The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel

by Patry Francis

  From Loop Street, she’d go back home for her bike and ride out to Route 6. It was a long trek through the dunes to Wolf’s shack, but every day she brought him a Thermos of coffee. He always greeted her the same way: “What the fuck, Hallie? Don’t you know I’m trying to work out here?”

  But as she had when she was a child, she found solace watching Wolf paint.

  In the afternoon, she’d wander into her father’s office for lunch and end up hanging around. She’d help Aunt Del with the paperwork, smiling as Nick joked with his patients or castigated an elderly woman in Portuguese for refusing to follow orders. Gradually, Hallie began to take on more responsibilities. She learned to take blood pressure readings to help Leah out on busy days and researched nutritional information for patients on special diets. And when her father brought home the files for a particularly challenging case, she studied them, too.

  Occasionally, in the evenings, she’d drive around with Felicia and Reggie, who had ended up staying in town, and the three of them would share a six-pack or a bottle of fruity wine on the beach. They’d talk about movies, and the beauty school Felicia was attending in Hyannis, and how boring Provincetown was in the winter. They’d bemoan the fact that all the best-looking men in town were gay, and then swear they didn’t care about guys anyway. The only subject that was off limits was the past.

  But wherever she went, she felt his shadow. He walked out of the sea; he called her name from the top of the monument; he sat on a bench in the center of town near the memorial where members of both their families were listed among the war dead. Once, in a dream that left her particularly shaken, he walked into the office wearing the black T-shirt from Lou’s, and smiled at her the way he had on the day of his father’s funeral.

  Neil had his own way of coming back, too. Hallie turned her head when she caught sight of a red Jeep, or spotted a rangy boy in a white dishwasher’s outfit like the one he wore for his summer job. Even the sight of the school bus where they had first become friends filled her with a private ache. Time made the “accident” on Race Point increasingly unreal, but her friendship with Neil was something tangible.

  She wasn’t sure she was ready to forgive him, but as the weeks passed, she knew she had to see him again. Thanksgiving break gave her the opportunity she was waiting for when she heard that Neil was home alone. Although his family had gone to Boston for the weekend, he had insisted on remaining behind.

  The Friday after the holiday, Hallie borrowed Nick’s truck and drove to the West End. Steeling herself, she knocked on the door—at first tentatively and then more insistently but there was no response. She was in the driveway heading toward the truck when Neil appeared on the porch. Despite an unseasonable cold snap, he was wearing only ripped jeans and a New York Knicks shirt and his feet were bare. He didn’t speak.

  “Wanna go out for coffee?” she finally asked.

  Neil shook his head. “Not a chance.”

  Hallie was about to leave when he continued. “If we walked into Ina’s together, half the town would know every word we said before we made it home. But you can come in here—that is, if you’re not afraid of me.”

  Hallie could see the bones of his shoulders protruding through his T-shirt. She followed him through the house and into the kitchen Neil’s mother had decorated in a seashell motif.

  “Sorry, but I don’t know how to make coffee,” he said, studying her as he leaned against a counter. He indicated the table with its severely angled chairs. “You want to sit?”

  She noticed that he’d gotten an ear pierced, and that his hair had grown shaggier. Her eyes were drawn to a scar on his cheek that was shaped like a crescent moon, an obvious souvenir of the night on the Point.

  “I don’t know what I want, Neil,” she said. “I just know I had to come. Ever since you and Gus went away, I’ve been trying to understand how it happened. How any of it happened . . .”

  Neil took a step forward to hug her like he had done a thousand times before, but then retreated. He slouched into a kitchen chair and put his face in his hands.

  “How it happened. It’s my undeclared major. I’m practically flunking out of school, Hal, because all I can think of is that night. The horrible stuff I said. What I fucking did. Last summer, when I called you, I wanted to apologize. Imagine that? As if any apology in the world could cover it.”

  “I’d like to say I’m sorry that you’re in pain, but I’m not. I can’t be, Neil.”

  “You think I want you to be sorry for me? That’s the last thing I want,” Neil said.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me you were the one who wrote the note?” Her voice was so low that she wasn’t sure it was audible.

  Neil reddened. “Shit, Hallie. I’d been telling you how I felt all my life. I thought you’d know it was me—”

  “And when I didn’t?”

  “You mean, when you immediately assumed it was Gus? Well, it was clear who you wanted it to be, no matter what you said in the dunes. I thought you and Gus would eventually talk about it, and I’d have to admit the truth, but you never did.”

  “When he didn’t bring it up, I thought he was embarrassed by it. Or maybe that I’d been wrong.”

  “But still, you never connected the dots.”

  “Like you said, I wanted to believe it was Gus.”

  Neil nodded. At that moment he reminded her more of his child self than ever. His nose was running, and his eyes were leaking, and the scar on his cheek had turned a flame color that nearly matched his hair. Hallie handed him a tissue.

  “I guess we were all wounded that night, weren’t we?” she whispered. She wasn’t even aware that she was crying herself until Neil pushed the tissue box in her direction.

  He was still sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands when Hallie let herself out.

  A few days later she called Sean Mello and got Neil’s number at school. She dialed immediately before she could change her mind.

  “I just wanted to tell you I’ve been thinking about what you said, Gallagher. I’m not a judge, but I want you to know one thing: what you did that night was horrible, maybe even unforgivable, but you didn’t ruin anyone’s life. Gus is out there doing what he wants to do, no matter how much it kills me; and someday you’re going to be a famous actor. And me? Don’t count me out yet, either.” Then, before he had a chance to respond, she hung up.

  She didn’t know what the revelation did for Neil, because he didn’t call her back. But it released something in her. She stopped passing by the house on Loop Street in the morning. Though she still dreamed of Gus, the dreams were less frequent; and shaking them off in the morning, less painful. When she took her daily walks, the past still accosted her like the Black Flash, a legendary ghost that all of the older people swore they’d seen at least once during the lonely winters in Provincetown. But increasingly she was too preoccupied to stop for it. The future, her future, was a fire that burned more brightly inside her every day.

  One pristine winter evening when she and Nick were walking home from Cap’s, sated and entranced by the stars, her father stopped dead. “You always used to sing around the house. Ever since you first learned ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’ ” he said. “I miss it.”

  She shrugged and kept walking. “I guess I lost that in the accident,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Lost what—your singing voice?”

  “No. Just the desire to sing.” She wasn’t ready to admit that she was afraid of what her voice might contain.

  Nick hitched the backpack he substituted for the traditional black bag up on his shoulder and resumed walking. “It will come back,” he said.

  “Yes, it will,” Hallie said, feeling a surge of the optimism that had been slowly building since Thanksgiving. “It will be different, maybe, but it will come back.”

  Nick studied her obliquely. “In the meantime, what are you going to do with your life?” he asked. It was the first time in months that he had suggested she might want to do more
than visit Wolf, putter in the office, and read with him in the study in the evenings.

  “Do I have to do something? Can’t I just stay here and be Hallie, like I always was?”

  “Just be? Might be fine for a Zen monk or an old hippie, but not for my Pie.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not your Pie anymore. I’m all grown-up, and I get to decide my own future.” Hallie speeded up slightly when she noticed nosy Mavis Black scurrying to catch up with them. Mavis was waving wildly, the eyebrows she’d painted orange to match her hair lifted in interest at the raised voices.

  “You’re also someone who has a lot to give. And if you don’t find a way to give it, you might be the proud master of your own fate, but you’ll never be happy,” Nick said, turning back to confront her.

  Then, spotting the woman he called his favorite hypochondriac, he cupped his hand and whispered, “Look at poor Victoria. Mavis has got that poor dog dressed up like something out of Dr. Zhivago.”

  Hallie giggled.

  Though she couldn’t have heard their voices, Mavis got the idea that the doctor was avoiding her. She harrumphed so loudly that even Nick laughed; and when Hallie finally turned around, Mavis and her fur-clad dog were trotting at a huffy clip in the opposite direction.

  They walked the next half-mile in easy silence, Nick’s question still between them: What was she going to do with the rest of her life? The answer had been growing inside her throughout the long fall as she helped out in the office, as she and her father discussed a particularly tricky diagnosis in the study at night. She wondered if he’d seen the new batch of catalogues that had arrived in the mail from Duke and Tufts.

  “Okay, I’m going to apply to a couple of schools for next year, but I’m especially interested in Berkeley.”

  “I hear they have an excellent premed program.” Though he tried to sound cool, Nick couldn’t quite pull it off.

  “Nick! You already knew!”

  “I’ve known since you were a little girl. And so have you. I was just waiting for you to remember.”

  Waiting for me to forget, is more like it, Hallie thought, following her father as he turned the corner. It was the exact spot where Gus had left her that afternoon when she found him in the church. But now she felt a different kind of possibility opening up inside her, and this time she passed the corner without allowing herself to sink back into that moment with Gus.

  The truth was no longer something to be argued with, or even mourned. It was just the truth: Gus wasn’t coming back. Her old strength and energy coursed through her veins. It hadn’t come from Gus, and he couldn’t take it away. Her father was right. She had something to give, something to do; and give and do she would.

  “It’s pretty far away,” she said, a little offended that her father hadn’t balked at the distance that would be between them.

  “Far away is hard, but sometimes it’s good—necessary even.” Nick stopped where he was. “There are too many shadows around here. If you stay in Massachusetts, you might never escape them.”

  Like you? Hallie thought, but didn’t say it out loud. Instead, she turned and hugged him the way she used to when she was a little girl. He returned it with a bone-crushing Costa abraço, lifting her off her feet.

  By then, they were standing outside their front gate. When Stuart pulled his Saab into the driveway next door, Nick waved wildly.

  “Hey, Stuart!” Nick yelled before their neighbor had a chance to climb out of his car. “Have you heard? Hallie’s gonna be a doctor!”

  Embarrassed, Hallie rolled her eyes. “Don’t listen to him, Stuart.” And then to her father: “I’m applying to an undergrad program, Nick. Don’t get the lab coats monogrammed yet, okay?”

  But, as ever, when Nick was excited about something, whether it was an outburst from Coleman Hawkins’ saxophone or the discovery of a new star, there was no keeping him quiet. Hallie threw up her hands helplessly in Stuart’s direction. Then they both laughed as Nick raced into the middle of the street, and turned toward the center of town, making his hands a megaphone. “You hear that, Provincetown? My daughter’s gonna be a doctor! A doctor!”

  PART THREE

  ST. BEN’S

  { 1999 }

  Chapter 15

  Gus had been at St. Benedict’s for six years, assisting in the parish and serving as chaplain in the hospital, when the woman showed up. Normally, he would have been downstairs watching the Red Sox game with his pastor, Jack, and their housekeeper’s daughter. Julia, who turned fifteen that year, claimed she didn’t like sports, but she seemed to enjoy the blare and hum from the TV and the grumbling banter between the two priests as she studied. But on this particular Monday, Gus announced he was going to bed early and headed for his room.

  “You—miss a game against the Yankees? What’s the matter? You pick up a bug at the hospital or something?” Jack said, following him to the bottom of the stairs. Gus’s dogs were confused, too. When she realized he wasn’t coming down again, Jane, a Lab mix with dolorous eyes and an overprotective streak, crept up the stairs loyally, while Stella, the rat terrier, tucked in her tail and clattered off toward the familiar drone of the game. Both dogs had been inherited from terminal patients Gus met during his rounds at the hospital.

  “You might say that. But don’t worry; it’s nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure,” Gus said, stroking Jane’s ears as he avoided Jack’s eyes.

  In his room, Gus lay down, arms folded behind his head, and studied the ceiling. His old friend Neil Gallagher had called earlier to say he was in Wellfleet, playing in summer stock again, and he was planning a reunion of their old high school crowd. Would Gus be there? After all this time, it shouldn’t have bothered him, but somehow the call derailed his day.

  For eight years after Neil left for New York and Gus entered the seminary, they had kept their distance. But when Neil’s brother, Liam, took a job in Emergency Services at Cape Cod Hospital, he began to pass news between the two former friends. Neil’s in a play Off Broadway . . . an amazing performance . . . He’s waiting to hear about a part he really wants. Something big . . . He worked with this prestigious director (whom Gus had never heard of) . . . that well-known actor (ditto.) He was nominated for a Tony in a supporting role. There were a dizzying series of girlfriends, a tall redhead, a gorgeous Colombian, a dancer who promised to leave her husband but didn’t.

  Sometimes he wondered what Liam said about him. That he ran on the beach and swam all year? He said mass? He comforted the sick and the dying? He watched sports with Jack and played touch football on the lawn outside the rectory with Julia? And then, the next day, he did the same thing again? There were no awards. No triumphs. No stunning announcements or crushing disappointments. Yet his life had never been fuller. How could he explain that to Neil?

  Gus picked up The Rule of St. Benedict, which Jack had given him for a recent birthday. He was usually too exhausted in the evenings to read, but now he opened it to the prologue. His eyes settled on the words Run while you have the light of life lest the darkness of death overtake you. They described the urgency that had driven him since he was a child, and the reason he felt so used up at the end of the day.

  He’d only got through a few paragraphs when he heard a knock at the front door, first so light that Gus thought he might have imagined it, and then more resolute. The sound of someone who wouldn’t disappear until they were heard.

  He listened for Jack’s predictable grumbling as he headed for the door. “They just won’t leave me alone, will they? Even when the bases are loaded. Julia, let me know if they score.”

  Gus waited for Jack to invite whoever it might be into the living room to watch the game. There in the middle of his usual sports talk, they would manage to get to the heart of whatever the visitor had come to share.

  He could almost see Julia frowning in annoyance that her family time had been interrupted. Then she would gather her books and scurry back up to the apartment she shared with her mother ab
ove the garage.

  “Night, Dad,” she teased before she retreated up the back stairway.

  Detecting the susurrus of a female murmuring, Gus got up and pushed open his door.

  “I’m sorry, but Father Gus wasn’t feeling well tonight. He’s already gone to bed,” Jack explained.

  Gus stepped into the hallway. “I’m still awake, Monsignor,” he said, formally.

  “You have a visitor,” Jack said, when he saw him. “A young lady.” An arch of his unruly white eyebrows conveyed all he needed to say about the matter. “Says she has an appointment, too.”

  Jack stepped back so that Gus could see the woman standing by the door.

  His first impression of the stranger was that she was indeed young—perhaps still in her teens, and ethereally pale. No makeup, with a scarf wound around her head and neck, she was wearing a sweater although it had been a hot day and the air was still close. His first thought was that she must be Muslim.

  As he walked down the stairs, Gus quickly realized that all he’d gotten right was her pallor and the incongruity of her sweater. The long ponytail that protruded from beneath her scarf indicated that it wasn’t a hijab.

  “I’m Father Gus,” he said, extending his hands. “Have we met?”

  “Don’t you remember? I spoke to you after the noon mass on Sunday,” she said, in heavily accented English. “I asked if you might have time to talk with me about a—about a personal issue.”

  “It’s Miss Cilento, right?” Jack said, slyly watching both of them.

  “Mrs.,” the woman corrected, addressing Gus. “But, please—call me Ava.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t remember.” Though he was certain they’d never spoken, there was something familiar about her. Up close, it was also clear that she was older than he’d first guessed—probably around his own age: thirty-one. “In any case, Monsignor does most of the pastoral counseling here. Usually in the afternoon.”