The Lucky Ones(7)

“Roland?” McQueen asked, pointing to the one with black hair.

“That’s Deacon. Roland’s the dirty blond,” Allison said. “The girl’s Thora. Dr. Capello gave us those red sweatshirts. He said it made it easier for him to find us on the beach when there were big crowds.”

“Sweatshirts on the beach?”

“It was Oregon,” she said.

“And where are you in this picture?” McQueen asked.

Allison pointed to the left side of the photograph that had been torn away.

“There,” she said. “I don’t know who has the other section. I found this in my suitcase when I unpacked at my aunt’s.”

“So there were four of you?”

“No, there were others,” she said. “But they were fosters, like me. There was an older girl named Kendra. And a boy about my age or a little older named Oliver. A few others but they didn’t stay long. Roland, Thora and Deacon were the three kids Dr. Capello adopted.”

“Did he want to adopt you?”

“I think so,” Allison said. “But he didn’t.”

Allison took the photograph out of McQueen’s hand, slipped it back in the pages of the book, walked over and put the book back on the shelf.

“There, I told you everything. Now you can go.”

“Not until you open the package.”

“Why do you care?”

“What if this Roland guy is writing to confess to the crime?”

“Roland was sixteen by then, almost seventeen. He had a summer job in another town. He wouldn’t have been home at the time. Trust me, I thought about this a lot after I left them.”

“So you aren’t over it.”

“I was twelve living with an elderly woman in a retirement community. Not like I had much else to do.”

“Then maybe Roland knows something and is finally coming clean.” McQueen stood up and followed her to the kitchen.

“Maybe he is,” Allison said.

“Open it.”

“I will.” Allison turned to face him. “Soon as you’re gone.”

“Cricket...” He put his hands on her hips.

Allison touched his face, his five-o’clock shadow that always came in about an hour early every day.

“Goodbye, McQueen,” she said, taking his hands by the wrists and removing them from her body.

His shoulders slumped in defeat before he straightened up again and picked up his keys off the table and shoved them in his pocket.

“All right,” he said. “You win. But do me a favor, okay?” He went to the door. “Keep in touch.”

Allison opened the door for him and he started to walk out. Then stopped. Then turned back. She knew it was coming and she knew she could stop it. She didn’t.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her lips, a long lingering kiss, a kiss she returned. The kiss was a bad idea, a terrible idea, but at least it gave her the chance to pull away first.

“I always knew I’d regret getting involved with you,” Allison said.

“Then why did you do it?” he asked.

“Because I knew I’d regret not getting involved with you even more.”

He laughed and that was a shame because McQueen had a good laugh. Too good. He kissed her again.

“One more time,” he said against her lips. “Maybe that’ll make you feel better.”

Allison let him take her into the bedroom.

She didn’t want it, but she needed it.

Anything was better than being alone.





Chapter 3

Last times were no time for anything fancy. McQueen stripped her naked, put her on her back in the bed and kissed every inch of her like he was kissing every inch goodbye. Allison sighed with pleasure when he entered her. It was either sigh or cry and she refused to give in to her tears again. McQueen kissed her neck and said into her ear, “And to think I always thought I was the first rich son of a bitch to take you in from the cold.”

“Oh, you were,” she said, almost smiling. “Dr. Capello wasn’t a son of a bitch.”

Dr. Capello was, in fact, an angel. At least, that’s how she’d once thought of him. Until age seven, Allison had lived in a little town called Red, where even the trees in spring were a dull shade of brown. High desert, they called it, past the Cascades, which might as well have been a sky-high wall for how well they trapped the rain on the other side of the mountains. Although Allison’s teachers had said they lived an hour’s drive away from mossy green forests and three hours from the ocean, she had never believed them. The whole world was high desert to her until that day the man with the brown beard came to the house where they’d taken her because she had nowhere else to go.

Allison lived in the single-story house with siding the color of desert sand, and shared a room with three other girls, all of them older. Older and terrifying. All three of them resented the intrusion of a “little girl” into their tween kingdom. It was 1997 and she had no idea who those boys were in the posters on the wall and not knowing who the Backstreet Boys were was apparently enough of a crime to render Allison unworthy of friendship or even basic kindnesses from anyone but Miss Whitney.

She’d gone to find Miss Whitney that day, because one of the girls—Melissa, the biggest one who called all the shots—had slapped Allison for daring to sit in the wrong chair. Allison had taken her tearstained red face to Miss Whitney’s tiny office in the hopes of being allowed to hide there and read all day. Miss Whitney had let her do that a time or two. Apparently Allison was “adjusting poorly” and suffering from “profound stress,” and she needed a “more nurturing environment.” Allison wasn’t sure what all that meant, but she’d heard Miss Whitney saying that on the phone to someone the day before. What Allison really wanted was her mother back, but Miss Whitney had reminded her—kindly and more than once—that her mother was never coming back. They’d been trying to find her long-gone father instead, or another relative for her to live with. No luck yet, except an aunt deemed too old to handle a seven-year-old girl.