She wasn’t fine.
She was alone.
Alone on her bed, she was a seven-year-old girl again, staring at the front door waiting for someone to come through it and knowing, deep down, that no one ever would.
Her worst nightmare. She was all alone.
Or was she?
Allison grabbed her robe, pulled it on and went into the kitchen again. She stood by the table, looking at the envelope. Allison told herself she was doing it to spite McQueen, but even she knew she wasn’t telling herself the truth.
She picked up the envelope and ripped it open.
Inside the envelope she found a letter. Before she lost her courage, she unfolded it and read.
Dear Allison,
What to say? I’ll be quick. It’s been thirteen years and I know I should leave you alone but you’ve been on my mind a lot lately so I’ll get to the point fast. Dad is dying. Stage five renal failure. He doesn’t know I’m writing you. I didn’t want to get his hopes up. Fact is, he’s always missed you. Any time your name comes up, you can tell he’s full of regret. So am I. If you have it in your heart to come see him one last time, I’d be forever grateful. If you don’t, I don’t blame you. But if you do come, we’re still at the old house, and you’re sure to find one of us here day or night. Dad’s determined to die at home in his own bed, and we’re going to do the best we can to honor his wishes. If you want to come, all I ask is please come soon. He doesn’t have long.
There’s so much more I want to say to you, but I’ll end here. I’ve taken up enough of your time.
Roland
P.S. Found this while digging through the attic. If you read as much now as you used to, you probably want it back.
P.S. #2. I think about you every time it rains.
A humble letter, humble and polite. Humble and polite and adult. It wasn’t until Allison read that letter that it hit her: Roland Capello wasn’t sixteen anymore. What sixteen-year-old boy says things like “I’ve taken up enough of your time”? What sixteen-year-old boy talks about stage five renal failure? What sixteen-year-old boy knows anything about regret?
In her mind Roland had been forever sixteen. Tall and thin with long coltish legs covered in light blond hair. Board shorts, ripped and faded T-shirts, hair long enough he could tuck it behind his ears. Wraparound sunglasses like Bono’s, worn up on his head more often than over his eyes to hold his hair back.
Allison had to walk away from the letter for a few minutes simply to recover from the simple realization that as much time had passed for Roland as it had for her. She was thirteen years older and so was he. Roland’s birthday was in July. Roland, eternally lanky and lean and sixteen, was now thirty. A grown man. And here she was, twenty-five and freshly dumped. Adults now, both of them.
She stood in the middle of her living room and breathed through her hands. When she looked up, she was jarred by her surroundings—the gray walls and the mullioned window and the red sofa with its intricately carved oak arms. For a split second she’d been back in the past where the walls were floor-to-ceiling windows instead of floor-to-ceiling bookcases and outside the door there was ocean, not asphalt.
Still shaking, Allison walked back to the table and the package and the letter. Dr. Capello was dying. She wasn’t ready to deal with that yet so she turned her attention instead to whatever it was Roland had sent her. She pulled it from the padded envelope and removed the newspaper wrapped around it. And as soon as she saw it, tears scalded her eyes.
It was a book, of course, a battered old yellow paperback with a winged centaur on the cover and three children riding on its back. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
“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