The Lucky Ones(9)

“No word on the father?” he asked.

“No father on the birth certificate. Sole living relative is a great-aunt who would take her if nobody else turns up. But she’s seventy, lives in Indiana, and she’s been sick.”

The bearded man harrumphed. Allison hadn’t ever met her great-aunt, a lady named Frankie who lived really far away, though she’d seen Christmas cards from her.

“I gotta figure something out here,” Miss Whitney said. “Allison weighed forty-seven pounds when she got here. Yesterday she weighed forty-two. One month.”

The bearded man harrumphed and whistled this time.

“Let me talk to her,” he said.

“You are talking to me,” Allison said.

“She’s very bright,” the bearded man said to Miss Whitney.

“Told you so. Reads on a fifth-grade level. Eats like a toddler.” Miss Whitney patted Allison on her knee. “Sweetheart, this is a good friend of mine. Vincent Capello. He’s a brain surgeon. We used to work together at a hospital in Portland. He was nice enough to come all the way out here to check on you. Brain surgeons usually don’t make house calls, so you should feel very special.”

“She is very special,” the man said. Allison grinned, happy to have someone being nice to her for the first time that day. She was still sitting on the bathroom counter. She wasn’t tall enough to be able to jump down without help yet and the bearded man, the doctor, had left her up there.

Miss Whitney left her alone again with the man who didn’t do anything at first but tug his beard hairs.

“Do you like it here, Allison?” he asked.

Allison’s mother had taught her not to complain, ever. Not so much out of politeness but because it never helped anything.

“I like Miss Whitney,” Allison said.

“She is a very nice lady.” The man nodded in agreement. “Do you like the girls here?”

Allison didn’t answer.

“Allison? Do you like the other girls here?”

“I’m not supposed to say.”

“Why not?” The bearded man furrowed his brow.

“If you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

He laughed.

“I guess I have my answer. You have quite the moral compass, young lady,” he said. “Adults could learn from you.”

She smiled broadly. She didn’t know what a moral compass was, but she knew a compliment when she heard it.

“Miss Whitney says you aren’t eating. Want to tell me why?” he asked.

Allison had dropped her chin to her chest. “Not hungry.”

“Does your stomach hurt?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“No?” he said. Allison stopped talking and hoped he would, too.

“Have you ever seen the ocean?” he asked her. That was not the question she’d been expecting.

“No.”

“You know what it looks like?”

“I saw pictures,” she said.

“We can do better than that.” That’s when he plucked her off the counter and set her on her feet. He took her by the hand and led her out to the back porch. There was nothing back there but a slab of concrete where a few old chairs sat looking at a yard of scrubby dirt backed by a hill of scrubby dirt. Everywhere she looked out there she saw nothing but scrubby dirt.

“See all that?” the doctor said, pointing from one end of the hill to the other.

“I see dirt,” she said.

“Okay. Now imagine everything you see is water,” he said.

Allison’s eyes went wide. She stared at the dirt and in her mind’s eye it started to change color from brown to gray to blue. The hills turned to waves, the raw wind became an ocean breeze and the concrete slab they stood on became a raft, bobbing and floating on an endless sea.

“I see it,” she said, grinning up at him.

“That’s the ocean,” he said.

“It’s lovely,” she said.

“Lovely? Yes, it is lovely, isn’t it?” he said, laughing. “That’s where I live, you know. On the ocean.”

“In a boat?”

He laughed again. “No, in a house. But the house is right on the beach and you can see the ocean from almost all the rooms.”

Allison couldn’t imagine that. She never even looked out the windows in this house. Nothing to see but dirt out the back windows and other sand-colored houses out the front.

“Can you swim in it?”

He stroked his beard. “You can swim in it. Might not want to. It’s kind of cold, but my son swims in it a lot.”

“You have a son?”

“I have two sons,” he said, smiling with pride. “And a daughter. They’re all kids like you. Some bad things happened in their lives so now they live with me in my house by the ocean.”

“Is it pretty?”

“The ocean?”

“The house.”

“If I told you it looked like a dragon, would you believe me?”

“No,” she said, laughing. That was the silliest thing she ever heard. “Dragons have wings. They have fire in their noses.”

“I promise it looks like a dragon.”