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Then, at last, after thirteen years, there it was.
Allison pulled in, stopped and got out of her car at the end of the long winding drive that led from the highway down to the beach. The eight-foot-high wrought-iron gates that stretched across the entrance of the driveway were open, but then again, they always had been. Iron and seawater were a bad combination and the gates were so rusted she doubted they could ever be closed again. She stepped through the gates to where the trees parted. Long ago she’d stood right here with Dr. Capello as he showed her the house, her new home, for the very first time.
“See it?” he’d asked her. “You see the dragon?”
She’d rolled her eyes, too smart for her own good at that age.
“It’s a house,” she’d said. A big house, yes. A tall odd house with blue-green shingle siding and a sort of square turret on top, but still...a house.
“Don’t look at the house,” Dr. Capello had said as he knelt down next to her. He pointed to the ocean. “Look there. Look at the water. You’ll see the house out of the corner of your eye. And then tell me that doesn’t look like a dragon.”
She’d taken a heavy breath, the breath children took when adults insulted their intelligence. But she’d done it, anyway. She’d gazed far past the house onto the ocean. She saw the whitecaps of the waves, the water running up the beach and running away again. And there in the corner of her eye, she saw a dragon.
He was sitting up, this dragon, prim as a cat with four paws daintily placed together, a straight back and his head—the square sort of turret room on top—held high. The green rain-drenched shingles were his scales and the shimmering windows his wings and the gray deck his tail wrapped around his feet. Looking at the square turret, she could make out the back of its head, which meant the dragon, too, gazed out at the ocean, just like she did.
“I see it...” she had breathed. “I see the dragon.”
Dr. Capello had laughed softly. “In the winter, when we use the fireplace, smoke comes out of his nose.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Oh, very. It wouldn’t be a dragon if it wasn’t dangerous.”
“He’s lovely.” So lovely the dragon was, she couldn’t help but try to get a closer look. She turned her gaze from the water to the house and in the blink of an eye...
“He’s gone,” she had said.
“Well, that’s what happens when you look too close at magical creatures. You can only see them when you aren’t looking at them.”
“That’s silly.”
“That’s magic for you.” Dr. Capello lifted his hands as if to say he didn’t make the rules. “It’s wonderful but fragile. You have to be very gentle with it.”
Although she was twenty-five and knew better, Allison couldn’t help but look for the dragon where the house stood. As she’d done eighteen years earlier, she gazed out at the water, letting the house hover in her peripheral vision. At first nothing happened. She saw a house and nothing but a house. All the magic long gone. As she was about to give up, get into her car and finish her drive, she saw it. For a split second, she saw the shingles transform into shiny scales and the wraparound porch turn into a tail and the windows on the third floor shimmer like silvery wings.
Maybe there was a little bit of magic in the old house yet.
Allison’s heart ached looking at the house that had once been her home. She wanted to drive away right then and never look back. She’d told no one she was coming for that very reason. And yet she got back behind the steering wheel and drove down, down, down the winding road to the house. She parked the car where Dr. Capello had always parked his. No cars were there today. She got out and walked the flagstone path to the side door, which was the family’s entrance. She took a breath and rang the doorbell. When there was no answer, she knocked. When there was no answer again, she walked out onto the deck. The house was as close to the beach as it could be without being on the beach itself. The beach that day was deserted. It seemed no one was at home.
Allison didn’t know what to do. Roland had said someone was always at the house, but it seemed she’d come at the one time no one was there. Maybe she was too late. Maybe Dr. Capello was already gone. Regret tasted like copper in her mouth and she almost wept with disappointment. She’d tried so hard to tell herself she’d made this trip to clear her conscience, but the tear she shed was proof she’d come here wanting more than to do her duty to a nice man who’d taken care of her a long time ago.
She’d really wanted to hug her Dr. Capello one more time.
A sound echoed from the side of the house and Allison spun around, suddenly alert and afraid. It was a sharp loud sound followed by a soft sort of grunting noise. Then she heard it again. Then again.
She walked around the deck to an arched wooden door that, if she remembered correctly, led to Dr. Capello’s wildflower garden, something her aunt Frankie had always called an “oxymoron,” like “bad children.”
Quietly and carefully Allison unlatched the gate and pushed through the door. Ten yards away, a man stood with his back to her, chopping firewood. He wore a yellow-and-black-checkered shirt and he was tall and broad-shouldered with blond hair pulled into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck. He lifted the ax with ease and brought it down with precision. Another log was sundered and the two pieces fell on each side of the tree stump.
The man went for another log to split but stopped. He stood up straight and turned around. He must have seen her out of the corner of his eye. He let the ax blade fall into the stump and it stayed there embedded in the wood even as he walked away from it and toward her.
He took one step forward into a shadow cast by the tree, and when he stepped out of it again, the man had turned into a twelve-year-old boy. Gone were the jeans and flannels, the big shoulders and strong forearms, and in their place stood a lanky boy of twelve wearing black basketball shorts and a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves.
Allison remembered...
She remembered the first moment she saw him on the deck, Mr. In-Charge-Because-Dad’s-Gone. She and Dr. Capello stood under his big black umbrella. The hard rain had turned into a light drizzle. She remembered thinking how funny it was that the boy was on the deck lounging in a chair like he was sunbathing in the rain. Rainbathing?
“Roland?” Dr. Capello had said. “Come meet Allison. Allison, this is my son Roland.”
The boy with the stick legs so long she wondered if he could even see his feet slowly rose from his deck chair and walked over to her. Roland wore sunglasses with water droplets on the lenses. He shoved them up on his head to hold his damp hair out of his face. The boy looked at her for a very long time and then at his father.
“It’s all right,” Dr. Capello had said, and she wasn’t sure if he was speaking to his son or to her. “Go on. Say hello to Allison.”
“Hey, Al,” he said, smiling. Allison stepped back away from him so far she’d bumped into Dr. Capello’s legs. She had no idea who these people were, where this house was. She wanted her mother or Miss Whitney. She wanted to be anywhere but here.
“Hey, hey,” the boy had said. He had his elbows on his knees as he squatted, and even in her panic she admired his balance. “Don’t be scared.”
“She’s tired,” Dr. Capello had said. “And probably hungry.”
“Are you hungry?” Roland had asked. “I make a good grilled cheese.”
She shook her head no.
Roland had glanced up at his father as if looking for guidance, but Dr. Capello hadn’t done or said anything. He simply waited like he was watching a TV show, but she wasn’t sure what the show was—The Roland Show or The Allison Show.
“Will you help me with something?” Roland had asked her then. “I’m supposed to read the bedtime story tonight. I need someone to help me turn the pages. Can you do that for me?”
Bedtime story? She hadn’t had a bedtime story since her mother died. Slowly, Allison had nodded. She could definitely turn pages in a book.
He held out his hand, and it was a nice hand, not the sort of hand that she could ever see slapping a little girl for sitting in the wrong chair. She put her hand in his, and before she knew it, he’d stood straight up and swooped her into his arms. It was so sudden, she’d been shocked into laughing. And he’d smiled at her and carried her into the house. She’d clung to him tightly the whole way, pressing her nose to his hair. He’d smelled like the rain. After that, Allison didn’t remember ever crying for her mother or Miss Whitney again.
Allison took a step forward and Roland, the man, not the boy, caught her up in his arms. She felt the warm flannel of his shirt against her cheek and the hardness of his broad chest against her breasts. She was seven again in his arms, and safe again in his arms, and home again in his arms. And when was the last time she’d felt all three? Here. With him. Thirteen years ago.
“I knew you’d come back,” he said.
She looked up at him. “I came back.”
Still holding her by the shoulders, he stepped back and looked at her face, and she wondered if he was trying to see the girl in the woman or the woman in the girl.
“You’re beautiful. When did that happen?”
She blushed. “I didn’t realize it had.”
“It did.” She made a horrible face at him. “Stop that,” he said. He nodded. “Better.”
“What’s this?” She lightly tugged on the chin hairs of his almost-beard. “You going full hipster on me?”
“Not trying to grow a beard, I swear,” he said. “This is what happens when I go two days without shaving.”
“God, you’re old.”
He sighed heavily. “Remind me why I invited you here again?”
Allison grinned. “What are you doing out here? Who needs firewood in September?”
“Ah, you know how it is. We get about one month a year when the trees dry out enough to collect and chop firewood,” he said.
“I heard grunting sounds. I’m glad it wasn’t what I thought it was.”
“Nah,” Roland said. “Now if it had been Deacon...”
“I didn’t need to hear that,” Allison said.
“You and me both.”
Roland smiled and it was a smile she’d never seen before. She remembered all his smiles. As a little girl a little bit in love with him, she’d counted up his smiles and cataloged them. He’d had six smiles. One—that laid-back, lazy, too-cool-for-school smile.
Two—the half smile, bottom lip out in casual agreement, and a knowing nod.
Three—the full smile with the wink of gentle “Dad’ll never catch us in the cookie jar” mischief.
Four—the sudden and slightly insane smile given the second Dr. Capello’s back was turned, the one to trick her into laughing and trick Dr. Capello into asking, “What’s so funny?”
Five—the back-flat-on-the-beach-baking-in-the-sun sleepy smile.
And her favorite, smile number six—the secret smile and a jerk of the head to follow him outside or upstairs. Wherever he was going, she would go, too, even if it was just to the deck to do homework alfresco.
The smile her gave her now was a new one, one she’d never seen him wear before, but it was already her new favorite.
Four hours too late but she thought she might have an answer for the lady at the rental car place who’d asked her what brought her to Oregon.
Maybe it was him.
Chapter 6
They sat on the deck in the white Adirondack chairs where they used to do their homework, boards across their laps as desks and black beach rocks on their papers to keep them from blowing away. The front section of the deck was flat with no railing, so they could sit and look at the ocean without anything in their way. The setting sun had lit the sky on fire and the red tendrils of flame stretched from the horizon to the back of the world where it was already night.
“Where is everybody?” Allison asked after settling down in her chair. Roland set his chair close enough to hers that their shoulders brushed.
“Who is everybody?” he asked.
“You know. Everybody?” she said. “Dr. Capello. Thora. Deacon. Oliver. Kendra.”
“I forgot how long you’ve been gone. Kendra and Oliver left the same year you did. Their families took them back. Haven’t talked to either of them in years,” he said.
“That’s too bad,” she said. She didn’t remember them very well but she remembered liking them both. Kendra had been a reader like her, and Oliver, though quiet, had been a sweet little guy. “But I guess they were happy to get to go home.”
“I guess,” Roland said.
“What about the Twins?”
“Deacon and Thora are good. They still live here. They’re with Dad at the hospital tonight.”
“How’s he doing?”
Roland shrugged. “He’s okay for a dying man. He had some tests run today and they wore him out, so they admitted him for the night. Famous brain surgeons get lots of attention at small-town hospitals.”
“I bet,” she said. An awkward silence descended. Allison wasn’t sure what to say next. She didn’t want to ask questions about Dr. Capello’s illness that Roland didn’t want to answer, but maybe he needed someone to talk to. Maybe he needed someone to talk to about anything but that.
“He’s got two weeks,” Roland said, interrupting her nervous train of thought. “If that.”
“Jesus.”
Roland nodded, tight-lipped and blank-faced. No more smiles.
“Should I go to the hospital to see him tonight?” she asked. “Or should I come back tomorrow?”
“Come back? Aren’t you staying?” He looked at her in confusion.
“I hadn’t planned on staying. I’m taking a long vacation,” she said. “I’m starting in Astoria and driving down to...well, until I get tired of driving or I hit Mexico.”
“We have plenty of guest rooms,” Roland said. “You can stay here.”
“Or I can go see Dr. Capello tonight and get out of your hair.”
“You’re not in my hair. Plus, it’s late. And he’ll be home tomorrow morning. You really want to leave already?”
Allison pulled her legs into her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees, resting her head on her arms. Something about this house made her feel like a kid again, a scared kid.
“I can stay a few minutes,” Allison said.
Roland nodded again, rested his head against the back of the chair and stretched out his long legs in front of him.
“I didn’t get you into trouble, did I?” Roland asked. “Mailing you at your boss’s company address?”
“My boss? Oh,” she said, flushing pink. “My boss. No. Not in trouble.”
“I wasn’t stalking you, I promise. Just Googling. I found your name in an article about some big hotel grand opening. Said you were Cooper McQueen’s assistant and you planned the party?”
Allison tensed. McQueen was not a topic she wanted to discuss.
“Sort of,” she said. “It was a temp job. I don’t, ah, I don’t work for him anymore.” McQueen’s real personal assistant had been sick one week, and he’d sweet-talked Allison into taking over managing the guest list. At the party, a society reporter had cornered her and asked her what she did for Cooper McQueen. Since the truth would have been unreportable, Allison had lied through her teeth.
“I’m glad the package got to you, anyway,” Roland said. “Couldn’t find an address for you anywhere. You’re a little off the grid, kid.”
“I’m, ah, sort of subletting,” she said, not ready or willing to tell Roland the truth yet. Or ever. “The apartment’s not in my name. I’m glad I’m not too late.”
“Never too late to come home,” Roland said, and squeezed her hand.
They fell into another silence but this one far less awkward, more companionable. Maybe it was because he was still holding her hand. Maybe it was because she was getting used to this tall handsome man who shared her former brother’s eyes and smile.
“So...anything new with you?” she asked. “Married? Kids?”
He shook his head slowly. “No wife. No kids.”
“What about Deacon and Thora? Either of them married or anything?”
“We’re all on our own out here. What about you?”
“Free as a bird,” she said.
Allison waited for him to say something else, more small talk, more catching up, but he didn’t seem in the mood for it.
“Let’s walk down to the water,” Roland finally said.
“I don’t know about that. Are you going to throw me in like you used to?” she asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“Not while I’m wearing suede boots.”
“Got it. I’ll take off your boots, then throw you in. Come on,” he said, standing. He held out his hand to help her up and she took it. He dragged her to her feet with ease, and she followed him down the deck steps to the beach below. The wind whipped through their hair, clean and cool, as she and Roland strode across the sand, Lawrence of Arabia in blue jeans. The water rushed up the shore. Allison danced backward away from the wave but Roland let it hit him, and the water turned his brown boots to black.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, and went on before she could answer. “Is it my fault that you never came back after you left?”
“Your fault? Why would it have been your fault?” she asked.
Roland looked at her, a long look, almost a guilty look, and all of a sudden it came back to her, a memory she’d either forgotten or repressed.
From her first day in this household, she’d been treated like the baby of the family. The youngest child, the smallest, she’d fit into that role like she was born for it. Thora did her hair. Deacon walked her to class. Roland carried her on his back or his shoulders when they went anywhere because her legs had been too short to keep up with the older kids. But time passed and by her twelfth birthday, she and fifteen-year-old Thora were sharing clothes, even bras.
It was the first week of June in her last summer at The Dragon. Allison had turned twelve the month before, and Roland had one more week left of his sixteenth year. A heat wave had hit and they were all miserable. Like every other house on the Oregon coast, it didn’t have air-conditioning, and Dr. Capello had taken the kids to the state park nearby where they could hide from the heat in the cool of the damp, dense forest. But Roland was going to start his summer job as a waiter at Meriwether’s the next day and had wanted to stay home. And if Roland was staying home, so was Allison.
They were out on the deck in the hopes the ocean breeze would give them some relief from the stuffy house. Roland stripped out of his shirt but the heat was still too much for him, so there was nothing left to do but throw himself into the ice-cold ocean. Allison followed him out to the beach where they’d both stripped to their underwear. Roland went straight to the water, not even pausing once to acclimate himself to the cold. She ran in after him, watching him dive like a dolphin into the lively waves. He stood up in the waist-high water to push his hair out of face and that’s when she’d noticed something about him she’d never noticed before. His biceps. Of course she’d known he had biceps. Everyone with arms had biceps. Even she had biceps, though her body was too soft to see any definition. But Roland had them. And triceps. Deltoids. All those muscles they’d studied in PE. Except in gym class, the muscles had looked like raw meat, but on Roland they were like...art. Like beautiful works of art, and when you saw beautiful works of art, you were supposed to stare at them, weren’t you? So she had stared.
She’d stared at the water running down his arms and over his shoulders as he stood up. She stared at the lingering droplets on his stomach and had this strange strong urge to lick them off him, which was bizarre because nothing tasted much worse on the tongue than ocean water. Deacon always called it “whale piss.” She’d stared so hard she hadn’t noticed the wave until it had knocked her under. Roland grabbed her quickly and pulled her out of the water and into his arms. Without thinking, she’d wrapped her arms and legs around him like she’d done a hundred times before, and he’d carried her out of the ocean. He dropped down onto the soft sand, her still in his arms.
When they hit the sand she’d had to straddle him or fall over. So she’d straddled his hips. And then she’d stayed there. There was no reason for her to stay on top of him as long as she did, and there was no reason for him to let her sit on top of him for as long he did. There was no reason for her to wrap her arms around his shoulders, and there was no reason he should let her kiss him. But she did and he did.
Allison had kissed him a million times before but this kiss was different. It wasn’t a pucker-upper sort of kiddy kiss, but she opened her lips a little against Roland’s and he must have, too, because she remembered feeling his breath inside her mouth. Some sort of instinct made her move a little on top of him. It wasn’t much, a mere shifting of her hips against his hips and then a second hard shifting after that. Roland moved once under her, then winced like it had hurt, though it hadn’t hurt at all when his hands lightly scoured the backs of her thighs. It lasted an eternity. It was over in two seconds. Without a word, he’d lifted her off him, dumping her onto the sand, and rolled onto his side away from her.
Lying there, under the hot sun, she told herself she was shaking and quivering because of the wave that had knocked her over. She willed Roland to face her and say something. When he didn’t, she’d rolled over toward him. She’d studied his long lean back, the line of his spine, the smooth skin caked with sand. With her fingertips she counted his ribs—one, two, three, twelve on the left; one, two, three, twelve on the right. It had never felt wrong to touch him before and yet it did now. And yet she still did it. Until he stood without warning and started back to the house.
“Better get cleaned up before everybody gets home,” Roland had said. He wasn’t looking at her as they walked. His head was down, his eyes on his feet.
“Okay,” she’d said. She’d agreed without argument, though there was literally no reason to get cleaned up before everyone got home. Nobody would have cared that they’d dunked themselves in the ocean. That wasn’t against the rules. But there was one ironclad rule in the house, and that rule was that the boys should never touch the girls and the girls should never touch the boys. Not touching like hand-holding or playing tag. But touching touching. Kissing and touching. Grown-up sorts of touching. And that’s what she and Roland had done on the beach. They’d broken that rule. She’d broken that rule.
Allison had grabbed a sandy stiff beach towel off the deck and wrapped it around her before heading to the deck door.
“Allison,” Roland had said. Usually he called her “Al” or “kid.” Why all the syllables all of a sudden? She’d looked at him, towel clutched to her body, and waited. “No more white T-shirts in the water, okay?”
Allison had flushed red to the roots of her hair. She’d stammered something along the lines of “Oh, right,” and then fled into the house. In the bathroom, she’d locked the door behind her before looking in the mirror. Deacon’s old T-shirt she’d thrown on so thoughtlessly clung to her body, the outline of the most private parts of her body showing through. If she could see it, Roland had seen it. Allison had brothers. She understood what had happened.
As an adult, she knew it was hardly breaking news when a sixteen-year-old boy got an accidental erection from an adolescent girl in a white wet T-shirt squirming on top of him. As a child, however, she’d been mortified, ashamed and grief-stricken, like she’d broken something between them that could never be fixed.
“I can’t believe it...” she breathed. “I’d forgotten all about that day. Completely forgotten.”
At the water’s edge they stood side by side, precisely in the same spot where it had happened. He’d brought her there to remember, and she had remembered. The memory—so long forgotten—hit her like a wave, and like a wave it left her cold and shaking and wet.
“I always worried it was... I thought that was the reason you didn’t come back.” The solemn, stricken look on his face hurt her worse than hate would have.