Rose felt very “misplaced” now as she returned to her grandmother’s after her second day of school. Rosalinda lived in a stucco house that presided over the corner of two tree-lined streets. It was so different from the neighborhood where Rose had lived with her mom. They had lived on Sylvan Lane in a suburb of Philadelphia. Her mom joked that Sylvan as a name was wishful thinking, since it did not have a tree on it. All the houses had been built in the past ten years and were for the most part boxy, brick, one-story ranch-style houses with garages that took up a third of the lot. The lawns were severe squares of green grass with fiercely trimmed shrubs that stood at attention. But Rose liked it. It was home.
Her grandmother’s house was on the corner of Meridian and Forty-Sixth Street. It was a neighborhood of stately houses, and though Rosalinda’s was no more or less grand than the next, it had an otherworldly feel about it, as though it belonged to another time, another place. Ivy crawled up the walls, forming a patchwork of green against the pale yellow stucco. It reminded Rose of a map, where the ivy was the sea and the stucco made up the continents. Perhaps it was like one of those very old historical maps that showed monsters swimming through unknown seas with the inscription Here There Be Dragons. But instead: Here There Be Grandmother. Grandmother Rosalinda.
If anyone wanted Rose to settle in, it didn’t help that she had to ring the bell to be let into the house. It sure didn’t make it feel like home. Her mother had trusted her with a key to their house back on Sylvan Lane.
Everything was wrong here. She walked up the three steps and rang the bell. At the same moment, a cat leaped onto the broad top step. Its fur was tawny bronze, just the color of the changing leaves.
“Now where did you come from, cat?” Rose whispered. She noticed it had only three legs. The cat cocked its head to one side and looked her up and down as if to ask Rose the same question. Its limpid green eyes flashed with a slit of gold light. On this crisp day, the creature seemed to be the essence of fall. September, that’s what you should be called, Rose thought. Then there was the loud click of the lock being turned in the door. The cat was gone! Betty stood in the doorway.
“Oh, hello, Rose.” Betty blinked as if Rose were a stranger trying to collect money for some cause or asking that a petition be signed to protect the habitat of an endangered toad. Or maybe Betty had a fleeting moment of thinking that Rose was simply an unexpected guest, which was exactly what she had been just twelve days before.
“Betty, there was a pretty cat here just a second ago.”
“Oh, that three-legged one. Yes, it hangs around. I don’t believe in feeding cats. They can become a nuisance.” She pursed her lips and shook her head in disapproval.
Rose believed in cats—in feeding them and cuddling them. She did not find cats a nuisance in the least. She found them soft, quiet, gentle, and for the most part accepting. She loved the feeling when a cat plopped in her lap. She often wondered how they could be so comforting without ever saying a word. How they could seem to listen, to understand. Her mom had bought a cat for her when she was quite little and Rose had named it a rather stupid name, Moon Glow. But hey, she was four. They had called her Moony. But Moony had died three years ago. It turned out she had feline epilepsy. Her seizures became worse and worse, and finally one day she staggered into the kitchen, started shaking violently, and keeled over, dead. Rose hadn’t been there to see it, but she dragged every single word of how it had happened from her mom. Then they collapsed on the couch in the den, her mom folding Rose in her arms, and they cried and cried.
Her mom had made a big deal out of Moon Glow’s funeral. She had invited Rose’s friends over and served lemonade and cupcakes. There were pictures of Moony on a table with a bouquet of flowers. They had buried her in the backyard with a stone marker that her mom had found someone to engrave. It read “Here lies our friend Moon Glow. Indeed a bright light in our lives. RIP.” Rose had actually made herself a mourning outfit. All black, of course, it was made from a slip of her mom’s and part of a witch costume she had worn the previous Halloween. All very drapey and topped off with a black straw hat she had found in a thrift shop with her mom, to which she had attached a black veil. She wore it for three days and then got tired of it. Her mom had taken a picture of her standing by Moony’s grave. She remembered her mom saying something about her looking like a teensy Jackie Kennedy at President Kennedy’s funeral.
Then, just three years later, all the lights in Rose’s life went out. And here she was at 4605 North Meridian Street in Indianapolis, Indiana.
There was no funeral for Rose’s mom, because there were no remains. There was a memorial service. She could not even remember what she wore to the service. Rose was barely conscious during it. She felt as if the minister was speaking about a stranger.
“Your grandmother is in the greenhouse,” Betty said. “Why don’t you go out and visit her? Or do you want to go to your room first and freshen up?”
Freshen up? Who used words like that, except old people? Rose nodded, not an answer so much as a dismissal, and then stepped into the large, shadowy entrance hall. From the tall windows, the occasional shaft of amber light fell on the polished wood floors. A staircase rose majestically with a lovely curving banister that cried out for a kid to slide down it. But here was another hope dashed: there was a stair lift fitted to the banister that made it impossible to slide down. That was how her grandmother ascended to the upper realms of the house where her bedroom was, as well as various guest bedrooms, a study, and a small library devoted mostly to books about plants and horticulture.
“You know, dear, your grandmother is often at her best when she’s in the greenhouse. Very alert when she’s fiddling about with her plants,” Betty said as she closed the front door behind Rose.
“Don’t call it fiddling, Betty.” Her grandmother appeared in the arched doorway beneath the stairs, leaning on her walker. “It’s anything but fiddling.” She was swathed in shawls. A pair of reading glasses dangled from a ribbon around her neck, and her thin, white hair looked as if it had been tossed with salad tongs, then pinned with what appeared to be chopsticks. A calligraphy of wrinkles creased her cheeks. Her eyes were a pale, almost colorless blue. She was neither thin nor fat but seemed rather shapeless. It was her feet, however, that fascinated Rose. She wore old-lady shoes that were black and laced up tight. Her feet were puffy, oozing over the edges of the shoes like rising bread dough in a small pan.
“Come along, dearie. Betty can have Cook send in a snack.” Rose had noticed that the live-in cook was only ever called Cook—she wasn’t sure if it was actually her name or not.
For the past twelve days, Rosalinda hardly seemed to acknowledge Rose, let alone the death of her mother, and now she wanted her to “come along”? Rose shook her head. “I have homework to do,” she said, wondering: Why is she asking me now? She had spoken of Rose’s mother as having been misplaced, not dead. Had she grieved at all? There was certainly no sign of grief. Did being eighty years old with dementia give one a pass on feelings?
Rosalinda was already pivoting with her walker to return to the greenhouse. “Oh, come along, we’ll only be a minute.”
But it wasn’t a minute. For that was the first instance that time started to go a bit catawampus, as her grandmother would say. It was there in the greenhouse that time would begin to strangely warp.