It’s difficult to say exactly what happened next. We were sitting and talking, and Viridian had just remarked how nice it would be to spend a week near the water, how she planned to swim every day, when her speech phased out—that’s what I’ll call it—and for a space of fifteen seconds she was speaking gibberish: and I ran away with the king of the bandits hey nonny nonny. I think that’s what I thought I heard. The next moment she was back to normal. She said she hoped the weather would stay fine for us.

I looked at Oscar and he at me, and I could tell we were both unnerved, and neither of us had invented or imagined it.

Viridian had reached the end of her thought and was waiting for one of us to speak. Oscar said, “Virdie? You feeling all right?”

“Of course I am.”

“You were talking funny.”

“Now don’t be rude.”

“Yeah, but you were babbling. About the king of the bandits. It’s like your mouth took a little detour.” Oscar looked over at me.

“I was talking about the weather,” Viridian said, sounding impatient.

“How’s your blood pressure?” I asked her. “Have you been taking it?” The hospital had sent her home with a cuff so she could monitor herself.

Viridian sighed. “I check it fifteen times a day. It’s perfectly normal. Is everyone going to follow me around all day, fussing over me? I swear, I will run away and join the circus.”

Oscar and I left her in the garden and went to sit on the front steps. I said that maybe we should call Dr. Gandhi. Oscar said that he would, but what the hell had happened?

“Maybe it’s the medication.” I hadn’t told anyone about the way she’d talked in the hospital, and anyway, this was something different, worse. “Ask him if there are side effects. Ask him if it’s safe for her to travel.”

“She won’t want to go back to the hospital. That’s for certain.”

“Should we call Boone?”

“She won’t listen to him either.”

I wasn’t sure if I’d wanted to call him or not, so I settled for not. I was out of good ideas, and I guess Oscar was, too. I didn’t want to admit defeat, although we’d have to, sooner or later. Oscar had begun tying his hair back in a tight ponytail that made him resemble a gone-to-seed Japanese monk. He was wearing shorts and sandals and one of his black T-shirts, the same clothes as when I’d first set eyes on him and wondered if he was either dangerous or merely what one called a character. By now of course I was well used to him. And he’d proved himself to be Viridian’s loyal friend.