“Is that why you never told anyone about the phone call?”
Dr. Capello smiled and started walking again in the wet sand. In Roland’s bedside note he’d left her that morning, he’d joked there were “no secrets” in this house. In one day she’d discovered three—the phone call, Rachel and now Oliver attacking her.
“You don’t have children, right?” Dr. Capello asked.
“Not yet.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “You remember the day I picked you up at Whitney Allen’s group home?”
“Yeah, like yesterday,” Allison said. “Why?”
“You and another girl at the house had tussled. Or rather, she’d tussled with you and you’d gone running with your tail between your legs.”
“Yes, thank you very much for reminding me.”
He patted her face again.
“You poor little thing. You broke my heart the second I saw you. Red-cheeked and trying so hard not to cry. Miss Whitney called me to see if I could do anything for you. She said she needed a doctor to make a house call, but I knew she was hoping I’d take you home with me. Don’t be hurt by that. Whitney cared about you very much, but she had three other girls in the house—all of them older than you—and they had all finally started to get along. Then a little girl showed up who needed all of her attention and everything was chaos again. It’s not easy balancing the needs of multiple kids from different backgrounds. It’s like that old circus act—the man spinning the plates, keeping them up in the air, trying to let as few crash to the ground as possible. If I had told the kids that your fall wasn’t a fall, that there’d been a call to say there was a killer in the house...well, you can imagine what kind of chaos that would cause. I needed my kids to love each other and trust each other and trust me, too. Can you understand that?”
Allison swallowed a hard lump in her throat. She could hear the note of anguish in Dr. Capello’s voice, the note of pleading. He wanted her to understand the choice he’d made. And the thing was, she did.
“Makes sense,” she said. “If it had been Thora and not me who’d been pushed and we didn’t know who did it? I wouldn’t have slept for weeks. I would have been terrified I was next.”
“So you understand,” he said, nodding. “Oliver left right after you, and I decided to keep it quiet instead of stir up the kids. Please believe me, there hasn’t been a day that passed without me wondering if I did right by you. But I can see that you turned out better than I hoped.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. She helped Dr. Capello take off his shoes and socks and then removed her own. “I’m not doing much with myself. Between jobs.”
“You know, a house on the ocean is a fine place to sit and think and figure out what you want to do with your life,” he said.
“You think so?”
“I know so,” Dr. Capello said. “That’s what happened to me. I came here, stood on the deck, looked at the ocean, looked at a big family with kids playing in the water and I knew that’s what I wanted. And then I went out and got it. You’ll get it, too, if you stay long enough. The water will tell you what to do.” He pulled his khaki trousers up and waded into the water up to his ankles. “Heaven,” he said with a happy sigh.
Allison followed him into the ocean, wincing at the sudden shock of cold water on her feet.
“I didn’t think you believed in heaven,” she said. “Deacon said you’re a humanist.”
“Junior’s been gossiping, huh? Not surprised. That boy’s a blabbermouth—God love him, someone has to,” he said.
“We were talking about Rachel,” she said. “And why she’s the reason Roland’s at the monastery.”
Dr. Capello winced. “Sore subject.”
“Sorry, forget I brought it up,” she said.
“No, no, no.” He waved his hand again. “Better to talk about it. I love my son. I want him to be happy. I simply would prefer he didn’t devote his life to an institution that I consider to be an enemy of human progress out of some misguided guilt for a long-ago tragedy.”
Allison’s eyes widened. “Enemy of human progress? Those are some strong words.”
“Too strong, I know,” he said with a sigh. “But I’m a scientist. We can’t count on the pie-in-the-sky man to fix our problems. Mankind causes its own problems. It’s up to mankind to solve them.”
“Maybe it helps Roland feel more at peace about Rachel.”
“He’s not going to bring her back into the world by taking himself out of it.”
“He says he needs God,” she told him.
“What he needs is a damn girlfriend,” Dr. Capello said.
“Be nice,” she said, chiding him as though she was the parent now and he the child. “You have to admit there’s good reason for believing in God and heaven and hell, even if they aren’t strictly real.”
“Give me one good reason to believe in heaven or hell, I dare you.”
“Evil?” she said. “Surely Hitler deserves to burn in hell, right? Rapists? Child abusers? Nobody wants them to get off scot-free.”
“Spoken like a poet,” he said. “Not a scientist. There is no such thing as evil.”
Allison boggled at him.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.
“There are evil acts, yes. I grant you that. Murder. Rape. Child abuse. Absolutely those are evil acts if by evil we mean ‘harmful to the human race.’ But they aren’t caused by a red man with a pitchfork sitting on our shoulder. Take Oliver, for instance. He harmed animals, harmed children, lied about it without compunction or remorse. All the hallmarks of classic psychopathy. Was he evil? No, ma’am. He was sick. That’s all.”
“Is that what causes people to be psychopaths?” she asked. “Brain tumors?”
“Sometimes a tumor in the frontal lobe can profoundly affect the personality. Or lead poisoning in my grandparents’ case. Most people who fit the criteria for psychopathy are simply born with it. They have atrophy in key areas of the brain—the limbic region, the hippocampus, et cetera. In layman’s terms, they are born with broken brains. That’s the worst hand any child can be dealt.”
“So not actually evil, then?”
“Not evil. Sick. He was sick, and I tried to cure him. Didn’t work but give it a couple decades and we’ll have it all figured out.”
“A cure for evil?”
“A cure for evil is possible,” he said, nodding. “Mark my words.”
“I’ll mark them,” she said. “And if you love me, you’ll live long enough to tell me ‘I told you so.’”
“I’ll do my best, doll. Count on it.”
He took her arm in his and they strolled side by side into deeper waters. The ocean was cool enough to make her wince but not cold enough to send her running.
Dr. Capello looked happy, contented, but there were moments, little ones, when she saw the fear hiding behind his mask. Once, he stopped, simply stopped, and let the water swirl around his feet while he stared and stared and stared out into the water. Side by side they watched the waves roll in and break, roll out and break again. His shoulders sagged.
“Is it hard?” Allison asked. “Dying?”
“It is,” he said, nodding. “I wish I could say otherwise. But you’ve never heard of a happy person committing suicide, have you? I love my life. I love my children. I love my house. I love this ocean. I love every grain of sand under my feet. What’s that old poem? Only a happy heart can break?”
“Almost,” Allison said, and then recited the poem to him from memory.
“It will not hurt me when I am old,
A running tide where moonlight burned
Will not sting me like silver snakes;
The years will make me sad and cold,
It is the happy heart that breaks.”
When she finished, Dr. Capello applauded. She gave him a little curtsy.
“Sara Teasdale,” she said.
“The world needs people who can recite poetry from memory. My mother could, too. Kubla Khan was her favorite to recite. She loved those lines—‘Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man...’”