“Oh, Roland...” she breathed. “You remembered.”
She sat down because she couldn’t stand anymore. Allison slowly flipped through the book. The pages had grown so soft and supple with age it felt like she was holding not a book but another hand in her hand. She opened it to the middle and pressed her face into the pages. She inhaled the scent of paper, ink and glue, and if they could make a perfume that smelled like old books, Allison would wear it every day of her life.
Roland had read this book to her. He’d read it to her the first night she’d spent at The Dragon. Not the whole thing, of course, but the first few chapters while she sat on his lap in the big blue reading chair with the other kids in the house gathered around on the rug, and she was in charge of turning the pages.
She’d loved him for letting her turn the pages.
And when Allison flipped to the final page of the book she wept openly. Written on the inside back cover in cornflower blue crayon were two words—Allison Capello.
“All right, this is how we do it,” Roland had said, taking her onto his lap and wrapping his big hand around her tiny hand. “C is an O and it’s trying to touch its toes but it can’t quite reach. And a is a little o with a line on the right side to keep it from rolling away. Make another little o for the p and put a long line on the other side. That’s its tail. P’s have straight tails. E’s have eyes. See? It’s looking at us and smiling. And l is a straight line. Do it again. Two l’s. And then one more o and there you go.”
Roland had taught her how to write her name. Not Allison Lamarque, the name she had been given, but Allison Capello, the name she’d coveted.
Allison put the book back onto the table next to Roland’s letter. She’d faced the existence of the letter and survived.
Now she had to deal with the content.
Dr. Capello was dying.
How was that possible? She’d joked that Dr. Capello was old but only to insult McQueen. He was never old to her. When they played frisbee on the beach, he played the hardest. When they cooked hot dogs on the campfire, he ate the most. He was always good for a piggyback ride up and down the halls. He didn’t read bedtime stories to them. They read bedtime stories to him. “One more page,” he would say, pretending to pout, and they’d roll their eyes and tell him it was time for him to go to sleep.
He worked, yes, but still made as much time for them as he could. He chose his cases carefully, picking the poorest and the sickest kids to bless with his talent. He didn’t have to work at all, as Dr. Capello had inherited a fortune from his parents, a fortune he spent helping kids, especially his own. Being taken away from that family had hurt worse than losing her mother because at seven, Allison hadn’t understood quite how long a time “never again” really was. By twelve, she was starting to have an idea. By twenty-five, she knew. And what she knew was “never again” was too damn long.
And now Roland wanted her to come back.
Allison knew she shouldn’t go. There were great reasons not to go back. Someone had tried to get rid of her and they’d succeeded. Maybe it was a prank, maybe it was something more sinister, but she couldn’t deny someone wanted her gone.
Then again...
She had fifty thousand dollars in cash on her kitchen table.
She had nothing to do and nowhere else to go.
She had freedom to go anywhere she wanted, which she hadn’t had since the first night she’d spent with McQueen.
McQueen would tell her not to go. He’d tell her it wasn’t safe, and he’d tell her she owed them nothing. He’d tell her not to open up an old wound. He’d tell her to take the money and run. And all that was good advice.
But.
McQueen had dumped her an hour ago, so why the hell should she give his opinion any weight? She shouldn’t. She wouldn’t. She’d do what she wanted to do and no one could stop her. There. Finally, Allison found one good reason to be happy that she was a free woman now.
After all...it would only take a few minutes, right? A few minutes, an hour tops. She could fly out to Portland, rent a car and make a vacation of it. She could drive the 101 all the way down the California coast if she wanted. She’d pop in to see Dr. Capello. It wouldn’t be fun, but it wouldn’t be awful, either. A one-hour visit to her childhood home followed by a nice long overdue vacation to celebrate her newfound freedom... Why not?
She knew seeing Dr. Capello again, and seeing him dying, would break her heart.
But as her heart was already broken, Allison had no excuse not to go.
So she went.
Chapter 5
It wasn’t until the wheels touched down at Portland International Airport that Allison realized she had never really believed she would go back. For two days, she’d been running on adrenaline, powered by the need to keep thoughts of the breakup at bay. Yet once she was in Oregon, the frenzy of energy disappeared and it took everything she had to disembark and collect her luggage. When the lady at the rental car counter asked her what brought her to Portland, Allison had been too dazed to think of a decent answer.
“I have no idea,” she said, and the lady looked at her with a mix of confusion and sympathy. She didn’t ask Allison any more friendly, prying questions after that.
The city was as green as she remembered and the rivers that bisected Portland still as blue. She took the highway to an exit that read Ocean Beaches and wondered how anyone managed to drive past that sign without immediately turning onto it and heading straight for the ocean. Very quickly the shining city faded behind her and lonely farms and hilly pastures popped up along the road. But soon enough those were gone, too, replaced first by patches of trees and then by full forests with branches so verdant and thick they formed an archway over the road, like soldiers forming an honor guard.
As she neared the coast, the clouds grew heavier, denser, stranger. The forests turned dark and eerie. In sunlight, the low-hanging mossy branches would look innocuous. At dusk, they looked like skeletal fingers pointing at her, the moss like skin falling off the bone.
Allison nearly jumped out of her seat when she banked around a curve and saw a fiendish grinning red-eyed face glowering at her from the side of the road. Once her heart slowed, Allison laughed at herself. During her flight to Portland, she’d reread A Wrinkle in Time. The villain in that book was a man with glowing red eyes who tried to get the three brave children to submit to him and allow him total control of their minds. She was glad McQueen wasn’t there to see her jump at the sight of someone’s stupid joke. Someone had nailed red safety reflectors to a tree trunk in the shape of eyes and a monstrous mouth. That was all.