Beautiful Dreamer

Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

Rosemary.

The word pulsed through my mind as I walked across Mrs. Hummel's front lawn, as Logan drove me home, as I unlocked the door to my house and slipped into the empty foyer. It bounced around in my skull as I attempted to read my Psych textbook. It gave me so much grief that eventually, I slammed my book shut and clomped down the stairs to the kitchen.

I wasn't really hungry, but I opened the fridge anyway, staring at its contents: fruits, whole wheat bread, leftover curry and rice. Nothing remotely interesting. The freezer yielded even worse results, and I sighed.

Humming softly to myself, I padded across the tile floor in slippered feet, shivering slightly in the cool air of the kitchen. I let my hand run across the birch cabinets, tracing the wooden edges until my fingers came to a stop at the final door.

Rosemary, Svana's voice echoed in my head. Mrs. Hummel's favorite spice.

Evidently, in my search for an explanation, my subconscious had led me to the one place where I might find something to help me.

My mother's spice cabinet.

I made a racket in opening the door, drawing Zipper from the sun room. Her nails clicked against the floor as she trotted over to me, rubbing her soft fur into the fleece pink fabric of my pants. I nudged her gently with my calf, pushing her back as I stuck my head into the cabinet.

Immediately, my senses were assaulted with the overwhelming scents of many spices mingling together in the stale air. I sneezed twice, wiped my face on the back of my sleeve, and attempted to blink the water out of my eyes.

With breath held, I began to swipe at the containers, reading their labels and shoving them aside. I got the feeling that they were in some kind of order, because basil was lined up before chamomile, but I disregarded that completely. There was a primal hunger gnawing at me: a deep-seated starvation for knowledge that willed me to face the possibility of my mother's wrath.

I went through row after row, shelf after jam-packed shelf, from garlic to mint to thyme, mumbling the names to myself and sometimes knocking the canisters off their perches. Zipper leapt around me, whining, but I just shushed her and continued on. I don't know what I was hoping to find by going through the cabinet, but I needed to and so I did and I didn't stop until I'd gone over every spice and herb twice. Then I checked again, because I was sure that I had missed it.

Rosemary. It should have been right there, between parsley and saffron. But I'd gone through already, and there was nothing. No space between the two to say that we'd run out. Just nothing. Rosemary wasn't there.

“What are you doing?” The incredulous sound of my mother's voice pricked me in the spine, and I whirled around to find her standing in the kitchen doorway, purse in hand. Her mouth was gaping open, aghast, as she regarded the state of the kitchen.

Worry built in the pit of my stomach as I, too, took a look around. Somehow, in my frantic search, I'd upended several containers onto the ground, sending flakes of sage and garlic and who knows what else onto the floor. Other bottles had shattered completely, leaving a mess of glass shards and spices. Zipper, who had accidentally licked up some pepper, was in the corner, coughing.

“Are you going to answer me?” my mother demanded. Her bun was slipping loosely down the side of her head, matching with her deteriorating mood. I frowned at her, not moving from my knees. There was some sort of irrationality in my calmness, a heavy weight in my stomach that made my words solid.

“We don't have rosemary,” I stated, staring at her. “I just went through the entire cabinet, and we do not have rosemary.”

My tone implied the need for an answer, and looking back, I think I must have sounded crazy. Perhaps that explains the look of horror that passed across my mother's face—at least, that's what I assumed at the time. Because at my words, a flicker of fearful disbelief crossed her features, leaving her expression several degrees more frigid than before.