The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel

by Patry Francis

  Chapter 38

  However, when I walk into the Oyster, Ava is the one who is sitting at the table opposite the door, watching for me. Her hair is shorn like mine, and the color has changed, too, as if we’ve been unconsciously imitating each other all along. It’s the most dramatic shining platinum I have ever seen. She is wearing a jade necklace that emphasizes her eyes, and a deep plum-colored lipstick; and she is tanned from her life in California.

  But no matter what color her hair was or how she was dressed, I would know her. Just as I knew her when I first saw her standing outside the fence at the playground. I don’t recognize her from memory, or because she resembles the pictures I have seen. I know her because her face holds everything I have hungered for since the day my father came into my room and told me she was gone.

  “Hello, Ava.” I try my best to sound cold, but I can’t quite pull it off. This is no delusion or hoax. It’s her. I try to stop the tremor that is building like a volcano inside me, but when she gets up to hug me, I break.

  “Mila, Mee-la,” she says, like she did on the phone. Tears are streaming down her cheeks as she steps back to drink me in. Grudgingly, I admire the way she refuses to cover or even blot them. “You don’t know how many times I’ve lived this moment in my mind—and now here you are. My beautiful daughter.”

  “Please, don’t,” I say, sliding into the seat opposite her. “It’s way too late for that.” But my voice, the tears that streak my own face, say otherwise.

  At that point, the server approaches with menus in her hand, but stops several feet from the table. “You want to see these?” she says, nervously flapping them in our direction. “Or will it just be the coffee today?”

  Ava asks for a refill, hardly looking up. I feel dizzy. Hoping a sugar rush will steady me, I order cranberry juice with lime.

  “I told you on the phone I wanted to explain what I did,” Ava says in a shaky voice. “But now I realize there’s nothing I can say. No justification you can ever accept. All I can do is ask for your forgiveness, Mila. Beg for it, really. There have been days when I didn’t think I could go on if I didn’t get it.”

  She’s so vulnerable, yet so luminous that I’m as mesmerized as the Bug must have been. I feel ashamed for doubting her. For that one moment, I feel rinsed with forgiveness. If I could, I would crawl into her lap like I did when I was a kid.

  “Do you remember the first time you came to see me?” I whisper.

  She closes her eyes. “You were nine, and someone—your father’s housekeeper, perhaps—had braided your hair. That was the first thing I saw . . . that long plait hanging down your back. With everything in me, I wanted to run to you, sweep you up in my arms and never let you go.”

  “I was playing outside at recess, and I felt someone looking at me. It wasn’t an ordinary kind of looking.”

  “It had been so long since I’d seen you, Mila. I didn’t expect you to recognize me or even notice me. But then you came toward me.”

  “I thought I was dreaming you.”

  “Your face was so serious. No child should be as serious as you were.”

  “Then the recess monitor called me and I turned around. ‘Do you know that woman, Mila?’ she asked. And I remember thinking, Oh my God, she’s real! Other people can see her, too. But when I turned back to look for you, you were gone. And again, I thought that there was something wrong with me, that I saw things, you know? But for years I clung to the monitor’s words: Do you know that woman, Mila? I said them in my sleep, I prayed them over and over. I wasn’t the only one who had seen you.”

  “I had come so far. I wanted so badly to speak to you, to touch you. But then I saw that woman questioning you.”

  “From that day on, I spent every recess waiting for you. I searched for your face wherever I went. But it was two years later before I saw you again. I had just gotten off the bus.”

  “You got out of the line of students and came running toward me. That’s when I realized the kind of heart you had. It wasn’t your father’s heart, Mila. It was my heart.” She almost upsets her coffee. “I’m so sorry I ran from you. But if I had stopped, I knew I would never be able to leave you again.”

  “You didn’t come back again until I was almost fourteen.”

  “Do you know how dangerous that was for me? You were old enough to tell your father. And be believed. Not that I feared going to prison. I would have welcomed the opportunity to exchange my life for the priest’s.”

  “Then why . . . didn’t you?” I ask. “How could you let Gus—”

  “By then there were other people to consider,” she says, blanching at the mention of Gus’s name. “Oh, Mila, you have to understand. When I got away, I promised myself I would never chance it again. But to never hear of you or contact you in any way? I couldn’t bear that. On your birthday, I sent you that card, and then I started haunting the post office like a ghost, waiting for you to write to me.”

  “And when I did, you decided to come back and tell the truth so Gus can finally come home.” I am so close to her, I almost slip and call her the M-word.

  I feel so sure I hardly notice the long pause that follows. When I do, I rush to fill it.

  “Gus has been in prison for ten years,” I say. “You have to . . . I mean, you’re going to go to the police, right?”

  She lowers her head and stares into the blackness of her coffee as if the answer is there; and when she looks up, the very atoms of the room have shifted.

  “Please, my darling,” she pleads. “You are almost an adult now. A woman. Surely, you know that some things can’t be so easily undone.”

  “Easily? Really? You dare to use that word with me? I mean, just how easy do you think Gus’s life has been this last decade?”

  “I know he’s suffered, but why would the priest contact you? Did he have to turn my own daughter against me? Was that his revenge?”

  “The priest? He has a name, you know.”

  “Mila, darling, you have to understand . . . I never thought he would go to prison.”

  “Say his name,” I press. “Say the name of the man who’s been sitting in jail, whether you intended it or not.”

  She is silent for so long that the waitress approaches with the check. Neither of us look up.

  “He used to tell me to call him Gus,” she finally says. “But I never did. I preferred Father. Not because I was a believer, but because I desperately needed him to be someone I could rely on. Someone I could trust. I no longer had any kind of father, Mila. For so long, there had been no one at all.”

  “And in return, you set him up—”

  “Have you listened to anything I’ve said?” she says, her green eyes flashing. “I may have been weak and alone, but I’m not the monster he made you think I am. Your father was the only one I meant to deceive. I never thought it would go so far. But that doesn’t give him the right to poison your mind against me.”

  “He has the right to do anything he needs to do to secure his freedom. In this case, though, I was the one who went to him.”

  “But why?”

  I shrug. “Maybe I needed someone I could trust, too. Though I didn’t know it at the time.”

  “But you haven’t told him—not either of them?” Ava stares at me anxiously. “I don’t believe you would—”

  “I told Hallie. Unfortunately, she thought I was just a lonely child who had visions of her dead mother. That’s when I realized I had to produce you if I wanted to convince anyone. Of course, I hoped that once you were here, you would do the right thing yourself.”

  “But you knew where I was. You could have sent—”

  “Sent them where? I’m sure you never lived in Weatherwood. You wouldn’t risk exposure.”

  “Until today,” she says, but I can tell she still doesn’t believe I would turn against her.

  “Well, it just so happens I have a new family, too. And my loyalty is to them—not to you.”

  Her eyes are wet green stones in a river. They
frighten me with the love they contain. But now that it is here before me, my heart is ice. After all the years of longing, I don’t want to drink from this river after all.

  “I could lose my son, Mila. It’s true—everything you think of me—I abandoned you, and let you be raised by a cruel man. A sick man. And yes, a man ended up in prison because of my mistake. But never, not for one hour, or one heartbeat, have I been free of what I’ve done. Do you want to know how desperate I was?” She picks up a knife from an adjacent table, and puts it to her wrist, teasing the skin with the serrated blade. It leaves a visible scratch.

  I seize her trembling hand. “Mommy—” And suddenly, the tough chica is gone and I am a little girl, running from the bus, my long braid flying behind me as I chased a mother I could never catch. Mommy!

  I put my head in my hands, remembering the sound of her body hitting the floor, the darkness in my head the night the same thing happened to me.

  “I had no choice,” she repeats. “Do you see that now? If there had been another way, any other way—”

  “But who hurt you in that motel room? The only fingerprints they found were yours and Gus’s? They said you lost so much blood. How did you survive?”

  “I told you I will answer all your questions,” Ava says, looking around anxiously. “But not here in this restaurant. Not now.”

  “At least, tell me how you got away. You were badly hurt. You must have had help.” But even before she answers, I know. She didn’t meet her husband after she left. Her new life, the one that excluded me, began before she ever left the castle, long before she kissed me goodbye for the final time.

  “My father was right. You did have a boyfriend.”

  She lowers her head, reaching for the long curtain of hair that used to hide her face, but there is nothing to shield her.

  “I was already pregnant, Mila. Now do you understand why I had to go? My husband arranged everything. He’d already gotten me a new identity, a driver’s license, everything I needed to become Cassandra Grayson.”

  “And then you found Gus. You knew how easy it would be for people to believe that it was just history repeating himself. He was just like his father.”

  “I knew nothing about that,” she insists so forcefully that a couple across the room turns to stare. “The night I went to him I was telling the truth. What I wanted—the only thing I wanted—was someone to look out for you after I was gone. If you believe nothing else, you have to know that is true.”

  Strangely, in spite of everything, I do believe her. “So when did you find out? Before you accused him of assault? Or after.”

  She looks down defeatedly. “I didn’t know when I told the police that terrible lie; I had no idea, but after the arrest, people began to talk about his past . . . I felt so terrible, but what could I do at that point? We had to go forward. Robert’s suspicions—and his rage—they were growing every day. He hurt me so badly that last time, Mila . . . It was a miracle my baby survived, or that I did. If I had any hope of getting away, your father had to believe I was dead.”

  “Were you in love?” I ask, though it comes out more like an accusation than a question.

  “It was the last thing I expected, the last thing I wanted, really, but when I met my husband, everything changed for me. For both of us. We were two people who shared so much. The same passions. The same disappointments. He had given up on the idea of ever being happy, too. I know it’s hard for you to understand, Mila, but everyone has a right to love. Some people would even call it a duty.”

  “What about your duty to me?” I blurt out.

  “I had a choice to make, a decision I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” she says, defiantly pushing her cell phone closer to me. “Now it’s your turn, Mila. Call your Hallie. The police. Whatever will help to ease your bitterness.”

  The move throws me off balance. “What will they do to you?” I say, my voice embarrassingly small.

  “Whatever it is, it’s less than I deserve. We both know that.”

  I stare at the phone and freeze. Then I shove it in her direction, upsetting my cranberry juice as I get up and run. It seeps into the wood floor, just like I imagine my mother’s blood spreading across the motel room all those years ago.

  Chapter 39

  Driving toward Ptown, I’ve never felt more lost. How can I even think about going back to Hallie’s house after what I just did? I let her go. I could have reached for the cell phone and made the call that would free Gus, and I didn’t. Instead, I gave Dead Mom a chance to go back to the Sandbar, pack up as quickly as she came, and get away.

  When I reach the stretch they used to call Helltown Road, I’m not crying; I’m wailing. Not the kind of wordless howl my father set loose when he first heard she was dead, the fearsome keening I still hear in my dreams. No, my wail takes the form of a word. One word echoing in the confines of the car where for years I swore I could still smell her perfume: Mommy! Mawwwmeeee!

  But the Mommy I’ve been holding on to is deader than everyone who knew her as Ava Cilento thought she was. Though I was just a little kid, I knew how much she’d been hurt; I experienced her fear right down to my spindly little skeleton. But somehow I always believed her love was stronger than anything the Bug could do to her. The way a mother’s love is supposed to be. Knowing that hers just wasn’t is like losing her all over again.

  When all I’ve got left are those little hiccuppy whimpers, I park the car and walk to the beach. The beach that Gus loved more than any place else on earth. The beach he’s unlikely to ever see again. And though I know it won’t help, I whisper, I’m sorry. At first, I’m talking to Gus. Then, before I know it, I’m breathing apologies to everything in sight. I’m sorry to the dunes and to the gulls; I’m sorry to the dark-blue waters, to the wind, and to the shiny stones beneath my feet.

  I even say I’m sorry to the broken green beer bottle that the waves will pound into sea glass. Looking at the shards, I realize why I’m apologizing to the whole world: because they will be transformed into something beautiful, but right now it looks as if nothing can ever change or forgive the crime my mother committed against Gus. The crime that became my own when I couldn’t pick up the phone.

  How long did I spend at the beach? Honestly, it was one of those pieces of time that is impossible to measure. It might have been an hour, but it felt like my whole life fit neatly inside it.

  Even before I get to the Sandbar, I know it’s too late. There are two cars in the parking lot. One SUV outside the office that I assume belongs to the manager, and another car with North Carolina plates. But what hits me is not the emptiness of the parking lot, which is pretty predictable at this time of year, but the utter desolation of the place. It reminds me of the squat, forlorn building with the grinning dolphin out front. The place where the former Ava Cilento staged her death. I wonder she would choose to stay in such a dump.

  “I’m looking for a woman by the name of Cassandra Grayson,” I say when I approach the desk.

  There’s a TV and an Xbox behind it, and the so-called clerk is seriously lost in some mindless mayhem.

  “Grayson?” he says, not even looking up. “I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so either,” I say, more to myself than to him. Did I really think she would register under her own name? For that matter, do I believe she’s told me her true name even now? “But I need you to check.”

  This time, he pauses the game and looks me up and down, taking my whole ruined life in with one quick glance: the mascara streaking my face, my punk haircut restyled by the wind, the crazy grief that’s got to be etched all over me. “Are you okay?” he says.

  “Listen, this is a police matter. I need you to check your computer and see if you have a Ms. Grayson registered here.”

  “You expect me to believe you’re some kind of cop?” He gives up a stifled guffaw. For the first time, he seems to have forgotten his game.

  “Did I say I was a cop? What I said was that this was a police matt
er. And a serious one. So if you wouldn’t mind checking your computer—”

  Once again, the guy seriously annoys me by breaking into a laugh. “Listen, hon, this is a family-run operation. We don’t even have a computer. I’ve got an old-fashioned log book; and I can tell you right now, there’s no one by the name of Grayson staying here.”

  “Anyone from California?” I ask, though I can tell he already hears the hopelessness in my voice. If Ava, or Cassandra, or whoever she is now, had been here, I’m sure she was driving a rented car with no out-of-state plates to call attention to her.

  “Nope.” At that point, the guy is clearly losing interest and eager to get back to his game. “You want a little advice? If this is really a police matter, maybe you should let them handle it.”

  “Thanks. Now you want to get that log book of yours out? I need to see it.”

  He reddens, and I’m starting to think that maybe I’ve aggravated him even more than he did me. “Listen, there’s such a thing as privacy laws and—” he begins. But then he notices how desperate I am.

  So I play it. “She’s my mom,” I say, tears springing into my eyes on cue. “She and my dad had this huge fight a couple of days ago, and I think she’s been staying here. I’m really worried about her.”

  It would have been easy just to describe her. A stunning woman with a platinum cap of hair and an indescribable air of fragile elegance would be instantly remembered, but I need to see that book. Need to see the name she used, and what she gave as an address. Or maybe I just need to see her signature, the familiar handwriting that is both delicate and aggressive.

  As soon as I open the book, it jumps out at me. But what really sends me reeling is not this visible proof that she was here, not even the evidence that she checked out two hours earlier—just as I’d known she would. She may have pushed the phone at me and urged me to call the police in a dramatic moment, but once she had time to think, self-preservation would rule just like it always has. What gets to me is the name she registered under: Mila Cilento. Against my will, the shaking starts again.