For today, tonight, tomorrow, she needs to figure out how to get Chuck out of Longwood and stashed somewhere safe until the drugs wear off and he can fend for himself.

And if he doesn’t, if he dies because of her interference?

Kidnapping and murder have much longer jail sentences than assault and breaking and entering, even for a first offender.

“I’m going to the teepee to meditate,” Rose announces.

“Om,” Mel replies, not looking up from her cell phone.

CHAPTER 25

Sitting in a half lotus, on an acrylic zebra skin, Rose lets her gaze soften. Her mind itches to count the time since her awakening in the Memory Care Unit and her final escape. Days? A week? Breathing in, she relaxes, not into the numbers but into the need for numbers, the need to calculate the half-life of drugs, withdrawal, fear, and stress.

There is the suffering of suffering.

The suffering of change.

The suffering of self.

Letting concepts drift free, her mind opens beyond the battered, poisoned gray matter of her brain. Rose lets go, and lets go again, settling into still radiance, inherent energy, and the thoughts and emotions rising and dissolving.

Then she is dissolving. Water pouring from her closed eyes as grief, deep and warm and eternal, fills her, stretching in every direction; grief she’s not had time nor mind for, the magnificent presence that was Harley Dennis, her husband of fifteen years, her boyfriend, her roommate, her partner in crime. The man who rescued her and loved her, who found her foolishness and eccentricity delightful. The hardworking, levelheaded, Presbyterian CEO who had always wanted to marry an artist and, when he was sixty-five, did so.

What a grand whirl it had been.

Rose cries for herself, and for all sentient beings who never know what true love feels like. She cries for the dogs they raised, the cats they served, the wealth of joy they created together.

Heartbroken happiness emanates from her as she floats in a vast sparkling sea of grief.

From a distant shore an irritating noise bores through to ears she’s forgotten she has. It stops. She breathes, settles. The noise augers in again.

The iridescent sea vanishes. Tears stop. Rose opens her eyes to the walls of the teepee, eerily glowing gray from the light on the screen of her cell phone. The plastic rectangle buzzes like a grasshopper in a paper bag.

A good and righteous Buddhist would not break meditation for worldly affairs, but then a good Buddhist wouldn’t be mired in karma up to her eyeballs. Knowing she postpones enlightenment for at least a lifetime, Rose picks it up. Black letters spell out UNAVAILABLE on the tiny screen.

“Hello?” Rose answers warily.

“You’ve been stirring up a hornet’s nest,” a man snarls into the phone as if trying to keep his anger at a respectable decibel level.

“Who, may I ask, is calling?”