The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel (30 page)

While the steam from our tea wreathes our faces, we study each other like cardplayers.
What have you got?

Finally, the Bug antes up. “Jimmy, the new dishwasher, saw you down at the bus station this morning.”

“Jimmy’s only seen me once. How could he be sure it was me?”

“With that ink-black hair, and those long skirts you like, who else could it be?”

“Lots of people have—” I start to say, even though I know I’m just buying time. Useless time at that.

“I called your friend Ethan’s mother. The woman sounded like she’d been drinking, but she was clear about one thing: you weren’t there today.”

“So how many issues do you want to deal with at once?” I’m still stalling so I can come up with some explanation for my presence at the bus station. A cigarette would really clear my head right about now, but lighting up in the kitchen would definitely be the final push. “Are we talking about my choice of hair color or Ethan’s mother’s drinking problem?”

“Right now, Mila, I just want to know what you were doing at the bus station.”

Sometimes I just can’t help pressing the Bug’s nuclear button so I shrug and seal my fate. “Nothing much. Just looking for a little action.”

In an instant, his hand is in the air, the flat of his palm taut with rage. The guy is just way too predictable. You put a quarter in the slot, you get the same gum ball every time. He hardly ever follows through and hits me, though. In fact, I think his raised hand scares him more than it scares me. And most of the time, that’s all it is—a hand in the air. Sometimes I want to raise mine back. Like
Hi!
In my own sick way, I like it when he goes to the edge of losing it. It gives me the upper hand.

“Jesus Christ, I was kidding, Dad. You know, a J-O-K-E?” I pause and sip my tea.

“Don’t curse like that,” he says, his defeated hand falling to his side.

“Why not? You don’t believe in God. Whose feelings am I hurting?”

“It just doesn’t sound nice, that’s all. Now, are you going to tell me what—”

“Okay, if you really want to know, there’s this boy from school who works there, and I was spying on him.”

“Spying? On a boy?” Now the poor Bug looks totally confused.

“That’s what high school kids do, Dad. Get crushes. Stalk their victims. You’re always saying how you want me to have a normal teenage life. Well, this is it.”

Sometimes I’m so good at crushing the Bug I scare myself. And what’s worse, I almost feel sorry for him. But then he goes into his self-pity routine. “It hasn’t been easy for me raising a daughter alone, you know . . .” There’s more, of course, but since I know this monologue by heart, I stop listening and focus on my cuticles, which are starting to look kind of ragged.

The Bug would like me to think our little family had this idyllic life before a sleazeball priest came along and mesmerized my mother. I don’t remember a whole lot about those days, but I know better. I was six when she died so I should remember more. But most of my memories are nothing but a lot of random flashes. Like I’m walking into a dark room, but all I see is the little light that’s plugged into an outlet in the corner. In the background, people are yelling and I’m cringing inside. So I just try to focus on that tiny light, to be absorbed by it. I fly into it like a moth.

Another memory: Again it’s night, and I pull my blanket over my head. I can feel that blanket, its satiny edging which I hold between my fingers. And there is this muffled noise, the sound of something or (someone?) falling on the floor.
No
, a woman’s voice cries in terror.
No. No.
In that memory there’s no night light. No place to fly.

I suppose these fragments don’t prove much, but they do suggest that life with Mom wasn’t as perfect as the Bug would like me to think it was.

“I feel for you, Dad, I really do.” I’m just daring him to raise his hand again. But he is too worn out for that. All he does is stare at me. Did I mention that my dad is old? Well, he is—not eighty or anything like that, but older than other kids’ fathers. The circles under his eyes are so hollow they look like they were carved out with a blade. The same knife also cut deep lines between his nose and his mouth. His “love lines,” I call them, because no one loves their own misery as much as the Bug does.

“I have to get back to the restaurant. We have eighty-four tonight,” he sighs, measuring his life the only way he can—by the daily reservations at Cilento’s. From what I’ve figured out, the guy has plenty of money, and none of it comes from his silly little restaurant. But if he gave up Cilento’s, what would he do?

“Eileen left your dinner in the fridge,” he adds. He kisses my cheek sorrowfully, and starts toward the garage. A few minutes later, I hear the Porsche starting up, and I am alone in Kafka’s Castle with my home-cooked solitary dinner and a whole box of Klondike bars. But on this night the house is emptier than ever. On this night even God has vacated the premises. Thank you very much, Gustavo Silva.

Chapter 33

I
had almost stopped thinking about Gustavo
Silva, his hot eyes and cold words, when I received the letter. And I’d forgotten about God, too. Ethan Washburne was already referring to that crazy time when I lingered in the theological section at the library and visited inmates at Millette State Prison as my “spiritual phase.” We were both relieved when it was over.

E was raised a Methodist and used to go to church almost every week until his parents broke up. That’s when his mother started inventing her own rules, including ones like “Thou Shalt not drink before 11 a.m.,” and “Never sleep with a guy before he buys you dinner—unless it’s Saturday night and you’re really lonely.” E says if I’d spent hours dying of boredom in Sunday school every week like he did, I would have given up on this stuff long ago.

I’m just getting home from school when a woman pulls up and parks her old Honda Civic in front of my house. Then she climbs out and leans against a fender.

“Mila Cilento?” she asks, looking me over.

Obviously, I ignore her. I continue fishing for my key in my purse, thinking I’ve got to seriously clean it out. I’ve collected so many lip glosses and receipts that I can’t find a thing. Maybe I should just knock, I think, still ignoring the lady who is drilling holes in my back with her stare. But Eileen has gained so much weight lately that I discover my key before she manages to waddle to the door.

The woman, who’s wearing jeans, a really cool pair of boots, and a black sweater, isn’t about to take a hint; she just says my name louder.

“Are you talking to me?” I glance over my shoulder as the key clicks in the lock.

“That’s your name, isn’t it?” she says. Then she tries to hand me this slightly grubby white envelope.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know you, and whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested,” I say, even though her voice sounds strangely familiar. I push the door open.

“We’ve spoken before. I’m a
doctor—
and I’ve taken time away from my practice to bring this to you.”

I look at her. “Seriously? What kind of doctor drives around in a shit-box Civic and passes out mystery envelopes to random people?”

“You’re not random. This is a letter addressed to Mila Cilento, and it’s from a mutual friend.”

Okay, so my curiosity is piqued. I drop my bag and take a couple steps closer—close enough to get a look at my name etched on the grubby envelope. “I only have one friend, Dr. Whoever-you-are. And that’s not his handwriting. Thanks, anyway.”

“You remember Gus Silva?” she asks, just when I’m about to disappear into the Castle. “Maybe
friend
is the wrong word. I’m Hallie Costa.”

“Hallie Costa? You mean, you’re the rude person who called my house and tried to talk me out of visiting my mother’s killer.” I knew I recognized the voice.

“
I
was rude? As I recall, you told me to get lost and slammed the phone in my ear.”

I shrug. “Not how it went. I told you to
please
get lost.”

At that point, Eileen finally makes it to the door. “Can I help you?” she says warily to Dr. Costa.

“She’s working her way through college selling magazine subscriptions,” I tell Eileen. The fake doctor has some little wrinkles around her eyes, but she still looks pretty young. And since Eileen’s half-blind without her glasses, she buys it.

I turn to the doctor and repeat, “Thanks, but we’re not interested.” Then at the last minute, I grab the envelope out of her hand. “I might as well take it,” I say. “Even though I’ll probably just throw it away.”

I hate the smug expression on her face.
Mission accomplished
. So before she has a chance to say another word, I go inside and slam the door behind me. The first thing I do when I reach my room is toss the envelope in the trash just like I said I would.
Take that, Gustavo Silva!

“Meee-la! Time for your snack,” Eileen calls from the kitchen, in exactly the same intonation she has used every day since I was six. Eileen was thin when my dad first hired her, and she showed up every morning in jeans with creases ironed into them and shirts that matched her socks. Initially, the Bug thought she would be a mother figure for me. But calling me for my daily after-school snack is as motherly as Eileen gets.

“No thanks, Eileen.” I was starving on the way home, but somehow that letter in the basket is messing with my appetite. Instead, I call E. Washburne, which is how he signs his name to the scathing letters to the editor he writes on a variety of subjects. E’s letters appear so frequently in the
Cape Cod Times
that he’s practically a columnist, but he’s also had letters in the
Globe
, and one even made the
New York Times.
His favorite thing is to go online and leave a comment on a
Times
article. Most of the people who hang out there are old hippies and retired professors, but E’s comments always get a lot of recommends.

Since he got home from school, E’s probably been online reading the papers and eighteen blogs, and undoubtedly gotten himself worked up about something by now. But I’m not friends with E because I want to be better informed. No, behind all that angst about the world, the kid is seriously funny. It probably sounds ridiculous, but I don’t remember laughing before I met E.
Ever.

He also helps me knock out my homework every day on the phone. As for his own, he can’t be bothered. And though they keep promising to pull his scholarship if he doesn’t make more of a “traditional effort,” the administration is afraid they’ll end up looking like fools when E wins a Pulitzer or the Nobel or something.

I feel different about homework than E does. For me, getting it done keeps Eileen and the Bug off my back until I can escape with my trust fund which I’ll get when I’m twenty-one. Of course I could run away. But let’s face it: spoiled kids like me don’t do well on the street. Even E finds the idea of “the ultimate freedom from parents” unappealing.

“What kind of rebellion would that be?” he says. “I’d end up living with a bunch of drunks just like my Mom. It would be home times twelve.”

Anyway, by the time I reach E, it’s too late. He’s way too fired up about something he read to show even the slightest interest in my biology questions. So I pour a big glass of orange juice and go back upstairs. And there is the letter, absolutely
staring
at me from the waste basket where I left it.

I honestly don’t think I would have read it if my name hadn’t been underlined three times like it was urgent. Maybe I can read it to E later, I think, rescuing it from the trash. Then the two of us can laugh Gustavo Silva into oblivion. I open it gingerly, like it might contain some kind of prison cooties.

Dear Mila,

I don’t know why you came to see me that day a couple of months ago. I don’t truly believe you wanted to learn about God from the man convicted of killing your mother. A fallen priest. “A dead man,”
as you said when you left. But whatever the reason, your visit had a huge—and entirely unexpected—impact on me. Believe it or not, I didn’t even know I was a dead man until a girl who looked disconcertingly like her mother told me I was.

That night and for many nights that followed, I paced the way I used to when I was writing a homily or trying to figure out what to say to a twenty-four-year-old who was dying of leukemia. I also cried for the first time since I’ve been here. I’ve seen a man killed before my eyes, been through a few violent incidents myself, and have been locked in the hole for so long I would have given 20 years of my life just to hear a human voice. But nothing affected me the way your visit did.

I doubt you took my advice and went to see my friend Jack Rooney. If you did, he would have taken you into the living room in the rectory and lit a fire in your heart.

The night after you came, I was tortured with various visions (not the kind saints have, these mostly involved various execrable things I’ve seen and experienced here). What your visit did—what
you
did, Mila Cilento, was force me to say out loud what my life had become. A denial of all that is good and true.

I will spare you the events that filled my “visions” and led me to my denial. In the end, they don’t matter. What matters is that saying the words produced a sorrow in me that was greater than anything I’ve ever felt in my life.

Father Jack used to say that anyone who came to you, anyone who knocked on your door, as you did so persistently for those weeks prior to your visit, presented what he called “a sacred duty.” To fail at a sacred duty, in Jack’s book, was to diminish your soul. Mila, my soul is so diminished already that one more failure and it will shrivel up and blow away.

Please give me another chance. The woman who will be delivering this letter is a close friend. She has offered to drive you here so you can avoid the trauma of the “nasty bus.”

Gus Silva

After I finish reading, I realize I can’t share it with anyone—not even E. There are some things that are so private, you have to close the door—even on your best and only friend. When I get to the part about the doctor with the yellow ponytail driving me out to the state prison, I go to my window.

I expect to see nothing but an empty street. But she’s still there, leaning against her car, smoking a cigarette. In one way, I’m glad she hasn’t left, so I don’t have to go to the trouble of tracking her down. But in another way, I’m seriously irritated. I mean, how did she know I would read the letter?

I’m thinking all this stuff as I’m walking down the stairs and out the front door, quietly enough not to alert Eileen. Outside, I break into a run down the walkway, waving the letter in the air.

“Thanks for the personal delivery, but you can tell our
mutual friend
the religious impulse has passed, and he can keep whatever hard-earned wisdom he got in ‘the hole’ to himself,” I say when I reach her car.

“
The hole?
” the doctor repeats, and she looks so genuinely pained that for a minute I feel sorry for her. Then, all of a sudden, it comes to me who she is.
Dr. Maddox
, they called her in the newspaper reports, though she introduced herself as
Costa
when she first called me.

“You’re the girlfriend, aren’t you?” I ask. “The one who testified at his trial.”

“I haven’t been anyone’s girlfriend for a long time.” She squints at me, indicating end of subject. “So you want me to tell Gus you’re no longer interested in visiting him?”

For some reason, I can’t speak so just nod.

“Okay, then.” She gets into her car. And that’s it. No goodbye or anything.

“It was a phase,” I yell after her, feeling a little offended that she doesn’t even ask me why. “Call it my ‘make friends with an inmate period.’ Anyway, I’m over it.”

She slams the door, and rolls down the window to dump the remains of some coffee on the ground. I try to say something else, but she puts up her hand to stop me. “No need to explain, Mila. To tell you the truth, I had no idea why Gus wanted to see you in the first place.” And without looking back, she starts the car and disappears up the road.

By then I’m so pissed I go inside and rip his letter into little pieces. Then I do the same thing to the envelope with his handwriting and the underlinings that tricked me into opening it. I throw it all back into my metal waste basket, and before I get the urge to try to tape it together, I add a lit match. All it makes is a few scrappy flames, which I blow out when I hear Eileen calling me.

I don’t answer right away, so she knocks at my door. Of course I’m not about to open it, because then she’ll smell the fire. “Your friend Ethan is here,” she says, when I still don’t respond.

“Tell him I have PMS or something.” It’s the first time I can ever remember consciously lying to E.

For a long time, Eileen just stands there outside the door, breathing. Then she says, “Do you want some Tylenol?”

So I fling open the door. “I want to be left alone if that’s all right with you.”

Then, realizing that I sound exactly like the truculent little brat the good doctor obviously thinks I am, I’m even more annoyed. “Did you hear me? I said.
Leave me alone!
”

That brings E running up the stairs. He stands behind Eileen holding the newspaper that undoubtedly got him rattled up earlier. “You okay, Frida?” he asks, using the name he always calls me and proving that even geniuses ask dumb questions.

“Go fight the world somewhere else, E,” I say. “I want to be left alone.”

Then he tells me to get over myself, which is probably the best advice I’ve had all day. But all I can think is
How dare he?
So without thinking, I tell him to fuck off. And he does.

Afterwards, I’m engulfed in misery. When you’ve only got one friend, you really can’t afford to tell him to go fuck himself. That night I skip dinner, which causes Eileen to panic and alert the Bug.

He comes home early from the restaurant, toting a carton of carrot ginger soup (my favorite). By then I’m absolutely starving, but I refuse it. I pretend I’m Gandhi on a hunger strike. The only problem is, I don’t know what my demands are or who is supposed to meet them. Maybe I’m boycotting myself.

I don’t tell the Bug any of this. If I did, he’d probably threaten to drag me to a psychiatrist. Then all I’d have to do was call his bluff and agree—which is the last thing he’d want. See, the Bug fears embarrassment more than death, and he’s already lived with a wife who was murdered by her priest boyfriend. A daughter with mental-health issues would be the last straw. So I decide to spare us both the aggravation. I tell him to leave the soup; I’ll eat it later.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he says, standing in the doorway with his usual funeral director’s face (
This way to the coffin . . . )

Just the sight of him makes me morph back into bitch girl.
Is it any wonder I’m screwed up,
living with that face all these years?
I want to scream. But instead, I just say, “It’s a headache, Dad. Not a brain tumor.”