by Nevada Barr
“We all have 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.
Rose hides it under the pillow. Lying back, she gazes at the ceiling, trying to calm herself. She has poisoned a soda pop, deceived a medical worker, committed physical assault and theft.
Her family is afraid she won’t last long … absolutely terrified … won’t last out the week.
That hardly sounds like a threat anymore. It sounds like a family member, worried that Grandmother’s delusion has taken a severe turn for the worse, sharing her concerns with medical staff.
Negative thoughts equal negative emotions. Negative emotions equal suffering, Rose reminds herself and lets the thought go.
An hour passes. Nine o’clock; not nearly late enough, but Rose can no longer stand the suspense. She maneuvers around the safety rail and out of bed. Padding to the door, she peeks out. Showing no visible signs of mental impairment, the nurse is at her desk studying her computer screen, the poisoned Pepsi near to hand.
Refusing to ponder what that means about pills, paranoia, or her chances of escape, Rose takes off the white cotton robe. The bedclothes straightened, she lays the robe out flat on the bed, the sleeves extended. She begins cutting. The scissors are made for four-year-olds, the blades dull, the tips blunt. They don’t so much cut the fabric as chew it. Before she has one sleeve severed at the elbow, a blister forms at the base of her thumb.
Every few minutes, she stops, moves to the door, and listens to see if the muffled sound of scissors munching cloth has penetrated to the nurse’s desk. She doesn’t peek out again; should the nurse glance up and see one of her charges out of bed, it will warrant an immediate visit.
Both sleeves shortened, Rose drops into the room’s one chair and rests. She longs to soak her hands in cool water but doesn’t dare risk the sound of the tap.
Sleep effortlessly overtakes her. When she wakes it takes several minutes to put herself, the place, and the plan back together. Outside it is still night. Rose hasn’t been asleep too long. At length, she rallies and attacks the body of the robe with her pathetic instrument, cutting it off at what should be just above the waist.
Again she interrupts her task to listen at the door: snores, the muted tick of the wall clock, the air conditioner roaring on and dying off, nothing from the nurse.
On her umpteenth visit, Rose dares a quick look.
Still in front of the computer, the nurse rests her chin and cheek in her left hand, elbow braced on the desk, the plump cheek pushing up in a roll above the fingers.
Rose can’t tell if she is resting, cogitating, or napping.
She goes back to work. Another blister forms on her index finger. The one at the base of her thumb is oozing blood. Each snip seems to do more damage to her than to the robe.
Around midnight, drenched in sweat and biting back whimpering noises, Rose finishes the final cut. As she is tiptoeing to the door to listen, she hears a loud thump. Rose peers around the jamb.
The cola-loving nurse has vanished. Her chair is rolling away from the desk into the archway to the activities room. Rose wants to scream. After ruining her hands and becoming a criminal, something tipped the nurse off. She’s bolted.
Without her keycard? That is hidden beneath the pillow on Rose’s bed.
Stepping out into the hall, Rose takes a better look. Fingers. Four of them lie on their backs, looking like fat pink sausages against the vinyl. They are protruding from behind the desk.
The night nurse is down.
A rush of relief buoys Rose up. She wasn’t mistaken. The pills are a drug, and a powerful one. The night nurse weighs close to twice what Rose does in her newfound scrawniness.
From the heights of relief, Rose plummets to the depths. The cola-loving nurse looks fairly dead.
“I’ve killed her,” she whispers, and stumbles down the hall, her legs wobbly as a new colt’s. The nurse is on her left side, one arm stretched out. Her legs tangle around each other. Her eyes are not quite shut; narrow crescents of white show above the red of the lower lids.
“No, no, no,” Rose murmurs. She drops heavily to her knees. Snatching up the woman’s outflung arm, she feels desperately for a pulse. Her own heart is beating so wildly, she can’t tell if she feels the other woman’s or not.
“I’m a murderer,” she gasps. Her karma is going to suck for all eternity. “Please, can you hear me?” she whispers urgently into the ear below the dead eyes.
Rose will be buckled into a straightjacket, dragged from the Alzheimer’s ward, shut in a hospital for the criminally insane, and chained to a radiator in a sooty cinder-block building with Mrs. Jeffrey Dahmer for a cellmate.
As gently as she can—the woman is a seriously large individual—Rose rolls the nurse onto her back. One of Karen’s Crocs-shod feet bangs the metal desk as her legs uncross. Plugging one ear with her forefinger, Rose presses the other to the woman’s chest. Fear renders her deaf for a second. It spikes, then begins to recede. She hears the steady thump of what, to her, sounds like a strong regular heartbeat.
But what does she know?
Nurse Karen might be dying.
Rose glances at the black desk phone with the line of buttons down one side. All she has to do is push one of those buttons and cry for help. In seconds someone will come. In minutes the nurse will be on her way to a hospital to get her stomach pumped. Rose will still go to prison, but only for attempted murder.
She reaches for the phone. Her hands are shaking so badly, the handset knocks over the soda can. Brown liquid pours out like Texas crude to soak into papers stacked neatly by the mouse pad.
The night nurse has consumed about two-thirds of the drink and is out cold. Not even a full day’s dose for a sixty-eight-year-old woman, weighing one hundred and ten pounds, has dropped a woman a quarter of a century younger, and nearly a hundred pounds heavier, as if she’s been struck between the eyes with a sledgehammer.
Paranoia, my foot, Rose thinks. She pats the nurse’s cheek softly. “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Rose trots back to her room. Free from the constraint of silence, she snips the edge of the bedspread, then, with a satisfying ripping sound, tears off a four-foot-long, eight-inch-wide strip. Her slippers are beneath the bed. Using blue and green markers, Rose scribbles the toes until they look more like colored flats than hospital shoes. Not great, but at a glance they will pass. The strip of flowered bedcover she wraps twice around her waist, then tucks the ends in, fashioning a colorful cummerbund over the nightie. The flower-and-vine motif picks up the blue-green of the slippers and the pink of the gown.
Once on, the mutilated bathrobe serves as a three-quarter-sleeve short jacket. Up close, if anyone really looks, it will be obvious there is something distinctly odd about the ensemble, but at least any passing kid on a bike won’t pick her out for a lunatic escaped from the asylum.
Ideally, before the sun rises, like any self-respecting murdering night creature, she will be hidden away, safe from the light of day.
Rose studies her reflection in the mirror over the bathroom sink. There is no full-length mirror. Perhaps this is a kindness in an old folks’ home. All the glass shows is her head and shoulders. Short, white, wavy hair in need of a cut; Rose runs water over her hands, then pokes and fluffs until it resembles a sane woman’s hair. She’s always had good hair. Her face is gaunt and pale, but her hazel eyes are clear.
“Tally ho,” she says to her reflection. The woman in the mirror does not smile.
Pilfered keycard in hand, she leaves the room. The cola-loving nurse has not moved. Passing the desk, Rose notices Karen’s purse in a half-opened bottom drawer.
Rifling through another woman’s purse is distasteful, but once one has drugged and stolen from her, perhaps it is inevitable. The wallet contains a credit card, a debit card, a driver’s license, and seven dollars in cash. Rose dares not take the cards and would not stoop to stealing such a paltry sum of money. The wallet is returned to the bag.
Car keys with a tiny LED flashlight on the ring are in a side pocket. Rose takes the flashlight. Tissues, pens, notebook, comb, reading glasses, aspirin, lipstick: Rose takes the lipstick and uncaps it. The shade is pinker than she likes, but what the hell.
Using the wall mirror behind the desk, Rose puts a bit of the color on her cheeks, then carefully paints her lips. The woman in the mirror smiles. Amazing how a touch of lipstick can cheer a person up. She drops the recapped lipstick back into the purse and closes the drawer with a slippered foot.
On the far side of the desk, she straightens her makeshift dress, tugs her jacket straight, takes a deep breath, and flattens the keycard against the black plastic reader.
Her prison door hisses open.
CHAPTER 6
Rose steps over the threshold into a blank-walled hall that doglegs into another short hallway. This opens into the entrance foyer. The reception desk is unmanned, the double doors locked. Rose presses the cola nurse’s keycard against a reader to the right of the doors. They silently slide apart.
Night air, warm and soft, sinks into her, a balm for a sore body and a troubled mind. Filling her lungs, she feels as if she drinks life, as if the conditioned air of the lockdown unit is merely oxygen to sustain the body. Fresh real air is sustenance for the spirit, filled with life-affirming qualities scientists will never discover in windowless laboratories.
For the first time in her mutilated memory, Rose feels completely alive, totally present. To her right a hedge of autumn leaves, psychedelic pink under the unearthly glow of a streetlamp, points the way. Dropping the nurse’s keycard into the cacophony of color, she turns right. Walking quickly—but not suspiciously quickly—she heads toward the dark arch of trees where the sidewalk ends.
Mel said that she came down the greenway looking for Gigi; that their house opens onto the parkland, and it isn’t far.
The darkness in the tunnel of trees is absolute. Path rough, Rose stumbles. Déjà vu. She stumbled in the same place on her last, doomed, escape attempt. Or is this the same attempt, a memory relived in a delusional brain?
Rose walks into the moonlight on the other side. This is new, she thinks. Check out the stylish clothes. A giggle escapes her lips. Given her questionable mental stability, chortling alone in the dark is not comforting.
The moon is still close to full. A good omen for a lunatic, Rose decides. In silence and silvery light, the gravel path leads away to the left and right.
If she has ever known what Mel’s house looks like, she doesn’t remember it. She was hoping she would see a familiar landmark, her memory would be jogged, and, abracadabra, she’d know where she was, and what to do next. No memory is jogged.
That isn’t the only flaw in the ointment. Rose doesn’t know from which direction Mel came. She doesn’t even know which direction she herself went the last time she was on the lam, as it were.
She has a fifty-fifty chance of going the right direction. She goes right.
Anywhere a garden meets the greenway, Rose abandons the path, slogs through the grass, and stabs into midnight yards with Karen’s tiny flashlight. Though it’s small, and the radius of the beam pitiful, it is surprisingly powerful.
Homes up on low bluffs, or with no gate onto the greenway, she writes off. The worst are where the foliage is too dense to tell if there is a gate or not. Forcing herself through the underbrush, she keeps losing her slippers; her makeshift wardrobe catches and rips; scratchy dark and patchy light play tricks on her. Trees loom, menacing. Confusion spins her around until she is dizzy, then spits her out to wonder again whether to turn right or left.
After a time thirst becomes a factor, and she forgets if this is then or now. If this is now, wouldn’t she have remembered to bring water after what happened then?
The moment is the moment, she tells herself, and trudges on.
The houses beyond the trees grow smaller and shabbier.
No bells ring. No lightbulbs come on. Though she can’t remember Mel’s house, she is sure that it is big and nice.
Right was wrong. Refusing to cry, she sits down on a fallen log and looks back the way she has come. The path dwindles away to infinity, then is snuffed out by the night.
Her head swims.
Her legs shake.
Her feet hurt.
Is this what old feels like? Fatigue, confusion, and pain? Rose doesn’t remember feeling old. Though her memory is blasted, she is positive this rickety old carriage is not her body, not the one she’d had. This one has not been kept up, the oil not changed, the tires not checked. This one is a wreck.
Sitting on the log, everything aches. Bone grinds against bone. Flecks of black vie with leaf shadows in her peripheral vision. Should a four-week-old kitten pop out of the underbrush and pounce on her, she’d be dead meat.
Stoically, she retraces her steps. By the time Rose makes it back to the tunnel of trees leading to the sidewalk, she is drenched in sweat. Her legs are so rubbery that twice she has gone down on one knee simply because it buckled under her. Dizziness plagues her. If she doesn’t concentrate, she walks like a drunken woman.
She stops at the arch of trees and looks toward the sidewalk.
Go back, a voice she scarcely recognizes as her own murmurs in her ear. An old woman, in a costume made of her nightie, bathrobe, and bedspread, wandering around in the dead of night, looking for a sign because she believes “they” are coming for her. An old woman dies of dehydration, her emaciated body found half-chewed by raccoons.
Bon appétit, Rocky, Rose thinks, and follows the path not taken, lifting one foot, then setting it down and lifting the other. She keeps on doing that. The moon sets behind the trees. Grasses turn dark. Shrubs hunch like bears, in the corners of her eyes. The needle-beam of her light scratches lines of green in the bushes.
Cyclone fence. Picket fence. Rail fence. Nothing shakes loose in Rose’s memory. Tears are dripping off her jaw. Pitiful whimpering cries that have been irritating her for a while are coming from her own throat. She is lost to everything and everyone. Lost to herself. Deep shadows beckon, enticing her to crawl beneath the bushes and die in peace like a worn-out old cat.
A faint wisp of path, leading through the grass to her left, then disappearing into a stand of laurels, calls her name. Leaves are rose-gray in the moonlight and smell of the last breath of summer. She follows the trail through bushes edged with the strange luminescence of a city night.
The path ends at a pint-sized door with a round top and a tiny brass grate for peeking through.
Memories download into Rose’s skull with all the nuance of a dump truck pouring rocks into a hole. Not collated, alphabetized, or arranged by date, a heap of images, sounds, and emotions hits so hard, she sits down with a bone-jarring thud.
When the dust settles in her psyche, she is still looking at the gate, which seems transfixed in time by the beam of her light. Rose remembers.
* * *
It is summer, hot and humid. Mel is a long-legged little girl of seven. Harley, Rose’s husband, white hair glued to his forehead under a battered straw hat, draws a claw hammer from the leather tool belt around his waist. Mel, practically dancing with excitement, smiles and holds out sixpenny nails for her granddad, her palms up as if making an offering to a god.
Izzy, Mel’s mom, and Rose sit on a blanket in the shade laughing. It’s a hobbit gate, Izzy tells Mel. “Like in Lord of the Rings. When you go through it, I’ll bet you’ll be in Middle-earth.”
“That’s silly,” Mel says, her maturity offended. Then she turns to Rose. “Isn’t it, Gigi?”
“Stranger things have happened,” Rose says with a wink at Izzy, h
er step-daughter-in-law.
“Daddy?” Mel calls on the ultimate source of what is real and what is not. Flynn, Harley’s elder son and Rose’s stepson, is several yards away talking on his cell phone. “Whatever your mom says, punkin’.”
“This is so you can look out and see who’s there,” Harley says, fitting a mesh he’s made of copper strips into a rectangle cut in the wood at Bilbo Baggins’s eye level. “That way nobody can come in that you don’t want to. See. You just slide this little door open.”
Mel slides the minute copper door aside and peeks out through the little mesh window.
“Do you see Gandalf?” Izzy calls.
* * *
Rose neither moves nor breathes for fear the door will vanish. A moment passes, and another. The door does not disappear into Middle- earth. She stands, curls her fingers around the handle. It is real, cool against her palm. She presses the thumb lever down. A prosaic click of metal on metal lets her know the latch lifted. Mel must have forgotten to lock it. Probably she’d ridden home from the facility with someone. What with Gigi slapping orange juice all over orderlies, and screaming about poison plots, latching the back gate must have slipped her mind.
Rose’s debilitating fatigue abates slightly. The pain in hands, legs, and feet no longer matters. Hope is better than opioids. She opens the gate, ducks through, closes it, and locks it behind her. Leaning against the wood, she feels momentarily safe.
She has escaped; she has reached Mel’s backyard. Like a dog chasing cars, now that she has secured her goal, she doesn’t know what to do with it. Flynn, Mel’s father, must have been the one who put her in the facility. Her stepson has not visited her that she is aware of. He has not come to free her. The idea of putting her life in anyone else’s hands is frightening. Rose decides not to expose herself, not yet.
The roof of the house is visible beyond the gentle rise in the yard. Mel’s room is upstairs. Rose tries to summon the energy to circumnavigate the house and toss pebbles at her window. As if tiny rocks striking glass will wake a thirteen-year-old who sleeps through tornado sirens and garbage trucks plying their trade.
