The roof of the house is visible beyond the gentle rise in the yard. Mel’s room is upstairs. Rose tries to summon the energy to circumnavigate the house and toss pebbles at her window. As if tiny rocks striking glass will wake a thirteen-year-old who sleeps through tornado sirens and garbage trucks plying their trade.

Carrying her slippers—both worn to wads of abused felt—Rose crosses the backyard. Grass is cool and healing under her feet. As she crests the low hillock she sees a brick platform. In its center is a giant green egg, the size of a dinosaur egg, made of glistening ceramic, the grill, Flynn’s prized barbecue.

Wind gusts through her cranium. Memories flutter up like dead leaves caught in a dust devil. Steaks and corn, Mel toddling, her mother laughing, a long-necked bottle of beer in her slender hand.

Crawfish. Flynn and his dad, Harley, watching the green egg as if it might hatch. Beyond them, on the lawn, Rose and Nancy—Mel’s paternal grandmother and Harley’s ex-wife, the woman who had come to the Memory Care Unit with Stella—playing croquet against Izzy and Mel.

Oysters, Flynn in a heavy coat and Santa hat. Harley and his ex, Nancy, helping Mel with her first real bicycle. Rose and Izzy fleeing into the house out of the cold.

Hot dogs and beans, Harley at the grill, Flynn leaning against the garage, a hand over his eyes. Rose in the playhouse holding Mel while she cries. Izzy three months in the ground, dead of breast cancer.

When Rose’s eyes clear, she is standing by a playhouse, built to half scale when Mel was six. Her hand rests on the frame above the side window. To her surprise, the lights are on in the kitchen and living room of the main house, spilling white squares onto the concrete of the drive.

Sidestepping into the heavy darkness, where the garage shadow overlaps the playhouse shadow, Rose forces herself to focus. She escaped the facility after midnight. Fatigue suggests she wandered the greenway for eight or ten hours, but it was probably closer to two. Too late for the family to be up; too early for anyone to be going to work.

“You don’t care!” a woman screams. “You have everything you want!” The shattering sound of glass breaking against a hard surface sharpens the words. The porch door slams open with such force, Rose flinches. From within, a humpbacked creature, with an oddly shaped head the size of a garbage can lid, is vomited out.

It shoots across the patio, running straight at Rose.

CHAPTER 7

Paralyzed with fright, Rose squeezes her eyes shut and shrinks deeper into shadow, her shoulder pressing against the playhouse wall, her head tucked beneath the low eave.

Bang!

The wall shudders.

Bang!

The eave thrums against her skull.