Chapter 5

      It wasn’t until the wheels touched down at Portland International Airport that Allison realized she had never really believed she would go back. For two days, she’d been running on adrenaline, powered by the need to keep thoughts of the breakup at bay. Yet once she was in Oregon, the frenzy of energy disappeared and it took everything she had to disembark and collect her luggage. When the lady at the rental car counter asked her what brought her to Portland, Allison had been too dazed to think of a decent answer.

      “I have no idea,” she said, and the lady looked at her with a mix of confusion and sympathy. She didn’t ask Allison any more friendly, prying questions after that.

      The city was as green as she remembered and the rivers that bisected Portland still as blue. She took the highway to an exit that read Ocean Beaches and wondered how anyone managed to drive past that sign without immediately turning onto it and heading straight for the ocean. Very quickly the shining city faded behind her and lonely farms and hilly pastures popped up along the road. But soon enough those were gone, too, replaced first by patches of trees and then by full forests with branches so verdant and thick they formed an archway over the road, like soldiers forming an honor guard.

      As she neared the coast, the clouds grew heavier, denser, stranger. The forests turned dark and eerie. In sunlight, the low-hanging mossy branches would look innocuous. At dusk, they looked like skeletal fingers pointing at her, the moss like skin falling off the bone.

      Allison nearly jumped out of her seat when she banked around a curve and saw a fiendish grinning red-eyed face glowering at her from the side of the road. Once her heart slowed, Allison laughed at herself. During her flight to Portland, she’d reread A Wrinkle in Time. The villain in that book was a man with glowing red eyes who tried to get the three brave children to submit to him and allow him total control of their minds. She was glad McQueen wasn’t there to see her jump at the sight of someone’s stupid joke. Someone had nailed red safety reflectors to a tree trunk in the shape of eyes and a monstrous mouth. That was all.

      When Highway 26 met the famous coastal 101, Allison turned south toward the cape. She’d spent the evening before online, reading everything she could about the Oregon coast and deciding where she would go and what she would see after she made her obligatory stop at The Dragon to pay her respects to Dr. Capello. It was a vacation, Allison told herself. No pressure. Just fun. If she were going to come all the way to the other side of the country, she might as well make an adventure of it.

      Except, as her drive took her closer and closer to her old home, her sense of adventure left her and low-level panic took its place. Her heart beat rapidly and she had to stop at one of the highway’s scenic viewpoints simply to catch her breath. She leaned against the long stone wall and gazed down at the ocean. It had been a long time since she’d seen the Pacific Ocean. Panama City Beach it was not. The waves were white-capped and hitting the beach hard, and she knew those blue-silver waters were like the siren’s song—lovely, yes, but ice cold and deadly. The scenic marker warned that what she was looking at wasn’t simply a nice ocean landscape, but the notorious Graveyard of the Pacific. Ship after ship after ship had gone down in those waters. No wonder Dr. Capello had called his house The Dragon. Allison imagined all it would take was two steps forward, and she’d fall off the edge of the world into oblivion. To think she used to swim here. Well, if she’d been brave enough and stupid enough to swim in a graveyard, surely she could be brave enough and stupid enough to go home for an hour.

      Calmer now, Allison got back into her car and headed south toward Cape Arrow. The whole place wasn’t much more than a collection of pretty beach houses on a hillside overlooking the ocean. It was an isolated, lonely sort of place, and Dr. Capello’s house was the most isolated of them all, a mile farther down from the cape and situated on a solitary spit of land amid deep tree cover. She didn’t know the street names and the GPS wasn’t helping. She turned it off and let memory alone guide her to the correct turn.

      Then, at last, after thirteen years, there it was.

      Allison pulled in, stopped and got out of her car at the end of the long winding drive that led from the highway down to the beach. The eight-foot-high wrought-iron gates that stretched across the entrance of the driveway were open, but then again, they always had been. Iron and seawater were a bad combination and the gates were so rusted she doubted they could ever be closed again. She stepped through the gates to where the trees parted. Long ago she’d stood right here with Dr. Capello as he showed her the house, her new home, for the very first time.

      “See it?” he’d asked her. “You see the dragon?”

      She’d rolled her eyes, too smart for her own good at that age.

      “It’s a house,” she’d said. A big house, yes. A tall odd house with blue-green shingle siding and a sort of square turret on top, but still...a house.

      “Don’t look at the house,” Dr. Capello had said as he knelt down next to her. He pointed to the ocean. “Look there. Look at the water. You’ll see the house out of the corner of your eye. And then tell me that doesn’t look like a dragon.”

      She’d taken a heavy breath, the breath children took when adults insulted their intelligence. But she’d done it, anyway. She’d gazed far past the house onto the ocean. She saw the whitecaps of the waves, the water running up the beach and running away again. And there in the corner of her eye, she saw a dragon.

      He was sitting up, this dragon, prim as a cat with four paws daintily placed together, a straight back and his head—the square sort of turret room on top—held high. The green rain-drenched shingles were his scales and the shimmering windows his wings and the gray deck his tail wrapped around his feet. Looking at the square turret, she could make out the back of its head, which meant the dragon, too, gazed out at the ocean, just like she did.

      “I see it...” she had breathed. “I see the dragon.”

      Dr. Capello had laughed softly. “In the winter, when we use the fireplace, smoke comes out of his nose.”

      “Is it dangerous?”

      “Oh, very. It wouldn’t be a dragon if it wasn’t dangerous.”

      “He’s lovely.” So lovely the dragon was, she couldn’t help but try to get a closer look. She turned her gaze from the water to the house and in the blink of an eye...

      “He’s gone,” she had said.

      “Well, that’s what happens when you look too close at magical creatures. You can only see them when you aren’t looking at them.”

      “That’s silly.”

      “That’s magic for you.” Dr. Capello lifted his hands as if to say he didn’t make the rules. “It’s wonderful but fragile. You have to be very gentle with it.”

      Although she was twenty-five and knew better, Allison couldn’t help but look for the dragon where the house stood. As she’d done eighteen years earlier, she gazed out at the water, letting the house hover in her peripheral vision. At first nothing happened. She saw a house and nothing