by Nevada Barr
“You can’t go back to the Applegarth house,” Mel says as Rose drinks, walks, and drinks again. “That cat-door, closet hidey-hole is too lame.”
“Lame,” Rose concedes, recapping the bottle but hanging on to it.
“Our house?”
“Can’t,” Rose says. The moonlight, along with the light pollution from the city, makes the path easy to see. Rose urges Mel nearer the trees where they are less obvious.
“Sure you can. I gave Uncle Daniel permission to go to a friend’s to watch the Panthers game.”
“Not Daniel, the guy with the knife. Too dangerous before, way too dangerous now,” Rose says. “If they don’t find me, eventually he—they—are bound to check your house.”
“Do you think you killed that nurse?” Mel asks. Both are whispering, walking as quickly as Rose can manage through the shadows at the edge of the greenway.
“I sure hope not,” Rose says. “Murder, or at least accidental homicide. The nurse probably has three adorable children. Their fireman father will bring them to the courtroom every day so the jury can see their tearful little faces while they decide how long to put me away for.”
“Not to mention what it would do to your karma.”
Rose snorts. “That ship has sailed. I finally get a precious human birth and I fritter it away on a measly homicide.”
“The drugs didn’t kill her last time,” Mel says.
“That’s right.” Rose is somewhat cheered. “They didn’t even land her in ICU.”
On the other side of the greenway is a dense growth of underbrush over a creek or ditch. Beyond it is the dead end of a street. Mosquitos, ticks, poison ivy—all the toxins of nature are probably represented in that wet, dark cut, but it will hide Rose until she is sure she can get clear—or the indigenous critters drain her of all of her blood.
She walks with Mel another couple hundred yards to where the hobbit gate is hidden in the rhododendrons. “Here’s where I get off,” Rose tells Mel. “I’m getting no nearer your house than this. Be sure and set all the locks, and don’t answer the door unless you know who it is.”
“I won’t take candy from strangers, either,” Mel says. “I’ve got an idea. Can I have my phone?”
Rose has not let go of the tissue box. The cardboard is crushed, corners smashed, one seam bursting with white tissues. She gives it to Mel. Mel rips out the phone, hands Rose back the cardboard and paper, and then begins tapping the cell phone with her thumbs.
“It’s nearly dead,” she accuses.
“You act like it’s a kitten,” Rose grumbles.
“Will you be okay here alone for a while?” Mel asks.
“I was going to hide out in the ditch back there a ways until the coast was clear, then go the Motel 6 route,” Rose says. She can’t hide a shudder.
“I’ve got a better plan. Go inside the gate. Nobody can see you there, and you won’t get eaten by bugs and snakes. I’ll be back in a while.”
“Going to keep me in suspense?” Rose asks.
“I’ve got to see if the plan can work before I get your hopes up,” Mel replies. She dumps the bike, takes Rose’s arm, and escorts her into the shadows of the bushes. Rose winces as she reaches for the gate’s handle, the raw flesh on her wrist pulling, the blood oozing on the damaged skin.
“Are you hurt?” Mel asks.
The concern in her voice is a balm. “The only thing that really hurts is trying to avoid the pain,” Rose says. Inside the gate, she sinks down on the grass and leans back against the fence. Sitting is wonderful. “I’m going to breathe it in and embrace it.”
“Really?” Mel asks dubiously.
“Yup.”
“Does it work?”
“Every now and then.”
A moment’s hesitation; then Mel says, “All right. I won’t be long.” And she is gone, back onto the greenway, the gate closing quietly behind her.
Head back against the rough boards, Rose breathes in the pain, trying to embrace it. There is a lot to get her metaphysical arms around. Her hip feels as if she partially dislocated it when she fell in the foyer of the MCU during her mad dash to freedom. Her wrist stings and burns. Both elbows ache from her fall from the table in the activities room, then her dive to the sod when Mel came up on her.
Trying to rise above the tumultuous demands from her body that she drown herself in a hot tub and a bottle of wine, she lets the night settle into the pores of her skin, breathes serene darkness as far into her lungs as they will allow without making her start hacking again. Sipping water, she observes waves of terror and violence breaking inside her, chilling her breastbone, prickling her scalp, tightening her throat.
Adventure costs more than it used to. Or maybe the price is just paid in a different currency.
Karma is. Is. That is fact.
This night Rose has created a mountain of the stuff, broken it into a million pebbles, and thrown them into a million ponds. Reverberations trembling through her, the nurse, Mel, Chuck, the candy striper. Like the red light flashing from the silent alarm, waves will go out and out, touching more lives: Daniel, Flynn, Marion.
In every city and town, on every continent, others are also mindlessly dumping avalanches of rock into billions of ponds. Rose can feel the waves gathering into a tsunami, a global panic attack.
The First Noble Truth: There is suffering.
As far as Rose can see, the storm of suffering she has been blown into, and is madly contributing to, is nowhere near over.
Would it stop if she went back to the Longwood MCU and let whatever they were doing to her be done? In the plus column, they would stop sending knifemen after her. Mel would no longer be drawn into night ops to save poor Gigi’s wrinkled old posterior.
Of course, Rose would be drugged to the gills and “probably wouldn’t last out the week.”
Would the world be better or worse off if she went gently into her next life as a vole or a banana slug? Mel would mourn, bless her, but she’d be alive to do it.
Or not.
Rose isn’t the only sentient being setting potentially deadly forces in action. Maybe she can stop her part of the ride, but Longwood will continue to do whatever it is they are doing, racking up a karmic debt that makes hers seem paltry by comparison.
Rose is not important enough to be drugged and murdered for her own sake. There is a profit motive somewhere, either to an individual or the institution. If it is profitable to hasten one little old lady into that good night, it will be ever so much more profitable to hasten a dozen, or a score.
Follow the money. Everybody says that. Rose can’t fathom where the money is, let alone track it. To Longwood, she is worth seven grand a month on the hoof, if she is alive, but Longwood has a waiting line. What with the baby boomers beginning to lose their collective marbles, dementia care is a seller’s market.
If Longwood doesn’t profit from the demise of the elderly, then it is an individual or individuals using Longwood. The profit must be significant to be worth the risk. But then, how great a risk is offing demented elders? Probably not a lot. Loved ones would drop a tear and breathe a huge sigh of relief, the body would be interred or cremated, and room would open up for the next victim.
Caring for the aged is harder than caring for little kids. Children will stop wetting the bed, begin speaking in full sentences, become more help around the house. With the old it is the opposite. Rose’s mother died of complications from dementia in Rose’s living room. Hospice had given Rose all the morphine she needed. No one did a postmortem, no police came, no autopsy was suggested. Hospice didn’t ask for the unused morphine to be returned. If Rose had wanted to off her mother, she could have, no questions asked.
People grow old, they sicken, they die. Sometimes assisted living becomes assisted dying. Rose accepts that. Accepting what is doesn’t mean giving the nod to ongoing evil. Even the Buddha, if the stories were true, killed a man during one of his incarnations: A pirate was set on murdering five hundred people. In his
great kindness, the Buddha slew the pirate, taking on the karma of one murder to save the pirate from the unutterably bad karma of five hundred murders.
Not that, in all honesty, Rose gives a flip about the next lives of whoever is intent on ruining hers. Compassion is all well and good—Rose is a hundred percent in favor of it—but it has been a heck of a night. Besides, after all the effort she and Mel and Marion have gone to getting hold of the files, it would be a shame not to even look at them.
She won’t go back to Longwood.
Nor will she sit here uselessly waiting for Mel to return. Muscles are starting to set up, concretized by trauma and neglect. Either she gets up now, or she’ll have to be hoisted with a forklift, all in a chunk like the statue of Jeff Davis. Gingerly, she makes it to her feet. She tries a Warrior Pose to get the energy flowing. Too much pain to breathe in and embrace at that given moment; she settles for shuffling up the grassy knoll.
Her invasion of Longwood’s turf will undoubtedly inspire another attempt to get her back in the MCU, or quiet her in a more permanent fashion. Finding Applegarth untenanted, they will come here. She will take first watch. At present, watching is all she can fathom doing with any degree of success.
Next to the fence, beneath a stand of enormous hostas, a few yards short of the crest of the slope, she lies down on her stomach. Lizard-like, she works her way through the thick leaves until she can see over the top of the hill. Chin on hands, she surveils the house and part of the street beyond. If she sees danger coming she can at least trot back to the greenway and warn her granddaughter. Given the trouble Rose has exposed the girl to, this is a pitiful scrap of protection. When the best one can do is pitiful, that is what one does.
Prone on the cool grass, sheltered by night and sweet foliage, Rose relaxes for the first time she can remember. Pain pours forth into the earth, and with it the last of the strength she’s been clinging to with her fingernails. She’s lost her husband. She’s been locked away in an Alzheimer’s ward. She’s had the flu. She’s been in a brawl with a big nurse. She has slithered beneath a planting of hostas like a cottonmouth, to watch for a person who might come to kill her. Drugs she doesn’t even know the names of still enjoy half-lives in her tissues. Prescriptions she’s been on for years have been scrubbed from her system by time and illness. Her brain floats in a chemical soup concocted by evil toddlers in a devil’s pharmacy.
Swathed in the surreal, her mind drifts away from her body. This is the moment she is in. Every moment is a once-in-a-lifetime event.
This one is a doozy.
Incrementally, she evanesces until she is one with the cosmos. That, or she dozes off for a bit. The faintest crunching brings her back. Lights off, a small dark pickup truck is gliding around the corner. Directly across the street, it swerves to the curb. The engine is turned off. No one gets out. Her friend from the rooftop has been sent to watch her granddaughter’s house.
Astral body, etheric body, and physical body crash back together.
This moment is primitive: predator and prey.
Rose is exceedingly tired of landing on the wrong side of that equation. She inches backward. Dead leaves and grass tailings push up the legs of her scrubs. Long pointed hosta leaves quiver as she slides under them, their tips mimicking brown recluse spiders crawling down her neck.
She hears the truck door open, then, very softly, close again, a quiet thump and a click. Parting the night-silvered leaves, she watches as a man gets out of the vehicle. But for a bandage around his right hand creating a splash of white, the intruder is unchanged: black ball cap, T-shirt, cargo shorts, deck shoes with no socks. Considering the rates Longwood charges, one would have thought they could afford a new, undamaged thug.
He wears no gloves, and he isn’t carrying a knife. Does that mean he is here merely to case the joint, as the saying goes? See if this is where Rose has gone to ground after fleeing the MCU and, perhaps, Applegarth?
The man pauses for a minute, looking both ways, then makes a beeline for Rose. Her spectral self leaps to its feet and flees. Her corporeal self does not. There is no way he can see her. He must just be heading for the darkest, blindest side of the house, as she had done. Rose eases backward until she can no longer see him. Whipping around like a frightened snake, she continues down the slope crawling on her belly. The knoll isn’t high enough to eclipse an upright human being.
She is less than an alligator-length from the hobbit gate when she is hit with a gust of laughter. This horror is followed by the joyous sound of young voices outside the gate. Mel is back. The gate bangs open, and a pale oval flashes as Mel lifts her face, catching the light.
Chuff, chuff, chuff, train sounds, as if an engine huffs uphill. Rose staggers to her feet. Resting has been a mistake. She can hardly stand, let alone run. The knifeman’s round head appears from the street side of the slope, dark moon rising. He is coming fast, his deck shoes eating up the distance.
“Go!” Rose shouts. Mel flinches, startled, then, suddenly as if she’s a magician’s assistant, is whisked from view, gate still agape. Vision narrows until all that Rose can see is that black rectangle in the dark wall of fence. Sucking breath in choking gasps, legs turned to jelly, she propels herself through the gate.
Mel is coming toward her through the dark tunnel of shrubs.
“No!” Rose wants to yell, but only manages a strangled whisper. She yanks the gate closed behind her. “He’s coming,” she breathes as she drops to hands and knees. Flailing in the darkness, hands clawing through the duff. Her fingers close around a sad excuse for a stick, a foot long and no bigger around than a broom handle. On her knees, Rose shoves the stick through the hobbit gate’s handle, letting it protrude on both sides in a makeshift crossbar. Bracing her spine against the gate, Rose digs her heels into the ground, a human barricade.
“I’ll hold the gate,” she gasps. “You go.”
Mel grabs her arm.
“Go!” Rose pleads. “I can’t run anymore.”
“C’mon,” Mel urges.
Fighting her granddaughter is only putting the girl in greater peril. Rose forces her protesting body away from the gate and, Mel pulling her arm, stumbles forward.
The knifeman crashes into the gate.
Rose and Mel squawk simultaneously. Then Mel is snatched out of the bushes, Rose along with her, losing her footing and falling to her knees. The hobbit door rattles as the thug tries to pull it open or push it out. The stick will break before the door, Rose knows. When Harley built a thing, it stayed built.
The thug yelps, then curses. Rose hopes he is right-handed, hopes he jammed the bloody stump of his severed finger into the metal as he tried to force the gate. Hopes the pain will slow him. It can’t slow him enough. Not long enough for Rose to find her feet, let alone walk.
Hands catch her. She is lifted up. Mel on one side, a boy on the other.
“Come on.”
“Don’t hurt her.”
“Get her on.”
“Hold on, Gigi.”
Chatter boxes Rose’s ears as she tries to help them and fails. Then she is astride the back of a bicycle. “Hold on to me,” the boy says. “Keep your feet up.”
Mel races away on her bike. The bike Rose is on lurches forward. Rose lifts her feet, legs out straight, and clings to the boy’s waist.
A loud cracking sound brings her head around. The knifeman hurtles out of the bushes, stops, turns his head in Rose’s direction. All he will see is the back of her disappearing into the moonlight on a bicycle. Rose thinks of E.T. silhouetted against the full moon on a bike, and wild irrepressible laughter bursts from her aching lungs.
From behind she hears: “Crazy bitch!”
CHAPTER 20
“You’re in an igloo?” Marion sounds annoyed, as if Rose is enough trouble without dragging housing into it.
Rose lounges back on a bed of animal “skins” of thick soft acrylic, a zebra and a tiger. A polyester wolf skin, complete with stuffed head, lies in front of a fl
ap that, when open, shows a neatly trimmed yard.
“A teepee,” Rose corrects. It is a real teepee with poles and canvas walls. The walls are decorated with boyish paintings: stick-figure Indians, stick-figure buffalo, stick-figure cowboys on stick-figure horses. Rose loves it. She’s slept eleven hours straight and feels downright festive.
A cause for happiness.
“Mel’s pal Royal has it pitched in his backyard. He was careful to inform me that he personally was much too old for it. His little brother, a mere lad of ten, is now the chief of the neighborhood tribe. The brother is at camp for a couple of weeks. Mom and Dad took the opportunity for a grown-up getaway. Royal, fourteen and a rising freshman, was left to guard the home front under the watchful eyes, and deaf ears, of Grandma. I am the criminal in residence for the nonce.”
Rose stretches her right arm out. Her wrist is bandaged and wrapped in gauze. The scrapes on her elbows have been cleansed, treated with Neosporin, and patched with bandages. All is done as prettily as a Christmas box from Lord & Taylor.
Mel and Royal took first aid in seventh grade. On their homecoming the previous night, while Grandma watched a rerun of Dexter at top volume abovestairs, Rose was smuggled into the basement.
Peroxide, secrecy, bandages, and cold pizza and grape juice by candlelight in the life-sized teepee have changed Rose’s perception of the night from a bad, geriatric acid trip to a delightful camp-out, missing nothing but s’mores.
For years Rose has read various texts affirming that life is but a dream, all phenomena essentially empty, devoid of a separate individual existence. Before she’d fallen asleep, there had been a second or two when she almost understood those concepts.
“What’s with this Royal person?” Marion asks.
“Thomas Hardy’s coincidental meetings on the heath are nothing compared with Charlotte’s greenway. As it happens, Royal, Mel’s friend, is the kid that gave me water the first time I broke out of the MCU.”
“Then turned you in to the men with the butterfly nets,” Marion reminds her.