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.
When Highway 26 met the famous coastal 101, Allison turned south toward the cape. She’d spent the evening before online, reading everything she could about the Oregon coast and deciding where she would go and what she would see after she made her obligatory stop at The Dragon to pay her respects to Dr. Capello. It was a vacation, Allison told herself. No pressure. Just fun. If she were going to come all the way to the other side of the country, she might as well make an adventure of it.
Except, as her drive took her closer and closer to her old home, her sense of adventure left her and low-level panic took its place. Her heart beat rapidly and she had to stop at one of the highway’s scenic viewpoints simply to catch her breath. She leaned against the long stone wall and gazed down at the ocean. It had been a long time since she’d seen the Pacific Ocean. Panama City Beach it was not. The waves were white-capped and hitting the beach hard, and she knew those blue-silver waters were like the siren’s song—lovely, yes, but ice cold and deadly. The scenic marker warned that what she was looking at wasn’t simply a nice ocean landscape, but the notorious Graveyard of the Pacific. Ship after ship after ship had gone down in those waters. No wonder Dr. Capello had called his house The Dragon. Allison imagined all it would take was two steps forward, and she’d fall off the edge of the world into oblivion. To think she used to swim here. Well, if she’d been brave enough and stupid enough to swim in a graveyard, surely she could be brave enough and stupid enough to go home for an hour.
Calmer now, Allison got back into her car and headed south toward Cape Arrow. The whole place wasn’t much more than a collection of pretty beach houses on a hillside overlooking the ocean. It was an isolated, lonely sort of place, and Dr. Capello’s house was the most isolated of them all, a mile farther down from the cape and situated on a solitary spit of land amid deep tree cover. She didn’t know the street names and the GPS wasn’t helping. She turned it off and let memory alone guide her to the correct turn.
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.