The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel (38 page)

Gus and I just stare at each other because goodbye is way too inadequate. I make no effort to move as Gus walks away. Just before he disappears, he frees himself from the guard’s hold and turns around. I read his lips:
What does this mean, Mila?

“Not as much as it should. Not yet, anyway,” I say, though he can’t hear me. Then, finally knowing what I have to do, I get up and run out of the suffocating room, tripping on my long skirt like a clumsy colt. I keep running until one of the guards feels sorry for me and walks me out.

“Sometimes I wonder why kids like you come here,” he says. “You probably love your dad and all, but people like that—well, put it this way, he’s here for a reason.”

That stops me, and I turn around. I don’t even bother explaining that he’s not my dad. “Actually, he’s
not
here for a reason. He went through all of this for no reason at all.”

The guard chuckles. “Just like everyone else here. Not a guilty man in the whole place, to hear them tell it—”

But before he can complete his spiel, I reach the door where I reclaim the change and jewelry I shed so I could pass through the metal detector. With any luck, it’s a ritual I will never have to repeat.

I expect to wait a while for Ethan to show up, but he’s already there, parked across the street from the spot where he let me off. Hunkered down over a book, he really does look like a car thief. When I get closer I can see that he’s eating a Boston creme doughnut.

I fling the door open. “Let’s get out of here.” It sounds like I’m talking to some kind of getaway driver or something. Then I land in the car, my skirt flouncing, my shawl on crooked, mascara smeared on my cheeks. I drop the jewelry and change I’m clutching on the floor. All Ethan does is look at me, book in one hand, doughnut in the other, glasses stuck on the ridge of his nose.

“What are you waiting for?” I snap. “Drive!”

Have I mentioned that one thing I really love about Ethan Washburne is that he never says or does the obvious thing. For instance, he doesn’t ask, “What’s the matter?” or “What the hell happened in there?” or any of the other questions that nearly any other human being would raise in this situation. Instead, he passes me the squishy doughnut, then points at a line in the book before handing that over, too.

“I was right there,” he says. “The writer had just brought up a really salient point. You’ll have to read the rest of the chapter out loud. Where we headed, anyway—home?”

“The police station in Ptown. Right away!”

So, sitting there in Ethan’s careening car, a vision of a crudely cut black heart with the letter X in the center before my eyes, I read at least seven pages without ever knowing what the book was about. When I came to the end of the chapter, Ethan pulls over in a rest area and gently takes the book from my hand, tosses the doughnut in the backseat with the rest of the detritus from Lori Washburne’s life, and cleans up the crumbs it left behind. Then he takes off his glasses and allows me to look straight into his naked eyes. They are the color of the ocean at dusk.

“Two things,” he says. “Since this is starting to feel something like a chase scene in a movie, and I’m not sure what or who we’re trying to outrun, maybe you should drive.”

I change seats with him, and am just about to pull out when I stop. “You said you wanted to tell me two things; that was only one.”

“It wasn’t important,” Ethan responds. It’s not till we’re on the highway that he speaks again, obviously making his best effort to sound casual. “I was just going to tell you I love you, that’s all.”

So there I am, flying down the highway toward the most dramatic moment in my life, when I will turn Ava in to the police—the lying, treacherous, negligent woman who is still my mother—and
dammit
, Ethan picks this time to say he loves me?

All I can think of is the words Gus said in the prison:
Holy shit!

Chapter 42

W
hile I was in the prison
with Gus, Jack said he would meet Hallie. I picture them sitting in a formica booth in Quissett Pizza and Mexican, drinking a beer. I see Hallie turning pale as she hears the truth about how I kept my suspicions to myself while Gus sat in prison. I’m sure she argues with Jack at first, refusing to believe that the girl she treated like a daughter is the ultimate traitor. The enemy who weaseled her way in for breakfast and never left. I cringe when I think of him relaying the part no one can deny: my meeting with Ava at the Purple Oyster. I cry out like I stepped on something sharp when I ponder the moment when he tells her how I let Ava go. And with her, Gus’s chance for a new trial.

The priest has promised to do his best to help Hallie understand. But even Jack, with his halo of white hair, his pure blue eyes and his book of spells, can’t perform miracles.

They’re already at the police station when Ethan and I get there. But in spite of everything, I finally feel like the absolutely fearless girl I once pretended to be. I hold Ethan’s hand and stand really straight like Gus always does as I walk into the station on Shankpainter Road and tell the whole crazy, mangled truth as straightforwardly as I possibly can. When I’m finished I feel like the last girl standing in the national spelling bee.

I don’t break until Jack steps forward to hug me. That’s when I notice that while I was nailing the spelling bee, Hallie has slipped out the door.

“Give her a little time,” Jack says, following my eyes. “When she gets over the shock, she’s going to be so proud of what you did today.”

A
fter leaving the station, I hike
out to the spot where old Dr. Nick’s shack used to stand. It’s just past five and the coffee I picked up at the bakery is cold by the time I reach the place. I had hoped to find Hallie in her usual spot, but there’s no sign of her.

I sit at the ghost shack, drinking my cold coffee, long enough to see the moon rise. Just when I’m about to give up, I see her lonely determined figure heading down the beach.

“Hallie! Over here!” I call. In the diminishing light, her face looks older, prouder, marked by a life I don’t totally understand, and never will.

“Mila. What are you doing here?” After she lets Stella loose to run, she sits down beside me and lights a cigarette. These days, this is the only place she allows herself to smoke.

“Looking for you. What else? I need to talk to you about what happened with my mother. What I did.”

“You mean what you
didn’t
do.” Hallie looks out at the ocean and exhales.

“Listen, Hallie, I know I should have called the police at the Oyster, but I was in shock—”

She puts up her hand, like she doesn’t want to hear it—or just can’t bear to hear it. Then, abruptly, she gets up, calls the dog, and starts down the beach, hugging her parka around her as if it’s the only thing that’s holding her bones together. “There’s nothing to talk about, Mila,” she says when I follow her. “Not till we find her.
If
we find her.”

Then she makes a sharp turnaround. “Damn it, Mila. I took you into my
home.
I treated you like a daughter. How could you let her go?”

I’m about to cry, but then I think of what happened this morning in the prison. I think of Gus. For the rest of my life, the truths we both faced down today will be with me, my totem, my secret strength.

“I know she’s done horrible things, unforgivable things, Hallie, but she’s still
my mother
! Don’t you understand? I still remember her holding me, singing to me. To this day. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been clinging to her memory. I thought that the worst thing that could happen would be to forget. Then I’d be totally alone.”

I’m glad I’m on the beach because I’m practically shrieking these words into the wind. “But it wasn’t easy turning on my mother. I’m sorry if you think it should have been, but it wasn’t.”

She studies me as if she’s trying to figure out who I am and why the hell she ever took me in. Without a word, she starts heading toward the road again. At first, she’s marching, moving fast, her arms swinging back and forth, anger shooting from her fingertips with every step. Then she breaks into a run. Poor old Stella is trotting behind to keep up.

I’m not sure if she’s running toward the car—or just away from me.

The hour I spend on the beach after Hallie leaves me has to be the most miserable sixty minutes of my life, and what’s worse, the wind is merciless. Sure, I’ve been through some bad shit before, but this time the bogeyman isn’t the Bug, or Ava, or anyone else. It’s
me.
I cry when I think about the Victorian with the purple door and the broad front porch. The house I foolishly began to call home.

Maybe I can sleep all night on the beach. Then, in the morning, in the face of a bright sunrise, I will think of what to do. I find shelter behind a dune, drink the last of my coffee and make a pillow of my two hands. I am curled up like that when I open my eyes and see Hallie standing over me, her hands resting on her hips.

“What do you think you’re doing?” She squints at her watch through the darkness. “I’ve been waiting in the car for an hour.”

“You were
waiting
? But I thought—I thought you
hated
me. I thought you never wanted to see me again.”

Hallie sighs, then reaches down and pulls me up. “Just because I got mad at you doesn’t mean I’d let you ride that bike home in the dark. Or stop caring about you. It doesn’t even mean I don’t understand
why
you did it. God, Mila, you really have no idea what it means to be family, do you?”

My face streaked with tears, I shake my head. “Are we really—” I say, and then add the last word, the sacred word, in a teeny tiny voice, “family?”

She gives me a huge hug, what she calls an
abraço.

“One thing I want to make clear,” Hallie begins, before stopping abruptly and taking my shoulders. “None of this was your fault. You were as much a victim as Gus was. And what you did—walking into that prison and telling Gus the truth, then reporting your mother to the police—that was incredibly brave. In fact, I think you’re the second-bravest girl I’ve ever met—even if I did get mad.
Especially
because I did.”

It is the closest thing to absolution in a dark confessional that I’m likely to get, and I have to fight back tears. “The
second
-bravest?”

“Next to me when I was your age,” Hallie says.

“Oh yeah? What was so brave about you?”

Hallie looks out at the ocean that glints under a brazen stripe of moonlight. “I used to test my strength by swimming out a little bit farther than I thought I could every day. I liked the feeling I got when my body was telling me I couldn’t go any farther and I had to make it back on sheer willpower.”

“That sounds more
stupid
than brave to me.”

“It was. I used to call it refusing to fear death, but it was really more like communing with my inner idiot.”

“That doesn’t count.”

“Okay, how about this one?” she says, still looking out over the water. “I was brave enough to love a boy who was damaged almost beyond repair from the age of nine. To love him so irrationally and completely that I’ve never been cured of it. And I probably never will be.”

She starts to walk again and I follow slightly behind her, keenly aware that I don’t know Hallie Costa nearly as well as I thought I did. And painfully certain that she is crying.

Chapter 43

T
he Dismal Kingdom, with its spectacular
view of the beach, never looked more desolate than it does the next day when I pay an impulse visit to the Bug. It is nearly nine a.m., but there is no response to my knock at the door or to Stella’s jittery bark. The dog looks up at me, her head cocked to the side, wondering where we are and why. Fortunately, I still have my key to the Castle on my ring.

I figure my father is probably asleep, so I go into the kitchen to make tea. But there, sitting at the island where I stared into the bottom of so many cups of chai, is the Bugman himself. His hair is a mess and he is wearing this velour bathrobe that’s probably as old as his obsession with Ava. Normal people probably wouldn’t believe this, but I’ve never seen my so-called “Dad” just hanging out in a robe, stubble on his face, no expensive cologne covering up the animal scent that I should know by heart but don’t.

As soon as the Bug catches sight of me, he climbs off his stool, looking like a stranger. I almost think I’ve wandered into the wrong Castle. I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I get is an angry-looking Bug, who is apparently put out in a major way by my unannounced appearance. “Mila. You should have called.”

I feel this weird lump in my throat. “Good to see you, too, Dad.” Sensing the ancient sorrows that fill the room like a gas, Stella begins to bark:
Let me out of here!

“Don’t worry, I’m not staying,” I add as I rest my backpack on the floor. He eyes it with suspicion, like it might contain a bomb.

I start feeling some of the old anxiety of life in the Castle coming back, so, resorting to a familiar defense, I put on the kettle. It’s almost sad to see that my old Japanese pot is right where I left it. My father returns to his stool as if he, too, has been calmed by my ritual. Once she realizes we’re not going anywhere, Stella curls up on the familiar island of my backpack.

Through a wreath of steam, I look furtively at the hunched-up Bug in his ratty robe. After years of hating him for beating my mother and punishing me for my resemblance to her, I now feel nothing but pity. Not that he isn’t responsible for his actions, but it’s simply the nature of some bugs to be red-fanged and full of venom. You can’t spend your life resenting them for it, can you?

He pours himself some tea from my pot and pronounces it
first rate.
“I could make you some French toast if you’d like,” he offers. “Or an omelette.”

“No thanks,” I say, startled by this sudden eruption of hospitality. “The tea’s fine.”

But for some reason the Bug suddenly wants to keep me here. Is it possible he’s
lonely
? “Ava loved omelettes. She used to say I made the fluffiest ones she ever had.”

I shudder visibly and clutch my cup for warmth. Honest to God, I’ve never heard the Bug speak my mother’s actual name to me. Never heard him indulge in an ordinary recollection about their lives together.
She liked omelettes.
Does that mean they were happy—at least for a little while? I don’t know whether the thought comforts or incenses me.

When he reaches for the omelette pan, I stop him. “Let’s not do this, okay?”

“What?”

“Pretend we’re something we’re not.”

Gently, he sets the pan on the counter, as if he’s afraid it might break. Or maybe he’s just afraid he might slam it down if he doesn’t maintain every ounce of self-restraint. “What do you want, Mila? Why did you come here?”

“I suppose you’ve read today’s paper.” I look down, concentrating on my tea.

“I read the paper every day,” the Bug responds nonchalantly. But when he lifts his teacup, his hands are unsteady.

It isn’t till we’re seated at the table that he acknowledges what I told the police. “So you have some idea that your mother’s alive.”

“It’s not
some idea.
I met her in Wellfleet less than a week ago, Dad. She was as close to me as you are right now.” I remember the green river of her eyes.

“It’s been a long time since you’ve seen her, Mila. You were only six when—”

“Jesus, she’s my
mother
,” I snap. “If I hadn’t seen her for a hundred years, I’d know her. I can’t believe you didn’t call me when you read about it.”

The Bug’s eyes are morose and dark behind his glasses. “Ten years ago—even five—the possibility that she was alive would have driven me to God knows what. But now, ever since that day when I—” He stops and sips his tea, apparently about to let that sentence dangle into eternity.

Stella whimpers in her sleep, disrupting the silence.

Though I know he is alluding to the day he punched me in the face, I ask, “What day, Dad?” I’m hoping that just maybe we can talk about it. Exorcise it.

But when my father removes his glasses and stares at me through those hooded eyes, I know it’s not going to happen. “I’m glad she got away from me,” he says, his voice drained of passion. “I only wish she took you with her.”

“That wouldn’t have fit in with her plan. Besides, you would have never let us go.”

“Children weren’t part of
my
plan. Ava knew that, but she wouldn’t give up the idea. It was the only thing she—” He lets his sentence drift until it collapses: “I’m sorry, Mila.”

I’m sorry.
Two words that are supposed to compensate for the morose years I spent in the Castle, for the flash of light that sent me spinning across the room and left me without my front teeth, for the memories of my mother being beaten in the next room. Suddenly, the life I lived and finally escaped is in my throat like dust and I’m choking.

I jump up abruptly. “I’ve got to go. Thanks for the tea.”

The Bug makes no move to stop me. He just sits there, nodding at his cup, at a particularly fascinating piece of lint on his bathrobe, at the cold stone floor. But when I reach the door, I hear him calling after me. “Mila!”

I stop, but don’t turn to face him.

“You know the worst part? I was raised in the Church, too, and in some way it never leaves you. But I was so convinced it was that priest; I blamed God—and then I started to hate Him.”

“No, Dad, that’s not the worst thing.” As I turn around, I’m enraged that he seems to be making this about
him.
“The worst thing is that a man’s been sitting in prison for over ten years now. Not just an innocent man, but an incredibly
good
one.”

“It’s still hard to believe,” he continues, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Not just because he was seen outside a bar with her or even that he was there that day in the motel. I suspected him long before that. There were dozens of calls to his number on her phone bill.”

“All part of the setup. She never even spoke during those calls. Just created a record,” I say, figuring it out as I go. “And as far as the motel goes, think about it, Dad. If the local priest was having an affair with a parishioner’s wife, do you really think he’d take her to a place a couple of miles from the rectory?”

“That was a reckless move, but they only went there once when—when she tried to break up with him. He was desperate.” It’s a story he’s told himself for so long, he obviously can’t let it go.

“So where do you think they went before that? There was nowhere in town where Gus wouldn’t be recognized.”

“That’s why he took her to a quieter town where he’d be less likely to be seen, where no one knew her. Not his hometown, but somewhere close to that.”

He doesn’t sound like he’s speculating. “What are you saying?”

“Ava had a credit card and a post-office box. She thought I didn’t know about it. But of course I did. She could hide nothing from me. Almost all the charges were made in the same town.”

If I were a dog, my head would be cocked to the side the way Stella’s is when she’s confused. I’m so shocked I can’t even utter the word that is screaming in my head:
Where?

“Wellfleet. That summer, while I was at work, she slipped off to meet him there three or four times a week.”

I shudder, thinking of how she’d also stayed there in her recent visit. Even when she met me, she was probably mooning over her putrid love affair.

“But what about me? Where was I when this was happening?” I wonder out loud, feeling abandoned all over again.

“There was a full-time nanny in the house, of course. Your mother paid her not to tell me when she went out.”

“But you knew anyway?”

“Unfortunately, Crystal’s loyalty belonged to the highest bidder. Your mother gave away her trust foolishly—first to Crystal, and then to that priest.”

Crystal.
The name brings back the memory of plump, freckled fingers tugging my hair into a braid. Just that and nothing more, but it’s enough to trigger an ancient revulsion. She may have duped both my parents, but, obviously, six-year-old me knew what she was about.

“And the post-office box—Crystal told you about that, too?”

The Bug nods. “I got the bill before she did. There were charges from a package store on Route 6, numerous visits to a tawdry motel like the one she died in, and meals for two—all take-out from a place in Provincetown. I figured someone Gus knew delivered it. How else would they convince the driver to come that far?” He looks at me as if I could provide an answer—both to that mundane question, and to the deeper one:
How could it be anyone but Gus?

And though the Cape was undoubtedly swarming with tourists at that time of year, I don’t have an answer, either.

“You wouldn’t happen to have those old bills?” I ask, already knowing what the response will be. When it came to Ava, the Bug saved everything—even, or maybe
especially
, the items that caused him the most misery. I wonder how many times he pulled out this tangible record of her duplicity and festered in his rage. And I wonder how many times he took it out on me.

Without a word, the Bugman disappears up the wide marble staircase. He’s gone so long I sit down on the cold floor, leaning against the door. Stella falls asleep in my lap. We’re in the same position when he finally returns, holding an envelope. His face is dark with the moth-eaten shame of her betrayal. A shame that predictably morphs into anger.

“Why would you want to look at this?” It sounds like an accusation.

And the sorry truth is that at that moment,
I don’t.
The details of the affair that ended with my abandonment in the Dismal Kingdom, and Gus’s heart-shaped tattoo, already feel like pinpricks on my skin. But Hallie’s voice is so deep in my head—or in my heart—that there’s no escaping it:
When there’s a choice, always do the brave thing.

“You should have turned this over to the police during the investigation,” I tell him as I reach for it.

“The police already had plenty of evidence. They didn’t need further proof of my humiliation.” The Bug’s fury is so concrete it feels like a buzzing in my head, and the word—
humiliation—
raises the noise several decibels.

I pull out the thin piece of paper and wince when I see that the “tawdry” motel the Bug referred to was the Sandbar. Why am I not surprised? Obviously, my mother has been tempting fate for a decade. Why not return and revel in the scene of her crime?

But then something else jumps out at me so powerfully that my eyes blur: I count seven charges to the Wellfleet Theater. Always one ticket.

“You didn’t say anything about theater tickets?” I say as calmly as I can.

The Bug’s face is an interesting shade of purple. “It’s obviously where they met.” He leans down to grab the bill from my hand, his eyes bulging as if he’s reliving the discovery. Then he shakes the deadly piece of paper so close to my face I feel a harsh wind. “The very first charge was to the theater!”

Instantly awake, Stella whines to get out of the Castle and I’m desperate to be gone, too. Away from the oppressive air, and the Bug’s escalating rage. My head hurts from thinking, but I can’t leave. Not yet.

“But why did she only buy one ticket?” I wonder aloud, talking more to myself or the all-consuming emptiness of the Castle than to the Bug.

“What?” the Bug blinks as if he’s just awakened from a decade of sleep. And maybe he has.

“It looks like she bought wine and dinner for two, but every time she went to the theater, she went alone. It doesn’t make sense. Unless—”

The Bug is so mystified that for a minute he forgets to be angry. “Unless what? Maybe the cheapskate bought his own ticket, but not hers.” It might even have been a “moment” for us, a chance for father and daughter to go over the facts that devastated our family. Maybe even to heal. But all I can think of is Hallie. And
Gus.

W
hen it hits me, I leap
up so quickly I stun the Bug. “Or maybe he didn’t need to buy a ticket. Did you ever think of that?” The phrase that Gus yelled in the prison is coming in increasingly handy, though this time it definitely needs an embellishment. “Holy fucking shit, Dad!”

The Bug, who clearly has no idea what I’m thinking, mumbles something about not cursing. Not in
his house.
Meanwhile, Stella has caught my excitement and is doing her trademark triple spin and barking joyously.

Is it really possible?
I think, beginning to doubt myself. I want to snag the bill from my dad’s greedy hands, but he is clutching it so hard his knuckles blanch, and he’s looking even more Bug-eyed as he pores over the items to see what he missed. And what I saw. What I’m seeing.

Unfortunately, what I’m seeing is not on the bill. Not in the Castle at all. It’s one of the photographs Hallie has tacked on the bulletin board in the kitchen. In it, she and her ex-husband loop arms with a third man in front of a small, unimpressive-looking building near the harbor. THE WELLFLEET THEATER.

The third man is Neil Gallagher. When I asked about the photo, Hallie told me he had acted in a long-running play that summer. I’m trying to piece together other things I’ve heard, and I’m almost sure he left the East Coast right after the trial—just months after my mother disappeared. Of course, my rational side and the Bug’s dubious expression are already making me doubt myself. What does any of that actually prove? Couldn’t Neil’s move be a coincidence, and Ava’s presence at the playhouse only further incriminate Gus? As Neil’s friend, he almost surely attended the play that summer. But seven times?