The Lucky Ones(92)

“You love Thora?” Dr. Capello asked. “You can thank me anytime now because believe me, you wouldn’t have loved her before I helped her.”

“Don’t pretend you’re some kind of saint or angel. I know the truth.”

“I never hurt a child on purpose in my life.”

“Except me.”

Finally she managed to land a blow hard enough to crack his self-righteous facade.

“Ah,” he said. “You do remember everything now, don’t you?”

“I remember.”

Dr. Capello let out a long breath. His skeletal shoulders slumped. He pointed a bony finger toward the filing cabinet that had held all the medical records before he’d burned them. Allison went over to it and opened the second drawer. She’d already seen inside the top one.

“Bottom drawer,” Dr. Capello said.

Allison bent down and opened the bottom drawer. She saw something inside it covered in an opaque milk-white plastic cover. She pulled the cover away and there in the bottom of the drawer was a machine, no bigger than a four-slice toaster, that looked like a prop from a 1960s sci-fi film. It was white plastic with rounded corners, large dials and knobs, with black wires coiled around it.

“That what you were looking for?” Dr. Capello asked.

“That’s it,” she said. Once she saw the ECT machine, she knew that was the thing Dr. Capello had used on her. She went cold looking at it, nauseous. “Was this your grandmother’s?”

“Oh, no. That one’s from a mental hospital that closed down in the 70s. It’s very safe, you know,” he said. “It’s not like the movies. You get the shock and you have a headache and some retrograde amnesia. That’s about it. What’s fascinating is that you remember anything at all from that day. It’s usually permanent, you know. The amnesia from ECT.” He spoke as if he wished he had the time to study her.

“I remember it all now. When I saw Antonio seizing today, it came back to me.”

“Interesting,” he said. “I wonder if it wasn’t the ECT that made you forget. Good chance you simply didn’t want to remember.”

“I didn’t,” she said. “But I do. I remember that I was twelve. And I remember I wasn’t sick. And I remember we weren’t in a safe, sterile hospital,” she said. “We were up here in a dark stuffy attic, and you drugged me and used thirty-year-old medical equipment on me.”

He had the decency—or the cowardice, perhaps—to say nothing to that.

“I never did fall, did I? You made all that up,” she said.

He raised his hand in surrender, the only admission of guilt she needed.

“How could you do that? You drugged me,” Allison said. Her voice was small, scared, far away.

“Just Benadryl,” he said. “A double dose.”

“You made me recite a poem to help me fall asleep. Kubla Khan.”

“‘A savage place!’” Dr. Capello recited, “‘as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waving moon was haunted / By woman wailing—’”

“‘For her demon-lover!’” Allison completed the line, finally remembering it. She closed her eyes and whispered a name. “Roland...”

“Yes, Roland,” he said.

“It wasn’t an accident, was it?”

“No.”

“He killed Rachel. Murdered her.”

“I don’t believe children, even psychopathic children, are capable of committing murder in the legal sense. But did he kill her on purpose? Yes,” Dr. Capello said. “He did. Their mother was long gone, father wasn’t home much. Roland would abuse Rachel, brutally abuse her. That’s how she came to me. Through the ER. Roland cracked her skull against the sidewalk.”

“Oh, God,” Allison said. She didn’t want to know any of this.

“She was too scared of Roland to tell anyone the truth about her injuries. The police assumed it was an accident and so did I. She was the sweetest little thing. I held her hand before the surgery, just to let her know I was taking good care of her. She didn’t want to let my hand go,” he said. “I can still feel those tiny little fingers. Her whole hand fit inside my palm. I told her she needed to be more careful playing outside. She said her accident wasn’t an accident, someone had pushed her. I assumed it was her father. Who would ever have guessed it was her brother? He was just eight.”

He stopped speaking and for a moment it seemed he was somewhere else, somewhere he wanted to return to.

“She asked me to take her home with me,” he said. “The sort of desperate hopeless wish children make, like wishing for wings. I never planned on having children. Work was my life. But I couldn’t let her go back to her father. I thought I would die if something happened to her. I’d never felt like that before with one of my patients, like she was my own child. So I asked to take her and they gave her to me. Just like that. And I thought if the father was hurting her, he’d probably hurt Roland, too. I brought them home and we spent a happy week together. Five whole days in this house, the three of us. And on the morning of the sixth day, before I was even awake, Roland dragged her out to the beach, buried her in the sand and let her suffocate to death. My little girl. My poor little Rachel.”

Though his eyes were dry and his body dehydrated, he still found a way to weep. Allison wept, too, but not with him. Their tears were for different reasons. He wept for what he’d lost. Allison wept for what he’d taken.