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.
“God, no.” She waved her hands in denial. “No, Roland, absolutely not. What happened that day... No, that was not why I haven’t come back before, I swear. I can’t believe you thought that.”
His shoulders slumped in obvious relief.
“I was sixteen and you were twelve,” he said.
“Nothing happened,” Allison said. “Nothing. Yes, I freaked out afterward but that was from embarrassment, not... I don’t know, trauma?”
“I know what a kid freaking out looks like. This was different,” Roland said.
“Was it? I don’t remember much after that day,” she said, realizing as she said it that that day, that incident, was the last thing she remembered from her final summer at The Dragon.
“What do you remember?”
“I remember the wave hitting me,” she said. “I remember you carrying me to the beach and not letting me go even after I was safe. I remember kissing you and, after, you telling me not to wear white T-shirts in the water anymore. I remember running to the bathroom to cry. After that day, it’s all a blank. But that’s... I’m sure that’s because of the fall. I’m the one who was grinding on top of you, not the other way around.”
“I might have done a little grinding,” he said, wincing.
“It was, like, three seconds,” she said. “And I was on top.” She’d hoped the joke would bring back his smile but it didn’t.
“You really don’t remember anything after that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Nothing,” she said. “What did I do?”
“You blanked me. Completely. I tried to talk to you about it, to make sure you were okay, and you wouldn’t say a word to me. You’d hide in your room when I was around.”
“Sounds like a very typical twelve-year-old-girl reaction to extreme humiliation.”
“I hoped that’s all it was, but I never knew for sure. When Dad said your aunt was taking you home to live with her because of your accident... I don’t know. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling it had something to do with me.”
Allison couldn’t believe she’d forgotten that day, that moment with Roland. Her first kiss. And with Roland of all people. What other lovely and terrible memories had her head injury stolen from her?
“No, of course that wasn’t it.”
“Then what was it? Why did it take Dad dying to get you back here?” he asked. He still looked equal parts relieved and confused.
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“Here’s what I know. You and I were alone at the house. The ‘incident’ happened. You stopped talking to me. I’m at work a couple days later, and Deacon called and said you fell down the stairs and you were going to the ER. Next thing I know, your aunt showed up and told Dad she was taking you home with her. I told him we had to stop her, but Dad said we had to let you go. What I don’t know is why you didn’t come back on your eighteenth birthday. Or nineteenth. Or anytime between then and now.”
“There’s a lot more to it than that. Dr. Capello didn’t tell you about the phone call?”
Roland looked at her, wide-eyed and baffled. “What phone call?”
“Roland... I thought you knew,” she said. “Someone called my aunt. It was right before my... Before I got hurt. Whoever called her, they pretended to be me. They told my aunt someone in the house was going to kill me. And then, bam, next thing she hears I’m in the hospital with a head injury.”
Roland rubbed his face and shook his head. “Dad said you fell. That’s all he told us. So who the hell called your aunt?”
“I don’t know,” Allison said. “My aunt said it sounded like me, but she also said the person cried the entire time on the phone, sounded hysterical. I’ve never figured it out.” She knew it had to be one of the kids in the house but she could never picture any of them betraying her like that for any reason.
“Why would anyone pretend to be you? Why would they say those things? I know none of us would do that,” Roland said. “I was at work. And Deacon and Thora were devastated when you were gone. I’d never seen either of them cry so hard. Thora screamed at Dad to find a way to force your aunt to give you back to us. Deacon tried to talk Dad into buying you back from your aunt. I cried. Kendra cried. God, even Dad cried when he thought no one was looking.”
The thought of them all weeping for her, mourning her, broke Allison’s heart all over again. Had she lost her family over a dumb prank gone wrong? Or had something truly sinister happened? Both seemed impossible to believe.
“I cried, too,” Allison said. “But Aunt Frankie wouldn’t even let me talk about visiting. No letters. No phone calls. I guess she told Dr. Capello you all weren’t allowed to contact me, either.”
“Dad said something about your aunt not wanting us to call you. But he said it was because she didn’t want you getting homesick or trying to run away or something. He never told us... Why would he never tell us about that?”
Roland stepped back from the water and sat on the sand. She sat next to him.
“I can’t believe Dr. Capello didn’t tell you about the call,” Allison said. “I thought you knew.”
“Do you really think someone tried to kill you?” Roland asked. “Not by accident, I mean?”
“It doesn’t make much sense but...something bad definitely happened and then I never heard from you or your dad or anyone again. That’s why I didn’t come back before. Whoever wanted me gone got what they wanted.” Allison forced a smile. “See? Not your fault at all.”
Roland rolled onto his back and lay in the sand. Allison stayed sitting upright. She didn’t really want sand all over her black T-shirt or in her bra.
“I want you to know I never forgot about you,” Allison said. “I would have come back if I hadn’t been too scared to. Sometimes I dreamed about...”
Roland took her hand again and twined his fingers within hers, hers within his, and rested their joined hands on his chest.
“Tell me what you dreamed of,” Roland said.
She smiled and looked up at the gray late-evening sky. The first stars were peeking out from behind the dark curtain of night, and she was alone on the beach with the first boy she ever loved, holding his hand with no witness but the ocean.
“I dreamed you’d come and find me,” she said.
“Why me?”
“Wishful thinking,” she said. “You were always my favorite.”
“Favorite sibling?”
“Favorite person. Ever. On earth. I was a little in love with you. And maybe a little in lust...”
Roland did a double take.
“What?” she said. “Twelve-year-old girls think about sex. News at eleven.”
“I’m stunned. Stunned, I tell you,” he said.
Allison tried to punch him in the arm, but he caught her hand before she could make contact and then held it a moment before suddenly letting it go as if he realized he was doing something he shouldn’t.
“You can hold my hand,” she said teasingly. “I’m not going to jump on you and start grinding again.”
“Too bad.”
She went to punch him again, and once more he ducked and caught her hand, and with one impressive show of strength he swooped her up into his arms and carried her to the edge of the water.
“No, no, no! Don’t you dare!” She screamed and laughed and laughed and screamed.
“You’re going in the drink,” he said.
“I’m wearing suede!”
“Fine,” he said with a sigh, and then dumped her on her feet on the dry sand. “But only because of the suede. You probably need a dunk in cold water. Not that it helped last time,” he teased.
“It’s not my fault you were so sexy at sixteen. I lost my head. I won’t do it again, I promise,” she said.
“Good.” He pinched her nose. They were having the conversation they should have had thirteen years ago. Better late than never.
“Unless you want me to do it again,” she said, grinning.
“Behave, twerp. I’m...unavailable.”
“Ten minutes ago you told me you weren’t married and you had no kids,” she reminded him. “And don’t call me twerp, jerk.”
He laughed and her heart danced a little in her chest. She was too happy. Happiness like this scared her.
“This is...a little different.”
“Now I’m intrigued,” she said, more nervous now than curious.
“I’ll tell you, but you have to promise you won’t act weird after I tell you,” he said. “Everyone acts weird after I tell them.”
“I will not act weird,” Allison said. “Promise. I’ll tell you my weird thing if you tell me your weird thing. Deal?”
“Deal,” he said. They shook hands to make it official.
“Now tell me.”
“Before I came back here to help take care of Dad, I was living...in a monastery,” he said.
“You were living in a monastery? Okay. Why?”
He smiled at her, almost apologetically.
“Same reason anyone who lives in a monastery lives in a monastery,” he said. “I’m a monk.”