While I waited, my own mind began to clear. A brother had come to visit. I had never gotten around to calling either of Sonia’s brothers.

Cell phones were strictly prohibited in the ICU. I don’t know if they really interfere with heart defibrillators, but I didn’t want to be the person to conduct the experiment. I left a note for Nurse Polanco with the woman at the ICU information desk and went down to my car, where I could call up my case notes on my iPad; I’d entered the two brothers’ phone numbers there.

Stuart, the math brother, was just about to set out for an afternoon’s sailing with his husband—it was two o’clock in Maine; I’d caught him in the nick of time, right before they cast off. No one had told him Sonia was hospitalized, but when I explained who I was and gave him a précis of the week’s events, he seemed more saddened than distressed.

“She was such an energetic little girl, whip smart, but our mother—she was drunk too much of the time to pay attention to her, and Sonia started acting out. I see now, now that I’m a teacher, that she was doing anything to get attention from Mom, but at the time I was six years older and I only thought of her as an annoying brat. She came to Boston for a few years—she had some real talent in the arts—sculpting, painting, even a bit of performance studies—but she couldn’t stay focused. Kevin—my husband—Kevin and I tried to help her, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t accept any medical treatment, and finally, when she was broke and got arrested for disorderly conduct, she went back to Kansas.”

“There’s some issue with one of your dad’s experiments that seems to lie behind your sister’s first collapse back in the eighties—do you know anything about it? Matt Chastain, a student who she was infatuated with, disappeared after supposedly making some colossal mistake.”

“I was already out here in Maine, at Bowdoin. My brother, Larry, he’s two years older than me, he was at Reed in Oregon. Neither of us wanted to spend our vacations at home, and we were young—we didn’t care about anything except our own issues, so we didn’t know what Sonia was going through. I got a garbled story from my mother: she was sure Sonia was making things up to grab attention, and she was angry about some woman my dad had invited to his lab from Europe—Barcelona, maybe—but she didn’t talk about any of Dad’s students.”

When I told him about this morning’s attack, he was shocked. “Will she survive? Should we come out?”

I said I didn’t know, that I’d get back to him when I had more news.