than a baby’s fingernail. They hung on long green strands and swayed in a ghost of a breeze. The tinted glass showered them in an array of colors. Standing at the top of the winding staircase, Rose felt as if she were in the midst of a blooming rainbow. A calm stole through her. All the terrible words, the terrible images etched in her mind since that horrible day when her mom had died seemed to fade away. She felt free, and it was as if for the first time she could breathe again. She didn’t care what those three horrid girls thought of how she dressed. She wasn’t going to change because of them. She might even start writing her blog again. For some reason, her grandmother’s words about spores came into her head: “Let the soil cling—otherwise they’ll wither and die.” She had lost so much, but she couldn’t lose herself. She would wear her favorite skirt, one she had made out of a huge sweater her mom had bought for herself and then never worn. It had big deep pockets that Rose turned inside out, which made flounces on either side. She’d wear it with yet another bow tie—a big floppy one that she had made from a tablecloth she’d found in a vintage shop that specialized in lace. It made her feel good planning her outfit. She just wished the boxes with her sewing machine and other stuff would come. Caroline had promised to send them right away.

  Rosalinda was gone by the time Rose descended the staircase. Betty had come to take her upstairs to bed. Outside, however, she thought she saw a fleeting bright shadow. Could it be that cat, September? Her glass was still filled with milk from her snack. She could pour it into one of the little pie tins that were stacked for soaking seeds. She quickly filled the tin and then walked to a door at the back of the greenhouse and set it outside. She couldn’t see the cat, but she sensed it watching her.

  Rose left the greenhouse through the passage that connected it to the entry hall, where Betty was helping her grandmother into the stair-lift chair. Her grandmother leaned toward Betty and whispered, “Who’s that girl?”

  “It’s Rose, your granddaughter.”

  “Oh, of course.” But there was no hint of recognition. Rose sighed, saddened. It wasn’t the first time since she’d arrived that her grandmother stared at her as if she were a stranger. An intruder. The vague look in her eyes had returned. There was a hum as the stair lift began to glide upward on its rail. Just before it reached the big curve, Rosalinda raised her hand
and gave a faint wave, opening and closing her palm like a baby might wave bye-bye.

  “Bye now,” Rosalinda murmured.

  Chapter 3

  The Court of the Mean Queens

  As soon as Rose set foot in the lunchroom the next day, she saw Carrie, Lisa, and Brianna huddled at a table. Their eyes landed on Rose like vultures spotting carrion, and then Carrie said something that made all of them look to each other and giggle. Rose saw Lisa and Brianna slide their eyes toward her again. They all laughed even louder. Rose turned away and spotted Myles sitting at a table with two other boys. She decided immediately to join them after passing through the cafeteria line.

  “Hi, Myles.”

  “Hi, Rose. Come on, sit here with us,” Myles said as Rose put her lunch tray down. “Rose, these are my friends Anand and Joe. They’re in Mr. Beatty’s homeroom. Joe’s a champion ice-skater.”

  “Junior champion.”

  “Cool,” Rose said.

  “And I’m a junior tiddlywinks champion.” Anand offered.

  “Really?” Rose said.

  “NOT!” the three boys said in unison.

  “Anand’s a mathlete, and so is Myles. They’re just modest,” Joe said.

  “Mathlete? Like on a team?” Rose asked.

  “School team,” Anand replied.

  “I . . . I’m not on any team,” Rose said. Her voice felt a little quivery. She was actually tempted to say, “I’m an orphan.” But that would be so lame.

  “What do you like to do?” Myles asked.

  “Uh . . . sew. Design stuff.”

  “I knew it!” Joe exclaimed, and high-fived Anand. “That shirt you wore the first day of school. I bet you got it in the boys’ department at Schockman’s, and the bow tie, perfecto!”

  “Schockman’s?”

  “The department store downtown.”