by Nevada Barr
Carrying her slippers—both worn to wads of abused felt—Rose crosses the backyard. Grass is cool and healing under her feet. As she crests the low hillock she sees a brick platform. In its center is a giant green egg, the size of a dinosaur egg, made of glistening ceramic, the grill, Flynn’s prized barbecue.
* * *
Wind gusts through her cranium. Memories flutter up like dead leaves caught in a dust devil. Steaks and corn, Mel toddling, her mother laughing, a long-necked bottle of beer in her slender hand.
Crawfish. Flynn and his dad, Harley, watching the green egg as if it might hatch. Beyond them, on the lawn, Rose and Nancy—Mel’s paternal grandmother and Harley’s ex-wife, the woman who had come to the Memory Care Unit with Stella—playing croquet against Izzy and Mel.
Oysters, Flynn in a heavy coat and Santa hat. Harley and his ex, Nancy, helping Mel with her first real bicycle. Rose and Izzy fleeing into the house out of the cold.
Hot dogs and beans, Harley at the grill, Flynn leaning against the garage, a hand over his eyes. Rose in the playhouse holding Mel while she cries. Izzy three months in the ground, dead of breast cancer.
* * *
When Rose’s eyes clear, she is standing by a playhouse, built to half scale when Mel was six. Her hand rests on the frame above the side window. To her surprise, the lights are on in the kitchen and living room of the main house, spilling white squares onto the concrete of the drive.
Sidestepping into the heavy darkness, where the garage shadow overlaps the playhouse shadow, Rose forces herself to focus. She escaped the facility after midnight. Fatigue suggests she wandered the greenway for eight or ten hours, but it was probably closer to two. Too late for the family to be up; too early for anyone to be going to work.
“You don’t care!” a woman screams. “You have everything you want!” The shattering sound of glass breaking against a hard surface sharpens the words. The porch door slams open with such force, Rose flinches. From within, a humpbacked creature, with an oddly shaped head the size of a garbage can lid, is vomited out.
It shoots across the patio, running straight at Rose.
CHAPTER 7
Paralyzed with fright, Rose squeezes her eyes shut and shrinks deeper into shadow, her shoulder pressing against the playhouse wall, her head tucked beneath the low eave.
Bang!
The wall shudders.
Bang!
The eave thrums against her skull.
The ungainly monster slams the playhouse door open, barges inside, and slams the door shut. Rose blinks, trying to recover a few of her wits. Night’s quiet reknits around her. No more shouts or smashings come from the main house.
Silent on bare feet, she slips around the corner of the half-pint house and stands on the faded welcome mat. The door is four feet high, the small window at the level of her chest. Faded curtains, ragged at the hems, are looped back with rotting ribbon. Rustling, like a mouse burrowing in silk, can be heard through the door. With one knuckle Rose raps shave-and-a-haircut gently on the wood.
“Go away!” is shouted from within.
Rose turns the knob and eases the door open an inch or so.
“I said go away! Leave me alone!” Something soft fluffs into the door and falls.
“Grasshopper, it’s me, Gigi,” Rose says softly.
There is no answer. Rose opens the door. “Cease fire,” she whispers. Stooping, she steps through, closes the door, and kneels. The ceiling is only five feet high, the entire house seven feet square. “Is the lady of the manor accepting callers today?” Rose asks, as she’d been instructed when Melanie was seven.
“Gigi?” An incredulous whisper emanates from a dark nest of girl, pillows, and blankets—undoubtedly the mass that formed the monster’s head when Mel ran from the house.
“It is indeed Gigi,” Rose says.
“Did you wander off again?” Melanie asks cautiously. “I’d better go get Uncle Daniel.”
Uncle Daniel: Rose recalls Daniel is Harley’s younger son, her other stepson.
The amorphous shape evolves into a girl sitting up, her legs crossed beneath her.
Adrenaline abandoning her, Rose’s exhaustion hits in a rising tide. She leans back against the door, crossing her legs as Mel does. Rose has used this playhouse many times. Melanie ceded it to her as a meditation retreat when she visited. As a child, Mel was delighted with the cushions, the incense—which Rose hardly ever burned at home—and the candle. For safety’s sake, the candle was only allowed when Rose was present. Often Melanie meditated with her, though seldom for more than a few minutes.
“This is heaven,” Rose says, and sighs deeply.
“No,” Melanie says carefully. “This is a playhouse. Let me get Uncle Daniel. Dad’s out of town.”
“May I tell you a story first?” Rose asks.
“I guess,” Mel replies dubiously.
Rose planned the transformation of bed clothes to street clothes, the poisoning of the night nurse, the theft of the keycard, the escape, and the search for Mel’s house. In all that time she never planned what she would say when she got there.
“Gigi,” Mel prods hesitantly.
“It’s a long story,” Rose says. “Why are you hiding out in the playhouse?”
“Uncle Daniel and Stella are fighting.”
Uncle Daniel and Stella—Rose remembers that after Izzy died, Daniel, chronically underemployed, would stay at the house with Mel when Flynn was managing trade shows in other cities. No warm fuzzy memories soften the few mental snapshots she has of Stella.
Not like those she has of Izzy. Izzy died. Rose had remembered that Isabelle—Izzy—was dead, but that memory was as a headline, news, no personal connection.
This remembering is visceral, a soundtrack of laughter and weeping over a flash flood of images: a lovely woman tickling a baby, choosing little dresses, leaving for work in green scrubs, blond hair in a ponytail. Then chemo and hair loss; Izzy making a game of buying and wearing wigs to help her daughter cope. Izzy being relentlessly cheerful and upbeat. Too many images to see; Rose feels them like a bloom of butterflies. Even dead, Izzy is love. Tears run down Rose’s face. She is glad the playhouse is dark.
“Like there was ever a time they were not fighting,” Mel continues. “But this one was World War Z meets The Battle of the Titans. Stella comes here when she gets a mad on, and I have to listen to it. You’d think by now she’d be finished ranting. Remind me never to get married.”
“Daniel is married to Stella,” Rose says. Stella is Rose’s other step-daughter-in-law. Another scrap of the past falling into place.
“They split up almost a year ago. Don’t you remember?” Mel asks too gently.
Don’t you remember? The three scariest words in the English language. Rose doesn’t. “I’m remembering a lot of things,” she says defensively. “Not everything, but a lot.”
By the faint light from the windows, Rose sees her granddaughter tilt her head back, graceful as a lily, her face toward the low ceiling. “Well, it’s old news. Or should be. Uncle Daniel left her the house. It’s a rental, but she got it, and all the stuff in it, but she keeps turning up here. She wants more money. I think she’s taken some of Mom’s things. Little things, clothes, makeup, like that, but still…,” Melanie says.
Fury at Stella flushes through Rose, waking her up. It is followed by annoyance at Flynn. Nearly two years. It was time he put away his dead wife’s things.
“Stella says she comes when Dad is gone because Uncle Daniel is too lazy, stupid, mean—you pick the adjective; she’s used them all—to look after me. Like Stella cares for me!”
“I care for you” is all Rose can think to say.
“I know,” Melanie sighs.
“I’d hide in the playhouse, too,” Rose says.
“You are hiding in the playhouse.” The caution is back in Mel’s voice. “Gigi, are they looking for you? If you’re still sick, they’ll have to take you back with them.”
Fear flutters in R
ose’s belly, but it is too tired to take flight.
“If you get me a drink of water, and promise not to rat me out yet, I will confess all,” Rose says.
Mel scrabbles in the bedding, then crawls across the floor to put a water bottle into Rose’s outstretched fingers. Rose is so excited, her hands are shaking. “Open it for me?”
Melanie does. Rose tips the bottle back and drinks until it is empty. “Nectar of the gods,” she says with a sigh.
“Boy, you were thirsty!” Melanie says. “Want me to get you another? It won’t get you out of confessing,” she warns.
“No. I’m good for now, but thanks. First, can I ask you a question?”
“Ask.” There is a scratching sound, then a flare as Melanie lights the candle on the miniature table beneath the window.
Rose fills her eyes with the tousled perfection of the girl. Mel is at the very end of childhood. In weeks, maybe days, she will be gone into the labyrinth leading to adulthood.
“Ask,” the girl repeats.
“What’s today’s date?”
“October eighteenth,” Melanie says.
“How long have I been in…” Rose doesn’t want to say the words “old folks’ home” or “Alzheimer’s ward.” “… the facility?”
“Actually inside Longwood?”
“Yes.”
“Not that long. A month or so,” Mel says.
“A month! Four weeks?” Rose gasps. “You’ve got to be kidding! Let me get this straight. One day I am perfectly sane, then, a month later, I’m in a lockdown ward? Didn’t anybody think that was a wee bit odd?” Anger, fresh and full of energy, wells up where, for such a long time, there has been only confusion and fatigue. Pure energy. Power. Rose welcomes it.
“You’d had a shock with Granddad’s death,” Melanie explains.
Shock with Granddad’s death. Granddad, Harley, Rose’s husband, dead.
Rose remembers.
* * *
At the Hobbit gate, she’d recalled the name, Harley, and seen a handsome white-haired man in a tool belt. Now she feels Harley, his arms strong around her. She watches the look of joy on his face as she walks up the steps in the backyard where he waits with Father Jenkins, Flynn beside him as best man. Harley hanging a swing for a toddling Mel, building a playhouse, sitting with Flynn as he drinks vodka and cries.
Then she is in the new house in Charlotte, surrounded by boxes. Flynn and Melanie come to the door. Drying her hands on a dish towel, she opens it. The moment she sees their faces, she knows.
“Do you want to sit down?” Flynn asks.
“No. Tell me.”
“It’s Dad,” Flynn says.
Rose stops breathing.
* * *
Sitting in the candlelight of the playhouse her husband built for their granddaughter, Rose waits for grief to come and take her, as it took her when the memory of Izzy’s death returned. It doesn’t. There are no memories after Flynn told her the news. Harley’s death is neither real nor unreal. Along with the rest of her, it is fogged with drugs. Rose has been robbed of her grief, left a widow without sorrow, only a feeling that when the other shoe drops …
Rose needs her anger back. She fans it. “How could anybody think that it was normal that a completely sane human being would go totally nutso-fruitso in four weeks!”
Melanie moves her gaze from Rose to the small window above the table where the reflection of the candle’s flame dances.
“What?” Rose demands.
“You know, Gigi, it’s not like you were really completely normal,” Melanie says miserably. “You’ve always been, well, you know, kind of eccentric.”
“I am not in the least eccentric,” Rose declares. The tide of anger, though generic, is still buoying her up. “Eccentric. What a crock.”
“You meditate,” Melanie says defensively.
“Oh for heaven’s sake!” Rose explodes. “Everybody meditates. Meditation is the new Prozac.”
“You’re always standing on your head everywhere,” Melanie continues doggedly.
“That’s yoga! Yoga is not eccentric. Yoga is so mainstream, studios have Mommy and Me classes.”
“You’re a painter and a poet.”
“A lucrative painter. Very lucrative,” Rose says holding up a finger. “And a published poet, thankyouverymuch. That is not eccentric, that’s downright miraculous.” Rose is listening to her own voice as if it were that of the Oracle at Delphi. The words are true, a verbal form of automatic writing. They bespeak her own memories, the “facts” that make up her “self.” She is coalescing out of the fog, taking on form.
“Stella said you smoke marijuana,” Mel says.
Rose throws up her hands. They smack into the ceiling. “It’s medicinal!” she shouts. Her own noise scares her. She squirms around until she can look out of the window. Her racket has not alarmed the main house; the porch light does not go on. The screen door is not thrown open.
“You wear African pants with the crotch at your knees and carry a parasol with purple sequins on it,” Mel rushes on.
“Nobody in New Orleans thinks I’m eccentric,” Rose counters.
Melanie rolls her eyes. “I wouldn’t use that defense in Crazy Court.”
Crazy Court.
Rose thinks about that. A few hardy crickets sing. Candlelight flickers. The incomparable peace of familiarity and love settles into the playhouse. Rose’s eyes grow heavy. Almost, she can believe that Harley is alive, and she has never been lost, confused, and incarcerated.
“I’m from New Orleans,” she says. She is from New Orleans.
“Were. You and Granddad moved here a couple months ago. For me. And Dad and Uncle Daniel. Now you live here.” To Rose, this is not good news. To spare Mel’s feelings, she keeps that thought to herself.
“You’re a Buddhist, but you smoke and drink and eat meat,” Melanie adds.
“I guess I’m not a good Buddhist.” Rose thinks about that for a moment. A Buddhist. Things that didn’t make sense before don’t make sense now, but she accepts that. She slumps against the wall. For a while neither she nor Mel speaks. Both gaze silently into the candle flame.
“I smoke?” Rose bursts out.
“Not very much,” Mel says quickly. “Four cigarettes a day.”
“That’s right!” Rose says ecstatically. “I smoke! I remember that now.”
“Camel nonfilters,” Melanie says.
“Aha. I am a purist.”
Melanie puts her palms together, thumbs to chest. Solemnly, Rose does the same.
Bowing, Melanie intones, “Anything worth doing…”
Without thought, Rose finishes, “… is worth overdoing,” and bows back.
“You are so wise, Gigi Rinpoche,” Melanie says.
“It is so, Grasshopper,” Rose says. Both laugh, and in that moment Rose believes that all the stars in the firmament do not twinkle as beautifully as those in her granddaughter’s eyes.
“I think you should forget that you smoke,” Melanie says.
“Nope!” Rose replies. “I love smoking. Now that I have firsthand experience of living in a nursing home I may up my intake to four packs a day. Better my odds of dying before the proverbial hits the fan. At least free, I can choose my own drugs, and they won’t be mind-numbing. I can’t go back.”
“It’s okay, Gigi.”
“They were giving me something to make me seem demented.”
Leaning her chin on her hands, Melanie puffs out a long breath, making the candle flame dance erratically.
“What?” Rose asks again.
“You won’t like it,” Mel warns, shaking her head.
“Best get it over with,” Rose says. After the adventures of the last few days, she doesn’t think she can be more shaken than she is already.
Of course, she is wrong.
“It wasn’t just eccentricity—we’re all used to that. You started acting, you know, like, demented, long before Dad got you a place in Longwood,” Melanie says apologetica
lly.
Rose feels as if she’s been trampled by gnus, not only because her theory of drug-induced insanity is smashed to smithereens, but also because it is so painfully obvious. Of course she was demented before she was put in the home. Had she not been, she would never have allowed it to happen. She would have hired a lawyer, called the police, flown back to New Orleans: all the things a sane person would do when faced with unwarranted influence in her life.
Tears fill her throat. Terror freezes them. The lump is so big, it is painful when Rose swallows it. Had she been alone she would have wept or raged, torn her hair and rent her clothing. Because of Melanie, she wraps herself in a forced calm. Whatever has happened, however she’s been brought to the brink, it is over, she tells herself.
“Now it’s your turn to tell me what’s going on,” Rose says. “What led up to my—to your dad putting me in Longwood’s MCU.”
With the innate flexibility of youth, Melanie curls down over her folded legs, her forehead touching the floor. From this pod-like posture, she begins her tale, her voice so low, Rose has to concentrate to hear the words. “After Granddad was killed, you started acting kind of odd—I mean, we were all shocky and miserable, but it was like it went way deeper with you, changed you. No big surprise, but you got weirder and weirder.”
“Granddad was killed?” Part of Rose’s brain knows her husband is dead. Part of her brain does not. “As in murdered?”
“You don’t remember?”
Rose can only shake her head.
“Do you want me to tell you? You totally refused to talk about it back then. You would practically run out of the room when people asked.”
Rose doesn’t know if she wants to remember or not, so she just shakes her head again.
Mel looks up, a pale oval in the supple crumple she’s made of her body. “You told Grandma Nancy you were having trouble sleeping, that you’d wake up drenched in sweat. Your legs would kick out sometimes like you were spastic. A couple times you said you saw people walk by in the hall when there weren’t any people there.