by Nevada Barr
Rose dares not answer.
“Talk to me when you can,” Marion says, then goes silent.
Footfalls halt. Her bottom and the soles of her feet toward the archway, face pressed against her thighs, Rose can see nothing. She feels—or imagines—a change in the quality of the dim light. The nurse’s considerable bulk eclipsing the fluorescent spill from the adjoining room?
A distinct click, no imagining this time. Karen has turned on the light. Rose screws her eyes shut and holds her breath. Woman found hiding under table in old folks’ home. News at eleven. Humiliating; even a closet or under a bed would have been less embarrassing. What possible excuse could explain being wadded up under the arts table in a secure hospital unit?
Playing at armadillo.
Chair yoga.
Looking for a contact lens.
Kissing her ass goodbye.
Click. The light goes off. Rose is sure of it. Karen expected the room to be empty. She scanned the clearly empty room and was satisfied. Still, Rose won’t open her eyes until she’s counted slowly to twenty.
She is considering making it a hundred when Marion says, “She’s back at her desk. She’s taking a long pull on her soda.”
“Let me know when she’s passed out,” Rose whispers.
“How long does it take?”
“Not sure. Busy, then. Maybe an hour?” Rose can hold this pose without discomfort for a while, but in ten or fifteen minutes she will be distinctly miserable. In an hour she’ll be crippled.
Time passes. Rose’s left foot is falling asleep.
“Another big swig,” Marion says encouragingly. “She’s on Amazon looking at garbage can liners.”
Om ah hum vajra guru padma siddhi hum. Rose silently chants a mantra to calm her mind. Nose between her knees, it is getting harder and harder to breathe. She allows herself to turn her head, resting her cheek on her thigh.
More silent chanting. Now her left leg from the knee down is asleep.
Two more swigs reported wirelessly by way of California. Karen has ordered a box of fifty kitchen can liners and a pair of thong panties.
“I think it’s kicking in,” Marion says finally. “She’s still upright, still facing the computer, but she hasn’t moved at all for six minutes. Not a finger.”
Inch by inch, Rose pushes the chair out. The carpet keeps the scraping to a bare minimum, but to Rose’s ears it is a shriek. “Does it look like she hears anything?” she whispers.
“Nope.”
Carefully, dragging her dead limb between chair legs lest it bang into one, Rose crawls out. Free of the table, she massages feeling back into her leg and foot. While they tingle themselves to full power, she does a few Cat-Cows to loosen up her back. Hearing nothing from Marion or the nurse, she does a Down Dog to limber her legs.
“The computer timed out. Screen saver is up. Nurse most definitely zonked. Still upright, though,” Marion says. “That’s all I can tell.”
Rose tiptoes to the arch and peeks around. Karen’s broad shoulders are slumped. One arm hangs limply at her side, the unanimated hand looking peculiarly dead. The other arm is bent at the elbow, the hand presumably in her lap.
Rose slips back out of sight.
“She’s swaying,” Marion reports.
Rose begins to think this absurd shenanigan is actually going to work.
Again.
“Uh-oh, she’s shaking out her hands,” Marion says. “Rubbing her face.”
Rose hears it before Marion reports, smacking of flesh on flesh.
“She’s slapping herself, trying to wake up,” Marion says. Then, “Reaching for the phone. She’s fumbling for the receiver—she’s got it!” shrills in Rose’s ear.
Without stopping to consider ramifications or consequences, Rose zips around the wall. Grabbing the back of the nurse’s office chair with both hands, she yanks it back. Wheels squeal their protest on the plastic chair mat.
The phone receiver drops, clattering against the desk.
“Holy mackerel!” Marion is shouting.
The beefy nurse turns sideways, reaching out for Rose, and toppling the chair in the process. Rose jumps back, but not far enough. One of Karen’s long arms flaps to the floor like a landed tuna. Her fingers close around Rose’s ankle.
Movement abruptly arrested, Rose loses her balance and falls hard on her rear end, wig flying, glasses smashing into her face on the end of their beaded chain.
The nurse stares at Rose. Her eyes are slits, the pupils nearly invisible, mere pinpricks of black in the pale blue eyes.
“You!” the nurse spits out the word.
CHAPTER 18
“I nearly lost my job over you,” Karen mutters, eyes bleary, mouth barely moving.
“She’s got me!” Rose cries out to Marion.
“You bet your ass I do,” the nurse growls, pulling Rose in.
“What’s happening? Damn it! I can’t see!” Marion screams.
“Let me go,” Rose begs. “I never meant to drug you. Okay, I did, but it’s not what you think—oh, shoot—that’s some grip you’ve got. How about I give you back your keycard? It doesn’t work anymore, but—let go, doggone it—aaah. Let’s discuss this like civil—yaaah!”
Rose babbles and screeches as quietly as panic will allow, her fingernails vainly trying to gain purchase on the tightly woven carpet.
Slow with drugs, but sure as the tide, the muscular Karen is reeling her in like a fish. Kicking desperately, Rose tries to get the nurse’s hand loose from her ankle. Her soft-soled Toms are woefully inadequate against the iron-hard fingers. Karen’s grip is so powerful, it cuts off the blood to Rose’s foot. Years of changing bedpans and lifting old people have given her titanium muscles.
Karen drags. Rose slides. The nurse gets her other arm free from where it was pinned under her. A ham-sized hand joins its mate on Rose’s ankle. Two-fisted, Karen jerks. Rose bumps half a foot closer.
“Whoa!” Rose yelps.
“What’s happening?” Marion wails.
The cola nurse looks up, her face presenting a perfect target. Rose draws her free leg back to smash her foot into the woman’s nose, break it, maybe take out a couple of her front teeth, bust her jaw, hit her in the throat, crush her esophagus. That will stop her.
Stop a nice health care professional, whom Rose has robbed and drugged.
Twice.
Karen is not a monster. Karen bought thong panties online. Rose can’t smash her face or knock her teeth out. Straightening her cocked leg, she taps the nurse firmly but, she hopes, not painfully on the top of her head with the heel of her shoe.
In drugged confusion, the nurse grunts, her single-minded attack momentarily derailed. The fingers around Rose’s ankles loosen. Her shoe pops off, smacking Karen in the chin. The nurse makes an enraged animal sound and glares at the shoe as if it is a live thing come from nowhere to assault her.
Rose’s bare foot slips through Karen’s fingers.
The pinpointed pupils focus angrily back on Rose. “No you don’t,” the nurse slurs. She clenches her fists. They close on empty cloth.
The waistband of Rose’s scrubs is down around her knees. Quick as an eel, Rose wriggles out of the scrubs. Her other shoe is lost in a trouser leg. Out of the pants, she crab-walks back until she hits the far side of the arch, nearly losing her underpants in the process.
Like a startled bear, the nurse snorts, “Ungh?” Then, bear-like, charges on all fours.
Squeaking, Marion shouting in her ear, Rose springs to her feet and retreats into the activities room.
Groaning and shaking her head from side to side as if to clear her vision, the nurse crashes into the side of the arch. Eyes narrowed, squinting into the dimness, she pulls herself to her feet. Head down and swaying, she stares around the room.
Rose wonders if Karen is seeing double, or really seeing at all. Then the eyes settle on her.
“You!” the nurse says. Her voice is thick and wet, it sounds like “Jew.” Not bothering to m
ove her feet—or incapable of moving them—the big woman dives at Rose.
Squawking, Rose clambers backward up onto the table and scoots to the far end.
Karen collapses over the back of a chair, chin striking the table, arms long across the wood, reaching for Rose’s bare feet. Backing away, Rose feels her hand hit nothing, then falls, slamming her elbow against a wooden chair seat on the way down. Her back strikes the floor, knocking the wind from her lungs. For a moment, she lies there, naked legs tangled in fallen chairs.
A thud. The floor vibrates.
“Talk to me,” Marion begs.
Rose can’t. No breath. Then her lungs suck in. Breathing is truly a magnificent art, a miracle. Life or no life, all on an inhale.
Gathering her scattered limbs, Rose grasps the edge of the table and levers herself to her feet. Every part of her quivers, muscles shivering like water in a flimsy sack, breath shuddering in and out.
Beyond the table, she sees a foot and part of a leg.
“I thinks she’s down,” Rose gasps. The words creak out, a kid mocking the speech of a very old woman.
“About time,” Marion says. “I can’t take much more of this.”
Neither can Rose. She isn’t sure if she can even walk unassisted. Leaning on chair backs for support, she totters unsteadily around the activities table. In her mad scramble she’d knocked over the mugs. Pens are scattered across the surface and onto the floor.
The nurse is collapsed, head and shoulders beneath the table. Two chairs have fallen over. “She’s definitely down,” Rose says. For the first time since she’d been introduced to the MCU, she is glad it is small, separate from everything else, and, undoubtedly, well soundproofed.
“Let’s get on with it,” Marion says.
“Let me get my pants on,” Rose says wearily.
“You don’t have any pants on? Why aren’t you wearing pants?”
“Tell you later.” Rose retrieves the bottoms of her scrubs. One leg is inside out. Ignoring Marion’s machine-gun questions—“What are you doing? What’s this about your pants? Are you sure she’s down?”—she turns the leg right side out, dons the pants and shoes, rights the office chair, and puts the phone receiver back in its cradle.
Marion sees her then. “Don’t go AWOL again,” she snaps. “Scared the hell out of me.”
“Okay.” Rose sits down in front of the computer.
A long intake of breath shushes in her ear; then Marion says, “One second. Okay. Here we are. The nurse’s password is Quackers2! Capital Q, numeral two, exclamation point.”
Rose types in the password.
“See the box Patient Files in the control bar?”
Rose finds it, clicks on it.
“The log-in is MCUsu6pm.” She spells it out.
Rose is in the patient files. She clicks on her own name. Everything is there.
“Scroll through,” Marion says. “I can slow the video down later for single pages.”
Rose scrolls. Every patient in the secure unit for five years back, they’d decided. A lot of scrolling. Each second grates on Rose’s nerves, sandpaper on a sunburn. The screen blurs. Rose puts on the reading glasses. They don’t help.
Her free ear is attuned to the heap of nurse meat in the activities room. This time she didn’t check Karen’s pulse. Didn’t even take the time to see if the woman was breathing. The cola nurse survived the first drugging; she would just have to survive this time. Two massive doses in such a short time might wreck her liver or spleen or something. Rose hopes not, but she doesn’t know what the drug/drugs is/are: opioid, narcotic, sedative, hallucinogen—probably not that. When she was on it, she hadn’t seen anything interesting. Most likely mostly tranquilizers, downers of some sort. In college they’d called them “reds” for some reason. Rose does not know the chemicals used to make reds.
Seventeen bone-aching minutes later and they are done.
“Log out,” Marion orders.
Rose’s scrolling finger is cramped into a claw.
“Out,” she says, and levers her body from the chair. After sitting still so long, she feels every blow her body suffered in the takedown of the big nurse.
“Now you get out,” Marion says.
“Half a sec.” Rose goes into the activities room. Karen is still unconscious. Or dead.
“I’m really sorry about this,” Rose apologizes as she unclips the keycard from Karen’s lanyard. She pats the nurse on the head. “Nothing personal.”
“Are you out? Who are you talking to?”
“Almost. Nobody.”
“Don’t forget the camera. I’m hanging up. My head is about to explode. Call me when you’re home. Wherever that is.” And Marion is gone from Rose’s ear. She feels both abandoned and free.
Rose walks down the hall to Chuck’s room. At the door, she peeks in. He is asleep. She moves quietly to his bedside. Taking his hand, she says, “Thanks, Chuck. I owe you.”
“My good wife loved roses,” he murmurs.
Tissue box clamped under her arm, Rose presses the cola nurse’s keycard to the pad. The door whooshes open. She’s in the deserted reception area when she remembers she’s left the beachy tote and clipboard behind the ficus tree. As she stops and turns there is a yip, like that of an overexcited Chihuahua.
The candy striper is standing in the wide doorway to the nonsecure area of the Memory Care Unit. Stark terror freezes Rose in her tracks; otherwise she would scream and jump into the air. As it is, her eyes go so wide, they hurt. Deer in the headlights. Automatically, her hand flies to secure the earpiece. Plastic touches her palm.
The wig is still on the floor behind her, forgotten in all the excitement.
The girl’s hand shoots out and smacks into a flat round button the size of a woman’s palm set into the doorframe. Long thin red lights start flashing near the ceiling. A silent alarm, so as not to frighten the patients.
The beachy tote with the clipboard, flashlight, and water bottle remains unretrieved behind the ficus tree. The girl turns and runs. Rose turns and runs. Her feet fly out from under her, and she falls hard, hip and elbow slamming into the floor. Fear overwhelms pain; she is on her feet in seconds. The tissue box tumbles nearly to the reception desk, blessedly empty at this hour.
Rose snatches up the box, then slams Karen’s keycard onto the black plastic. The doors start to slide open. Then stop.
The doors begin to close.
Rose jams her shoulder and leg into the narrowing slot. Programmed not to mash human beings, the doors do not pinch her in two. Neither do they retreat politely to let her through. Muttering curses she hasn’t used since Mel was a toddler, Rose shoves her body between the black rubber seals. She is grateful for the scrubs: no buttons, no belt, no buckles.
Her body is out. Before she can snatch her arm free, the doors close, trapping it at the wrist. Jerking, Rose abrades her skin. Blood makes the passage slippery. She takes a deep breath and pulls the last of her personage from the doors’ hard rubbery lips.
Free, she runs toward the familiar dark welcome of the greenway. People will come after her. People with flashlights, then people with guns and badges. Or, worse, a nine-fingered man with a brand-new knife. Though this has been a night of encores, Rose doubts she will get away with hiding in the bushes until morning a second time.
Pain cuts into her side, forcing her to slow.
Feet pound on the sod behind her.
They’ve wasted no time.
CHAPTER 19
Digging deep for nonexistent reserves, Rose manages a painful burst of speed. Before the adventures in the MCU, she’d jogged five miles several times a week. But, then, it was jogging. On a treadmill. Twenty years, at least, have gone by since she’s sprinted full out. Muscles in her thighs stretch and scream. There is the awful feeling of running in a nightmare, forcing legs through thick mud, lungs burning in short hot flares, sharp as razors in her throat.
Yelling, unidentifiable due to the breath rasping in her ears, drifts i
n her wake. Hounds baying in pursuit, no doubt.
Whirring and crashing; then a hand touches her back. Only a touch, but it might as well be the hammer of a wrecking ball. Already on the ragged edge, Rose goes down. Elbows and forearms slam into the grass, saving her from a broken nose and missing front teeth.
At least she’ll look good for the mug shot.
A wheel spins beside her head; that, or her brain is spinning, catching bits of moonlight on the spokes and hurling them into the night.
“Gigi? Are you okay? You’re fast for an old lady.”
Rose tilts her chin up. “Grasshopper?” Then she vomits into the dry grass.
“Oh yuck. There was this hill when I tried out for track. Puke’s Peak. Must run in the family.” Mel helps Rose to her feet. Unsteadily, Rose watches as Mel picks up her bicycle.
“You look like an extra from The Walking Dead,” Mel says sympathetically. “You should sit down and rest.”
Rose shakes her head. “They saw me,” she gasps, then coughs until she’s sure her lungs will turn inside out like sticky pink balloons. “An alarm went off,” she croaks.
“They don’t know who they saw,” Mel says. Then her face tightens. “Where’s the wig?”
“Lost it in a fight.”
“You were in an actual fight? As in scratching and clawing and punching?” Mel sounds aghast. Or awed.
“You should see the other guy,” Rose chokes. “Same nurse as before. The one I drugged. Not in ICU.”
“She saw you, as in saw Rose Dennis, for identification?” Mel asks.
“Exactly.”
“Maybe she’ll have drug-induced amnesia like you did,” Mel offers.
“I was pretty memorable,” Rose confesses. “She pulled my pants off, and I drugged her again—and some other things.”
Mel whistles low. “Sheesh. Do you think they’re after you?”
“Probably right behind me.”
Mel is wearing a small backpack.
“Any chance there’s water in that?” Rose asks.
“That’s why I brought it. Just in case.” Mel balances the bike against her hip, slips the backpack off, fishes out a water bottle, and hands it to Rose.
