Next to the fence, beneath a stand of enormous hostas, a few yards short of the crest of the slope, she lies down on her stomach. Lizard-like, she works her way through the thick leaves until she can see over the top of the hill. Chin on hands, she surveils the house and part of the street beyond. If she sees danger coming she can at least trot back to the greenway and warn her granddaughter. Given the trouble Rose has exposed the girl to, this is a pitiful scrap of protection. When the best one can do is pitiful, that is what one does.

Prone on the cool grass, sheltered by night and sweet foliage, Rose relaxes for the first time she can remember. Pain pours forth into the earth, and with it the last of the strength she’s been clinging to with her fingernails. She’s lost her husband. She’s been locked away in an Alzheimer’s ward. She’s had the flu. She’s been in a brawl with a big nurse. She has slithered beneath a planting of hostas like a cottonmouth, to watch for a person who might come to kill her. Drugs she doesn’t even know the names of still enjoy half-lives in her tissues. Prescriptions she’s been on for years have been scrubbed from her system by time and illness. Her brain floats in a chemical soup concocted by evil toddlers in a devil’s pharmacy.

Swathed in the surreal, her mind drifts away from her body. This is the moment she is in. Every moment is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

This one is a doozy.

Incrementally, she evanesces until she is one with the cosmos. That, or she dozes off for a bit. The faintest crunching brings her back. Lights off, a small dark pickup truck is gliding around the corner. Directly across the street, it swerves to the curb. The engine is turned off. No one gets out. Her friend from the rooftop has been sent to watch her granddaughter’s house.

Astral body, etheric body, and physical body crash back together.

This moment is primitive: predator and prey.

Rose is exceedingly tired of landing on the wrong side of that equation. She inches backward. Dead leaves and grass tailings push up the legs of her scrubs. Long pointed hosta leaves quiver as she slides under them, their tips mimicking brown recluse spiders crawling down her neck.

She hears the truck door open, then, very softly, close again, a quiet thump and a click. Parting the night-silvered leaves, she watches as a man gets out of the vehicle. But for a bandage around his right hand creating a splash of white, the intruder is unchanged: black ball cap, T-shirt, cargo shorts, deck shoes with no socks. Considering the rates Longwood charges, one would have thought they could afford a new, undamaged thug.