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Dedication

For Brooks

CHAPTER 1

Rose’s head drops, jerks, and she’s awake. I’ve fallen asleep meditating, she thinks. It’s been a while since she’s done that. Over the years, an ease of concentration has incrementally developed. Staying awake is—was—easy. Eyes still closed, she circle-sweeps her hands overhead, breathing in. The inner elbow of her right arm burns like a cigarette has been stubbed out on the flesh. Her muscles complain as if, instead of their own weight, each arm carries a twenty-pound dumbbell. Hands together, she touches her forehead. Clarity of perception, she thinks ritually. Then, hands to mouth, she thinks: Honesty in what I say and do. Hands to heart, she bows: An open and compassionate heart toward all beings.

Ritual done, she takes a moment to center herself, to be aware of being aware, before ending the session. The smell of forest loam, damp and earthy, fills her nose. Mixed with it is the faint exciting odor of burning leaves in autumn.

Rose’s eyes snap open. Golden leaves scatter a small patch of earth around her folded legs. Scarlet foliage shivers like flames on an enclosing hedge.

“What the…” Rose is not in her meditation room. It is not August. She looks up. Above her stretches the trunk of a slender pale-barked tree. Yellow leaves, the shape and size of coins, clatter like falling rain as a breeze plays them against a deep blue sky.

Coins begin to spin, the edges of blue growing dark. Rose drops her head into her hands, waiting for the vertigo to pass. Through her fingers, she sees her legs crossed in a half lotus. They are fish-belly white and skinny, shins knife-sharp, skin falling away in crepey folds from her thighbones.

In August, at the age of sixty-eight, fit and fine, Rose sat on her meditation cushion. Now she is a hundred and three, no place she’s ever been before, and it is autumn.

Holy Rip Van Winkle, she thinks.

Raising her arms, she studies herself. Inside her right elbow, sore and ripped at the center, is a raw puncture wound. Several healing jab-wounds orbit it. Tracks on her arms, like a junkie. She looks down. Her chest and belly are covered in a short blue-and-white-print cotton tunic. Tree bark chafes her lower back as she shifts position. Her back is bare.

This is a hospital gown.

Fear that has been gathering like an army on the edges of her confusion pours down in a screaming horde. Rose closes her eyes and raises her hands, palms out as if to stop the barbarian invasion.