The Lucky Ones

by Tiffany Reisz

  white walls and windows looking out on the ocean. Her favorite was the massive bay window with the padded window bench perfect for a child to lie on for reading or napping or watching the waves. Dr. Capello had a beautiful old boat of a desk, weathered gray wood with a three-masted ship carved onto the back and sides.

  A map hung behind the desk, over a decorative fireplace. At least in Allison’s memory it had been a map, the old-fashioned ink and parchment sort with dragons lurking along the far edges. But her grown-up eyes now saw it for what it was—a skull. A map of the skull with parts of the brain labeled like countries. At the very core of the skull, there she saw the pen-and-ink dragons. How strange. Why would there be dragons inside the human brain? She’d heard of the “lizard brain” but never the dragon brain. She’d have to ask Dr. Capello about it.

  Allison walked around the desk and that’s when she found what she’d come for. Photographs, a dozen of them in plain black frames, sat on Dr. Capello’s desk in an array that spanned twenty years or more.

  On the far right corner of the desk was a picture of the five of them—Dr. Capello, Thora, Deacon, Roland and her. It had been taken on the back deck with the sun and the ocean behind them. A summer picture, they were all in shorts and T-shirts. Allison grinned at the sight of her tiny self in Roland’s arms. She was the shortest one, which meant Roland had to hold her up so that more than just the top of her head would be in the picture. She couldn’t quite remember when that picture had been taken. She slipped the photograph out of the frame and read the back.

  July 30, 1997—the kids and me with our new addition, Allison.

  The picture had been taken one month after she’d come to The Dragon, and she looked happy and healthy and at home. One of the family already.

  Next to that picture Allison found a photograph of orange-haired Thora and black-haired Deacon playing tag on the wet sand. Thora and Deacon—otherwise known as “the Twins.” They weren’t related, Deacon and Thora, but they were the same age, had the same birthday by coincidence and were inseparable. For a long time, Allison had simply assumed they were twins despite looking nothing alike.

  As the photos progressed from right to left, the children in the pictures aged from kids to preteens to teenagers to adults. Somewhere around the middle section, the teenage years, she and Kendra and Oliver disappeared from the pictures. Only Roland, Deacon and Thora were in the photos on the left of the desk. Allison knew where she’d gone—home to live with her aunt. But what about the other two? Where were they now? In the three farthest pictures she saw Thora, as a beautiful young woman, in a pretty strapless prom dress with Deacon and Roland standing next her and beaming like proud papas. Another photograph showcased Deacon and Thora in their graduation robes and caps, grinning awkwardly at the camera. The picture next to that one was of Deacon on a Kawasaki motorcycle, looking terribly dashing in a leather jacket, his black hair wild from wind.

  One picture held her eye longer than the others—Roland, about age twenty-four or twenty-five, stood in front of a chapel wearing the black robes of a Benedictine monk. He wasn’t smiling in the photograph, but he didn’t look sad, either. Pensive? A little. Maybe lonely, too? Or not. Maybe that’s what she wanted to believe. It wasn’t as jarring as she thought it would be to see him as a monk. He looked like himself, only younger, his hair an even lighter blond, still parted down the center and tucked behind the ears like she remembered so well. In the photograph she spied an eyebrow piercing—an endearing mix of medieval and modern, just like Roland himself. Curious to see when this picture had been taken, she slipped the photo out of the frame and read the back—Brother Paul, it said, 2009. But that wasn’t all she found. Hidden behind the picture of Roland in his black robes, Allison found another photograph.

  The second photograph was of four very young children. She recognized three of the four—Roland, Deacon and Thora—but the last boy she’d never seen before. He had olive skin and dark eyes. She imagined his hair was dark, too, but she couldn’t see it since he wore a bucket hat with Clark Beach emblazoned on the front. On the back of the photograph it read:

  The kids meet their new brother, Antonio Russo, age eight. February 1995.

  New brother? She didn’t remember any of them mentioning a boy named Antonio. He must have been another foster child Dr. Capello had taken in who’d come and gone before Allison had arrived. It appeared the picture had been taken in the sunroom. She recognized the big white couch and the windows behind them. All of the kids wore big cheesy grins in the photograph, all of them but Antonio, who stared blankly at the camera.

  Allison put the photographs back exactly as she found them. She made a mental note to ask Roland later who Antonio was. During her time at The Dragon, a handful of kids had come for a week or two each before being placed with relatives. Maybe that’s what had happened to Antonio. They had thought he’d stay for a long time but a relative had been found to claim him. These things were sad but they happened in the system. The question was...why was the photograph with Antonio hidden behind another picture? It wasn’t like Dr. Capello couldn’t afford another frame. She’d ask Roland about that, too.

  As Allison was leaving the office, she noticed a framed newspaper article on the wall by the door. The photograph in black and white was of flip-flops, seven pairs of them, all lined up in a row, and the headline read The Lucky Ones—Sick Kids in Oregon Find a Hero in Dr. Vincent Capello and a New Home in a House Called The Dragon. It was a profile of Dr. Capello and his work as a philanthropist and foster father, dated 1998. Allison hadn’t seen it before, or if she had, she’d been too young to remark on it. Intrigued, she began to read.

  The call came on a random rainy Wednesday when Vincent Capello was scrubbing out after surgery—a child with a brain tumor that left the boy partially blind.

  “The president for you,” Dr. Capello was told, “on line one.”

  “President of what?” he’d asked.

  “The country,” the nurse said.

  It seemed Dr. Vincent Capello was then President Clinton’s top pick to replace the outgoing surgeon general. The call was brief and polite, with Capello turning the offer down in under two minutes.

  “It was an honor to be asked,” Capello said of the position. “But I had kids to take care of.”

  Allison laughed in surprise. She’d had no idea Dr. Capello had once been offered the surgeon general’s post. And he’d turned it down for his kids? Amazing. She kept reading.

  Vincent Capello and his children live in picturesque Cape Arrow, in a grand old house that was built as a gift from a man to his beloved wife and later became the scene of her murder.

  Allison paused. Murder? She’d never heard this story about The Dragon.

  In 1913, wealthy timber baron Victor Courtney purchased one hundred acres of pristine coastal land and began work on the beach home his wife, Daisy, had longed for since leaving her old-money Boston family to marry the upstart Oregon millionaire. Work was completed on the house in 1921 and Victor and Daisy moved in shortly after. No expense was to be spared as the house was built to satisfy Daisy’s every whim—a Victorian turret, a library of first editions on solid oak shelves, a sunroom, a drawing room, a formal dining room, servants’ quarters and ocean-facing windows galore. At first, the Courtneys were happy in their new home, but a few months later their troubles began.

  “My grandmother Daisy had always been cheerful, they say,” Capello said on the day of our interview. “And she loved her daughter, my mother, doted on her, and she wanted many more children. But she miscarried shortly after they moved into this house. Then miscarried again a year later. She fell into a deep depression. Friends said she changed completely and could be found day and night, rain or shine, walking the beach and weeping, talking to herself and her lost children.

  “My grandfather had a temper, though it was more bark than bite. But after moving into the house, he changed. He became brutal, even violent. He raged at servants, sometimes beating them, eve
n beating my grandmother, which they say he’d never done before. The abuse was bad enough my grandmother sent my mother away to boarding school back East. It likely saved her life.”

  The rages became legendary in their small coastal community. People speculated the Courtneys were cursed or the house haunted, and the suffering couple was called cruel nicknames by locals—Crazy Daisy and Vicious Victor. Victor blamed his own troubles on his wife. He had her subjected to brutal psychological treatments—unregulated drugs, water “cures” and even high-voltage electroshock therapy. Nothing worked to alleviate her depression. When the news came that Victor and Daisy were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide, no one was much surprised. The house remained in the family but laid abandoned for decades until the Courtneys’ only grandchild returned to it in his midthirties.

  “It was morbid curiosity that brought me here. I wanted to see the old pile my mother talked about but refused to visit. I knew I’d inherit it eventually and wondered what I’d be getting myself into. Sell it? Knock it down? I was planning for the worst when I drove out here. My mother blamed this house for killing her parents. My grandfather had named the house Xanadu, but behind his back everyone called it Courtney’s Folly,” Capello said. “All up and down the coast you can still hear people telling ghost stories about the house. I was in medical school at the time and had a very good feeling it wasn’t a ghost that caused my grandparents’ troubles. I sent in contractors who tested the paint, tested the pipes. My grandparents weren’t insane and they weren’t bedeviled by ghosts or demons.” What they were, Dr. Capello’s testing found, was ill. Very ill. “They both suffered from lead poisoning, which has both physical and neurological side effects. Unscrupulous builders had substituted poor quality lead pipes for the higher quality copper pipes my grandfather had ordered. My feeling had been right. The house did kill them but not for the reason everyone thought.”

  That discovery lead Capello on a quest to restore the house and his grandfather’s reputation in the community. The three-story estate has half a dozen bedrooms, just as many bathrooms and sits directly overlooking the beach. “I stood on the old deck and saw a family of five splashing in the water. One of the kids ran over to me and asked if I lived in the house. I told her no and her face fell. She said that was too bad, because the house was ‘so cool’ because to her it looked like a green dragon from a distance. I’d never noticed that before, but then I couldn’t stop seeing it like that.”

  And so it began, Dr. Capello’s quest to turn a house haunted by death and darkness and rumors of madness into the ideal family home. The old pipes were replaced, of course, and all the lead-based paint removed or painted over. Capello had inherited two fortunes when his parents passed away—his mother, who despite her wealth spent her life teaching English literature in underprivileged schools, was heir to the Courtney lumber money, and his father, David Capello, had invested heavily in pharmaceutical stock that paid off handsomely in the 1980s. The hardworking surgeon is now a very wealthy man, though you couldn’t tell from looking at him. He wears scrubs at work and old khakis and sweatshirts at home.

  “I’m a dad,” he says of his attire. “We don’t dress to impress around here. We dress to make a mess.” This, his eldest child says, is one of Capello’s many “dad-isms.”

  Capello explains he was the sort of man married to his work, but always longed for children. As Capello dreamed that first day at Courtney’s Folly, the house is now full of children. Seven, at the moment, and all of them taken from the foster care system.

  “My grandparents’ story taught me we have a long way to go to understanding and treating the causes of violent behavior. When I decided to bring foster children into my life, I knew I would help the kids no one else wanted, kids with behavior problems that made them ‘unadoptable.’ Every child’s fate is up to the luck of the draw. I won the lottery of birth—wealthy parents and a happy life. These kids lost it. All I want to do is share my winnings with them.”

  But it’s how some of these “unadoptable” children ended up in Dr. Capello’s life that is, perhaps, the most incredible story. He even spoke of meeting one of his foster children through his medical practice. The boy, he explained, was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which Dr. Capello was scheduled to operate on. This same child also had extensive behavioral problems, including a compulsion to harm children and animals. Remarkably, once the tumor was removed, the child’s sight was restored and his behavior improved by leaps and bounds. Capello continues his research in this area, however, hoping to show how extreme behavioral issues are sometimes the result of trauma on the brain (from a tumor, for example) and are, in fact, treatable with surgery.

  Some of the children he fosters stay for a week or a month. Others stay with him longer. Capello has officially adopted three of his foster children and may adopt more in time. “Seven at the most,” Capello said. “My van won’t hold more than that.”

  Friends in the Department of Health call Capello a natural, a born foster father and even a magician. Katherine Grant, head of DHS’s foster care placement program agrees, saying, “If I had a hundred Vincent Capellos I could save every troubled child in this state. We send him our tough cases, the ones we despair of being able to help. Every lion comes back a lamb. Either there’s something in the water out there, or he’s working miracles.”

  Ask Capello his secret to helping these children through their issues and he’ll answer with one word: “Love.”

  Soon the legendary surgeon, nicknamed “the Man of Steel” for the strength of his hands, a boon to any surgeon, will retire to become a full-time foster father. “Surgery is a young man’s game, and I’m not a young man anymore.”

  His children are counting down the days until Dad no longer has to leave at five in the morning and come home exhausted from the hospital. The sooner, the better, they say, agreeing, “Dad really is getting too old for that stuff.”

  The once-abandoned and seemingly haunted house is a palace now. A children’s palace. No longer is it called Courtney’s Folly but The Dragon, a perfect name for the green-shingled gentle monster of a home that lurks at the edge of the map. When Dr. Capello is working, which is more often than he likes, three local women take turns acting as nannies to the brood—cooking and cleaning, driving the kids to school and helping with homework. But more often than not, you’ll find Dr. Capello here alone with his children, which is exactly the way he wants it.

  Today seven pairs of flip-flops sit by the deck door. Every room is brightly painted and lovingly decorated. There are toys and books and beach towels everywhere you look. Anyone watching Dr. Capello grilling hot dogs on the deck while his children play in the sand can’t help but envy them. From being dealt a bad hand to holding a full house, these kids are indeed very lucky to have found a doctor, a father, a savior and a hero in Vincent Capello. But don’t try telling that to him.

  “No, no, no,” Capello said to this remark. He pointed at himself. “I’m the lucky one.”

  Chapter 12

  Allison read the article beginning to end twice, and by the time she finished, she had to wipe a tear off her face. She’d never known any of that about Dr. Capello’s family or the history of The Dragon.

  It sounded like Dr. Capello, calling himself the lucky one, though she would have argued with him if she could. She’d been miserable in that group home before a man in blue pajamas had brought her to this magical house. If her luck hadn’t run out, she could have stayed here her whole life. Maybe she would have been in all the pictures on the desk.

  Allison left the office and walked down the third-floor hallway, seeing the house now with new eyes. Daisy Courtney had walked this same hall Allison walked. Did the floor creak under Daisy’s every footfall as it did for Allison? Did Daisy bathe in the same pedestal bathtub Allison had that very morning? Allison couldn’t picture it. To her this was The Dragon, a children’s home. Impossible to imagine two very ill and troubled people haunting these hallways and dying in thes
e rooms. What room had Daisy died in? What room had Victor? Allison didn’t want to know. She could understand why Dr. Capello hadn’t told her the history of the house and his family. Madness, violence, miscarriages, poison water and a weeping woman walking the beach at all hours hardly made for a cozy bedtime tale for children. Even as a grown woman, the story disturbed her deeply.

  On the third floor there were only two other doors. The first was the door to Dr. Capello’s bedroom, which must have been the library in Victor and Daisy’s day. Built-in oak bookcases lined the walls and a bench sat in the bay window, a perfect spot for reading. As a child she’d paid no attention to Dr. Capello’s books. These weren’t storybooks—no pictures or conversations, as Alice in Wonderland would have complained. These were medical books, many of them clearly valuable antiques. She ran her fingers over the red and black leather bindings, took random tomes off the shelves and examined the elegant pen and ink drawings of human organs and veins, muscles and bones and parts of the brain. They smelled like heaven—or like old books, which was her version of heaven. Dr. Capello had a vast collection of books on child psychology, brain development, personality and behavior disorders. One would have thought he was a psychologist and not a neurosurgeon based on his bookshelf. But the article on the wall had made clear Dr. Capello believed most behavioral issues had medical causes. Made sense to study both physiology and psychology, she supposed.

  The bed stood in the arched alcove by the big window like it always had and next to it sat a leather armchair covered in an old blue afghan. Allison felt a deep and troubling tenderness as she took the afghan off the chair and folded it neatly. This was where Roland slept when he was on night watch with his ailing father. A book about famous inventors lay on the side table. She picked it up and turned to a dog-eared page. “All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed—only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.” The quote was from Nikola Tesla, and it must have resonated with Dr. Capello as he’d underlined it in blue pen.

  Allison placed the book back on the table where she’d found it. She pictured Roland reading it to his father at night. She wished Roland were here so she could kiss him again. Bad thought. Dangerous thought. She didn’t need to feel this intensity of affection for Roland so quickly. She was leaving today, after all.

  Wasn’t she?

  Allison left the question behind her as she walked into the hallway and shut the door to the bedroom behind her. Directly across from Dr. Capello’s bedroom was the door to the attic. From the very first time she’d seen the house, with the square sort of turret sticking up from the top, she’d wondered what delights were in that room, but the attic had been mostly off-limits back then. Roland had said in his letter to her that he’d found her copy of A Wrinkle in Time up there. Maybe more of her old things were up there. She reached out for the doorknob, but the second her finger touched it, a jolt of electric shock ran through her arm. Nothing too painful, and yet she stood there in a daze as if it had stopped her heart. She remembered something. What was it? Something about the attic. Something she needed to know.

  Closing her eyes, Allison touched the doorknob again. The static shock had dissipated, but when she tried to turn the knob she found it locked. Odd. It had made sense to lock up the attic when they were children, but there were no children in the house anymore.

  Allison tried the door one more time. It was an old house; doors swelled and hinges rusted. No, it was definitely locked. A key lock, too, which meant somewhere there had to be a key. Allison stepped away from the door, intending to check the key hooks in the kitchen, when she felt her phone vibrating in her back jeans pocket.

  When she saw who was calling she almost didn’t answer, but she longed to hear a familiar voice.

  “Yes, McQueen?” she said as she started down the stairs. She tried not to sound annoyed when she answered, but she didn’t try