by Nevada Barr
“Cheer yourself up,” she says into the dusty gloom.
Leaving the borrowed jeans, T-shirt, and underpants in a trail on the bedroom floor, Rose goes into the bathroom. Turning both showerheads on, she wastes a criminal amount of water scrubbing the nursing home out of her hair and the pores of her skin.
When she runs out of hot water, she wraps herself in a towel. There is a toothbrush in a stand by the sink. Rose hopes it’s hers. Picking it up, she looks for a drawer that might contain toothpaste.
Time stutters to a halt. On the counter, in a small egg-shaped bowl of blue Wedgwood, is a gold heart-shaped locket. It is the first gift Harley ever gave her. Rose lifts it and fastens it around her neck. Beneath are two rings of gold, inset with small flat rectangular diamonds: her wedding and engagement bands.
With a sense of returning irreplaceable artifacts to their proper places, Rose puts them on. Holding her left hand to her chest, she looks in the mirror at the gold locket and the wedding rings. Harley is in the next room. For the rest of her life, her husband will be in the next room. “Thank you, love,” she calls lightly.
The closet is a treasure trove of brightly colored clothes. Rose chooses a knee-length white tunic with a Nehru collar and a pair of loose trousers gathered at the ankles. More strands of what she laughingly calls her “self” are restored.
Downstairs, she finds the refrigerator empty, clean, unplugged with the door ajar. She had not been expected back anytime soon. Several cans of pork and beans, an emergency staple, remain on a shelf. Standing over the sink, Rose opens a can and eats the beans cold. Can rinsed and set aside for recycling, Rose opens the dishwasher to dispose of the spoon. It has been loaded and run, but not emptied. Three plates, four coffee cups, assorted flatware, a spatula, and two prescription pill bottles that originally contained Venlafaxine, an antidepressant Rose has been on for twenty-plus years.
The food gives her the strength to climb back up the stairs. The thin wires that have kept her skinny flu-and-drug-ravaged puppet body upright and moving snap. Bones collapse against one another.
Falling back on the California-king-sized bed, arms flung wide, she stares at the ceiling fan, white and unmoving. Memories of this house without Harley trickle into her mind: Boxes she was too tired to unpack. Food she was too uninterested to cook. Thoughts she was too miserable to think. Grief sets those memories in black-and-white. Ubiquitous roaring leaf blowers make up the soundtrack. The life-form that was Harley has dissolved back into … whatever life is when it’s not incarnate. The Harley/Rose life-form now only has one heart, one skeleton.
The house, even with her in it, is empty of life. Rose craves the sensation of being alive. She rolls to her side. A small dark object sits in the center of one of the pillows. A mouse. Rose sits up. The mouse is gray with big ears and black bead eyes. It’s made of rabbit fur with plastic whiskers.
Rose has cats.
She has been gone a long time. If they’ve gotten out, they’ve run away. They are indoor cats, unused to the urban wild. Honey Cat and Laura Lei have been taken to the pound, rehomed, or killed. A sob bursts from Rose’s throat. The grief she cannot access for her husband pours out for their cats. Rose wails and gulps. Tears and snot mingle. Her mouth is an open square of pain.
“It’s different, Harley!” she gasps at the bedcover. “You were doing exactly what you wanted, exactly where you wanted to do it. Our kitties were captured and caged, scared to death, dumped in a kennel to wait on a cold metal table for the syringe!”
Covering her face with her hands, Rose mumbles, “Stop telling yourself this story. This is an awful story. Tell yourself a good story about the kittens being taken to a nice farm in the country where they can chase mice. No. Stop the stories. No more stories.” She breathes in. This is here. This is now. There are no cats here and now. That is the truth; anything else is just an empty story to frighten or reassure herself. What happened to Honey Cat and Laura Lei will come clear at the appropriate moment.
Rose finds herself in space—she is at 87 Applegarth Street, Charlotte, NC. She needs to find herself in time. Leaping off the bed, she staggers, then catches herself on the doorframe. This body is frail. Holding on to the rail, she carefully descends the stairs. On the kitchen counter are her iPad and iPhone, both dead. Too tired to stand, she plugs her lone charger cord into a baseboard outlet and sits cross-legged on the floor, the iPad open.
Her email is clogged with ads. She begins to delete, enjoying the delusion that she can impose order on chaos. Finally there are only four left. Two are from Greene and Associates. Rose has no memory of that firm, but the subject line reads HDennis Will. Rose opens the first, sent the previous day.
Greene and Associates, reads the email, was Miller and Associates when you and Mr. Dennis did your estate planning. When Mr. Miller passed, Alma Greene inherited the firm. Miller was the family lawyer. When Izzy got sick, she and Flynn used him to draw up their will. After Daniel’s father-in-law remarried, he went to Miller to change his will to accommodate his new circumstances.
Mrs. Dennis could you please make an appointment re: Mr. Dennis’s bequests.
The second email says much the same thing, adding that Rose and Alma Greene Esq. met when Ms. Greene was a paralegal. Rose remembers. She marks both “Save as New” and moves on.
The next few are from distant friends she is vaguely in communication with.
Four emails in six weeks. So few.
Rose opens the old mail file. Most are from Marion.
“Marion,” Rose whispers as memories deluge her, buffeting her nerves and inundating her bones until her hands shake so much, she folds them in her lap lest she knock over the iPad.
* * *
Two little girls in swimsuits and red cowboy hats, standing in an inflatable wading pool holding hands; two girls, one towheaded, one darker, peeking from between the ears of two kittens, making little paws wave for the camera. Two green fairies in tights and leotards, wings of green netting; two teenagers driving four hundred miles to college in a beat-up green station wagon named Sherman. Two women standing up at each other’s weddings. Two women helping each other pick up the pieces after divorce. Two old women laughing so hard, the shoppers at Belk’s avoid them.
* * *
Thousands of phone calls, almost all long distance; conversations with Marion are the beads woven through the events of Rose’s life. Schools, jobs, men, mistakes, mundane days and glorious nights: With Marion all the memories are there in grand disorder.
Never has there been a world where Rose was and Marion wasn’t. How could Rose have forgotten Marion, her older sister and oldest friend? Even without Harley and cats, she is not alone. She has family. Rose can almost feel her blood getting thicker than water.
She laughs and yells, “Marion!”
None of the personal emails is more recent than six weeks. That must be about the time Rose was incarcerated. No wonder there are so few. Marion would have informed Rose’s close friends that she was non compos mentis.
Rose has to hold her right wrist with her left hand to steady her hand enough to open the most recent of the old emails from Marion.
“You’re not answering your phone or email. I’m calling whatsisname.”
Flynn, Rose guesses. Marion called Flynn because Rose stopped communicating.
Scrolling down, she opens another from three weeks prior.
“You were weird on the phone last night. Are you seeing anybody? I know shrinks aren’t the be-all and end-all, but I think you should find one. Sooner rather than later.”
A week after that: “Call me. You’re scaring the crap out of me.”
The next one, flagged, is from Nancy, Harley’s ex.
“Stella and Daniel have issues they need to work on. Your so-called grief is bad for them at this time. Flynn’s gone and you are leaning so hard on Melanie they are all coming to hate you. I don’t like to be the one to have to tell you this but the entire family is absolutely vilifying you. I’m t
elling you this for your own good. You should stay away for MANY MONTHS.”
“Holy smoke,” Rose breathes. Nancy and Stella had email wars for a few years. Though Rose was not the Other Woman—or even the next woman—early in her and Harley’s marriage, Nancy did send a few email bombs, but nothing like this. The vitriol boiling behind the words would scarify the insides of anyone holding on to it. Or char the skin off anyone who tried to grab it. It speaks of suffering so deep as to be a pathology. Rose hits DELETE.
She opens the SENT folder. Over a three-week period she sent Marion eleven emails. Rose opens them in order. They start with “I cannot get my mind around the fact that Harley is gone.” And end with “I cants seem to kep it tgether/” Taken as a whole, they and Marion’s replies create a picture of the decline and fall of Rose Dennis’s sanity.
Rose pulls the charger cord from the iPad and plugs it into the phone.
CHAPTER 9
On the floor, legs crossed beneath her, Rose watches the dust motes going about their business in a narrow beam of sun that pushes between the blind and the window frame. She thinks of movies and books and plays where loved ones return from the dead. In fiction, it never works out well for the living.
She taps CONTACTS, then her sister’s number. Five rings, then the click: “You’ve reached Marion’s answering machine. You know what to do.”
Rose doesn’t know what to do. “Marion, it’s Rose. Your sister?” Panic creeps up her esophagus, and she begins bailing out words as if she is drowning in them. “It’s me. Please pick up if you’re there. If you’re not home please, please, please call me back. I don’t know what my number is—oh, right, caller ID. I was in the home, this place, Longwood. I’m not there anymore. I—”
“Rosie?”
Hearing the familiar voice, Rose begins to cry. Through choking tears she gasps, “Don’t hang up. I’m okay. Don’t hang up.”
“I won’t,” Marion says. “But don’t cry too long. My head is about to explode.” She sounds angry.
Rose laughs, mucus running out of her nose. Cell phone clamped tightly against her ear, she scrambles up, grabs a handful of paper towels, and mops her face. “Okay,” she says. “I’m done with that. Thank God you answered! Better put me on speaker. This could take a while.”
“Where are you?” Marion demands. “Last I heard whatsisname, Harley’s son—”
“Flynn.”
“Flynn emailed me to tell me you’d gone around the bend, early onset Alzheimer’s acerbated by shock, and were put in a rest home.”
“You didn’t bother to check?” Rose is getting angry herself.
“I called the home several times. They said you were there but weren’t responsive. What was I supposed to do? Dash out there with my hair in a knot, kick down the doors, and drag you out?”
Marion doesn’t travel. She lives alone with seventeen cats, four computers, two laptops, an iPad, and security cameras in every room. Rose knows she will not leave her home. Though she understands, she is stung. “You could have launched an investigation,” she says indignantly.
“Into what? The last few times we talked you were confused, anxious. You sounded like all the screws were coming loose. You were scared you were losing your mind, that people were poisoning you. You started nailing windows shut because you thought people or poltergeists were coming in and out of your house and moving things around. Then you quit answering the phone.”
A silence follows. Rose is holding her breath. She lets it out slowly so Marion won’t hear.
“I was just glad whatsisname—”
“Flynn.”
“Flynn was there to keep you from playing on the railroad tracks, or whatever they have there to play on. Besides, this isn’t the first time you’ve gone off the deep end.”
“It is too!” Rose insists.
A longer pause, an eight-months-pregnant pause.
“That was different!” Rose remembers with a shock. “Okay, some bizarre behavior, but that was divorce aftermath. I’ve never ever been put into a facility, for heaven’s sake!”
Marion says nothing.
“That was voluntary,” Rose wails. “I wasn’t tied down and drugged. It was just group therapy and sing-alongs. Besides, it was nearly thirty years ago.” Rose’s throat is so tight, it aches. She is careful not to make any telltale sounds.
Seconds of telephone silence, the grayest kind of silence, clunk by.
A sigh whispers through the cell phone speaker. “It was,” Marion concedes. “But you have to admit, you haven’t always been all that stable.”
“I’m as stable as you are,” Rose shoots back.
“And your point is…”
Rose’s laugh is shaky.
“Tell me everything,” Marion says.
“What about your headache?” A little payback.
“I expect it’s about to get worse. Sorry,” Marion says. “I’d finally given up Harley for dead, and you up for as-good-as. Your sudden resurrection is—it’s a good thing—it’s just a lot when I was getting over losing you. Don’t ever make me go through that again.”
As she has done her entire life, Rose tells her sister everything: the first escape attempt, the drugged orange juice, hiding the red capsules, the slow return of her cognitive mind, the women talking in the hallway, saying she wouldn’t last the week, the costume, the drugging of the night nurse, and her final escape. Spoken out loud, for someone else’s ears, her fear of being drugged, of being plotted against, sounds like more of the paranoid behavior Marion had noticed prior to her being placed at Longwood.
When she finishes, there is a bit of silence; then Marion says, “It’s obvious you were drugged, but maybe it was for a reason. Didn’t the manager, the woman with the perfect eyebrows, say you were agitated, a danger to yourself and others? Maybe that was true.”
“It’s not true,” Rose says.
“For years after your divorce your dream date was Dr. Kevorkian. I thought I’d lost you then.”
That is true. Rose remembers those years. “I’d never harm anyone else,” she says defensively.
“Tell that to the night nurse, if she’s still alive,” Marion says.
A shudder runs through Rose. “If I murdered her it would ruin my whole day,” she says. “I can’t have. I gave her one day’s dose for me, and the woman is the size of a refrigerator.”
“Maybe she has drug allergies,” Marion says ominously.
Rose pinches her nose tightly to keep from making sniveling noises.
“I might be able to find out,” Marion says. “I’ll poke around.”
Marion never hacks; she swears she doesn’t know how to hack. She “pokes around” and “explores.” Since the Dread Pirate Roberts went down, she’d been skittish about poking and exploring.
“Thanks,” Rose says. “That would be one load off my mind.”
“Maybe the … What do you want to call it? The nervous breakdown? Psychotic episode? The incident?”
“Spell,” Rose says with a smile. “Spells are such delightful things.”
“Is it possible your recent spell was brought on by drugs—not theirs, yours? Sleeping pills? I remember you once lost a night to Ambien. Drug-induced amnesia.”
“I don’t remember.”
Marion laughs. Rose loves making her sister laugh.
“Wine?” Marion asks. “During your first divorce you lost a night to alcohol.”
Marion’s memory is too good. Unfair, Rose thinks.
“More than usual,” Rose admits. “But not blackout, not even close.”
“Medication?” Marion asks. “Medication” means cannabis.
“Nothing unusual, that I remember.” Rose supposes she’ll be tacking that caveat onto her statements for some time to come.
“Antidepressants?”
“I suppose.” Rose is too tired to sit up. She curls down on the kitchen tiles in the fetal position.
“Are you on them now?”
“No. I’ve taken no
thing but those red capsules. I doubt they were antidepressants. They did knock the big nurse out,” Rose says.
“Better call your doctor and get him to phone in a prescription for you,” Marion says.
Rose hates being reminded. Twice she’s tried to go off antidepressants. Both times were disastrous, complete with hallucinations and attendant psychic phenomena.
Marion doesn’t push it. “Maybe the mix of the various medications, plus the shock of Harley being killed, and you living in a strange house full of boxes, in a strange town full of strange people, created a situation where you lost it for a week or two. Flynn gets you help. You get better. Does that work?” she asks.
“It is possible,” Rose admits.
From Marion’s end of the phone she hears a cat complaining. She aches for Honey Cat and Laura Lei. Nothing is as comforting as the feel of fur and the sound of purring.
“Tell me about Longwood,” Marion says.
Rose thinks for a moment. Loathing of the place tries to force lies onto her tongue. “Longwood,” Rose says slowly, “is upscale. Nice décor. The people are professional and kind. The food is good. The bathrobe was sturdy and hard to cut. The bedspread ripped nice and straight. My shackles were soft and fleecy. My drugs were powerful and quick acting. Not a dump.”
“Not a dump,” Marion agrees.
“How would you know?” The complacency in Marion’s tone is irksome.
“I researched it online. You don’t think I’d stand by while you were put in some hellhole, do you?”
“Well, I don’t believe it now,” Rose says. “For a while there I was wondering.”
“They have a two-year waiting list,” Marion told her. “It’s a happening place. Very expensive. Lots of prizes for this and that. Harley’s son had to pull in a favor from one of Harley’s old board members in Charlotte, who felt he still owed him, to get you accepted.”
