Recovery? Hallie had thought, taking in the squares of white mineral board on the ceiling, the hospital machinery, the sound of the staff’s brisk footsteps in the hallway. She’d attempted to form a word, but it was hours—or even days—before it came. Time had become irrelevant. Gus. Where’s Gus?
By then, Aunt Del and Stuart had arrived. And they, too, were crying and kissing her hand, hugging Nick and promising her and each other that she was going to be fine. But even when she spoke louder, no one would answer her question.
“Rest, my darling,” Nick had said. “You need to rest.”
And though she wanted to argue back, Hallie gave in to exhaustion.
Still she’d called for him repeatedly. She knew something had happened between her and Gus. Something bad. But the images floating to the surface of her mind made no sense. Had they been in an accident? Was Gus hurt? Dead? No, she couldn’t bear to think of it; and yet she couldn’t imagine anything else that would keep him away.
Not now, her father said, echoing her thoughts. You have to focus on healing. And on the days when she grew agitated: Gus is all right. I promise you, Pie. Now no more questions. Please, you have to trust me.
If he’s all right, then why isn’t he here? she wanted to say. But again, she was too weak to form the words. Too tired to make sense of the answers.
Even Aunt Del left the room when the subject came up, repeating Nick’s stock lines as she went: “There will be plenty of time to think about that, but first you have to take care of yourself. You’ve done so well, sweetie.”
Now, back at home, her father was clearly trying to steer her thoughts toward the future. However, when he brought up college, Hallie turned toward her window.
“If you keep working hard on your therapy, you could take a couple of courses at the community college in the spring. Linda said she’ll sell me her old Corolla,” he persisted, the determined optimism in his voice never waning. “Thing’s got some miles on it, but it would get you to Barnstable and back for a few months.”
“You know the reason I work so hard at therapy?” Hallie asked—more sharply than she intended. “It’s not so I can get a car. Or go to college. Or hang out with my friends. I’m doing it for one reason and one reason only.”
She shook off Nick’s hand. “I’m starting to remember what happened that night on the Point, and I know why Gus has stayed away. He probably thinks it’s all his fault.”
“I’m glad you’re starting to remember, Pie, but the situation is more complicated than what happened that night. You don’t understand—”
“No, you don’t understand, because if you did you’d know I’ll never give him up.” Hallie shouted, startling her father with the newfound power in her voice.
Nick set his coffee cup on her bedside table next to a copy of Jane Eyre he’d brought upstairs. The novel she could never resist, even though she’d probably read it a dozen times, remained untouched. He gave a perfunctory glance at his watch, signaling that he was through with the discussion. “I’ve got to get to the office—”
“If Gus won’t come to me, then I need to get strong enough to go to him. That’s what I’m working for . . . what I’m breathing for.”
A flash of anger darted across Nick’s face. “Gus Silva is thinking about his own future, Hallie. You need to do the same.”
“How do you know what he’s thinking about? Have you seen him? You’ve got to tell me the truth.” Against her will, Hallie began to tremble.
She expected her father to come back and sit on the bed again. To comfort her like he always did. Instead, he stood firmly in his spot. “I’m sorry, Hallie. Truly, I am. But if you started to plan a little bit, some of this might become easier.”
“Some of this? You mean knowing that Gus is torturing himself for something he didn’t do? That only the blackest despair could keep him away from me? Or maybe feeling like I’m going to lose my mind if I have to go through another day—another hour—without seeing him?
“All I can say is that it will get easier. I can’t tell you when, but it will,” her father said with the same compassionate but professional stolidity he used when he told a patient he or she had a terminal illness.
“I don’t want it to get easier,” Hallie snapped. “I want to see my boyfriend!” By then, the tears were running into her mouth, and onto her chin.
Nick stood in the doorway, the shadows on his face emphasized the light that poured through the door. “You want to know Maria Silva’s worst mistake?” he asked finally. “She thought she could save Codfish. Even when her own life was threatened, she kept believing she could save him. I’m sorry, Hallie, but I won’t allow that to happen to you.”
Hallie blinked back fiery tears, as the objections formed in her throat. Gus was not like the Captain. He was nothing like him. But when she looked again, the doorway was empty; her father was gone. All that remained were the dust motes spinning in the light and the echo of his words.
Hallie had been home for three weeks, growing stronger and more lucid every day. She had been eager to see her friends, but when Felicia and Daisy pivoted quickly away from the subject of Gus, she stopped taking their calls.
Then one day Hallie heard the coltish click of Felicia’s heels on the stairs, her friend’s impatient hammering on the door. “I’m not taking no for an answer, Hallie. Open up,” Felicia demanded. When that didn’t work, she wheedled: “Please? I’ve got music, and a ton of gossip—even a couple of your precious books.”
“That’s not what I want and you know it,” Hallie called back.
Felicia released an audible sigh. “I swear, Hallie—I haven’t seen him. No one has. And even if I knew where he was . . .”
In spite of her weakness, Hallie climbed out of bed and made her way to the door. “Even if you knew—what? Finish the sentence.”
Felicia seemed stunned by her friend’s pallor, the hand that shook as it held the door.
“You need to get back in bed, Hal,” she said, gently taking her elbow.
But Hallie just shook her off as she glared defiantly. “Finish the sentence, Felicia.”
“Listen, you almost freakin’ died out there on the Point whether you know it or not. Your dad’s worried about you, okay? Nick only let me come because I promised on my life that I won’t talk about . . . him.” Felicia’s voice sunk to a whisper as she pronounced that last word.
Hallie looked her directly in the eye before she firmly closed the door. Though she believed Felicia, she couldn’t pretend to carry on a normal conversation until her questions were answered.
Images of Gus tormented her. Gus in his blue scarf on prom night, or regarding her with a mixture of skepticism and vulnerability that day she found him smoking in the church. The mute child, his hair askew from lying on his bed all day, looking at her with eyes that had swallowed the whole world and all its sorrow. Gus climbing the rickety ladder to the roof, the brightness of a starry night eclipsed by the yearning on his face.
No one would ever know him as well as she did. Nor would anyone else understand what the accident on the Point would do to him or where it would take him. Fucked-up for life . . . Neil had called him. Hallie shut out the words, her memory of Neil’s thick, sour breath.
Nick was surprised when she asked if she might have a phone installed in her room. Though he was glad that she was well enough to want something—anything—he balked. “You know I’d love to hear you talking to your friends the way you used to, but you also need to spend less time in your room. If you want to call from the kitchen, I promise not to listen in . . .”
But when Hallie continued to beg, he relented. “One caveat,” he said, when he entered the room with a slender phone. “Don’t try to contact the Silva boy. And no calls from his buddy, either.”
“I have nothing to say to Neil—not ever. But do you really think that anyone can keep me away from Gus? If you don’t want me to talk to him in your house, I’ll find another way.”
Nick, who
was sitting at the table checking his schedule for the day, closed his appointment book and returned her gaze. “Don’t you understand? Gus will be in serious trouble if he speaks to you.”
“What happened that night was an accident, Nick. I’ve told you that—”
“Was it an accident what he did to Neil Gallagher’s face? Not that the cuzo didn’t deserve it. But Gus could have killed you, Hallie—whether he intended to or not,” Nick said softly. “The kid’s lucky he’s not in prison. Damn lucky.”
“So you’re saying he’s not in jail? Then where is he? Why won’t anyone tell me?”
Nick rose from the chair to go to the office as he did every day, but that morning he looked particularly tired. “If you try to call him, he won’t talk to you. Gus has . . . something else in his life now, someone else. He doesn’t want to see you.”
Someone else—Gus? It was impossible. “That’s a lie!”
“I’m sorry, Hallie. I didn’t mean to blurt it out like that, but sooner or later, you had to find out.”
Hallie refused the Valium he offered, and she pushed away the steaming cup that Aunt Del brought later.
“I don’t want tea, Aunt Del. I want answers. Gus couldn’t—” Hallie began before something she saw on Del’s face stopped her in mid-sentence. She realized she was shaking violently. This time, when she was offered the small blue pill, she accepted it.
The next day, though, she steeled herself and picked up the small white phone. In spite of what she’d promised her father, what she vowed to herself, the first number Hallie dialed was Neil’s. She still had no desire to talk to him, but if anyone would tell her what she needed to know, he would.
Neil seemed as shaken by her voice as she was by his. “Please, Hallie. Don’t hang up. I know I can never explain, but—”
“No, you can’t,” Hallie said, closing her eyes against the images that rose against her wishes. “You can never explain; and right now, it would probably kill me if you tried.”
The line went quiet.
Finally, Neil said, “Then why—” Then he stopped himself. “Of course. You’re calling to ask about Gus, and here I am thinking about myself again.”
Hallie’s head hurt. Was he being sincere or sarcastic? Somehow her brain couldn’t tell the difference anymore. Nick was right: it had been a mistake to call him.
Before she could put down the receiver, he spoke again, “I mean it, Hal. You’ve been through hell; you probably have no idea where Gus is; and the first thing I do is dump my guilt on you.”
“So you’ve talked to him, then? After everything that’s happened, you two—”
Neil hesitated. “It’s not the same, and it probably never will be if that’s what you want to know, but yeah, I had to see him.”
Not wanting to think about that reuinion, Hallie repeated what her father had said verbatim . . . Gus has . . . someone else. He doesn’t want to see you. It had been so difficult to speak the words that she felt herself growing breathless, as if she’d run across the dunes. “It’s not true, is it, Gallagher?” she finally asked. “It can’t be true.”
At first, she thought Neil had put the phone down, or they’d lost their connection. But then she realized that the silence on the other end of the line was his answer.
She hung up, and waited for it to ring again, but the phone remained eerily silent. More than anything, Hallie needed to get out of bed and scale the ladder to her roof, where she could think. But when she opened the door to the third floor, she saw shadows of herself and Gus in every corner. It was as if she had stepped directly into that night of beginning, and experienced it again. Even her private church would be contaminated with Gus’s presence now. Exhausted, she stumbled back to her room and locked the door as if she’d been chased away by her own ghost.
Two days later, Neil finally called back. He didn’t bother with social niceties. “Gus wants to see you. Not now. And definitely not at your house. But when you’re strong enough to come out to the Point, he wants to talk to you one more time.”
“One more time? What are you saying, Gallagher?”
There was a long pause.
“He’s going away, Hal,” Neil finally said. “I’d say more, but I don’t really understand it myself. Anyway, he wants to be the one to tell you.”
Hallie felt a thickening in her throat. “God, Neil, tell me! Is he going to jail?” she asked, wondering if her father had lied to protect her.
“No, nothing like that. There wasn’t even a trial.”
“So they realized it was an accident?” Hallie was flooded with a mix of relief and confusion. If Gus wasn’t being physically kept from her, then why wasn’t he here?
“Not exactly, but he had a great lawyer; a couple of pillars of the community came forward to speak for him; and I certainly wasn’t going to testify against him. It could have gone a lot worse.”
“But he didn’t do anything wrong—” Hallie began, and then she thought of Neil, his lanky body unresisting, being smashed repeatedly onto the hood of the Jeep.
“Listen, I gotta go, but I’ll be in touch, okay?” Neil said.
Throughout 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
Finally, 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.
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