The Children on the Hill(4)

Gran rattled the ice in her glass. She poured another gin and tonic from the pitcher on the table between them.

“And there was the episode between her and H.G. on Wednesday,” he continued.

“She was provoked,” Gran responded, lighting a cigarette with her gold Zippo lighter with the butterfly etching on it. The other side had her initials engraved in flowing script: HEH. Vi heard the scratch of the flint, smelled the lighter fluid. Gran said smoking was a bad habit, one Vi should never start, but Vi loved the smell of cigarette smoke and lighter fluid, and most of all she loved Gran’s old butterfly lighter that needed to be filled with fluid and to have the flint changed periodically.

“She’s dangerous,” Dr. Hutchins said. “I know you feel she’s making progress, but the staff are starting to question whether the Inn is the best place for her.”

“The Inn is the only place for her,” Gran snapped. She took a drag of her cigarette, watched the smoke rise as she exhaled. “We’ll have to increase her Thorazine.”

“But if she continues to be a danger to others—”

“Isn’t that what we do, Thad? Help those no one else can?”

Yes, Vi thought. Yes! Gran was a miracle worker. A genius. She was famous for helping patients others couldn’t help.

Dr. Hutchins lit his own cigarette. They were quiet a moment.

“And what about Patient S?” Dr. Hutchins asked. “Things still progressing in a positive way?”

Vi finished up her notes on D.M. and started a new page for Patient S.

“Oh yes,” Gran said. “She’s doing very well indeed.”

“And the medications?” Dr. Hutchins asked.

“I’ve been drawing back on them a bit.”

“Any hallucinations?”

“I don’t believe so. None that she’ll admit to or is aware of.”

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Dr. Hutchins said. “The progress she’s made? You should be very proud of yourself. You’ve given her exactly what she needs. You’ve saved her.”

Gran laughed. “Saved? Perhaps. But I’m starting to think she may never lead a normal life. Not after all she’s been through. She’ll have to be watched. And if the authorities or the papers ever…”

“Do you think she remembers?” he asked. “What she did? Where she came from?”

The hairs on Vi’s arms stood up the way they did during a bad storm.

“No,” Gran said. “And honestly, I believe that’s for the best, don’t you?”

They both sipped their drinks, ice cubes rattling. Their cigarette smoke drifted up into the clouds.

Vi listened hard, wrote: WHAT DID PATIENT S DO? Murder someone???

She knew the Inn had violent patients, people who had done terrible things not because they were terrible people, but because they were sick. That’s what Gran said.

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.