But was an actual murderer there? Someone Gran was protecting, keeping safe?
She scribbled WHO IS PATIENT S??? in big letters in her notebook.
* * *
VI THOUGHT ABOUT Patient S now as she walked back across the lawn and drive to their big white house, directly across the road from the Inn. “Who is Patient S?” she asked out loud, then listened for an answer. Sometimes, if she asked the right question at the right time, God would answer.
When God spoke to Vi, it was like a dream. A whispered voice, half-remembered.
When God spoke, he sometimes sounded just like Neil Diamond on Gran’s records:
I am, I said.
And Vi pictured him up there, watching her, dressed in his tight beaded denim suit like the one Neil Diamond wore on the live double album Gran loved to play—Hot August Night. God’s hair was wild as a lion’s. His chest hair poked out through the V of his jacket.
There were other gods too. Other voices.
Gods of small things.
Of mice and toasters.
God of tadpoles. Of coffee perkers that whispered a special hello to her each morning in a bright bubbling voice: Good morning, Starshine. Pour a little cup of me. Take a sip. Gran says you’re old enough now. Take a sip of me, and I’ll tell you more.
But today, so far at least, the gods were silent. Vi heard birds and the slow drone of bees gathering nectar from early blossoms.
It was a bright, sunny spring day, and Vi settled in on the porch swing, reading one of Gran’s books—Frankenstein. Each time she went into Gran’s gigantic library or the little brick Fayeville Public Library in town, Vi let the God of Books help her choose what she’d read next. He spoke in a thin, papery voice, as she ran her fingers along the spines of the books until he said, This one. And she had to read the whole thing, even if it didn’t truly interest her. Because she’d learned that, even in the dullest book, a secret message was inside, written just for her. The trick was learning how to find it. But Frankenstein felt like the whole thing had been written just for her. It made her feel all electric and charged up.
She read some passages again and again, even underlined them in pencil so she could copy them out later when she sat down to write her report for Gran, as she did for each book she read: No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
She was swinging and reading, and listening to the porch swing creak, creak, creak until the creaking became a song—torrent of light, torrent of light, torrent of light—and she closed her eyes to listen harder.
That’s when she heard her name being called. From far away at first, then closer. Louder, more frantic: Vi, Vi, VI!
She opened her eyes and saw her brother. He was tearing up the driveway, bare-chested. His red T-shirt was wadded up in his hands, wrapping something he cradled carefully as he sprinted toward her. He was crying, his face streaked with mud and tears. Whenever Vi saw him shirtless, she thought her little brother looked like one of those terrible pictures you saw in National Geographic of a starving kid: his head too big for his pale, stick-thin body, his ribs pressed up against his skin so you could count each one like the bars of a xylophone.
Eric’s tube socks were pulled up nearly to his knobby knees, yellow stripes at the top. His blue Keds were worn through at the toes, his shorts ragged cutoffs of last year’s Toughskins jeans. His crazy tangle of curly brown hair bobbed like a strange nest on top of his head. After the long Vermont winter, he was pale as the inside of a potato.
“What happened?” Vi asked, standing up, setting her book down on the swing.
“It’s a baby rabbit,” he gasped, holding the filthy bundle to his chest, unwrapping it enough for Vi to see the brown fur of the tiny creature. “It’s hurt,” Eric said, voice cracking. “I think… I think it might be dead.”