The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel (13 page)

“Probably. But at that moment, I couldn’t even think,” Gus said, impervious to her anger. “I had become someone I promised myself I would never be. I was my father—a violent, jealous drunk who would do anything to get what he wanted. That night I called my cousin, Sunny, in New Bedford.”

“Sunny? You mean the—”

“That’s the one. The crack addict. Or maybe it’s heroin now. Whatever she can get her hands on. She hadn’t heard from me in years, but an addict is always happy to bring someone into the fold. I told her I was coming down. Could she hook me up? I was hoping I’d OD before the cops ever caught up with me.”

“But you never went,” Hallie said, almost disappointed. It seemed that anything—even drug addiction—would have been easier to fight than what now possessed Gus.

“I made it onto Route 6, and the first car stopped for me. It was sputtering along at about thirty miles an hour.”

“D’Souza.” Hallie recalled the jokes she’d heard about the priest’s driving. “The old buzzard followed you.”

“Honestly, I wasn’t gonna get in the car, but you know him—he plays hardball. He threatened to send me back to my aunt’s house. And I couldn’t do that—no matter what. My room was so full of you, I could taste you as soon as I went in there. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I felt your hair spilling across my chest. If I even walked through the door, I knew I’d break.”

It was the first time he’d acknowledged their afternoons in the house on Loop Street, or that
he loved her.
But as he spoke, he looked out on the ocean, as if he were seeing something far away, not something real and vital the way it felt to Hallie.

“We’ll be together like that again, Gus. Not in Junior’s room, but in our own place. In Montana.” This time, though, her voice no longer sounded convincing—even to herself.

When he looked at her, she saw the anguish on his face
.
But also an unmistakable resolve.

She steered the conversation back to the highway, where his story had the potential to turn out differently. She imagined Gus standing before the priest’s hearselike black Buick, making one of the most critical decisions of his life while the old crank stared him down. “So you went back,” she said.

“I went back and hid in the spare bedroom at the rectory, but there was no escaping myself. I felt the insane rage I experienced when I saw you and Neil together. I didn’t just remember it, Hallie. I
felt
it—heart hammering, fists ready to pound someone, the whole thing. You want to know the worst of it?”

Hallie wanted to say no; she didn’t want to know, but she couldn’t summon the word.

“The worst was how
good
it felt when I was hitting Neil. Like being on the field under the lights, the whole town cheering for me. A minute on the clock, I had the ball, and no one, no matter how fast they ran, was ever gonna stop me. Except this time someone did.”

“
Me
,” she whispered.

“One thing you need to know: no matter how crazy I was that night, I never meant to hurt you. I was going for Neil—and out of nowhere, you were there. I don’t care if the judge believed that or this whole stupid town believed it, but it’s important to me that you do.”

“Do you think I ever questioned that?” Hallie asked.

“The next thing I knew you were on the ground. You weren’t moving, and there was blood in your hair. I didn’t live it once, Hallie; I lived it a thousand times a day. I’ll probably never stop living it.”

“I’ve got something I wanted to say to you since that night, too. One thing
you
need to know: I never kissed Neil and I never wanted to. There was never anything—”

“You think I don’t know that?” Gus reached out to touch her face, but then retracted his hand. “The problem wasn’t you; it wasn’t even Neil. It was
me.
The way I reacted when I saw your dress—it was like a bomb went off inside me. Something that had been dormant for a long time. If it hadn’t exploded that night, it would have happened another time.”

“It was five in the morning, and you’d been drinking all night. It isn’t who you are, Gus. And even if it was, do you think your God can change that?”

“He already has,” Gus said quietly. “Once the booze was gone; once I stopped cursing myself and my blood, there was nothing left but me and that quiet room. By the time I was ready to go downstairs and sit at the table with Father D, I wasn’t the same person.”

When he finished speaking, a calm had replaced the grief in his eyes. Finally, Hallie understood that all her protests were useless. Her father was right: Gus belonged to someone else now; and even if his new love seemed like an illusion to Hallie, it was utterly real to him.

She felt a surge of fury to think that a few weeks in the rectory could have stolen both their future and their past.
How could he just forget that he loved her?

“So you brought me out here to tell me you were going away before I heard the gossip in Nick’s waiting room? That’s really thoughtful of you, Gus. I appreciate it.”

“It’s not like that—”

“I didn’t understand what my father was hinting at, but he knew,” Hallie said. “I guess everyone who visited me knew. Felicia and Daisy—people I ran into at Ina’s. Everyone. Hell, even Wolf probably knew.”

“Felicia and Daisy knew I wanted to tell you myself, that I had to see you before I let you go.” This time when Gus looked at her, it was as if he really did see her.

But Hallie was thinking about the weeks she had spent in the hospital, and cosseted in her room, fighting to get well enough to be with him, weeks Gus had used to leave her behind, and find a new vocation.

“So now I’m supposed to say goodbye like an old friend and pretend I understand, right?” she said. “Pretend you’re doing it for
me
? Is that what I’m supposed to do? Well, you want to know the truth? What you’re doing right now is far worse than anything I went through in the hospital, and a thousand times more painful than what happened on the Point. So fuck you, Gus Silva.
Fuck you.
”

Tears blinding her, Hallie turned and started up the beach. Gus called her name just once. The sound of the gulls cut through her like a late-October wind. She kicked off her sandals and walked faster. At first she felt dizzy and weak, but then she forgot what her body was or wasn’t ready to do and just ran. She felt the sand kicking up behind her, and Gus’s eyes as he watched her disappear. And she also felt the truth growing stronger with every step: Gus wouldn’t come after her. Not this time. Not ever again.

Chapter 15

T
hat fall, when most of her
friends left for college, Hallie stayed home and walked. Every morning she walked from the East End, where she lived, to Loop Street in the West End. She stood across the street from Manny and Fatima’s forlorn cottage with its dangling shutter and the fallen Madonna out front, wondering what drove her there. Did she expect to see Gus, bounding out the front door the way he once did every morning, hungry to see her? Or maybe the shadow of the girl who had waited for him on the porch? The foolish girl who had laughed as easily as she breathed.

From Loop Street, she’d go back home for her bike and ride out to Route 6. It was a long trek through the dunes to Wolf’s shack, but every day she brought him a Thermos of coffee. He always greeted her the same way: “What the fuck, Hallie? Don’t you know I’m trying to work out here?”

But as she had when she was a child, she found solace watching Wolf paint.

In the afternoon, she’d wander into her father’s office for lunch and end up hanging around. She’d help Aunt Del with the paperwork, smiling as Nick joked with his patients or castigated an elderly woman in Portuguese for refusing to follow orders. Gradually, Hallie began to take on more responsibilities. She learned to take blood pressure readings to help Leah out on busy days and researched nutritional information for patients on special diets. And when her father brought home the files for a particularly challenging case, she studied them, too.

Occasionally, in the evenings, she’d drive around with Felicia and Reggie, who had ended up staying in town, and the three of them would share a six-pack or a bottle of fruity wine on the beach. They’d talk about movies, and the beauty school Felicia was attending in Hyannis, and how
boring
Provincetown was in the winter. They’d bemoan the fact that all the best-looking men in town were gay, and then swear they didn’t care about guys anyway. The only subject that was off limits was the past.

But wherever she went, she felt his shadow. He walked out of the sea; he called her name from the top of the monument; he sat on a bench in the center of town near the memorial where members of both their families were listed among the war dead. Once, in a dream that left her particularly shaken, he walked into the office wearing the black T-shirt from Lou’s, and smiled at her the way he had on the day of his father’s funeral.

N
eil had his own way of
coming back, too. Hallie turned her head when she caught sight of a red Jeep, or spotted a rangy boy in a white dishwasher’s outfit like the one he wore for his summer job. Even the sight of the school bus where they had first become friends filled her with a private ache. Time made the “accident” on Race Point increasingly unreal, but her friendship with Neil was something tangible.

She wasn’t sure she was ready to forgive him, but as the weeks passed, she knew she had to see him again. Thanksgiving break gave her the opportunity she was waiting for when she heard that Neil was home alone. Although his family had gone to Boston for the weekend, he had insisted on remaining behind.

The Friday after the holiday, Hallie borrowed Nick’s truck and drove to the West End. Steeling herself, she knocked on the door—at first tentatively and then more insistently but there was no response. She was in the driveway heading toward the truck when Neil appeared on the porch. Despite an unseasonable cold snap, he was wearing only ripped jeans and a New York Knicks shirt and his feet were bare. He didn’t speak.

“Wanna go out for coffee?” she finally asked.

Neil shook his head. “Not a chance.”

Hallie was about to leave when he continued. “If we walked into Ina’s together, half the town would know every word we said before we made it home. But you can come in here—that is, if you’re not afraid of me.”

Hallie could see the bones of his shoulders protruding through his T-shirt. She followed him through the house and into the kitchen Neil’s mother had decorated in a seashell motif.

“Sorry, but I don’t know how to make coffee,” he said, studying her as he leaned against a counter. He indicated the table with its severely angled chairs. “You want to sit?”

She noticed that he’d gotten an ear pierced, and that his hair had grown shaggier. Her eyes were drawn to a scar on his cheek that was shaped like a crescent moon, an obvious souvenir of the night on the Point.

“I don’t know what I want, Neil,” she said. “I just know I had to come. Ever since you and Gus went away, I’ve been trying to understand how it happened. How any of it happened . . .”

Neil took a step forward to hug her like he had done a thousand times before, but then retreated. He slouched into a kitchen chair and put his face in his hands.

“
How it happened.
It’s my undeclared major. I’m practically flunking out of school, Hal, because all I can think of is that night. The horrible stuff I said. What I fucking
did.
Last summer, when I called you, I wanted to apologize. Imagine that? As if any apology in the world could cover it.”

“I’d like to say I’m sorry that you’re in pain, but I’m not. I can’t be, Neil.”

“You think I want you to be
sorry
for me
? That’s the last thing I want,” Neil said.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me you were the one who wrote the note?” Her voice was so low that she wasn’t sure it was audible.

Neil reddened. “Shit, Hallie. I’d been telling you how I felt all my life. I thought you’d know it was me—”

“And when I didn’t?”

“You mean, when you immediately assumed it was Gus? Well, it was clear who you wanted it to be, no matter what you said in the dunes. I thought you and Gus would eventually talk about it, and I’d have to admit the truth, but you never did.”

“When he didn’t bring it up, I thought he was embarrassed by it. Or maybe that I’d been wrong.”

“But still, you never connected the dots.”

“Like you said, I wanted to believe it was Gus.”

Neil nodded. At that moment he reminded her more of his child self than ever. His nose was running, and his eyes were leaking, and the scar on his cheek had turned a flame color that nearly matched his hair. Hallie handed him a tissue.

“I guess we were all wounded that night, weren’t we?” she whispered. She wasn’t even aware that she was crying herself until Neil pushed the tissue box in her direction.

He was still sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands when Hallie let herself out.

A few days later she called Sean Mello and got Neil’s number at school. She dialed immediately before she could change her mind.

“I just wanted to tell you I’ve been thinking about what you said, Gallagher. I’m not a judge, but I want you to know one thing: what you did that night was horrible, maybe even unforgivable, but you didn’t ruin anyone’s life. Gus is out there doing what he wants to do, no matter how much it kills me; and someday you’re going to be a famous actor. And me? Don’t count me out yet, either.” Then, before he had a chance to respond, she hung up.

She didn’t know what the revelation did for Neil, because he didn’t call her back. But it released something in her. She stopped passing by the house on Loop Street in the morning. Though she still dreamed of Gus, the dreams were less frequent; and shaking them off in the morning, less painful. When she took her daily walks, the past still accosted her like the Black Flash, a legendary ghost that all of the older people swore they’d seen at least once during the lonely winters in Provincetown. But increasingly she was too preoccupied to stop for it. The future,
her
future, was a fire that burned more brightly inside her every day.

O
ne pristine winter evening when she
and Nick were walking home from Cap’s, sated and entranced by the stars, her father stopped dead. “You always used to sing around the house. Ever since you first learned ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’ ” he said. “I miss it.”

She shrugged and kept walking. “I guess I lost that in the accident,” she said over her shoulder.

“Lost what—your singing voice?”

“No. Just the desire to sing.” She wasn’t ready to admit that she was afraid of what her voice might contain.

Nick hitched the backpack he substituted for the traditional black bag up on his shoulder and resumed walking. “It will come back,” he said.

“Yes, it will,” Hallie said, feeling a surge of the optimism that had been slowly building since Thanksgiving. “It will be different, maybe, but it will come back.”

Nick studied her obliquely. “In the meantime, what are you going to do with your life?” he asked. It was the first time in months that he had suggested she might want to do more than visit Wolf, putter in the office, and read with him in the study in the evenings.

“Do I have to
do
something? Can’t I just stay here and be Hallie, like I always was?”

“Just
be
? Might be fine for a Zen monk or an old hippie, but not for my Pie.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not your Pie anymore. I’m all grown-up, and I get to decide my own future.” Hallie speeded up slightly when she noticed nosy Mavis Black scurrying to catch up with them. Mavis was waving wildly, the eyebrows she’d painted orange to match her hair lifted in interest at the raised voices.

“You’re also someone who has a lot to give. And if you don’t find a way to give it, you might be the proud master of your own fate, but you’ll never be happy,” Nick said, turning back to confront her.

Then, spotting the woman he called his favorite hypochondriac, he cupped his hand and whispered, “Look at poor Victoria. Mavis has got that poor dog dressed up like something out of
Dr. Zhivago.
”

Hallie giggled.

Though she couldn’t have heard their voices, Mavis got the idea that the doctor was avoiding her. She harrumphed so loudly that even Nick laughed; and when Hallie finally turned around, Mavis and her fur-clad dog were trotting at a huffy clip in the opposite direction.

They walked the next half-mile in easy silence, Nick’s question still between them: What was she going to do with the rest of her life? The answer had been growing inside her throughout the long fall as she helped out in the office, as she and her father discussed a particularly tricky diagnosis in the study at night. She wondered if he’d seen the new batch of catalogues that had arrived in the mail from Duke and Tufts.

“Okay, I’m going to apply to a couple of schools for next year, but I’m especially interested in Berkeley.”

“I hear they have an excellent premed program.” Though he tried to sound cool, Nick couldn’t quite pull it off.

“Nick! You already
knew
!”

“I’ve known since you were a little girl. And so have you. I was just waiting for you to remember.”

Waiting for me to forget, is more like it
, Hallie thought, following her father as he turned the corner. It was the exact spot where Gus had left her that afternoon when she found him in the church. But now she felt a different kind of possibility opening up inside her, and this time she passed the corner without allowing herself to sink back into that moment with Gus.

The truth was no longer something to be argued with, or even mourned. It was just the truth: Gus wasn’t coming back. Her old strength and energy coursed through her veins. It hadn’t come from Gus, and he couldn’t take it away. Her father was right. She had something to give, something to
do
; and give and do she would.

“It’s pretty far away,” she said, a little offended that her father hadn’t balked at the distance that would be between them.

“Far away is hard, but sometimes it’s good—necessary even.” Nick stopped where he was. “There are too many shadows around here. If you stay in Massachusetts, you might never escape them.”

Like you?
Hallie thought, but didn’t say it out loud. Instead, she turned and hugged him the way she used to when she was a little girl. He returned it with a bone-crushing Costa
abraço
, lifting her off her feet.

By then, they were standing outside their front gate. When Stuart pulled his Saab into the driveway next door, Nick waved wildly.

“Hey, Stuart!” Nick yelled before their neighbor had a chance to climb out of his car. “Have you heard? Hallie’s gonna be a doctor!”

Embarrassed, Hallie rolled her eyes. “Don’t listen to him, Stuart.” And then to her father: “I’m applying to an undergrad program, Nick. Don’t get the lab coats monogrammed yet, okay?”

But, as ever, when Nick was excited about something, whether it was an outburst from Coleman Hawkins’ saxophone or the discovery of a new star, there was no keeping him quiet. Hallie threw up her hands helplessly in Stuart’s direction. Then they both laughed as Nick raced into the middle of the street, and turned toward the center of town, making his hands a megaphone. “You hear that, Provincetown? My daughter’s gonna be a doctor! A
doctor
!”