by Nevada Barr
Rose watches a sponge in boxer shorts cavort on the television screen.
At seven thirty, Karen emerges from behind the desk to place her key card onto the black plastic. The glass security door opens. A young woman carrying a tray of snacks, boxes of juice, and a Diet Pepsi comes in.
“You do love me!” Karen says as she takes the soda and puts it on her desk.
The young woman is really a girl, no more than fourteen. She wears a pink-striped dress. Candy striper. A snippet of memory, a snapshot out of the dark, coming from nothing and leading to nothing, flickers in Rose’s mind.
The girl gives each resident a box of juice, then helps them to skewer a foil hole with a tiny straw and unwraps their snack-packs of crackers and cheese.
Rose sips and munches along with the others, eyes fixed on the television. Mentally, she notes the comings and the goings, trying them against her nascent plan.
Shanika returns. Residents are being carted away, down a short hall with six doors opening off of it. Shanika comes to Rose’s chair. “Are we ready for a shower?” she asks cheerfully.
Wisdom—or animal instinct—keeps Rose from responding either in words or looks. Instead, she stares passively at nothing while the nurse helps her out of the chair and shepherds her down to the second door on the left. The room has leaf-green walls. An old rocking chair sits beneath the single wire-reinforced window. A coverlet, printed with roses, covers the bed. It is accented by a flounced throw pillow. Rose recognizes these things. They are her things. This is her room.
Shanika shuffles Rose into the bathroom and efficiently eases her onto a stool in the shower.
“A shower will make you feel a lot better. It always does me. Of course, I’m a bath girl at heart. I like nothing better than a good long soak in a hot tub.” While she talks, the nurse strips off Rose’s gown. It is pink with puffed sleeves and has tiny flowers machine-embroidered on the yoke.
“Good girl!” Shanika exclaims. “You didn’t wriggle out of your panties.”
Rose keeps her face impassive as Shanika lifts her an inch off the stool and, with a practiced move, slips her undergarment off.
Diapers. They are soiled.
“You see,” Shanika said. “Because you didn’t take them off, you are all clean and dry. Diapers are our friend.”
The nurse steps on a lever to raise the wastebasket lid. The offending article is dropped inside.
With great gentleness, telling Rose what she is going to do before she does it, Shanika shampoos Rose’s hair, then washes her body.
The water feels so good, Rose is too grateful to suffer any but the slightest embarrassment. Shanika makes her feel cared for, as if she is a human being who actually exists. Rose is tempted to say, “Thank you,” but she doesn’t. Drugged orange juice, toxic red capsules, and capture are now part of her limited stock of memories.
In bed, in the same nightgown and a clean diaper, Rose realizes the simple act of moving from bed to bath has completely robbed her of physical reserves. When Shanika is gone, and the hall lights are dimmed, she forces herself to get up. Retrieving the day’s capsules from the pocket of her robe, she looks around the room, then hides them behind a box of latex gloves in the drawer of the bed stand. Exhausted, she creeps back between the sheets.
“Do you want to see her?” Wanda is speaking in the hall on the other side of the half-open door to Rose’s room.
“Not necessary.” Another woman, the one who wishes she had died of pneumonia.
“I think we’ve gotten her stabilized,” Wanda says reassuringly.
“Good. Her family is afraid she may not last much longer.”
“Are they?” Wanda asks.
“Yes, very afraid. Absolutely terrified that she may not even make it through the week.”
Rose listens, her head cocked to one side. They don’t say anything more. She hears the subdued hush of the security door swooshing shut like the sound of distant surf.
Absolutely terrified she may not even make it through the week.
Hackles, residual from time in the jungle, prickle on the back of Rose’s neck. She runs her fingers through her hair, scratching her scalp to get the blood flowing. Is she paranoid? Or delusional? People with delusions can become violent if those delusions are attacked.
It occurs to Rose that normal people do the same thing. No one changes their mind. No one ever says, “Thank you for pointing out what an idiot I am, and how smart you are. From now on I’ll be a better person.” Tears start to flood Rose’s eyes. She wills them back into their ducts.
Not make it through the week.
A threat? An old lady stops breathing in the middle of the night, or trips over the rug in the Alzheimer’s ward, breaks a hip, and dies of complications, no questions are asked. Rose’s mother died in Rose’s living room. No police came asking if anyone had put a pillow over her face. Old people die. Her mother was senile. She was old. She died.
Though the room is cool, sweat trickles between her breasts in a slow chilling crawl.
Whether she is delusional or visionary makes no difference, Rose decides.
Sobs boil up her throat. Shoving the corner of the pillow in her mouth, she stifles the noise.
Pad, pad, pad. “You okay, Ms. Dennis?”
The night nurse. That is who will come if she cries. Rose takes a deep cleansing breath and sighs it out.
Crazy or not, she will rescue herself. Working out the details of just how that will be accomplished, she falls asleep.
Rose wakes early, climbs out of bed, and puts her diaper back on. The orderly, not the one from the previous night, but the other one, brings breakfast. Scrambled eggs and sausage; Rose eats every scrap. Rest and food are making her stronger, cleverer, more human.
Shanika comes to remove the tray. “You’re looking much better today, Ms. Dennis.” Rose says nothing, and does not make eye contact, afraid she will reveal a hidden streak of sanity or, worse, give in to the nearly overwhelming urge to explain things, set the matter straight, talk through all this nonsense.
It is hard to remember that in this place, Rose is a confirmed lunatic. As recently as yesterday—she is pretty sure it was only yesterday—she ratified that diagnosis by behaving like a madwoman. Hard to remember that after the orange juice, she toppled back into oblivion.
Did she need sedating to keep her from mad killing sprees? Rose doesn’t think so. This is not a hospital for the criminally insane.
While Shanika putters about, straightening the room, Rose imagines talking to her.
“You know, I’m not actually demented,” Rose would say casually.
“Not demented! Isn’t that good news. Who should I call to come get you?”
“I don’t know,” Rose would admit. “But, you see, I was a bit off—”
“And that’s why they found you meditating in the bushes without any underpants on?”
“There was a reason for that,” Rose would say with a smile. “I was resting on my way . . .”
“On your way where?” Shanika would ask kindly.
“I don’t know, but that’s not the point. The point is, those red capsules you give me—and the orange juice—are what make me seem demented.” A nice smile here.
“You drank your orange juice this morning,” Shanika will note.
“Not all orange juice, just some. Never mind the orange juice.” Rose will be so patient. “Here’s the thing, since I’ve stopped taking the red capsules, my mind has gotten much clearer. I think I’m being intentionally drugged.”
“For how long?”
“Yesterday, of course. Before that . . .” There is no before that. Not yet.
“Is that why you hid in the bushes all night?”
“No. I must have . . . I must have needed something. So I . . .”
“Why didn’t you just press the bell so we could come help you instead of running away in a backless hospital gown?”
“I don’t know. Look.” She’d show Shanika the track marks,
the capsules in the bed stand.
“You’re off your meds!” Shanika would say. “Let me get my supervisor.”
Rose is shaking her head back and forth on the pillow.
“Are you okay, Ms. Dennis?” Shanika asks.
Rose nods. She comforts herself with the knowledge that sanity is only a perspective agreed upon by social consensus. A handful of people thinking that when they die Hale-Bopp will beam them up is crazy. Ten million thinking Jesus will beam them up is the Rapture.
A stretch of the Noble Eight-Fold Path opens before Rose:
Right View: Her mind works better when she does not take the red capsules.
Right Action: Don’t swallow red capsules.
Focus on a plan.
* * *
Lunch is over. Rose is parked in the activities room. Four more red capsules have been added to her cache in the bed stand. With food, and without drugs, her body and mind are continuing to gain strength and acuity, but complex ideation is laborious. Trains of thought are difficult to keep between the rails. The difference between thinking and dreaming is not yet always crystal clear.
Mr. Buschbaum is working on his puzzle. Chuck and Rose have been given computer printouts of a lighthouse, and colored markers. The markers have a wide brush-like tip at one end and a fine pen point at the other. The colors are jewel tones: emerald, ruby, lapis, cobalt, tourmaline, amethyst. Rose is drawn into the play of light and color and space. Around her life fades. Vaguely she is aware of people talking.
“My, what a busy bee.”
“That’s pretty incredible.”
“Mr. B, you’ve knocked it all apart.”
“I heard she was this big-deal painter when she was younger.”
“Cookies and juice?”
“That is too amazing. Are you sure you’ve given her all her meds?”
Light changes quality, grows dimmer, is replaced by the unlovely glare of an overhead.
“Got to clean this up, Ms. Dennis. Time for supper.” A thick-fingered, slug-pale hand drops on Rose’s.
Color, space, and light kaleidoscope, then shatter. Rose looks around, blinking like an owl. Chuck’s lighthouse has three red stripes. A scribble of blue represents the sky.
The paper in front of Rose is covered with ink. A storm front looms up from a tangerine blaze that slashes a sea flecked with whitecaps. The lighthouse is limned by the glow from the drowning sun, the near side black in shadow. A salvation of yellow-white light cuts from the tower beacon to die in the bloated belly of the clouds.
Stunned, Rose stares at it. Since she was six, she has had what her mother called “artistic trances,” fugue-like states when she does her best work, when her mind slips free of language and opens to a clarity that is either integral to her DNA or channeled from a pure space, depending upon which teacher her mother asks.
Rose remembers that she is a big-deal painter.
Color and light and shadow are not the only things that have come together. As often happened in the past, while her conscious mind is absorbed by the composition of a painting, her subconscious mind works on other problems.
She now knows how she will escape.
Chapter 5
Rose opens the bed-stand drawer, takes a tissue from the box, and spreads it flat on the rolling table. Six red capsules, not even half her cache, are pinched out from their hiding place behind a box of latex gloves. Ears tuned to any sound of encroachment from the hall, she opens each capsule and pours the minuscule white spheres onto the tissue. That done, she herds the tiny balls into the crease, folds the tissue in half, then folds the edges closed on three sides. The empty capsules are flushed down the toilet. Hopefully, using the toilet all by herself is on the list of acceptable behaviors.
The tissue envelope is carefully placed in the pocket of her robe along with a pair of kindergarten scissors pilfered from the activities room. Putting on one slipper, she shuffles dead-eyed out to the common room. Diddle, diddle dumpling my son John, one shoe off and one shoe on, beats a refrain in the back of her mind. One shoe off and one shoe on; is she doing this to fool the nurse, or is this what crazy looks like?
Sitting on the couch beside the woman whose internal plumb bob is on the fritz, Rose stares alternately at the television and nothing. When thoughts arise, pleasant or unpleasant, she breathes them out, staying alert and in the moment. The plan depends on timing. At seven thirty the door opens. The diet-cola-loving night nurse comes in, takes her place behind the desk, and pulls the tab on her drink can. The day nurse goes home. The girl in pink stripes enters with snacks.
Eight P.M.
Karen leaves her cola to help the candy striper put the residents to bed. When both health workers are occupied in the rooms off the short hallway, Rose stands. Moving as quickly as she can, she rounds the desk to where the nurses sit. Gingerly she removes the tissue envelope from her pocket, unfolds one end, and pours a full day’s dose of her drugs into the soda. Taken all at once, she hopes, they will make the night nurse drowsy enough, or inattentive enough, that Rose can get away. A few granules scatter over the top of the can. She blows them off, then scurries back to the couch.
The act has been witnessed by two people who neither notice nor will remember. Rose is short of breath and trembling, horrified by what she has done, what she risks, who she might be beneath the fog and the pretending. Is her mind really clearing, or is it merely that she thinks it is? Would a clear-minded individual poison a nurse? What if six capsules are enough to kill the woman? Tears well up and run down her face. She thinks about overturning the poisoned Pepsi.
She stays on the couch. If she is crazy, she consoles herself, it is appropriate to do a crazy thing. If she is not, they deserve what they get.
The idea of failing isn’t as awful as it was when this escape plan first came to her. Now, both succeeding and failing are equally terrifying. In a day, or a week, will the thought of leaving become more frightening than staying, going madder and madder? More frightening than the thought—or the paranoid delusion—of being drugged, then killed by voices in the night?
The candy striper comes for the leaning woman. Like the Grim Reaper in scrubs, Karen resurrects one of the reclining-lounger corpses and escorts it away. Growing old is like an Agatha Christie play: And then there were five. And then there were four.
The girl in the striped dress stands in front of Rose. “Ready for bed?” she asks too loudly, smile too wide. Rose doesn’t want Pink Stripes. The girl will go off duty when the last of the elders are tucked in bed. The candy striper is useless to Rose.
When the girl reaches to help her up, Rose bats her hands away. The child’s face crumples as if she might cry. Rose hardens her heart. Hand in her pocket, clutching the purloined scissors, she waits for Karen, the cola-loving nurse.
The girl turns to the leaning lady. Ms. Tilted allows herself to be helped up and, zombie-like, is led away.
Karen arrives, towering over the sofa, blotting out the light. Rose’s heart is pounding so hard she is scared the nurse will hear it. Amped up as she is, Rose is amazed Karen doesn’t feel the anxiety pulsing through her as she grasps Rose’s upper arm and helps her to her feet.
Jittering with nerves, Rose has difficulty moving slowly, with the demeanor of a bovine mind. Not jumping out of her skin is hard. They turn from the hall into her room. Rose threads her thumb and forefinger through the handles of the scissors in her pocket.
Let the games begin, she thinks, then nearly giggles. This is insane.
Don’t think about it.
Karen maneuvers Rose expertly until her back is to the bed. “All you got to do is bend your knees, sweetie, and you’re there,” she says.
Instead of sitting, Rose pitches forward, throwing her arms around Karen’s neck as if for support. The scissors are tight in her right hand, blades aiming downward.
“Whoa!” the nurse mutters, stepping back a little. Rose holds the neck of Karen’s scrubs with her left hand. Rose is shaking, time is playing
tricks, the light seems to pulse and fade. The hand with the scissors wavers as she struggles for a good position from which to strike.
“I’ve got you,” the nurse says. “You’re okay.” Hugging Rose with her meaty arms, she mashes Rose’s face against her chest. Neatly, Karen waltzes her back to the edge of the bed.
The surgical grab-and-slice Rose had envisioned is in reality blind fumbling.
Karen lowers her until Rose’s bottom is securely on the mattress. “There we go,” the nurse says, laying Rose back on the bed. Desperately Rose releases her grip on the scrubs and clamps a hand on the nape of the nurse’s neck, clinging like a monkey. Fingers not trapped in the handle of the scissors scrabble at the woman’s flesh.
“What’s gotten into you, Ms. Dennis? This is as bad as putting a three-year-old to bed.” The nurse bends over, lowering Rose to the pillow.
Then Rose has it! The strap is hooked over her left thumb. Scissors in position, she cuts down. The nurse lets go of her. Rose falls the last three inches, arms crossed on her chest. Immediately she rolls onto her side and curls up in the fetal position, terrified by her crime—terrified that she’s actually done it, and terrified that she’ll be caught.
Silence.
Rose squeezes her eyes shut. A blanket and a heavy sigh settle over her shoulders.
“Sleep tight, Ms. Dennis. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” Rubber-soled shoes squeak softly from the room.
The cola-loving nurse is going back to her poisoned beverage. Guilt pours ice-cold into Rose’s pounding heart and slows it. Karen is so nice. Where is Nurse Ratchet when one wants her?
It will be okay, Rose tells herself. If the pills are antidepressants, they won’t hurt Karen. If they are toxic, well, then the nurse has it coming.
“We’ve all got it coming,” Clint Eastwood says from some neglected corner of her cerebral cortex.
For a while, Rose remains in the fetal position waiting for the outcry.
None comes.
Eventually she dares to inspect her prize. The scissors are still in her right hand. In her left, held so tightly her fingers cramp, is the cola-loving nurse’s keycard, ribbon ends trailing from the severed lanyard.