“Flynn was there to keep you from playing on the railroad tracks, or whatever they have there to play on. Besides, this isn’t the first time you’ve gone off the deep end.”

“It is too!” Rose insists.

A longer pause, an eight-months-pregnant pause.

“That was different!” Rose remembers with a shock. “Okay, some bizarre behavior, but that was divorce aftermath. I’ve never ever been put into a facility, for heaven’s sake!”

Marion says nothing.

“That was voluntary,” Rose wails. “I wasn’t tied down and drugged. It was just group therapy and sing-alongs. Besides, it was nearly thirty years ago.” Rose’s throat is so tight, it aches. She is careful not to make any telltale sounds.

Seconds of telephone silence, the grayest kind of silence, clunk by.

A sigh whispers through the cell phone speaker. “It was,” Marion concedes. “But you have to admit, you haven’t always been all that stable.”

“I’m as stable as you are,” Rose shoots back.

“And your point is…”

Rose’s laugh is shaky.

“Tell me everything,” Marion says.

“What about your headache?” A little payback.

“I expect it’s about to get worse. Sorry,” Marion says. “I’d finally given up Harley for dead, and you up for as-good-as. Your sudden resurrection is—it’s a good thing—it’s just a lot when I was getting over losing you. Don’t ever make me go through that again.”

As she has done her entire life, Rose tells her sister everything: the first escape attempt, the drugged orange juice, hiding the red capsules, the slow return of her cognitive mind, the women talking in the hallway, saying she wouldn’t last the week, the costume, the drugging of the night nurse, and her final escape. Spoken out loud, for someone else’s ears, her fear of being drugged, of being plotted against, sounds like more of the paranoid behavior Marion had noticed prior to her being placed at Longwood.

When she finishes, there is a bit of silence; then Marion says, “It’s obvious you were drugged, but maybe it was for a reason. Didn’t the manager, the woman with the perfect eyebrows, say you were agitated, a danger to yourself and others? Maybe that was true.”

“It’s not true,” Rose says.

“For years after your divorce your dream date was Dr. Kevorkian. I thought I’d lost you then.”

That is true. Rose remembers those years. “I’d never harm anyone else,” she says defensively.

“Tell that to the night nurse, if she’s still alive,” Marion says.

A shudder runs through Rose. “If I murdered her it would ruin my whole day,” she says. “I can’t have. I gave her one day’s dose for me, and the woman is the size of a refrigerator.”

“Maybe she has drug allergies,” Marion says ominously.

Rose pinches her nose tightly to keep from making sniveling noises.