The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel

by Patry Francis

“Seven years of training, baby. Imagine how good I’ll be after fifty or sixty?”

  Fifty or sixty years. It seemed unimaginable, but as Hallie fell asleep, she felt like she was drifting in a quiet boat on calm seas.

  The next morning, Hallie and Sam stopped to listen to a street musician playing the accordion in Portuguese Square. They clapped enthusiastically before tossing a donation into her hat. Then Hallie showed Sam the War Memorial, delicately tracing her grandfather’s and great-uncle’s names on the stone. “Nick used to say we could never leave Provincetown, because he couldn’t be too far from his dead,” Hallie said, remembering the times when her father had lifted her up as a child and pointed out the same names.

  “Do you think that was why he stayed?”

  “Nah, he just liked it here.” Hallie grinned, indicating an open bench. “You sit here and listen to the music while I go down the street and get us some breakfast.”

  The bakery had a line even in the off season, and there were several people lingering over coffee who were excited to see her. “The old house is looking great,” she heard more than once. And most often it was followed by, “So when are you moving back? We need a good doctor in town.”

  “I’m just summer people now,” Hallie said, silently grateful that she hadn’t brought Sam with her.

  “Summer people—you? Never,” someone in the corner shouted out. Hallie recognized Sonny Rivers, one of Nick’s former patients.

  She had her order and was turning to go when she came face-to-face with Gus’s cousin, Alvaro. He was standing too close to her in line, and though it was nine in the morning, she detected alcohol on his breath. Looking at his unshaven face, she suspected that he was just in from a fishing trip, and that maybe he’d stopped off for a traditional drink on the way home.

  “Large coffee, Gracie. Black,” he said to the girl behind the counter, ignoring Hallie.

  But she refused to allow it.

  She put her hand on his arm and lowered her voice. “What’s going on, Alvaro? How’s Gus doing?”

  At first, he seemed determined not to respond as he shook off her arm, his eyes flashing. “How’s he doing? Is that a serious question? How do you think he’s doing?”

  Hallie felt as if she’d received a physical blow. Inside her, Lizzie leaped in response. By then everyone in the bakery was watching them.

  “You know I did everything I could to help him.”

  “Do me a favor, will you? Save it for the people who will always take your side just because you’re Nick’s daughter.”

  “Think whatever you want about me, Alvaro,” she said when she could speak. “But there hasn’t been one day in my whole life—not one day—when Gus and I weren’t on the same side.”

  “You really believe that, don’t you?” Alvaro snorted. “Man, you’re even more deluded than I thought you were.” He dumped his coffee into the trash, not even flinching when the hot black liquid splattered on his jeans. Then he slammed out the door.

  Hallie was shaking as she made her way down the street to the bench where just a few minutes earlier, she’d been looking forward to enjoying some breakfast and street music with Sam. Still engrossed in his conversation with the accordion player, he didn’t notice her at first. But as soon as he turned toward her, his eyes changed.

  He touched her mouth with the tip of a finger. “Your lips are white, sweetie.”

  “Probably just a little morning sickness,” Hallie said, pulling away so he wouldn’t feel the tremor that had begun in the bakery.

  “Morning sickness? You’re long past that,” Sam said. “Maybe we should drop off Aunt Del’s croissant and head back to Boston early.” He glanced briefly in the direction of the bakery, as if expecting to see someone—or something—that might explain what had happened.

  Hallie quickly agreed, silently cursing her lifelong inability to tell a persuasive lie.

  Chapter 26

  Though she couldn’t know if it was true, Hallie would always feel as if the events that devastated her life and Gus’s hard-won peace had occurred on the same day. At the same shattering hour. It didn’t matter that her late-term miscarriage happened weeks before she got the call about Gus. In her mind—and, more importantly, in her heart—the two would always be linked.

  She had just delivered good news to a patient who had been treated for leukemia three years earlier. Her blood counts were normal.

  “Who ever thought normal could be such a beautiful word?” the patient said, hugging Hallie as if she herself had produced the result. Before she could speak, Hallie felt a sharp burst of the back pain she’d been experiencing, and trying to ignore, all morning.

  In the bathroom, the whir and hum of everyday life in the clinic reverberated in her head. Laughter. Footsteps. Voices. She was about to see her last patient before lunch, and she could already smell the minestrone that someone was microwaving in the break room. When her nurse knocked on the door to say that the next patient was waiting, Hallie was startled by the calmness of her own voice. “Would you please call an ambulance, Lucy. I think I’m—something is wrong.”

  Lucy only hesitated a matter of seconds. “Right away. You hang in there, okay, Hallie?”

  She had never seen Sam cry before, but he wept that day in the hospital. Wept and stroked her hair, telling her repeatedly that he loved her. Hallie had accepted the embraces and the words; she’d even cleared his tears away with her fingertips, but inside, she felt hollow. No tears. No love to spare for anyone or anything. No Lizzie. She froze when he tried to say they would try again. “No, never.” When it was clear he didn’t hear her, she wondered if she’d even spoken the words out loud.

  The physical recovery from the miscarriage, and the D and C that cleared every evidence of her daughter’s life from her uterus, had been easy. Too easy, Hallie thought. Within a week, she was wearing her old clothes as if she’d never been pregnant. “One of the advantages of being fit and slender,” her obstetrician had said. The words felt like a slap. There were no advantages, she wanted to shriek. For the first time, Hallie understood her father’s grief over Liz Cooper, and Gus’s months of silence after his mother’s murder. She learned how grief could lock you into an isolation that no one could penetrate.

  “It will be good for you to go back to work, Hallie,” Sam urged her gently after several weeks had passed. “Get out of the condo. Out of your head.”

  “It won’t be good for me,” Hallie cried fiercely. “And it certainly won’t get me out of my head. You don’t know—”

  “You’re right, Hallie. I don’t know. I don’t know how to help you or what to say to you. All I know is that everything I do is wrong. Sometimes I think you’re happier when I’m not around at all.”

  When she didn’t contradict him, he got his jacket; and then, as he had after the trial, he left.

  At first, Hallie was relieved, but when he stayed away for several days, she began a vigil that was reminiscent of the ones kept by fishermen’s wives when they’re husbands were too long at sea. On the rare occasions when the phone rang, she sprinted to life, but it was never him. It was Lucy from the office, calling to ask when she’d be back, the persistent Aunt Del, or her friend Abby, whose house bubbled with the sounds of her two young sons. A dozen times a day she picked up the phone to call him. But she never got past the first three digits of his number before she realized she had nothing to say. Nothing to give him but a hollow woman, a husk, a mother without tears.

  Later, Hallie would learn that Sam had kept a similar vigil over his own phone, waiting to hear that she wanted him to come home, that she needed him. “One word of encouragement and I would have been there in an instant, even if I had to walk out in the middle of class,” he would say.

  But she got the other call first. When she saw Neil Gallagher’s number on the caller ID, she suspected he’d heard about her loss and was calling to offer his belated condolences. She walked away from the phone and closed the door to her bedroom so she wouldn’t hav
e to hear his voice on the answering machine. She was already choking on sympathy. On flowers and cards and the tentativeness she heard in people’s voices. As if she might implode if they said the wrong thing. The worst part was that it was true; she might. She had.

  It took an hour for her to walk into the living room and confront the blinking phone. Her first instinct was to delete it without listening, but then, impulsively, she pressed the play button:

  . . . I thought you’d want to know. It’s Gus. They . . . . Hallie took a step away from the machine as if she were afraid she might ignite if she stood too close. The words blurred, even when she’d played them three times. A pretty bad beating . . . He lost a lot of blood. Oh Christ, Hallie; I don’t know. And again the apologies. I know this is a happy time for you, and I hate intruding on that, but I felt like you should hear it from me. There was more, the social stuff oddly tagged onto the dire news. My best to Sam. If you want to call me back . . .

  But Hallie didn’t hear it. Her mind had caught on certain words and phrases . . . Rush him . . . pretty bad . . . blood . . . a lot of blood . . . I don’t know, Hallie.

  In her mind, Hallie saw Gus more clearly than she had in years. She saw him untainted by her old anger and guilt. Oddly, it wasn’t the Gus she loved who appeared to her with heartbreaking clarity. It was the boy with his hair poking up in the back, who had accepted her gift of two minnows.

  That vision was what finally released the tears she had been unable to cry for Lizzie. Every time someone, especially Sam, referred to her as “the miscarriage,” Hallie felt like she was losing her all over again. Was she the only one who knew that the daughter who lived inside her for twenty weeks, who leaped and tumbled in her womb, was real? Hallie cried for that, too. For the crushing loneliness that had descended on her since she lost her baby.

  She retrieved the phone, intending to call Neil, but then she replayed the end of his message in her mind. He said he hated to intrude on her happy time. So he didn’t know. If she called, she would not only have to hear the terrifying details about what had happened to Gus; she would have to tell her own story, too.

  It was dusk, but her hair was loose and uncombed, and she was still in her pajamas when she heard footsteps in the hallway. Footsteps and then the sound of a key in the lock. She was so full of confusion that it took a minute for her to process her husband’s presence in the doorway.

  The first thing she was viscerally aware of was the armful of roses he carried—at least two dozen of them. Even across the room, Hallie felt accosted by their scent. They reminded her of the roses he’d brought to her on the day of the miscarriage. But most of all, they were too red. When she looked at them, she thought of the words she’d heard on the answering machine, and the blood she’d seen in the bathroom that day at the office.

  The roses weren’t the issue, though. After six days, her husband had come home. He was home, and it was clear from his expression that he still loved her. That she had never been nearly as alone in her loss as she thought she was. She was across the room before he had a chance to close the door.

  He tossed the roses on the floor and reached for her.

  “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she sobbed. “I thought you were never coming home.”

  “And I thought you didn’t want me to. Do you know how crazy and miserable I’ve been? Why didn’t you call?” Sam said. He smelled like the cold, crisp air of winter, and the piney aftershave she loved. But the embrace didn’t last. Feeling the phone that she still held in her hand wedged into his back, he released her. “You were just about to, weren’t you?” he said.

  Of course, his conclusion made sense. There was no one else she would have called—at least, not until she’d heard Neil’s message. If her face wouldn’t give her away, Hallie would have lied. “I wanted to call you. Ever since the night you left, I wanted to call—”

  Sam tilted his head slightly to the side in the sweet, bemused way she loved. “But you didn’t,” he said cautiously. “And you weren’t going to call me now, either.”

  He squared his shoulders and walked toward the answering machine. Hallie cringed as he replayed the messages. In an instant, Neil’s words filled the room, the house, their lives, with the latest episode in Gus’s life.

  Hallie sunk into the couch and put her face in her hands. “I didn’t even answer the phone, Sam,” she said. “I didn’t call back, either.” It was her last defense, and it was a weak one.

  Sam looked down at her, his eyes drained of emotion. “And here I thought you were crying for our baby. But no, you had no tears for her. No tears for us. It was that sociopath priest you were crying for, wasn’t it?”

  “I desperately wanted you to come home, Sam,” Hallie said. “I’ve tried so hard—”

  Sam reached out and fingered the bright strands of her hair. “I know you’ve tried; that’s what kills me. My wife gets an A for effort in her attempts to love me. She even tried to forget the guy who almost killed her, and who actually succeeded with his next victim. Poor tragic Gus Silva. Well, thanks, but no thanks.”

  He stood up abruptly and started for the door.

  “You don’t understand,” she said, rushing to block his path. She wiped her face awkwardly on her sleeve, a childish gesture that seemed to soften him.

  “I’m afraid that’s the problem. I do understand, Hallie. When we first met, I knew there was a barrier there, some hurt that prevented you from getting close to anyone. But I loved you so much I believed I could make you forget. Even after you told me about the high school boyfriend who—”

  “Gus is a priest. He’s been out of my life for years and you know it.”

  Sam shook his head, and Hallie finally glimpsed the grief beneath his anger. “You know, I truly believed that for a long time—until the trial. That’s when I first understood the hold he had on you. When you looked at him from the witness stand, it was as if everyone in that courtroom vanished. Including me. But then you got pregnant and for a while we were so happy I thought we were invincible. Even Gus Silva couldn’t touch us. I sincerely thought I had won. We had won. And maybe if Lizzie had been born, we might have.”

  “We still have each other,” Hallie pleaded.

  Sam sighed. “If only that were true.” Then he walked slowly and deliberately toward the answering machine and replayed the message. Hallie wanted to block her ears against Neil’s voice, but she knew that would only fire her husband’s anger. “Didn’t you hear this, Hallie? Gus is in trouble again,” he said, starting for the door. “He needs you.”

  Chapter 27

  An accidental glance at the bathroom mirror caught Hallie off guard. Her eyes were red from weeping, skin pale from holing up inside, lips cracked from the dry heat in the condo. She probably had scurvy, too, she thought. In the two weeks since Sam had left for good, she’d lived on the kinds of foods she warned her elderly patients against: crackers, cereal from the box, the last olives in the jar.

  She had avoided the mirror because it contained the truth: Sam was right. Though she’d tried to avoid thinking about Gus, she had called Neil right after Sam left.

  “How is he?” Hallie had blurted out when he picked up.

  “According to Alvaro, it was a pretty serious injury. There was some kind of knife involved; it came within an inch of his heart. But the last I heard he’s probably going to make it: this time. That’s an exact quote.”

  “I feel so helpless. What can we do, Neil?”

  “Not a goddamn thing. Nothing but live our own lives as best we can.”

  “Something I’m not doing particularly well right now,” Hallie said.

  “Yeah, well, no one’s screwed up more than I have. Seeing Gus sentenced to prison did something to me, you know? I’m not the same person, Hal,” Neil said despondently. “I guess our holy friend would probably tell us to pray.”

  “A lot of good that’s done him, huh?” Still unable to talk about her miscarriage, Hallie made an excuse to get off the phone. S
he hoped Neil hadn’t noticed that as she said goodbye she was already crying.

  Then she went to the kitchen window and opened it the way Nick always did when he lost a patient, a symbolic action of release. The cold felt sweeter than anything she’d experienced in weeks, and she took a huge drink of it. Somehow, though, she’d been expecting the ocean air. But once her lungs adapted, even the pungent smell of the city was salutary. She took another deep breath and then coughed.

  She’d given up smoking when she began her fertility treatments, and had only relapsed once when Nick was ill. But now she was dying for the taste of her old vice. It was the first thing she’d truly desired since she lost Lizzie. In her jean jacket she found a crumpled pack of Marlboros containing one very stale cigarette. She lit it up right there in the house. Once she took that first drag, she wanted more. She wanted a spinach and mango salad from the café where she’d first had coffee with Sam, and a walk across the Commons. But as soon as she was outside, an even more undeniable want accosted her. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? If just for a week or even an hour, she needed to go back to the place where she had always gone when she was in trouble or pain. As she turned in the direction of South Station, she walked faster, almost breaking into a run like she did when she was a child and she was racing home to Nick.

  Chapter 28

  Hallie was scraping paint from the office door with Hugo Bestler. Throughout an unusually harsh April, Hugo and Hallie had worked hard to get the office in shape. Hugo usually showed up an hour late, hungover and sucking hard on a cup of coffee, but he was a great listener. One who didn’t judge. One who didn’t even talk back, aside from the occasional grunt, usually when she said something that reminded him of his own divorce a decade earlier. Hallie had learned not to ask him a direct question before two p.m., a practice that seemed to work well for both of them. She could talk freely, not worrying how outrageous or silly she might sound, and he was left to his brooding silence. It was actually during one of these largely one-sided conversations that Hallie realized she was never going back to Boston. She was home to stay.