The Lucky Ones(101)

“The slug?”

Thora smiled. “That’s what Deacon called the brain tumor Dad told him he had. Apparently Dad said that the tumor looked kind of like a slug. Deacon blamed it for all the horrible things he’d done. But he was scared that maybe it wasn’t the slug, he said. That’s why I...why eventually I wanted to figure out if there was something wrong with him I didn’t know about.”

“That’s why you broke into Dad’s medical files?” Allison asked.

“That’s why,” Thora said. “And that’s when I found this big file called the Ragdoll Project. I read it front to back. Didn’t understand a tenth of it, but I understood enough to figure out that none of us ever had anything wrong with us. Not nothing. But you know what I mean. No tumors, no lesions, no cysts.”

Allison said nothing.

“Dad told me, and I’d told myself, that all the bad things I’d done, the lies I’d told, that it wasn’t really my fault, that it was this thing in my brain,” Thora said. “It was my one comfort. But it wasn’t a thing. It was all me.”

“You were a kid, Thora. A little kid.”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s still...” She shook her head. “Imagine being smart and being proud you’re smart, and then finding out you’re only smart because a doctor put a microchip in your brain when you were seven. Imagine thinking you’re a decent person and then finding out the only reason you’re not a monster is because a doctor screwed with the wiring in your head?”

“I can’t imagine,” Allison said.

“Pretend you just found out that the only reason Ro loves you is because someone rewired his brain. It is, you know. If he really was as bad as that file said, then he would never have been capable of real love. How does that feel?”

“Not great,” Allison admitted. “But it wasn’t his fault he was born...” What did she even call it? Born evil? Born wrong? Born broken? Born sick? She left it at that. It wasn’t Roland’s fault he was born, the end.

“Maybe your father was right,” Allison said. “Maybe what we call evil is just a disease. Someone had to try to cure it, right?”

“Maybe,” Thora said, but it didn’t sound as if she believed that. “I never told Deac what I found in the file. I never told Ro. I think they both still believe what Dad told them. They need to believe it. I know how horrible it was for me to find out I wasn’t who I thought I was.”

“It must be hard keeping that secret,” Allison said.

“It’s not easy being the only kid in the family who knows there’s no Santa Claus,” Thora said.

“Am I supposed to lie to his face if he asks me what I know?”

Thora turned away and gazed out the window at the long winding driveway that had brought each of them here once long ago.

“Sometimes,” Thora began, “on clear nights, Roland will stand on the beach and look at the stars, and it’s like he’s looking to see if God’s up there. When he does that, I love him so hard it hurts. I’m scared one day he’s going to look up and see that nobody’s looking back.” Thora met Allison’s eyes. “If you knew no one was looking back, would you tell him? Or would you let him keep looking?”

“Isn’t it a waste of time to keep looking if no one is up there?” Allison asked.

“The stars are up there,” Thora said.

“Tell me one thing,” Allison said. “Did Dad do the right thing with you all?”

“Oh...who knows? He made us good,” Thora said. “He didn’t make us wise. I have no idea if it was right or wrong, good or evil. I know it would be considered unethical, the way he went about it. But I ask myself this—would I want to undo what he did?”

“No?”

“Never in a million years. I don’t remember much about my life before Dad, but I do remember...” Her voice trailed off. She looked away out the window. A tear escaped her eye and all the way down her face where it fell off and landed on her thigh. “I remember enough.”

Allison didn’t ask for details. Thora deserved some privacy, even some secrets.

“I know there were others,” Thora said. “I know he hurt them when he was trying to help them. But I know Dad loved us. To take the risks he took to help us, that’s love, right?”

“It’s a kind of love,” Allison said. “Or an attempt at it, anyway.”

“When you love someone, you sometimes make choices you don’t want to make. You do things to help them that you wish you didn’t have to do,” Thora said. She had been looking at the floor but she lifted her head and met Allison’s eyes.

Allison knew then who it was who’d called her aunt that day.

“I had a feeling it was you,” Allison said. “Though I could never guess why.”

“I saw you lying there unconscious,” Thora said with a shaking voice. “I saw Dad over you, panicking. And I watched the ambulance take you away. You looked so helpless. You looked so little. I knew what Dad had done to us and I thought... I was scared.”

“You were scared he was going to do it to me, too?” Allison asked. “The operation?”

“He lied to people so he could do it to us. What if he was lying about you falling down the stairs so he could experiment on you? When Deacon ran to find Kendra and tell her what had happened, I called your aunt. I pretended I was you. I didn’t know what else to do. I’m sorry.”