The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel (40 page)

Chapter 46

A
round three, when I get up
to go to the bathroom, I see the door to the attic is open and I know that Hallie is on the roof. It’s usually my cue that she wants to be left alone, so I almost go back to my room. But I know there’s a very particular loneliness waiting for me there and I’d do just about anything to avoid it.

Peering up the dark stairs, I truly understand why Hallie started making dangerous pilgrimages to the top of the house when she was a little girl. It was because she knew the ache I feel.
Saudade
, she calls it. Despite my bare feet, I walk through an attic littered with sharp objects and climb the rickety ladder to Hallie’s cathedral.

She is leaning against the chimney, looking out over the water, and at first I don’t think she even notices me. If there was any chance I could sneak downstairs without speaking, I would. But then Hallie looks up. The moon has illuminated a shadowy path of tears on her cheeks.

“Do you want to be alone?” I stammer.

But Hallie scoots over. “Sit with me, Mila.”

When I do, she wraps her arm around me, seeming to invite me to take in the wild beauty of the night that surrounds us.

I speak first. “I know why you’re crying. You’re thinking of what it will be like when Gus comes home.”

“I wish I could say those were happy tears, Mila,” she says, wiping her eyes. “But actually, they were the selfish variety. And this is the last—the absolute
last
—time I’m ever going to cry them.”

At that moment, I’m wishing Hallie had someone else to talk to. Someone wiser—and, okay,
older.
Like Abby, Jack, or maybe Stuart, who’s lived next door since she was a kid. Even shy Julia would know what to say. But I’m the only one here. “Selfish tears? I don’t understand.”

“As long as Gus was in prison, he needed me. He waited for me. He belonged to me like he did in high school.”

“But now that he’s coming home again, won’t you two—”

Before I get the words out, Hallie is shaking her head—not only in answer to my unfinished question, but to the tears that fill her eyes, despite her resolution to keep them back.

“I don’t think Gus has decided what he’ll do when he comes home. He hasn’t had time yet. But I know. Jack says I’ve always known—even when I wouldn’t allow myself to face it.”

“You mean he’ll go back to the
Church
? No chance! Gus has told me a million times he’s not a priest anymore. And it’s not like the institution gave him much support over the last ten years.”

“His friends in the Church—and there were a lot of them—never stopped believing in him. And, besides, it wasn’t about the institution for him. It was about something he found in a lonely pew in St. Peter’s all those years ago. Something he saw in people like Jack and Sandra, and in the experiences he shared with the sick and dying at the hospital. Prison almost took it away from him before you came along and reminded him.”

“But I’ve seen you two together. It’s so obvious you belong—”

Again, Hallie shakes her head. “There was a reason he decided not to be with me all those years ago, Mila,” she says. “In every way that counts, nothing has changed.”

“But he told me that you two—that he—I mean,” I stammer. “He said he loved you, Hallie. More than anyone else on earth.”

“You want to know what really breaks my heart? He
does
love me more than anyone else. But my competition was never another person, Mila.”

It’s then that I finally remember—and even begin to understand—the rest of what Gus said that day:
He loved Hallie, but being in love was for people like me, not for people like him.
I don’t want to cry in front of Hallie, but I can’t help myself.

“Don’t, Mila.” Hallie says with mother-style firmness. “This is a happy day. This is the day we waited for. It really is. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’m going to go inside and try to get some sleep.”

Chapter 47

H
allie and I don’t talk much
on the way to the jail where Ava’s being held. It’s the sunniest day ever, but for us it’s the midnight hour. Within twenty-four hours, Neil and Ava will stand before a judge and hear their crimes pronounced out loud. Undoubtedly, the Bug will carry his sorry bag of flesh into the courtroom to stare down the woman he could never release, and Alvaro has made sure that the courtroom will be packed with Gus’s friends. People who used to brag about the almost famous actor they went to school with, who had faithfully come home to see Neil’s plays in Wellfleet during the summer and paid more than they could afford for good seats at his shows in New York. People like Hallie, who thought they knew him.

But the ones who love Gus best, Jack and Julia, and of course Hallie, will not be there. You see, they—or I should say we, because they’ve invited me to come along—will be at Millette State Prison. Or, rather, we’ll be standing outside that ugly fortress, watching a certain door. Yes, it’s true. In exactly twenty-one hours and thirty-seven minutes, Gus Silva is scheduled to be released.

“Are you
sure
you want to go in?” Hallie asks when we arrive at the jail where my mother is being held. Not imprisoned exactly. Just held. We’re standing outside, smoking a cigarette in the parking lot, her on one side of the car, me on the other. “You know how I feel.”

“Yeah, I do. And you’re aware of my opinion, too.” I mash out my cigarette with the heel of my new lace-up boots.

“There are some things I need to say to this woman—your mother—and, well, it just might be better if you didn’t hear them.”

“I know,” I repeat, but I’m already heading toward the entrance.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you’re the most stubborn girl on the Cape?”

“Just the Cape? Jeez, give a kid some respect.”

It’s a standing joke between us, but this time neither of us is laughing.

E
ven in her orange jumpsuit, Ava
is stunning. Her pallor, the dark half-moons beneath her green eyes only add to her enigmatic appeal. She looks as vulnerable and alone as she must have been that first night she appeared at the rectory, asking for “Father Gus.” It’s hard not to notice her grace as she slips into her chair, the artful way she uses a tilt of her head, her hands. The hair that was platinum when I saw her last has been restored to a lustrous chestnut brown. Determined not to fall for it, I give her my coldest glare.

But a moment later, she greets me as
my little Milena
, the name I haven’t used for more than a decade, and something collapses inside me. No matter how hard I try, the abandoned six-year-old always betrays me. With more fortitude than I feel—and my best imitation of Hallie’s
cortesia
, I thank Ava for allowing us to visit.

“I don’t have much to say, but Hallie wanted to come,” I add, since Ava is obviously ignoring her.

Ava’s eyes openly settle on the woman beside me. She nods her head warily, not even pretending this is a friendly visit. “But why? Did you come to prove that my daughter is more loyal to you than—”

“Mila is loyal to the truth, and she’s been incredibly brave. If you were any kind of mother, you’d be proud of her,” Hallie snaps.

Ava’s eyelashes flutter the way they did the last time I saw her. “So you’re here to judge me? Well, fine. But leave Mila out of it. You know nothing about my feelings for my child.”

“I’m here because I need answers, and Neil refused to see me. Why did
you
agree to the visit?”

Ava adjusts the rolled cuffs of her jumpsuit, but I can see that she is shaking. It frightens me that I can’t stop feeling her emotions. Will I ever? I have an irresistible urge to rise up and stand between them—though I’m no longer sure who I want to protect. Is my loyalty with Hallie—as Ava thinks—or not?

“Do you think I would miss a chance to meet the woman who has tormented my husband for so long? The rival I could never really fight? He tried to hide it at first, but a wife knows these things, Doctor.”

“
Tormented? Rival?
I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hallie fires back. “Neil and I were friends—from the time we were nine years old. At least, I believed we were. Now I wonder how I was ever so deceived.”

“Neil also thought he had been deceived, and in the cruelest possible way. He told me all about it. You knew how strong his feelings were for you; you encouraged it. Then you used him to get close to Gus.”

“If he said those things, he’s delusional. I never used anyone—”

Ava raises her voice and continues as if she didn’t hear her. “And finally you both betrayed him. Do you have any idea what that did to my husband, Dr. Costa? He never had a good relationship with his family, but it almost didn’t matter. He had a friend who was closer than any brother—and he had you, the girl he’d loved as far back as he could remember. The orphans of Race Point, right?”

“What a twisted interpretation of something that was meant to be innocent and good. You have no right to even talk about it.”

“I have every right. Neil is
my husband
,” Ava yells, briefly attracting the attention of the guard
. “
I’ve lived with the consequences of your blindness for the last ten years.”

“If I was blind, or if Gus was, it was only because Neil was so good at hiding his dark side. You, on the other hand, were obviously aware of it from the start. Why don’t we talk about what he did out of love for you?”

At that, Ava emits a caustic sound from her throat. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s a kind of choked laughter. Now that the focus had turned to her marriage, the present, she seems distinctly uncomfortable. “Neil has obsessions, not loves. And, yes, for a while I was one of them. But as I said, I never had the power over him that you did. Or the good Father. Him above all.”

Ava gets up and shivers like she is cold. She begins to pace in circles around the little room, which arouses the guard’s attention. But she doesn’t seem to notice or care.

“Did you ever wonder how we met—your Neil and me?” she asks stopping abruptly. “I mean—think of the unlikelihood of it. A scared, reclusive wife, living in a coastal town, and a gregarious actor from New York.
Fun-loving.
Wasn’t that the adjective most used to describe him? What on God’s earth would such a man want with someone like me?”

“You went to see one of his plays in Wellfleet. Maybe you ran into him somewhere afterwards. Obviously, you’re an attractive woman.”

“The playhouse was an hour away, and you have no idea how constricted my life was.
You
remember, Milena,” she says to me, though her eyes remain on Hallie. “I could scarcely take my child to the beach without arousing Robert’s suspicion, much less wander off to the
bohemian end
of the Cape, as he called it. But that summer something happened inside me. That summer I was free in spite of him. Love did that for me—but not the love you think. Before I met Neil, there was someone else.”

Hallie refuses to ask the question my mother is leading her toward. When she fingers her keys, I think we might escape relatively unscathed. But never one to back down, she clatters the keys on the table like a challenge. “Go ahead.”

“I met Gus first. It was such a desperate time for me. The only hope I had was a vial of sleeping tablets I’d hidden in my closet. I counted them every morning, waiting for nothing, hoping for nothing but the day when I would have the courage to use them.”

“You didn’t even know Gus; he told us that himself,” I interrupt, trying to forget the day I found that vial of sleeping pills. I was nine—surely old enough to know better, but I was hungry for anything that was hers. I can still remember the bitter taste of the pill I tested on my tongue.

But Ava is so focused on Hallie she doesn’t hear me. “Robert and I had fought—
argued
, as he called it—the morning I first walked into Gus’s church. I don’t know what started it—I almost never did—but it was bad. When it was over, my eye was swollen shut; and my side hurt so much I could hardly breathe.”

“A fractured rib,” Hallie muttered.

Without answering, Ava continues. “When he began to dress for work, I ran to the bathroom and turned on the light. I had a secret fascination with my injuries. My scars. They were how I measured my life’s progress. Worse than last time. Much worse.
Almost there
, I thought
.
You don’t know how much I wanted to die.

“But this time, Robert followed me. He was so furious when he saw my face in the mirror; I thought he would hit me again—especially when he shut the door. ‘You always have to push me, don’t you, Ava? There’s no way you can go to Mila’s school play looking like that, and what about the wine tasting on Friday? I’ll have to come up with some excuse for you—again.’ I can still see his eyes, the way he shook his head in disgust.”

“Then you apologized,” I whisper. “He hurt you so bad, he could have killed you, and you
apologized.
Why would you do that?”

“You heard that, Mila? My God,
you knew
?”

“Of course, I knew. I followed you. I cried when you couldn’t. I was standing in the hallway when he yelled at you for what he’d done. Your voice was so small, but it felt like a jackhammer to my heart. Why would you say you were sorry?” Ava lowers her head, revealing the vulnerable whiteness of her neck. “I pray to God that you will never understand the answer to that question. I apologized because this man—your father—had convinced me that I was wrong. It wasn’t just what I did that was wrong. Or what I said.
I
was wrong, Mila. Every breath I took.”

She almost looks afraid, as if she’s still trapped in that bathroom, in her terror. “Do you remember his radio?” she asks.

I’m ashamed that this woman still has the power to draw tears from me. “He turned it on whenever you fought—always to a news station. He was so afraid that someone might hear the truth of who he was. What went on in that house. Even now, I still can’t listen to radio news.”

“Neither can I,” my mother admits.

Then she turns back to Hallie. “That morning, the announcer was talking about a storm—a n’oreaster he called it, high winds, heavy rain. People were advised to stay off the beaches. I can’t tell you the joy I felt. Not just relief, Doctor, but real
joy.
Fortunately, Robert always left for work at dawn, and even earlier when I
provoked
him.

“ ‘You won’t want to go outside looking like that,’ he said before he left. And, yes, I think I said I was sorry again. Sorry for my bruised face, for the pain in my side that is with me to this day in certain weather. Sorry that I was an affront to all the good people who shouldn’t have to look at lives like mine. Who didn’t want to see it. As it turned out, when Robert left the house, it was the last time he would ever have power over me.

“It was still dark and so wild when I reached the beach, but I didn’t care. I got out and walked against the wind toward the water. My plan—if you could call it that—was to dive into the ocean and swim until I couldn’t go any further. But as soon as I felt the undertow at my ankles, I knew I couldn’t do it.”

“If only you had,” Hallie can’t keep from saying, making me understand why she didn’t want me to be there.

“Not until I found someone to look after Mila,” Ava continues, ignoring Hallie’s words. “Someone who would make sure my daughter would not become my replacement.”

“But you didn’t go to the rectory and ask for Gus’s help until a year later. Are you really trying to tell me you met him before that night? Because that’s impossible.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. That was not the first time.” Ava’s eyes remain closed, as if to lock Hallie and me out of the private story that is unfolding in her head. “I had no faith left, none; in fact, I hated the Church. But the morning of the storm I was so desperate. I could think of nowhere else to go. I don’t know why—perhaps, I thought I would find something I had lost when I was a little girl. A remnant of innocence. Some sense of goodness and light.

“It was so early, I never expected anyone would be there. I thought the door would be locked, the church empty.”

“But it wasn’t.” The resignation in Hallie’s voice breaks my heart.

“Do you want to know the strangest thing? Just the way the light came through the windows, that certain hush, I felt like I was at home in my little chapel in Bratislava. I felt like a child again.”

“And Gus—”

“The Father was on the altar, saying mass. Saying it for no one but himself and his God. Honestly, my first thought was: What’s wrong with him? He was so handsome, so young. I couldn’t fathom why he would choose such a life. But he performed his ritual with such reverence, such—there’s no other word for it,
love
—it became obvious. Just the sight of him filled me with shame. To this day, I can’t explain it. I wanted to run away from it, but I couldn’t. I was transfixed.”

“Did you speak to him?”

Ava shakes her head. “When he went into the sanctuary, I left. Then I went out into my car and cried.”

“You say you had no faith. Why would you be so moved?”

“I wept because I had betrayed everything that was good. Because I was so filled with darkness. I cried because I loved nothing and no one but my daughter. And what good did my love do her? I was too weak to protect anyone—even myself.”

“So you went back to look for him,” Hallie says, and it is not a question.

“Every day at the same time. At first I hid in the candle room like I had the first day, and watched him say his private mass. But one day I dropped my bag, and he stopped. He looked back to see if anyone was there. After that, I waited outside on the street. The man’s habits were so predictable. He said his mass, and then he went to the beach to run with his dogs, and, finally, winter or summer, he pulled off his shirt and swam in the ocean.”

“You stalked him. If you can’t tell the truth to me, at least stop lying to yourself.”