Chapter 25
Allison spun around and saw Dr. Capello in his blue bathrobe standing at the top of the stairs.
“Fairwood called me,” Dr. Capello said in answer to her silence. “They said someone came to see Antonio today. I knew it had to be you. You must be pretty upset.”
“They called you?”
“I asked them to,” he said. “I like to keep tabs on the poor boy. Michael said Tony had a seizure while you were there today.”
“He did,” she said. “It was...awful.”
“Kid was dealt a bad hand at birth,” Dr. Capello said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t change his cards.”
“You aren’t playing cards,” Allison said. “You’re playing with kids and their lives.”
“It wasn’t playing, doll face. It was my job.”
Now was Allison’s chance to ask the question she’d come back here to ask.
“What did you do to your children?”
Dr. Capello didn’t answer. He shuffled across the floor to a chair and sat down in it, hard and heavy. He looked sick and he looked tired. He looked just like what he was—dying. He took a few moments to catch his breath and then began speaking.
“There was a girl,” Dr. Capello began. “A French girl. We studied her in med school. She had epilepsy. No drug could silence her seizures, no treatment could quiet her suffering. Day in and day out she suffered without hope. And then a surgeon proposed a rather radical treatment. Her seizures were seated in her hippocampus. Perhaps if he removed it, it would end her seizing. Of course, there was a great risk to this surgery. The hippocampus is also the seat of empathy, of inhibition, of memory. You can’t just cut something like that out of someone’s brain without consequences. But the girl was desperate. It was this or death by seizure. They performed the operation. She lived. Everyone held their breath to see what sort of person she would be once the organ of empathy was cut out of her brain. Would she be a zombie? A psychopath? Would it have been all for nothing? And then the most wonderful thing happened.”
“What?” Allison asked, swept into the story despite herself.
“She stopped seizing. That they expected. What they didn’t expect was that she developed hyperempathy.”
“Hyperempathy?”
“Yes, it’s a condition wherein a person overidentifies with the feelings of another. Hyperempaths are so sensitive to other people’s moods and feelings they can seem almost psychic. It’s the brain, you see. We call it neuroplasticity. A big word that simply means the brain has extraordinary powers of healing itself. Especially in children. Whole hemispheres of the brain can be removed and people can not only survive but thrive as the remaining hemisphere of the brain quickly takes over the job of the lost hemisphere. My God, Allison, it’s like magic to see something like that happen. Keep the moon. Keep the ocean. Keep outer space, I don’t want it. It’s the brain that’s the true undiscovered country.”
“And you explored it,” she said.
“I did indeed. Inspiration is a terrifying thing. Hits you like lightning and you’re never the same again. I read that case study about the French girl thirty years ago and had the idea that this was it, this was the cure the world was waiting for. It’s the common denominator among all psychopaths—the lack of empathy. And here was a way to create empathy, hyperempathy even, in a human brain. Remove part of the hippocampus. It’ll shock the brain into rewiring itself. We already knew thanks to Phineas Gage that if you damaged the brain you could damage the personality. Well, it turns out if you sculpt the brain, you can sculpt the personality. Like Deacon with his glass, that was me with the brain. A sculptor. Dr. Jarvik created artificial hearts. I sculpt artificial souls.”
“This sounds insane, you know,” Allison said. He waved his hand in disgust.
“It sounds insane to break a child’s jaw, doesn’t? Sounds awful. But we do it all the time. If a child is born with an overbite, you break the jaw, you reset it and you let it heal correctly. That’s all I did. I broke the brain, reset it, let it heal. And I’m not the first to do it, kid. It’s called psychosurgery, and it’s been around for decades. In the 1970s, a procedure was perfected in Japan to treat aggression. Cut out part of the amygdala—the seat of aggression—and violent people become less violent. My procedure simply went a step further. Or two.”
“Or three?” Allison asked.
“Or three,” he said.
“What did you do to these kids?” she asked again.
“I called it ‘the Ragdoll Project.’ A little joke. My mother kept Ragdolls until she died. Best cats there are.”
“Because they’re so tame they can’t even protect themselves?”
“What’s wrong with being tame?”
“That’s really what you did, isn’t it? You ‘tamed’ violent kids?”
“Not any old violent kids. Psychopathic kids,” Dr. Capello said. “I found children who fit the criteria. I operated on them. The end.”
“No,” Allison said, shaking her head. “Not the end. Not even close to the end. You didn’t always cure them, and that’s only the beginning. Now tell me the rest. Kendra’s on a dozen drugs and almost never leaves her house. Antonio’s a wreck. Oliver’s dead. You want to explain that to me?”
“What’s to explain? It’s experimental surgery. It’s the risk we take.”
“Antonio has to be restrained constantly. He’s been chained to a bed for fifteen years! This isn’t the risk ‘we’ take. It’s the risk you took for him. He was a child.”
“Yes, and had he been an adult they would have locked him up in prison and thrown away the key,” Dr. Capello said. “Save your sympathy. If I hadn’t operated on him, he would have been facing a death sentence long ago.”
“How do you know? You can’t see the future.”
“You’re a sweet young woman,” Dr. Capello said, “and you’d make a lovely wife, a good mother and a wonderful friend. But you’d be a terrible doctor. The children were ill. No other treatment works for kids like that.”
“Kids like Deacon,” she said. “Right? Antonio said he killed his cat.”
“Oh, Deacon killed lots of cats. And dogs. And birds. And anything he could catch. It was a mania. It was...sick. That was part of the Macdonald Triad, you know. The old criteria to diagnose future violent offenders—do they set fires, do they wet the bed, do they harm animals? Deacon had all three.”
“And Kendra?”
“The newspapers called her ‘the Firestarter,’ like that old movie. Burned down her grandfather’s house with her grandfather still inside. And Oliver—”
“Threw his baby brother against the wall,” Allison said. Dr. Capello raised his eyebrow. “We went to see his mom.”
“I see,” Dr. Capello said.
“And Thora?”
Dr. Capello nodded.
“And Thora. Psychopath through and through. A pathological liar like most psychopaths are,” Dr. Capello said. “Accused her first foster father of molesting her after he punished her for beating up one of the other kids in the house. He was arrested for sexual contact with a minor. His wife left him. He wasn’t allowed to see his children. By the time Thora recanted, it was too late. His father-in-law had shot him and killed him.”
Allison buried her face in her hands.
“Allison, listen to me. There was no hope for these kids. They were done for the day they were born, the second they were conceived. The same way some kids are born with bum tickers, these kids were born with bum brains. Unlike the heart, you can play a little with the brain. And that’s what I did. Partial hippocampectomy, burn a few holes into the prefrontal cortex and then wait and see. If it all goes well, in six months to a year, you have a brand-new child with a brand-new personality. When it goes right you get Roland. If it doesn’t go quite right, you have—”
“Antonio. Oliver. Kendra.”
“Sadly, yes,” he said. “I couldn’t save them all. But I tried.”
“They never had tumors, did they? Or cysts or anything?”
“When the procedure works, the kids all have healthy consciences. Too healthy. If they were going to be normal kids, they couldn’t be walking around thinking they were born evil. Better to let them think it was a tumor, something foreign that had invaded their brains, something easy to fix. It’s hard to heal when you’re saddled with guilt. A tumor or a cyst—that was something they could point the blame at rather than themselves.”
“And it gave you a reason to operate,” she said. “Right? I’m sure you had to come up with an excuse to cut inside the heads of little kids. You couldn’t just walk around saying you wanted to cure them of evil.”
“You would think that, wouldn’t you?” he said, shaking his finger at her. “You would think I would have to show the parents and guardians X-rays, test results, brain scans, treatment outcomes... You would think my nurses would try to stop me, residents, interns, the hospital brass. You would think. You want to know how it really happened?”
“You walked in, snapped your fingers and they gave you a kid?”
Dr. Capello snapped his thin old fingers.
“These kids weren’t kids anymore to their parents or their social workers. They were problems. And you tell someone you can make their problems go away, they will roll out the red carpet for you and say, ‘Be my guest.’ Nobody wanted anything to do with these children. I said, ‘Show me your worst kids and I’ll take them off your hands.’ It wasn’t a hard sell. They gave me the kids with a sigh of relief and no questions asked. That’s not a cliché, my dear. In all the years I was looking for children to help, not a single social worker ever asked to see the X-rays.”
“Of course they didn’t. You were a pillar of the community. People looked up to you, trusted you.”
“That had nothing to do with it.” He waved his hand, batting away the idea. “I promised to make their problems go away. They would have let the devil himself take those kids if it meant they didn’t have to deal with them. What would you do with a boy like Antonio? A boy who stabbed a girl in the neck with a fork and tried to rape her on the playground? A boy who giggled when you tried to punish him for it? A boy who’d as soon set your bed on fire as look you in the eye? A boy who did set his own mother’s bed on fire for trying to discipline him. He was remorseless as a snake. Allison, one of my own nurses looked at one of my Ragdoll patients on the table and said, ‘At least if she dies, it’s no big loss.’ You know which kid that was? Thora.”
Allison pressed her hands to her face. She couldn’t believe she was hearing this.
“You love Thora?” Dr. Capello asked. “You can thank me anytime now because believe me, you wouldn’t have loved her before I helped her.”
“Don’t pretend you’re some kind of saint or angel. I know the truth.”
“I never hurt a child on purpose in my life.”
“Except me.”
Finally she managed to land a blow hard enough to crack his self-righteous facade.
“Ah,” he said. “You do remember everything now, don’t you?”
“I remember.”
Dr. Capello let out a long breath. His skeletal shoulders slumped. He pointed a bony finger toward the filing cabinet that had held all the medical records before he’d burned them. Allison went over to it and opened the second drawer. She’d already seen inside the top one.
“Bottom drawer,” Dr. Capello said.
Allison bent down and opened the bottom drawer. She saw something inside it covered in an opaque milk-white plastic cover. She pulled the cover away and there in the bottom of the drawer was a machine, no bigger than a four-slice toaster, that looked like a prop from a 1960s sci-fi film. It was white plastic with rounded corners, large dials and knobs, with black wires coiled around it.
“That what you were looking for?” Dr. Capello asked.
“That’s it,” she said. Once she saw the ECT machine, she knew that was the thing Dr. Capello had used on her. She went cold looking at it, nauseous. “Was this your grandmother’s?”
“Oh, no. That one’s from a mental hospital that closed down in the 70s. It’s very safe, you know,” he said. “It’s not like the movies. You get the shock and you have a headache and some retrograde amnesia. That’s about it. What’s fascinating is that you remember anything at all from that day. It’s usually permanent, you know. The amnesia from ECT.” He spoke as if he wished he had the time to study her.
“I remember it all now. When I saw Antonio seizing today, it came back to me.”
“Interesting,” he said. “I wonder if it wasn’t the ECT that made you forget. Good chance you simply didn’t want to remember.”
“I didn’t,” she said. “But I do. I remember that I was twelve. And I remember I wasn’t sick. And I remember we weren’t in a safe, sterile hospital,” she said. “We were up here in a dark stuffy attic, and you drugged me and used thirty-year-old medical equipment on me.”
He had the decency—or the cowardice, perhaps—to say nothing to that.
“I never did fall, did I? You made all that up,” she said.
He raised his hand in surrender, the only admission of guilt she needed.
“How could you do that? You drugged me,” Allison said. Her voice was small, scared, far away.
“Just Benadryl,” he said. “A double dose.”
“You made me recite a poem to help me fall asleep. Kubla Khan.”
“‘A savage place!’” Dr. Capello recited, “‘as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waving moon was haunted / By woman wailing—’”
“‘For her demon-lover!’” Allison completed the line, finally remembering it. She closed her eyes and whispered a name. “Roland...”
“Yes, Roland,” he said.
“It wasn’t an accident, was it?”
“No.”
“He killed Rachel. Murdered her.”
“I don’t believe children, even psychopathic children, are capable of committing murder in the legal sense. But did he kill her on purpose? Yes,” Dr. Capello said. “He did. Their mother was long gone, father wasn’t home much. Roland would abuse Rachel, brutally abuse her. That’s how she came to me. Through the ER. Roland cracked her skull against the sidewalk.”
“Oh, God,” Allison said. She didn’t want to know any of this.
“She was too scared of Roland to tell anyone the truth about her injuries. The police assumed it was an accident and so did I. She was the sweetest little thing. I held her hand before the surgery, just to let her know I was taking good care of her. She didn’t want to let my hand go,” he said. “I can still feel those tiny little fingers. Her whole hand fit inside my palm. I told her she needed to be more careful playing outside. She said her accident wasn’t an accident, someone had pushed her. I assumed it was her father. Who would ever have guessed it was her brother? He was just eight.”
He stopped speaking and for a moment it seemed he was somewhere else, somewhere he wanted to return to.
“She asked me to take her home with me,” he said. “The sort of desperate hopeless wish children make, like wishing for wings. I never planned on having children. Work was my life. But I couldn’t let her go back to her father. I thought I would die if something happened to her. I’d never felt like that before with one of my patients, like she was my own child. So I asked to take her and they gave her to me. Just like that. And I thought if the father was hurting her, he’d probably hurt Roland, too. I brought them home and we spent a happy week together. Five whole days in this house, the three of us. And on the morning of the sixth day, before I was even awake, Roland dragged her out to the beach, buried her in the sand and let her suffocate to death. My little girl. My poor little Rachel.”
Though his eyes were dry and his body dehydrated, he still found a way to weep. Allison wept, too, but not with him. Their tears were for different reasons. He wept for what he’d lost. Allison wept for what he’d taken.
Finally, he calmed himself. He turned and opened the filing cabinet drawer, the third one, and riffled through some papers before bringing something over to Allison.
“There she is,” Dr. Capello said, handing her the photograph of a little gap-toothed girl of five with brown hair and brown eyes and a smile to break anyone’s heart. Allison stared at the photograph, the little girl killed by her own brother. Her brother, the man Allison loved.
“Master manipulators, psychopaths are,” Dr. Capello said. “Even as children. And I fell for it hook, line and sinker. Rachel was too scared of Roland to tell me the truth. And she died for it.”
In the photograph, the girl sat cross-legged on a bed, a blue bed, holding a stuffed toy puppy. She wore a floppy beach hat to hide the shaved part of her hair from the surgery. She wore a smile to hide how scared she must have been trapped in the same house as the boy who would kill her that week.
“I made Roland tell me why he did it and you know what he said?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“He said, ‘Because you liked her better than me.’ He killed her because I loved her. It almost makes me want to believe in hell. I could have wrung the life out of him with my bare hands. A boy of eight and I hated him. Do you know how terrifying it is to realize you truly want to strangle a child? But I didn’t do it. I didn’t hurt him. I fixed him. And I was right to do it, Allison. Instead of justice, I showed him mercy. They love to talk about mercy at his monastery. I say what I did was an act of mercy. I operated on him, and lo and behold, the old boy was dead and a new boy was born in his place. He was a work of art. Total transformation. Demon to angel... Yes, he killed her because I loved her, and I saved him because I hated him. God, I hated him. Until I loved him.” He lowered his head and Allison knew he wanted to weep.
“I love him, too, you know.”
“Love him? You’ll destroy him if you aren’t careful.”
“Destroy him? How?”
“You don’t know fragile these kids are. Before the surgery, they have no remorse. After, they’re penitent as saints. You have to protect them from too much guilt. They’re like sponges, especially in the beginning, soaking up everyone’s feelings. If you hate them, they hate themselves. That’s what did Oliver in. His mother’s grief became his. And I saw the way she watched him, like he was a bomb about to go off. He was better here where no one knew what he’d done. He needed to be shielded. But she took him home and you know the rest. I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t want to lose him like I’d...”
“What?”
Dr. Capello didn’t answer.
“You lost another patient, didn’t you?” she asked. “Another kid? A kid who killed himself like Oliver?”
He still didn’t answer.
“How many kids?” Allison demanded. “Tell me how many kids died.”
“Five.”