Vi slipped Gran’s wrists—so slender, the skin so thin—into the leather restraints attached to the bed, then did her ankles. She’d lost one of her shoes, abandoned on the floor. Next to it was the butterfly lighter.
Vi picked up the lighter. It was still warm from Gran’s hand.
She flicked it, and the flame jumped to life, the familiar smell of lighter fluid filling her nose.
She stepped around the bed. She felt so light she was almost floating, as if she was not even in the room where she’d spent hours, days, weeks, months, years even, chained to that same bed, being made to forget everything she once was, then made to believe she was something entirely new.
Where she was put to death, then brought back to life with a new name. A new identity.
Vi looked at the lighter in her hand, the flame still burning, guiding her like a torch, the butterfly sparkling.
Did the butterfly remember what it meant to be a caterpillar?
Sometimes, Vi thought. Sometimes it did.
That caterpillar was still inside but transformed, now so much greater than itself.
Vi left the room without looking back, shut the door, and turned out the lights.
Lizzy
August 21, 2019
WE WERE NEARLY there now.
I could feel an electric charge, a thrum building as we got closer.
A storm was settling in over the valley. The sky darkened and opened up, heavy drops of rain thumping on the roof of the van.
The air felt thick and heavy.
The inside of the windshield fogged.
I slowed, squinting at the highway. I put on my turn signal and got off at exit 10, where the green and white sign said: FAYEVILLE.
“So you’re saying your sister is Violet Hildreth, Patient S? Like the Patient S?”
I gripped the wheel tightly, eyes darting from the road to the GPS map.
The windshield wipers were slapping back and forth, back and forth, the defroster blasting air to try to clear the glass.
I had spent most of the nearly two-hour drive so far telling Skink about the Inn, about how I was once a girl named Iris, and about Vi and Eric and Gran.
“Yes,” I said. “She’s Patient S.”
“Wow. I read the book, like, a hundred times. And I’ve got a DVD of the movie. I know all about it. What Patient S did—killing her family and everything.”
I shook my head. “You know what Julia wrote. But she left a lot out, and some of what was in there was wrong. Just guesses.”
“But she used Dr. Hildreth’s papers, right?”
“She only had one file. The only one left. The others were all destroyed.”
“How’d she get it?”
“I gave it to her,” I said.
“No way!”
I nodded. “I packed it the night the police took Eric and me from the house.” I looked out the windshield at the rain pouring down in sheets, making it look as if the world itself were melting.
“Wait.” Skink frowned. “So if she’s Patient S, then where did you come from? Did you ever find out?”
“No,” I said. “Anything that might have told me who I was was destroyed.”
I squinted into the rain, eyes on the two lanes of rural highway in front of me. It was getting dark.
I knew we should wait until morning, make a better plan and go in with daylight on our side. I knew we should wait—but if we waited, we might be too late.