A cigarette dangling from his mouth, Gus reminded her of James Dean or Marlon Brando in the campy old movies that played at the theater in town. “Today’s her birthday. Of all the days on the calendar, he chose this one.”
Hallie took the cigarette from his lips and drew the smoke into her lungs.
So are you ready to hear the worst thing about me?” Gus asked.
Hallie nodded, though she wasn’t sure she was. In the last hour, she’d already learned that he loved the mass like an old woman clutching her beads, that as a boy he’d wandered around in the rain searching for his dead mother, and that he came to the church to drink and smoke.
“It was my fault,” Gus said abruptly.
Hallie stayed quiet, willing him to keep talking, but at the same time afraid that he would.
“The night she died I stayed in my room. I closed my eyes and covered my ears. I counted backward from a hundred and let the Portuguese song she taught me run in my head like a tape. I sang.”
Despite the heat, Hallie shivered as she thought of the voice that had awakened her that night. The sound she had never described to anyone.
“And you know what else I did?”
It had been many years since she’d thought about what Johnny Kollel used to say: that Gus Silva was crazy; that he was the one who’d really killed his mother. Codfish had only gone to jail to protect him. But now the memories, the rumors from that dark time crowded in on her.
“Nothing,” Gus said. “I was right there in the next room and I didn’t even try to save her.”
“You were nine years old!” Hallie was ashamed of her thoughts—and of the relief that flooded her. “You didn’t know what was going to happen. And even if you did, what could you have done?”
“Did your dad ever tell you about the time my mother went to him with a dislocated shoulder, her whole arm covered by bruises?”
Though she knew Nick harbored regrets about the incident, Hallie hesitated. Her father had taught her that anything she overheard about a patient in the office was strictly confidential. But this day, this encounter seemed to be happening outside all the rules she’d ever known. She nodded almost imperceptibly. Yes, she knew.
“Every fight they ever had, it was the same story. Codfish would be drinking and someone would say something about my mother—maybe that they saw her when she was hostessing, and man, she was lookin’ good. You know how men talk, but my father went crazy over that shit. It was like he blamed her for it. So he’d have a couple more shots to make himself feel better. By the time he got home, he had convinced himself she was sleeping with every guy in town.
“Anyway, when I heard her scream, I got out of bed and ran into the room. I was small, but that night my rage was as big as his—no, bigger. I threw myself against him with everything I had, pounding his stomach and his chest with my fists. I don’t know what I was yelling—or even if it was words.”
“So he stopped?”
“Stopped? Are you kidding me? Codfish never stopped. He accused my mother of turning his only son against him. He said I was a mama’s boy, a spoiled little Provincetown cabrao. He wasn’t sure if I was even his son. And when I said I hoped I wasn’t, he threw me against the wall so hard I couldn’t breathe.
“The next thing I knew I was on the floor, and both my parents were crying. At that point, my father was himself again, the guy who taught me how to dig for clams and read a navigational map, the dad I was so proud to walk through town with. Almost as if the shock of seeing me hurt had sobered him up on the spot.
“He was like a kid that way, you know? He thought he could throw the biggest tantrum he wanted, that he could hit my mother—once he even pushed her down the basement stairs—and no one would really get hurt. He was always shocked when he saw the marks on her—as if someone else had done it.
“I didn’t know I’d been knocked out until we were in the car heading for Hyannis, and I didn’t care either. All that mattered was that the fighting had stopped. Even when I found out I had a concussion and had to spend the night in the hospital, I felt like I’d won.”
“But if you were at the hospital, why didn’t they treat your mother’s shoulder? Why did she wait till the next day and go to Nick?”
“The people in the emergency room were already suspicious—even though my parents stuck to the story that I’d fallen off my bike earlier in the day. If the doctors had seen my mother’s arm, that would have blown the whole thing. It was the kind of hot spring day we never get on the Cape and she’d just gotten the beating of her life, but she was wearing long sleeves, and holding my father’s hand like they were the happiest couple this side of the bridge.”
“And you didn’t say anything?”
“Gallagher might be a great actor, but he couldn’t touch me that night. I said I’d been speeding on my bike when I hit a patch of sand, and I didn’t tell my mother I’d been knocked out because I had a farm league game that day. By the time we left, the doctor was clapping my father on the back, and telling him he had three sons of his own. Boys will be boys, right? And Codfish was flashing that smile of his. ‘One’s enough for me. This kid’s already taken ten years off my life.’ He sounded like he believed it himself.
“The next day my mother was late bringing me home from the hospital. She’d already seen Nick, but she hid her sling in the car until after we left. ‘Your father wanted to come, but he’s out on the boat. Won’t be back for three days,’ she said, talking to me in code in front of the nurses. But when we looked at each other, this calm I can’t explain passed through us. You’d have to live like we did to understand. For a few days, things would be normal. I didn’t realize how much pain she was in until we got into the car. I had a black eye and this huge egg on my forehead, but we were so happy we sang all the way home.
“We didn’t talk about anything till after dinner when she pulled me into the living room and cried. Cried and called me her little hero. Then she took me by the chin and looked at me more seriously than she ever had before. ‘I need you to take a vow, Gustavo. Do you know what that is?’ I didn’t answer. ‘It’s a promise you can never break, no matter what,’ she said. ‘Because if you do, you will grow up to be a man without honor.’ It sounded like something a Jedi knight would do. I stood up straighter and said I was ready. I wouldn’t break my vow no matter what.”
At that point in his story, Hallie noticed the sheen in Gus’s eyes. “She asked you to promise that you would never get in the middle of a fight again.”
“I vowed that when my parents argued, I would never come out of my room again. I would cover my eyes and block my ears, count from one hundred backwards, and sing the song she taught me.
Atirei o pau au gato tu, tu
Mas o gato tu, tu
Nao morreu, reu, reu
Dona Chica, ca, ca . . .
“In all these years, I never knew what it meant. Do you?”
Hallie had immediately recognized the rhyming song her great-aunt used to sing to her. Though most people in town knew only a handful of phrases in Portuguese—usually prayers or curses—a few, like Maria, whose family had immigrated to New Bedford when she was five, or Aunt Del, still retained their native tongue. Though not fluent, Hallie had been taught by her father, who had taken the opportunity to study the language in college.
“It’s about a woman trying to chase a stubborn cat away,” she said. “All the kids learn it in Portugal, according to Aunt Del. Kind of like ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ for us.”
Gus looked sadly over the horizon. “So that’s what I was singing while it happened. A nursery rhyme about a cat.”
“You were a little boy doing what your mother asked you to do . . .” Hallie said, though she already knew that no words, no spell could take away his guilt.
“But instead of becoming a Jedi knight, I lost my mother—and my father, too. I counted and sang through all the yelling and scuffling and doors slamming. When I finally stopped, the house was quiet, and my father’s t
ruck was gone. Usually, when he left, I went and crawled in bed with my mother. But this time she wasn’t there. At first, I thought she’d gone out, too, even though she never left me alone. I was scared, but I refused to cry. If my father came back and caught me crying, it would start all over again. So I curled up in the bed. On her pillow, I could still smell the Ponds cold cream she always put on before bed. By then, I was so tired from trying to keep my vow, I almost fell asleep.”
He paused, as if trying to stop time before he added five grim words. “And then I saw her.”
Hallie closed her eyes and tried not to imagine the terrible hours between that moment on the bed and the time when Nick found a nearly catatonic Gus hiding in the closet. Her first instinct was to hold him the way Nick had that day after he removed the door and lifted him from the small space.
But Gus was no child anymore. He stared straight ahead for a long time, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips, his face a mask.
Abruptly, he leaped to his feet and extended his hand to her. “Let’s get out of here,” he said abruptly. “There’s nothing in this place but old bones and stories no one wants to remember.”
Hallie wasn’t sure if it was the cigarette and the alcohol or the shimmering heat—or just everything she’d heard and tasted and felt that afternoon—but she was wobbly.
“You know something?” Gus said. “I’ve never talked about that day to anyone, and here I am, spilling my guts like I’ve known you all my life.”
Hallie wanted to tell him that they had known each other all their lives. Had he really forgotten? And what’s more, she wanted to hear it. But instead she blamed the Jack Daniels.
Gus stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “That’s not the reason,” he said. “It’s just that there’s never been anyone close enough to tell. Not till today.”
Chapter 9
That night when she went to bed Hallie felt like the dimensions of her room had changed; it was far smaller than she’d imagined it. On the other hand, the moon outside her window was huge, and so bright it seemed to pulsate. Even the air she breathed felt like it had been charged with a secret intoxicant.
By morning, the ordinary road she had walked every day of her life was new, too. It was the last place she’d seen him. If she looked hard enough, she could almost see him disappearing down the road, his spine arrow straight in spite of the Jack Daniels, and what had happened that day. If she listened hard enough, she would hear the gravelly music of his voice. I’ll see you, okay? Now as she looked out the window toward the spot where he had vanished, she had only one question: When?
All day, the street remained a desert, even as it hummed with activity. Gus didn’t come. Hallie wondered if she had imagined what had passed between them? Had he only told her his secrets because he was vulnerable? Or had it been the Jack Daniels after all?
Though she once abhorred the gossip in the office, she now listened obsessively to the speculation about Codfish. Would there be a funeral? How was the family holding up? Would he be buried in Provincetown? All of that ended when word of the suicide note got out.
“It was more like the list of orders he used to leave for the guys,” Diane Cleve announced in the waiting room. Fatima had invited the crew from the Good Fortune, including Diane’s husband, Bobby, to hear the note read. The office fell silent as she recited Codfish’s final requests.
1. Cremate the body.
2. No ashes are to be preserved.
3. No mass or memorial.
She paused before she recited number 4, the only personal piece of the note: I loved her.
The note was signed and dated the way he once formalized his business correspondence:
Captain Gustavo Silva
The Good Fortune
Provincetown, Massachusetts
“Nothing addressed to his son?” someone asked when Diane finished.
“Nothing,” she said with finality.
After learning about the note, Hallie was so addled that when she answered the office phone, she drew a blank. She was jerked back to the present when the caller spoke to someone in the background. “I’ve been dialing the same number for ten years now. It’s got to be Dr. Nick’s.”
“Yes, it’s Nick’s,” Hallie managed to get out before the woman hung up. “We’ve just been, um, having some trouble with the line this morning.” When Aunt Del looked up sharply, Hallie disappeared into the bathroom, where she pulled out the Camels she’d impulsively picked up at Lucy’s Market that morning. She locked the door and lit one up.
With the first inhalation, her afternoon with Gus returned. The heat, the rough lettering of Maria Botelho’s name, the dry salty wind in her nostrils. But most of all the saudade in his eyes. No, she hadn’t imagined it. She hadn’t imagined any of it. With the phone ringing in the background, Nick’s nurse, Leah, pummeled the door. “What the hell are you doing in there, Hallie? It’s a zoo out here.”
“Be right out,” Hallie said. She took one more puff from the cigarette before she flushed it and sprayed the narrow space with a scent that smelled like baby powder. Just to be safe, she opened the window.
Gus didn’t call or show up that day or the day after that, but a week later, when Hallie had almost given up watching for him, he walked into the office.
“I guess there’s no chance you can get off,” he said, as if they were already in the middle of a conversation.
Hallie glanced around the room where every seat was filled. “You’re kidding, right?”
Old Tony Poillucci tapped his cane on the floor impatiently. “This was a place of business the last I checked—not a high school social. Make your dates on your own time, Silva.”
But Gus didn’t seem to hear him. “I know you’re busy, and that it’s the worst possible time, but—” Then, as if he’d reached the top of a mountain, he took a long, deep breath.
“But?” Hallie repeated.
“But I stayed away as long as I possibly could—to the minute.”
Ignoring the jangling phone, the charts piled high on the desk, and Old Tony, who was waiting to make an appointment, Hallie stood up and led Gus by the hand onto the porch.
“Your family needed you; and I figured you wanted some time alone, too,” Hallie said. She couldn’t begin to imagine how difficult his days had been since they’d talked in the cemetery.
“That’s not the reason,” Gus said. He looked downward for a long minute before he met her eyes. “You know when I told you I could never do anything for my mother again?”
Hallie nodded.
“Well, I was wrong. There was one thing I could do for her. One last thing she really wanted from me.”
Hallie waited for him to continue.
“I could refuse to let him hurt me ever again, especially with his bullshit list. So while the house filled up with his old buddies, all blubbering about what a great guy he was, I rode my bike further and further every day. Most days I went to Eastham, and hung out with my friends.”
“That’s forty miles, round trip.”
Gus shrugged. “Football practice starts in a couple of weeks, and I’ve been smoking a pack a day all summer. If I showed up in that condition, Coach would bench me. By the time I got home from Eastham, I was too tired to listen to the shit that was flying around the house. Too tired to think or feel. But I couldn’t get something out of my head.”
Hallie tilted her head curiously.
“I couldn’t stop thinking of how close you were the other day in St. Peter’s. Or how you looked. Sometimes when I closed my eyes, I almost expected you to be there.”
Hallie thought of how she’d watched the street with the same sense of his presence, and she smiled to herself. “Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“Are you gonna make me say it?” Gus said. “Okay, then. I was scared. More freaking scared than I’ve ever been in my whole life.”
“Voodoo Silva—scared of a girl? Do you really expect me to believe that?”
Gus put his h
ands on his narrow hips, and gazed into the street.
“This is something different, Hallie. I mean, isn’t it? This is something I never—” He shook his head, and left the sentence unfinished.
Unconsciously, Hallie nodded. Standing a couple of feet from him, she felt as drunk and exhilarated as she had in the cemetery; and this time, there wasn’t a drop of Jack Daniels to blame.
But before she could speak, the screen door snapped open, and Nick stood in the doorway. “Jesucristo! There’s an office full of people in there, Hallie. What do you think you’re doing?”
“It’s my fault, Doc,” Gus said quickly. “I knew Hallie was working and I—”
“To tell you the truth, Gus, I don’t care whose fault it is. The phone is ringing off the hook, and if Tony Poillucci doesn’t get some attention in about thirty seconds, he’s gonna have a coronary right there in my office.” Nick slammed the door and went back inside.
“I better go,” Hallie murmured..
“I hope I didn’t get you in trouble,” Gus said. “But even if I did, I’m glad I came. If I didn’t smell your hair or hear your voice, I was seriously going to lose my mind.”
He started down the street where he had disappeared the other day.
Her hair had a scent—and Gus remembered it? She seized a clump of pale hair and pressed it to her face, inhaling the fragrance of her everyday shampoo.
When she looked up, she saw that he had come back. He smiled at her outside the gate. “Hey, one more thing. Since our first date was at the cemetery, maybe next time we should do something more traditional. You know, go to a movie or something.”
“That was a date?”
Gus grinned. “Pretty pathetic, I admit, but I’ll make up for it. I promise.”
“As long as it doesn’t involve whiskey. The morning after our first date, I felt like I was going to die.”
The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel Page 7
