by Nevada Barr
The intruder heaves into sight beyond the porch roof. Limping badly, his injured hand clasped to his belly, he crosses the street to a small dark-colored pickup. One-handed, he opens the door, then folds himself in. As he drives off, Rose tries to guess the make of the car, get the license plate number. It is too far, too dark, her mind and vision too disturbed: squat dark man, squat dark truck. Not much to put in a police report.
Of course there will be no police report. Living outside the law brings a plethora of complications, she realizes.
The truck turns a corner and is gone from sight. Rose sits unmoving. Throughout the smashing glass, crashing furniture, stabbing, de-guttering, and falling bodies, not one single light came on in the neighboring houses. Either violent crime is more prevalent in Charlotte than she’d thought, or its citizens are uncommonly sound sleepers.
Good. It quashes Rose’s temptation to cry for help.
She read somewhere that when impaled by a foreign object, one should not remove the object but leave it in situ for the ER doctors to deal with. That not being an option, Rose grasps the handle of the knife firmly, closes her eyes, and pulls straight up. Pain again threatens to unseat her. Liquid warmth pours over her leg.
Rose opens her eyes. Dangling from the knife, an inch above the dripping steel point, is the empty ape-skin glove, black and flaccid. Convulsively, she flings knife and glove from her. They hit the roof, then the ground, with a squishy thud and a clink.
She starts to cry, then stops. No point in crying when there is no strong shoulder to absorb the tears. There is nothing to be done but get on with saving herself. Trying to keep her squeaking and mewling to a minimum, she scootches, bumps, and inches along the interminable length of ridgeline. Each movement ignites a flare of agony. Rose tries embracing it. She fails. The seat and thighs of her thin rayon harem pants shred away as they drag over the rough shingles. Blood makes her hands and leg sticky.
Finally she is above the porch. She folds her good leg over the ridge and sits on the peak of the roof sidesaddle. Below is a ribbon of the concrete that she will hit if she slips. Arms trembling, she turns her body and lets herself slide until she is hanging belly-down on the roof, fingers clinging to the ridge. Forcing the bad leg out, she feels it drop over the edge of the main roof. With a heave, she rolls herself after it, and falls. The porch roof catches her. Such is the pain in her leg, the impact of landing is a nonevent.
Walking is less agonizing than crawling. Rose gets to her feet. Using the wall to remain upright, she navigates around the corner to the side window and collapses through. For a time she lies gasping in the ruin of her bedroom.
Blood pastes the fabric of her trousers to her skin from knee to crotch, but there is no pumping or spurting. Of course there isn’t, she thinks. Unless she is dead and doesn’t realize it yet. That happens more than one might think, stubborn life forces unable to let go of the attachments of an incarnation. They wander around wondering why nothing works like it used to. Pain convinces Rose that she is not a ghost, not yet.
Running on the power of self-reliance, born of utter abandonment, she does not dissolve into the inviting embrace of self-pity. Crab-walking backward on heels, butt, and hands, she reaches the bathroom and peels off her clothes.
Trousers and tunic are ruined and filthy. The pajamas she’d pulled her clothes over have literally saved her skin. Belly, chest, and buttocks are unscathed. Thighs, hands, and forearms are red, rough, and stinging. She turns on the shower, then, too weak to stand, lowers her protesting body into the pathetic excuse for a bathtub.
Hot water washes the blood from her hands and leg. The wound above her knee gapes like a little red mouth drooling pink. The cut is about an inch long and probably that deep. Had she still been a citizen of the so-called civilized world, she would get stitches.
She could sew it closed with cotton thread and a needle. The very idea makes her insides quiver.
Having dried herself as best she can, she closes the wound with four butterfly bandages. Half a roll of toilet paper wrapped around her leg and tied snugly with a scarf, knot over the wound, serve as a bandage, keeping the whole jury-rigged mess in place.
Body close to exhaustion but mind racing, Rose puts on a tank top and loose linen pants. The glove and the knife have got to be retrieved. They are evidence. Besides, she doesn’t want some neighborhood cat getting hold of the mutilated glove and dropping it proudly at the feet of an unsuspecting householder.
Rose limps outside.
The two items are artistically displayed on the white gravel, spattered now with black splotches, a gold mine of criminal DNA. If the Charlotte police are anything like the New Orleans police, they don’t cotton to all that CSI nonsense, just shoot suspects and work lucrative private security details.
Several feet from the knife lay the glove, her final stab has nearly severed the leather forefinger. What remains is attached only by the thinnest strip of black. Grimacing with distaste, she pinches it up. There is a lump in the dangling tip. A finger. Rose cut the intruder’s index finger clear off; that’s why his hand slipped free of the glove. A wave of revulsion rocks her. She doesn’t drop the gory object. Evidence. One day she might need it, not to prove the intruder’s guilt but to prove the entire incident was not a figment of an overheated delusion.
Glove in one hand, knife held gingerly in the other, Rose limps back through the shattered sliding glass door and into the kitchen. Trusting the neighbors to be as disinterested in illumination as they are in noise, she risks flipping on the lights.
Knife and glove laid on the counter, Rose contemplates her next move. She supposes she is in shock, supposes she’s lost a lot of blood, supposes she has PTSD. All this is probably true, but her mind is running at high speed, the manic side of depression. A treat. She’s suffered depression on and off for forty years, but never mania. If this is it, she is all for it.
Unable to bring herself to touch the glove again, she holds the tip of the nearly severed part in a pair of hot-dog tongs. The kitchen scissors serve to slit the leather. A bloody lump, two inches long, is revealed. Meat clamped in the tongs, she holds it under running water. Pink liquid pours over the pile of pots and pans she’d made as an early warning device. They will have to be thrown away. There will be no eating out of them after this, even if they are sterilized.
The lump is rinsed clean. It surprises Rose that a severed digit still looks exactly like a finger. Some part of her expected it to be more scientific, less graphic. She lays it carefully on a paper towel.
Her painting supplies are in two of the big boxes in the living room. Rose cuts the packing tape and levers the easel free. Acrylic inks, brushes, and paint are in a large box Harley built for her. When opened, it sits on end like a slender steamer trunk, tubes of paint and ink hang neatly on cup hooks.
Leaving the rest, she carries the inks and a sketch pad back into the kitchen. Quinacridone violet tempts her, but black seems the most professional. Selecting a never - to - be - used - after - this salad plate, Rose pours several drops of the ink on it. Using the tines of a dinner fork, she spreads the ink into a thin, even coat. This done, she steels herself to the necessity of touching the artifact.
Holding her breath, as if the detached finger might have already begun to decompose and stink, she gingerly picks it up with thumb and forefinger, the nailed end pointing away from her hand. The intruder bit his nails to the quick.
“Gross,” she whispers. Never has she touched anything that felt so dead: not rock, not wood, not hamburger, not chicken breast. This is one dead finger.
Holding it steady, Rose carefully rolls the finger in the ink, then onto the sketch pad. After ten or fifteen tries, she gets several excellent prints. Satisfied, she settles back on the stool she’d pulled up during her project and studies her work. She likes it. There is a visceral progression from the muddied early attempts to the cleanly defined whorls. Even the several drops of blood, quickly turning dark as they dry, add to the impact
of the piece.
Rose has all but forgotten her medium. She is painting, or printing rather, with a severed human finger. Nausea nearly overcomes artistic license. Her lips in a moue of disgust, she sets the digit back on the paper towel, then folds the towel into a discreet opaque package.
The freezer? Flesh will be disfigured as the cells freeze and burst, destroying the print. Does she need both the finger and the prints to prove she isn’t delusional?
The refrigerator? Not if she ever plans on eating the other half of the turkey and provolone sandwich.
The garbage disposal? Way too gross.
A compromise. Rose puts the towel-wrapped package into a zip-lock bag and drops it into the freezer. The sketchbook is left open on the kitchen counter. Acrylic ink dries quickly, but she doesn’t want to chance smearing any of the evidence. Evidence, she reminds herself as she glances at it before leaving the kitchen. Not art.
In the living room she returns to the box of painting supplies. The easel is set up in minutes, an eighteen-by-twenty-inch canvas in place. Black, white, Payne’s gray, and ultramarine blue: Those will be all the colors she needs. She arranges the tubes of paint and several brushes on the top of a chest-high moving box marked DINING ROOM.
A quick trip to the kitchen for a roll of paper towels and half a pitcher of water, and she is ready to begin.
Chapter 13
“Gigi?”
The word penetrates the layers of Rose’s mind. The sun is well up, morning. Mel, plastic bags in one hand, the ubiquitous cell phone in the other, is standing on the deck. Between them is the shattered sliding door.
“Gigi, what happened?”
The caution in her granddaughter’s voice wakes Rose up to her surroundings. The entire top of the packing box has been used as her palette. Paintings are propped against various boxes. Two are on the couch, another, partially finished, on the easel. The floor and the sides of nearby boxes are splattered with black, white, blue, and shades in between. Paint streaks Rose’s shoulders, the consequences of holding one brush in her teeth while using another, loaded with a different color.
Drawing herself out of the land of visions, the world from which she paints, Rose greets Mel in what she hopes is a normal and reassuring manner.
“Be careful of the broken glass,” she says. “I’ve been painting.”
“So I see,” Mel replies, still with a distinct note of caution. “Planet of the Apes?”
For the first time since the painting trance took her, Rose looks critically at her work. A black hand, knuckles creased more like living skin than dead leather, clutches a knife the size a butcher might use for the serious work. Dark eyes, burning with sparks of blue, glare from beneath a cap brim, the shadow and the eyes melting together. Hunched and canted, a simian shape lurches through the spill of a streetlight. A shadowy vehicle hints its existence in lines and planes. Seen from above, one thick leg extruding from a pair of black cargo shorts, another ape-like figure hunkers over, straddling a window sill. All are in shades of night and terror.
“Bad day at the zoo?” Mel asks.
“Unclear perceptions,” Rose says wearily. For identity purposes, her paintings are fairly worthless. “I had a gentleman caller last night. I perceived him as an animal. Now I’ve painted him that way. Doggone it!” Too tired to stand erect any longer, she walks to the couch and flops on it full length, her heels resting on one arm.
Mel steps through the doorframe.
“Careful,” Rose says again. Most of the glass is in neat little squares, safety glass, but bits crammed into the frame could be sharp.
“Someone broke in?” Mel asks incredulously.
“No. Someone came in, with a key, I think, then broke the door on his way out to make it look like he’d broken in,” Rose explains.
“How do you know?” Mel sounds as if she still does not trust Rose’s reality, simian or otherwise.
“On his second visit he didn’t leave the premises through the same door. I discovered the door broken but unlocked and open.”
“Somebody really broke in while you were here?”
Rose can see Mel absorbing the idea.
“Gigi, that’s awful!”
The genuine concern touches Rose. Oddly, it makes her leg and palms hurt. It makes her fatigue nearly unbearable. Mel cares. Rose is not going to let that weaken her. Mel does not need a grandmother who is any more of a burden than Rose already is.
“You know,” Rose says, making herself sit up and look moderately perky, “it’s not awful. It’s pretty wonderful. Remember I said I thought people at Longwood were plotting my demise?”
“I remember,” Mel says.
“Well, they were. They are. I am not crazy. QED.” As the words come from her lips, Rose realizes they are true. A psychic weight lifts. She is not crazy, not delusional. They really are out to kill her. This is such an excellent revelation, she laughs.
“Gigi, would you mind walking me through QED step by step?” Mel asks warily.
Rose does, from first awakening to final unfinished painting. She shows Mel the wreck of the bedroom and her clothes, the blood spatters and smears on the skylight. Looking from below with the sun behind them, they look like mud. For the finale, pointing proudly at the open sketchbook, Rose boasts, “I got his fingerprint.”
Mel is suitably impressed. She crosses the small kitchen to study the page of prints. “Wow!” she says, beaming at Rose. “How did you get him to give you fingerprints?”
Rose had left that part out as indelicate. “I . . . well, what happened was I accidentally ended up with his finger. Then I made the prints with that,” she says.
Then that story has to be told in full.
“You want to see it?” Rose finishes.
“What kind of grandmother are you?” Mel asks. “Offering to show an impressionable child a cut-off finger!”
“You’re way tougher than me,” Rose replies.
“Of course I want to see it,” Mel says. “Are you kidding? How often does a chance like this come along?”
Rose takes the plastic bag out of the freezer and dumps the towel-wrapped morsel onto the counter. With tongs and a fork, she peels the paper back.
“Jeez,” Mel breathes. “It looks so much like a finger. I mean, you know, a finger.”
“Creepy, huh?”
“Wrap it back up.”
Rose does, and drops the package back into the freezer drawer.
“That’ll be a big surprise for the cleaning lady,” Mel says, after they’ve returned to the living room and are sprawled on the couch, the only usable area remaining in the house. “You don’t think the break-in could be a coincidence?” she asks. “Guy thinks the house is empty. It’s not. So he decides to kill the witness?”
“I didn’t witness him until he came back for me,” Rose says. “That’s the telling part. He was scot-free, run of the house to burgle at will. He takes nothing, then comes back for me.”
“Pretty convincing,” Mel admits.
“Don’t forget, he broke the glass in the door on his way out, not in.”
“So a key or a good lock picker,” Mel says.
“And when I cut off his finger, he said, ‘You are one crazy bitch,’ not ‘You are one crazy bitch.’ That suggests to me that he was sent here by somebody who called me a crazy bitch. Now we’re back to Longwood. Nobody else in this town knows me well enough to call me a crazy bitch.”
“Grandma Nancy,” Mel offers.
“Other than Grandma Nancy.”
“Stella.”
“Other than Grandma Nancy and Stella.”
After a moment of quiet cogitation, Mel leaps up with a lithe grace Rose can barely remember. She gathers the paintings, eight finished, and props them against boxes where they can be easily viewed from the sofa. That done, she plops down next to Rose, her feet folded beneath her. “So that’s our guy,” she says. “He looks properly thuggish.”
The two study the paintings for a while.
&
nbsp; “Hispanic? Korean? Italian? Hawaiian?” Mel suggests.
“Maybe.” Rose stares at the paintings. There is more detail than she’d first thought. “Hispanic or Italian,” she decides. “Very dark eyes, almost black.” She looks at the piratical figure with the knife in its jaws. “Good straight teeth,” she adds. “Or were. When I pulled the knife away, one of his incisors broke off.”
“Ouch!” Mel says.
“It did make him a tad waspish,” Rose says.
“Not tall but thick,” Mel adds. “I’m guessing late twenties or thirty?”
“My guess, too.”
“With these and the fingerprint, the cops should be able to find him, wouldn’t you think?” Mel says.
“You’d think,” Rose agrees. “But that doesn’t make it so. Me, they’d nail in a heartbeat. A bird in the hand as it were. Maybe even a nice mention on the six o’clock news.”
“Cynical,” Mel sighs.
“I’ve lived too long in New Orleans,” Rose excuses herself.
“His ears look really small and tight to his head,” Mel observes. “Were they really like that?”
Rose looks more closely at the painting Mel indicates. “Must have been. Why else would I have painted them that way?”
The doorbell rings and they both twitch.
“I’ll get it,” Mel says, unfolding herself and slipping effortlessly over the back of the sofa.
Rose wants to stop her, to tell her to be careful, but she doesn’t. That seems too dramatic for a sunny suburban morning.
Mel is back. “FedEx,” she says, tossing Rose the envelope.
“A credit card and an ATM card. Marion sent them overnight express.”
“Wish I had a sister,” Mel says.
“I wish you did, too.” Rose opens the envelope. “There’s something else.” She upends the envelope. A plastic prescription bottle falls out. It’s wrapped in a Post-it Note. “Antidepressants,” Rose says, then reads the note: I called my doctor and asked for a prescription. Not a problem. They hand these things out like candy. I’m surprised they don’t have help-yourself bowls on pharmacy counters like they do dog treats at Petco.
