by Nevada Barr
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For Brooks
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[viii=bl]
[1-10; next page is 11]
Chapter 1
Rose’s head drops, jerks, and she’s awake. I’ve fallen asleep meditating, she thinks. It’s been a while since she’s done that. Over the years, an ease of concentration has incrementally developed. Staying awake is—was—easy. Eyes still closed, she circle-sweeps her hands overhead, breathing in. The inner elbow of her right arm burns like a cigarette has been stubbed out on the flesh. Her muscles complain as if, instead of their own weight, each arm carries a twenty-pound barbell. Hands together, she touches her forehead. Clarity of perception, she thinks ritually. Then, hands to mouth, she thinks: Honesty in what I say and do. Hands to heart, she bows: An open and compassionate heart toward all beings.
Ritual done, she takes a moment to center herself, to be aware of being aware, before ending the session. The smell of forest loam, damp and earthy, fills her nose. Mixed with it is the faint exciting odor of burning leaves in autumn.
Rose’s eyes snap open. Golden leaves scatter a small patch of earth around her folded legs. Scarlet foliage shivers like flames on an enclosing hedge.
“What the . . .” Rose is not in her meditation room. It is not August. She looks up. Above her stretches the trunk of a slender pale-barked tree. Yellow leaves, the shape and size of coins, clatter like falling rain as a breeze plays them against a deep blue sky.
Coins begin to spin, the edges of blue growing dark. Rose drops her head into her hands, waiting for the vertigo to pass. Through her fingers, she sees her legs crossed in a half lotus. They are fish-belly white and skinny, shins knife-sharp, skin falling away in crepey folds from her thigh bones.
In August, at the age of sixty-eight, fit and fine, Rose sat on her meditation cushion. Now she is a hundred and three, no place she’s ever been before, and it is autumn.
Holy Rip Van Winkle, she thinks.
Raising her arms, she studies herself. Inside her left elbow, sore and ripped at the center, is a raw puncture wound. Several healing jab-wounds orbit it. Tracks on her arms, like a junkie. She looks down. Her chest and belly are covered in a short blue-and-white-print cotton tunic. Tree bark chafes her lower back as she shifts position. Her back is bare.
This is a hospital gown.
Fear that has been gathering like an army on the edges of her confusion pours down in a screaming horde. Rose closes her eyes and raises her hands, palms out as if to stop the barbarian invasion.
“It’s a dream,” she says. Her throat is dry, her breath puffing in rasps over an arid tongue and cracked lips.
Rubbing her face vigorously, Rose breathes deeply several times, then opens her eyes again. Still autumn. Still an ancient junkie. Still in an alien land. She slaps herself, hard: cheeks, shoulders, thighs. At the same time she yells as loud as she can: “Aaaahhhhhhhh!”
Nothing changes, except now her cheeks sting and her throat is filled with razor blades and sawdust. Thirst has become more demanding than the pain in her arm, the sickening spin of leaves more demanding than fear.
This is a dream.
Rose knows this. People don’t wake up on the wrong side of the rabbit hole. She rolls to her hands and knees. Slowly, achingly, her dream-body convinced it is that of an emaciated centenarian, she readies to stand. Arms around the tree, she pulls herself to her feet. The bark is smooth. A breeze blows cool on her bare buttocks.
Awfully specific for a dream, she thinks. This thought injects another dose of terror into her brain. She lets it pass. It leaves a trail of broken glass in her psyche. Rose has had many dreams where she knows she is dreaming. So many, she has devised a surefire test. When Rose is dreaming, she can fly. Letting go of the tree, she raises skeletal mottled arms to the sky.
Rose cannot fly.
She’s back on her knees, sticks and leaves pricking her bare legs.
Asleep, awake, in her meditation room, or in the Land of Nod, she has to have water. Never before has she been truly thirsty. This is it. Water becomes the only thing that matters. After she drinks, she will figure out what is happening.
In the ring of flaming leaves surrounding her, there is a break, a dark triangle big enough for a child—or a shriveled old woman—to crawl though.
Rose crawls through it.
On the other side is a long narrow meadow. Sun touches the grasses. They sparkle with their offerings of dew. Cars honk in the distance. Traffic hums faintly. Beyond the trees, across the cleared area, she sees roofs tucked into the riot of fall color. Rose has never been here before.
No past, no future, the present a mystery, she is groundless, a spark of life in a chunk of meat, part of the duff and twigs. This is the eternal moment of Now. Somehow, she’d imagined it would be more enlightening, less creepy.
Laughter, gay and careless, percolates through the gap in the foliage screening her from the meadow.
Holding to fistfuls of the supple branches, she totters out of her meditation lair. She pulls herself to her feet, stands swaying and blinking in the morning sun. Two boys, perhaps twelve or thirteen, both wearing small backpacks, are walking bicycles down the green. They don’t notice an ancient skeleton in a hospital gown wobbling in the shrubs.
In the side pocket of one boy’s pack is a red plastic water bottle.
In another incarnation, she might have said, “Excuse me” or “Good morning.” What she does is point and croak, “Water.” A cartoon, the tattered old prospector crawling across the desert sands toward a mirage boasting a single coconut palm, unrolls in her mind, and she laughs, a dusty “Huh, huh!”
The boys stop.
“Did you hear that?” says the boy with the water bottle.
“Gunga Din,” Rose says, and wishes she hadn’t. It will be incomprehensible—insane—to a modern boy.
“There!” The other one points a finger at Rose. “Hey, lady, were you the one screaming?”
The nearness of water gives Rose the initiative to let go of the bush. She takes two staggering steps toward the boys, both frozen, mouths agape, eyes round. Reflected in those eyes Rose sees herself as the boys must see her. Hair uncombed, leaves clinging to a filthy stained hospital gown, gaunt and wobbly and bat-shit crazy.
“OMG,” says the nearer boy, a nice-looking kid with shiny brown hair falling over his forehead, his wiry frame covered in the ubiquitous baggy cargo shorts and a green T-shirt. “You okay, ma’am?”
Rose can think of no short answer to that. She opens her mouth to say, “Could you please let me have a drink of water?” What comes out is “Unh, unh.” A withered arm with a bony hand claws at the air. The boys flinch back.
“Aden,” says the boy who has the water, “you go tell the people at the nursing home one of their patients got away. I’ll stay here and make sure she doesn’t get more lost.”
“You sure?” asks Aden, eager to get away from the specter that is Rose.
“Pretty sure,” the water boy says.
Aden straddles his bicycle.
Nursing home? Got away?
“No,” Rose cries feebly. “Help me!” Her knees give way. As she falls to all fours, the hospital gown parts in back and slides down her elbows, leaving her naked.
“Go! Go! Go!” she hears the water boy yell, then the sound of bicycle tires throwing gravel as Aden leaves.
No longer able to hold her head up, Rose stares at the grass, pantin
g like a dog.
A tentative hand lands on her shoulder. “Water, ma’am. I’m sorry there’s not much.” Gripped in a brown young hand, the bottle appears beneath her face, the spout near her mouth. Roes wraps cracked lips around it and sucks.
“You have to bite down to get the water to come out,” the boy says.
Rose bites down and, like a suckling calf, works her throat. A couple of tablespoons of tepid water reach her before a gurgle lets her know the bottle is empty. She keeps sucking convulsively until the boy gently pries the spout from her lips. There isn’t enough water to reach her throat, but her tongue is sufficiently wet not to feel like beef jerky any longer.
“Can you stand up?” the boy asks.
Rose nods. With his help she makes it shakily to her feet.
“Let’s get you fixed up,” the boy suggests. Matter-of-factly, he draws the hospital gown up around her shoulders. Moving behind her, he says, “You’ve got yourself all undone.”
Her gown is tugged straight as he ties the two ties in the back.
“Amazing boy” is all Rose can manage.
“When Dad’s aunt Clara got bats in her belfry we kept her at home,” he says. “There. Good as new.”
“My belfry is emptying. Bats are flying the coop. Mixed metaphor,” Rose says. “You—somebody—tell me where this is.” Rose feebly waves an arm and feels the gown pull open over her bottom. “This is so weird . . . It’s not summer. What—I don’t know . . .”
“You’ll be okay. Aden is going to get people to help you. Want to sit down?” the boy asks kindly.
Rose doesn’t want to sit down, but realizes she can no longer stand up. He helps her to a boulder near his fallen bike. Without his hand gripping her arm, Rose would collapse.
“Hey!” comes a shout. Two men in white coats burst out from an arch of trees a hundred yards away. “Hold her,” one of them shouts as they trot toward her and the boy.
“White coats,” she murmurs. “Where are the butterfly nets?” Terror slams into her, snatching the breath from her lungs. “No! No,” she begs, and clutches the boy’s hand. “There’s been a mistake. Don’t let them take me.”
“You’ll be okay now,” the boy says soothingly. “They’ll get you some water to drink, and get you all set.”
The men arrive. Both panting, both overweight, alike to one another as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
“I think she’s super dehydrated,” the boy says. “I gave her some water, but it wasn’t much.”
“Thanks, kid,” the nearest Tweedle says. “We’ll take it from here.”
Rose can’t run. She can barely stand.
Expertly, they flank her. Each takes an elbow and a grip on the corresponding shoulder. Effortlessly, they lift her until her toes are skimming the ground, not like she’s a person, like she’s a sack of lawn clippings being dragged to the curb.
“Wait,” Rose wails, kicking as ineffectually as a baby. “Damn you! Put me down!”
They pay less attention to her than they would to a yapping dog. In a practiced two-man scuttle, they cover ground rapidly, rushing her toward the gaping hole in the foliage from whence they emerged. The tops of Rose’s feet scrape along the ground. She bends her knees, lifting her feet to stop the damage. The men don’t notice the extra weight. Rose tires; her feet are dropping. She tries to run between them, but they are moving too fast.
The three of them shoot through a tunnel of leaves. On the other side are houses, lawns, sidewalks. Half a block away two police cars and two sedans, one white and one gold, are double-parked in front of a one-story brick building with wide glass entrance doors. A discreet sign bolted to the brick reads LONGWOOD MEMORY CARE UNIT.
Two uniformed men and four women, one in pale green scrubs, are standing on the sidewalk as if waiting for the delivery of Rose. One is an impeccably dressed woman in her seventies, tall with a straight back and determinedly brown hair. Her arms are crossed tightly, as if she is afraid a word will shatter her. Next to her is a diminutive redhead in her forties, hair blunt-cut across her eyebrows.
“I know you!” Rose screams. “I know you!” She laughs with relief. Her throat is so dry, the laugh sounds like a growl. Names, Rose needs their names, but nothing comes. The handsome older woman is a blank. When she looks at the small redhead, all that comes to mind is “bad boob job.” Trying to pull her arms free of her captors, Rose shouts again, “I know you!” The tall fragile woman turns her face toward Rose, her glasses flashing in the sun.
“You know me! Help me! For God’s sake help me!” Rose tries to plant her feet, stop the parade. The men don’t slow.
“Gigi!” comes a call from behind. Twisting painfully in the orderlies’ grip, Rose manages to look back. Hair shining in the morning sun, strong tan legs flashing as she runs, a girl races up the sidewalk from the direction of the tree-lined arch.
“Grasshopper,” Rose shouts. She knows this girl, loves this girl. Rose is so happy she babbles, unable to stop herself. “I’m dreaming. Or I’m Rip Van Winkle. How old am I? This is so crazy. I sat down. Then I woke up and—and, and I’m so glad to see you!” She laughs from sheer joy at the sight of the beloved face of her granddaughter.
“What are you doing here, Mel?” Boob Job demands.
“Just what I was going to ask you,” the elegant woman says to Boob Job.
“Did you Uber, sweetie?” the woman in green scrubs asks too loudly, too brightly—a woman trying to defuse a difficult situation.
“I was searching the greenway for Gigi,” Mel says. Rose wants to hug her granddaughter, but Dee and Dum have such short arms. “Our house backs up to it, you know.”
“Of course I know,” snaps Boob Job. To Rose she says, “You’ve caused quite a commotion. We’ve been looking for you half the night. We had to call the police.”
“Stella,” says the older woman repressively, putting a manicured hand on the younger woman’s arm.
“Well, sorry that I still care! Sorry that I think she’s still family,” Stella says hotly.
Her name is Stella. Never trust a woman with big boobs and slitty eyes. Still, Rose shouts, “Stella!”
Mel—Grasshopper—comes around in front of where Rose sags between the two men. Her eyes, her roguish smile, are so familiar, so comforting, that Rose’s eyes burn with tears.
“Don’t, Melanie,” the older woman says. “Seeing you upsets her.”
Rose is going to protest, fight the Tweedles, but a sturdy black-haired woman in a Santa-red power suit, fingers sparkling with rings, shoves a large plastic cup filled with ice and orange juice under Rose’s nose. The sides are beaded with precipitation; a bent straw sticks invitingly out of the plastic top. Everybody and everything disappears. Rose latches her lips around the straw and sucks until her cheeks cave in, swallows, and sucks some more.
“I bet she got pretty dehydrated,” says Ms. Red Suit cheerfully. “First the flu, then the night’s adventure.”
The juice is nectar. Cool and sweet, it flows over her tongue and down her parched throat. Rose has never tasted anything so good. Afraid it will be taken from her, she drinks as fast as she can. The straw slurps in the ice cubes at the bottom. Liquid painfully swells her shriveled stomach. Still, she gasps, “More.”
“More?” asks Red Suit. Suddenly Rose is hypnotized by the woman’s eyebrows. By their artistry. They are gelled and brushed and painted until they are as exquisite as the antennae of a luna moth. Then Rose flies out of her body, sees it slump, lifeless in the hard male hands. From above, she sees herself as a rose mandala sand painting. Wind comes. The sand eddies, blows into tiny tornados, the pattern scattering.
“Poison!” she screams, juice running down her chin. “They are poisoning me!” With a gust of sand that resembles a human arm, she slaps away the plastic cup and watches it fly in slow motion from the beringed hand.
“Just a mild sedative,” the sturdy woman says. “She is so agitated. I was afraid she might harm herself.”
Wind takes all
that is left of Rose, trailing it in pale blues and pinks and golds. Then all of it is gone. Rose is gone.
Chapter 2
Out of a coil of snaking dreams an answer rises, floating into a window as small and dark as that of a Magic 8-Ball, a child’s toy. Rose doesn’t know what the question was. The answer is consciousness. Rose is conscious.
Barely oblivious, she thinks vaguely.
Fog curls around the tiniest thread that is her and carries it away into the darkness.
An hour, a day, a year later, voices call her back. Not by name, by shared humanity. Or maybe merely noise different from the humming of her brain.
Voices in her head.
Voices in one’s head is always bad.
Open your eyes, she thinks, and tries. No dice. Panic lends her strength. With a mighty effort, she wins a narrow slit of vision, red-rimmed top and bottom and sliced by blades of black, as if she peers through a prison window at sunset. Above is a colorless sky. Glare from an unseen source backlights tombstones leaning precariously over her. Rose considers screaming, but can’t remember how that is done.
“How in hell did she get out?” a woman asks.
“She wasn’t in lockdown. They moved her to general when she got the stomach flu,” another woman answers. “Her medications got flushed from her system. She must have woken up and decided to leave us.”
“See that it doesn’t happen again.”
Not markers of the dead, these are people. The voices aren’t in her head. This is a good sign.
Rose feels as if she should recognize the speakers. They are somebody. Who exactly drifts in the fog clogging her mind. Turning from the slit of vision, she closes her eyes, trying to penetrate the mist. Each tentacle of thought unravels like smoke in the wind.
“Too bad it didn’t turn into pneumonia, the old person’s friend.”
“Stomach flu rarely turns into pneumonia,” a woman says dryly. “The point is, she vomited up her meds. These don’t stay in the system long. They need to be kept to a certain level. Besides, these things can happen too fast and too often. We need to be careful of our special needs patients. When we get her back in the Secure Community, and get her medications stabilized, I’ll be a lot more comfortable.”