The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel (12 page)

“Listen, I gotta go, but I’ll be in touch, okay?” Neil said.

T
hroughout August, Hallie redoubled her efforts
to regain her strength. During the weeks she’d been in the hospital, her muscles had atrophied; but above all, her brain was tired. Tired of trying to arrange the thoughts in her head, of organizing her words so people would understand what she meant, of trying to get out of bed when there seemed so little reason to do so. Everyone told her how lucky she’d been, how little cognitive or physical damage she displayed on various charts and scales. Her prognosis was excellent. But she, who had always felt like the luckiest of girls, now inhabited a treacherous universe. Was there a scale to measure that, she wondered.

Only when she heard that Gus was going away did her urgent sense of purpose return. Finally, she had a goal: she had to get strong enough to see him;
she had to change his mind.
For the last two weeks, she’d worked hard, performing her physical therapy twice a day like the high achiever she was. She began taking walks around the yard, and then to the corner, and finally into town, where people poked their heads out of shop doors and apartment windows to greet her.

Everyone seemed to be rooting for her. Even Wolf was now making regular visits to the house for the first time in two years. He had come because he was missing a saw and thought he might have left it behind. Or because he forgot the color of the sky in one of the paintings he’d abandoned in the empty bedrooms and he needed to know. He’d come because after years of drinking Nick’s abominable coffee, nothing else was quite strong enough to jolt him awake. Usually, he just stayed long enough to bolt a cup of the dark brew and to peek in on Hallie. If she was awake, he grumbled an angry, unpracticed
Hello!
and quickly escaped, his footsteps clattering down the stairs as if he were being pursued. But if he thought she was asleep, he would pace around the room, watching her and muttering cholerically, the way he had once done in the attic. Much of his grumbling was incoherent, but sometimes Hallie heard him cursing
the stupid boy
, or
the stupid girl
, or his own stupidity for caring. In her bed, she cried silently for all of them.

Chapter 14

F
inally, three days before Labor Day,
Neil called to say the meeting was set. He even offered to drive her out to the Point. It had been easy for her to absolve Gus for nearly killing her, but she didn’t think she could ever forgive Neil. Whenever she thought of him, the memories came back in hard, violent shards. The drunken kiss. Her exposed breast. Him calling her a bitch.
Nick’s pampered little bitch.
Was it possible that her friend had really thought that of her all along? And then there were the things he’d said about Gus.

But most of all, she couldn’t forgive him for loving her. For
still
loving her. She could hear it in his voice.

“Thanks, but I’ll get out there on my own,” she said before she hung up.

The day of the planned meeting Felicia drove her to the beach. “Did Neil tell you where he’d be?” she said when they reached the parking lot.

“He didn’t have to tell me. I know.” It was where they always went—beyond the area where tourists set up their patchwork of towels, the same place where they had built a bonfire on prom night.

Exhausted from the walk, she sat and waited until she spotted Gus in the distance. As usual, he was running. Even far off, everything about him was familiar—from the dark-blue track shorts he wore to the black of his hair against the sky and the disciplined, fluid motion of his body. She had thought of him so much that the sight felt like a kind of miracle.
He really existed; she hadn’t imagined him after all.

He stopped a good yard away from her, still breathing hard from his run, but he was looking at her the same way—as if he could hardly believe she was really there.

“You look good,” he said at last. His eyes were wet.

“You, too—beautiful.” Hallie wondered if he remembered the last time they had said those words to each other. They were only yards from the spot where they had camped that night in a single sleeping bag.

She waited for him to come closer, to pull her up and embrace her, but he remained frozen where he was. That didn’t matter, though, Hallie told herself. He was
there.
He was
right
there
, and he obviously still loved her. How had she ever doubted it? She got up and took a loping step toward him, until she was close enough to inhale his familiar smell—tobacco, the fresh sweat from his run, and the most intoxicating scent of all—
just Gus.

But instead of reaching for her, Gus looked out over the water, hands resting on his hips. “I don’t deserve to see you, Hallie,” he said, as if beginning a prepared and difficult speech. “But I appreciate you coming out here.”

Appreciate you coming out here?
He sounded like one of Nick’s patients after a house call.

“So, you’re okay?” he asked, turning back to her. “You’re
really
okay? Everyone told me you were doing better than anyone expected, but I had to see for myself. Just once, I had to see.”

“Physically, the doctors and therapists say I’ve made remarkable progress. But okay?
Without you?
” Hallie was unable to quell the tremor in her voice. “Can’t you at least give me a hug? I’m dying here.” It was exactly what she
didn’t
want to say, but standing this close to him, there was no way to keep back the truth, or the tears that rolled down her cheeks.

But Gus remained where he was. Hallie followed his gaze out over the sea.

“I promised I wouldn’t see you again, Hallie,” he said. “And I intend to keep my word. But before I do, there’s something I need to tell you.”

“Who would ask you to make a promise like that?” But even as Hallie spoke the question out loud, she already knew the answer.
Nick.
Aside from Gus, the person she loved most in the world. She wondered what her father had given Gus in return. Had he paid for the high-priced attorney that Neil told her about? Maybe even shown up in court in his ancient suit, the frayed red tie he pulled out for funerals and weddings? Had he testified on Gus’s behalf—not merely as a “pillar of the community” but as the father of the victim?

“He had no right,” Hallie said. “This is my life we’re talking about here. Our lives.” A new rage sluiced through Hallie’s blood. At Nick, who had betrayed her in the name of protecting her. At an anonymous court system that knew neither her nor Gus, but thought it had a right to decide her fate. At everyone who had withheld the truth from her. But especially at Gus. She would have served fifty years in prison before she agreed to give him up. Had he been willing to sacrifice their future—to sacrifice
her
—for a favorable outcome in court?

As if reading her mind, Gus said, “I didn’t do it for them, Hallie. The only promise that ever mattered to me was the one I made to you.”

“What are you talking about?”

Gus took a long, deep breath. “Don’t you remember that day in the cemetery?”

“Do I remember?
Everything
began that day for me,” Hallie whispered, once again fighting tears.

“No, it didn’t,” Gus said. “You had an incredible life before me, and you’ll have it after I’m gone. It’s in your eyes right now; I can see it. You are so strong, Hallie—more strong—”

She interrupted before he could finish. “We said we’d always tell each other the truth. Even when we couldn’t tell anyone else.
That’s
the promise I remember from the cemetery.”

“There was another one, though. Maybe you didn’t hear it; maybe you took it for granted. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was sitting on my mother’s grave when I promised I’d never hurt you.”

“It was an accident, Gus. You didn’t—”

But something steely and distant in Gus stopped her. “I asked you to come out here because there’s something I have to say,” he said, meeting her eyes with a disconcerting directness. “I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else.”

An image of Reggie Aluto came into her mind. All the girls and women who were drawn to Gus. Was it possible Nick was right—that there was someone else?

“I’m going away,” Gus said, intruding on her thoughts with the words that had haunted her since Neil first spoke them. “I’m—”

“No,
we—
we’re going away. To Montana. Remember, Gus? We’re going to live someplace so open that nothing can limit us. We’re going to a town where no one remembers what happened to your mother, or looks at me and sees Nick’s daughter. I know my accident slowed us down, but we can still—”

She hated the way her words rushed out in a panicky torrent and the note of pleading she heard in them.

“That was a great dream, Hallie. And if I was someone else—”

“I never wanted you to be anyone else; you know that.”

She was sure that he was about to hug her like he always did when she cried. Draw her close and say that
of course
, he knew that. And of course they’d go to Montana, just like they’d planned.

But instead he looked at her, his eyes full of the blinding compassion that had drawn people to him since he was a small boy. “I’m entering the seminary as a postulant in three days, Hallie. I know it must sound crazy to you. How could it not? But it’s the right decision for me.”

He reached out to take her hand, but Hallie jerked away. “The
seminary
?” The words made no sense. Though she knew he found solace in the quiet of an empty church, he never even attended mass.

“Is this a joke? You—a
priest
? No one does that anymore, Gus,” she blurted out. “I didn’t even know you really believed all that stuff.”

“Well, I do. I believe it, Hallie. Don’t you remember when you found me that day in St. Pete’s? You must have known—”

“You were
drunk
—drunk and grief-stricken and smoking cigarettes on Old Man D’Souza’s hallowed ground. Now you’re trying to tell me that you were having a religious experience?”

“You’re right, I
was
drunk. Drunk and screwed-up—just like Neil said I was. Probably more so. But I went to the church for a reason. It’s where I’ve always gone when—”

Hallie took a dazed step backwards, stumbling in the sand. “Don’t try to make this about God, okay? Because it’s not. This is some crazy guilt trip you put on yourself because of what happened to me.”

“Not what happened to you—what
I did to you.
Do you think I can just forget that?”

“It was a drunken accident, Gus,” Hallie pleaded. “And it’s never, ever going to happen again.”

“You might believe that, Hallie—and you know why? Because you don’t have it in you to hurt anyone. But me? Well, obviously I do. I beat Neil badly, and I almost killed you.”

“It’s not true. And even if it was, do you really think that becoming a priest is the answer? If the Church wasn’t so desperate, they wouldn’t even consider you.”

“Maybe they are desperate, but so was I. So
am
I—and you know what? It’s okay. In fact, some people would say desperation is the first step toward redemption.”

“What people—
Father D’Souza
?” Hallie snapped. “Don’t you think a religious vocation should be about more than running away?”

Gus sat down in the sand and folded his arms loosely around his knees. “I suppose I
was
running away at first, and the church was the perfect hiding place. None of my friends would think to look for me there, and since half the police force belongs to the parish, they wouldn’t say much.”

“So that’s where you’ve been all summer?” Hallie asked, sitting beside him.

“The first couple of nights, I slept on the pews; then I’d hide in the confessional when a few parishioners straggled in for the morning mass. I guess I thought I was getting away with something till Father D’Souza pulled open the curtain one morning. ‘If you’re going to stay here,’ he said, ‘you better come over to the rectory for breakfast. I can’t have anyone starving in my church. What have you been eating?’ I pulled out an empty bag of Doritos I’d taken from Fatima’s house before I left. Believe me, my first impulse was to take off right then and there, but I was so hungry I would’ve sold my soul for breakfast.”

“It sounds like you did.”

Gus laughed wryly, but Hallie refused to return his smile. “Father D’Souza is an old crank who’s mad at the world, and you know it. Probably because no one cares about his church anymore.”

“I admit the guy’s a little old-fashioned. And, yeah, he might push the fire-and-brimstone bit too far. But he took me in when the whole town was ready to lock me up in my father’s cell. He took me in and didn’t judge me.”

I didn’t judge you, either. I never judged you
, Hallie thought, recalling the summer she’d spent defending him. She had never stopped believing in him.

“I couldn’t stay at my aunt’s house anymore,” Gus continued. “Between Fatima crying and Manny screaming about what a typical piece of Silva shit I was, I couldn’t take it. Besides, Sean and Daisy, and everyone else from town, they were all showing up constantly. I didn’t want to see anyone. I couldn’t.”

It was the first thing he’d said that Hallie truly understood. “I didn’t want to see anyone either,” she said, then lowered her voice to the intimate whisper that had always pulled him to her in the past. “Just you.”

Gus gazed in the direction of the Race Point Light as if he hadn’t heard her. “That day over breakfast, Father D’Souza gave me the lecture of my life. Then he offered me a spare room in the rectory. Nothing but a bed and a dresser and a little cross on the wall.”

“The old coot probably realized you were vulnerable.”

“It wasn’t like that; he left me on my own. The cook even served me supper in my room.”

“What did you do all day?” Hallie thought of the weeks she’d spent in a hospital bed, but even there, she’d had her father’s daily presence, the staff who had become friends during her stay, and the rhythms of the ICU and then the floor where she was transferred to anchor her.

“At first, I thought I was going to lose my mind. Then I remembered that Sean’s father found a stash of booze when he went to fix the sink at the rectory—gifts from parishioners who didn’t know Father D’Souza was a teetotaler. Mostly it was sweet
vinho
, the kind my grandmother used to drink, but I didn’t care. As soon as he went out to say the seven-o’clock mass the next morning, I snuck down and got a bottle. I know it didn’t make any sense. I mean, alcohol had ruined my life twice, but I didn’t know where else to turn. I stayed drunk for two weeks straight.”

“I was waiting for you,” Hallie whispered. “Even when I could hardly speak, I called for you.”

“You asked for me? They never told me when I checked with the hospital—”

“Just like no one ever told me you called.”

“I didn’t leave my name. I was considered a threat to you.”

Hallie closed her eyes. If they could have spoken—even once—when she was in the hospital, would they be sitting here now? Would she be listening to his desperate plan? In her mind, she cursed everyone who had kept him away: the nurses who had pretended to be her friends, the police,
her father.
“So you crashed at the rectory and stayed drunk for two weeks? Then what? You realized you had to stop?”

“More like I ran out. One day, I went to look for a bottle under the kitchen sink and there was nothing left. When I looked up, a strange little man was standing over me in a T-shirt and his polka-dotted boxers. I’d never seen Father D’Souza without his collar before.”

“Has anyone? I thought he was born in it.”

“So there he was—no longer the powerful priest, bellowing from the lectern, but a feeble old man. ‘It’s gone,’ the old man said. ‘And it doesn’t look like it worked very well, does it? Maybe it’s time to try something stronger.’”

“Let me guess. He was talking about
prayer.
” Hallie struggled to keep the skepticism out of her voice. Though she hadn’t been brought up in a church, she found the words to many of the prayers she read beautiful, especially the St. Francis Peace Prayer. And occasionally, when she was in trouble, she secretly found herself importuning some unseen force for help. But now all she could feel was resentment at a Church that had tricked him into a vocation.