The Lucky Ones(91)

“Antonio has to be restrained constantly. He’s been chained to a bed for fifteen years! This isn’t the risk ‘we’ take. It’s the risk you took for him. He was a child.”

“Yes, and had he been an adult they would have locked him up in prison and thrown away the key,” Dr. Capello said. “Save your sympathy. If I hadn’t operated on him, he would have been facing a death sentence long ago.”

“How do you know? You can’t see the future.”

“You’re a sweet young woman,” Dr. Capello said, “and you’d make a lovely wife, a good mother and a wonderful friend. But you’d be a terrible doctor. The children were ill. No other treatment works for kids like that.”

“Kids like Deacon,” she said. “Right? Antonio said he killed his cat.”

“Oh, Deacon killed lots of cats. And dogs. And birds. And anything he could catch. It was a mania. It was...sick. That was part of the Macdonald Triad, you know. The old criteria to diagnose future violent offenders—do they set fires, do they wet the bed, do they harm animals? Deacon had all three.”

“And Kendra?”

“The newspapers called her ‘the Firestarter,’ like that old movie. Burned down her grandfather’s house with her grandfather still inside. And Oliver—”

“Threw his baby brother against the wall,” Allison said. Dr. Capello raised his eyebrow. “We went to see his mom.”

“I see,” Dr. Capello said.

“And Thora?”

Dr. Capello nodded.

“And Thora. Psychopath through and through. A pathological liar like most psychopaths are,” Dr. Capello said. “Accused her first foster father of molesting her after he punished her for beating up one of the other kids in the house. He was arrested for sexual contact with a minor. His wife left him. He wasn’t allowed to see his children. By the time Thora recanted, it was too late. His father-in-law had shot him and killed him.”

Allison buried her face in her hands.

“Allison, listen to me. There was no hope for these kids. They were done for the day they were born, the second they were conceived. The same way some kids are born with bum tickers, these kids were born with bum brains. Unlike the heart, you can play a little with the brain. And that’s what I did. Partial hippocampectomy, burn a few holes into the prefrontal cortex and then wait and see. If it all goes well, in six months to a year, you have a brand-new child with a brand-new personality. When it goes right you get Roland. If it doesn’t go quite right, you have—”

“Antonio. Oliver. Kendra.”

“Sadly, yes,” he said. “I couldn’t save them all. But I tried.”

“They never had tumors, did they? Or cysts or anything?”

“When the procedure works, the kids all have healthy consciences. Too healthy. If they were going to be normal kids, they couldn’t be walking around thinking they were born evil. Better to let them think it was a tumor, something foreign that had invaded their brains, something easy to fix. It’s hard to heal when you’re saddled with guilt. A tumor or a cyst—that was something they could point the blame at rather than themselves.”

“And it gave you a reason to operate,” she said. “Right? I’m sure you had to come up with an excuse to cut inside the heads of little kids. You couldn’t just walk around saying you wanted to cure them of evil.”

“You would think that, wouldn’t you?” he said, shaking his finger at her. “You would think I would have to show the parents and guardians X-rays, test results, brain scans, treatment outcomes... You would think my nurses would try to stop me, residents, interns, the hospital brass. You would think. You want to know how it really happened?”

“You walked in, snapped your fingers and they gave you a kid?”

Dr. Capello snapped his thin old fingers.

“These kids weren’t kids anymore to their parents or their social workers. They were problems. And you tell someone you can make their problems go away, they will roll out the red carpet for you and say, ‘Be my guest.’ Nobody wanted anything to do with these children. I said, ‘Show me your worst kids and I’ll take them off your hands.’ It wasn’t a hard sell. They gave me the kids with a sigh of relief and no questions asked. That’s not a cliché, my dear. In all the years I was looking for children to help, not a single social worker ever asked to see the X-rays.”

“Of course they didn’t. You were a pillar of the community. People looked up to you, trusted you.”

“That had nothing to do with it.” He waved his hand, batting away the idea. “I promised to make their problems go away. They would have let the devil himself take those kids if it meant they didn’t have to deal with them. What would you do with a boy like Antonio? A boy who stabbed a girl in the neck with a fork and tried to rape her on the playground? A boy who giggled when you tried to punish him for it? A boy who’d as soon set your bed on fire as look you in the eye? A boy who did set his own mother’s bed on fire for trying to discipline him. He was remorseless as a snake. Allison, one of my own nurses looked at one of my Ragdoll patients on the table and said, ‘At least if she dies, it’s no big loss.’ You know which kid that was? Thora.”

Allison pressed her hands to her face. She couldn’t believe she was hearing this.