The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel

by Patry Francis

  “What?”

  “Pretend we’re something we’re not.”

  Gently, he sets the pan on the counter, as if he’s afraid it might break. Or maybe he’s just afraid he might slam it down if he doesn’t maintain every ounce of self-restraint. “What do you want, Mila? Why did you come here?”

  “I suppose you’ve read today’s paper.” I look down, concentrating on my tea.

  “I read the paper every day,” the Bug responds nonchalantly. But when he lifts his teacup, his hands are unsteady.

  It isn’t till we’re seated at the table that he acknowledges what I told the police. “So you have some idea that your mother’s alive.”

  “It’s not some idea. I met her in Wellfleet less than a week ago, Dad. She was as close to me as you are right now.” I remember the green river of her eyes.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve seen her, Mila. You were only six when—”

  “Jesus, she’s my mother,” I snap. “If I hadn’t seen her for a hundred years, I’d know her. I can’t believe you didn’t call me when you read about it.”

  The Bug’s eyes are morose and dark behind his glasses. “Ten years ago—even five—the possibility that she was alive would have driven me to God knows what. But now, ever since that day when I—” He stops and sips his tea, apparently about to let that sentence dangle into eternity.

  Stella whimpers in her sleep, disrupting the silence.

  Though I know he is alluding to the day he punched me in the face, I ask, “What day, Dad?” I’m hoping that just maybe we can talk about it. Exorcise it.

  But when my father removes his glasses and stares at me through those hooded eyes, I know it’s not going to happen. “I’m glad she got away from me,” he says, his voice drained of passion. “I only wish she took you with her.”

  “That wouldn’t have fit in with her plan. Besides, you would have never let us go.”

  “Children weren’t part of my plan. Ava knew that, but she wouldn’t give up the idea. It was the only thing she—” He lets his sentence drift until it collapses: “I’m sorry, Mila.”

  I’m sorry. Two words that are supposed to compensate for the morose years I spent in the Castle, for the flash of light that sent me spinning across the room and left me without my front teeth, for the memories of my mother being beaten in the next room. Suddenly, the life I lived and finally escaped is in my throat like dust and I’m choking.

  I jump up abruptly. “I’ve got to go. Thanks for the tea.”

  The Bug makes no move to stop me. He just sits there, nodding at his cup, at a particularly fascinating piece of lint on his bathrobe, at the cold stone floor. But when I reach the door, I hear him calling after me. “Mila!”

  I stop, but don’t turn to face him.

  “You know the worst part? I was raised in the Church, too, and in some way it never leaves you. But I was so convinced it was that priest; I blamed God—and then I started to hate Him.”

  “No, Dad, that’s not the worst thing.” As I turn around, I’m enraged that he seems to be making this about him. “The worst thing is that a man’s been sitting in prison for over ten years now. Not just an innocent man, but an incredibly good one.”

  “It’s still hard to believe,” he continues, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Not just because he was seen outside a bar with her or even that he was there that day in the motel. I suspected him long before that. There were dozens of calls to his number on her phone bill.”

  “All part of the setup. She never even spoke during those calls. Just created a record,” I say, figuring it out as I go. “And as far as the motel goes, think about it, Dad. If the local priest was having an affair with a parishioner’s wife, do you really think he’d take her to a place a couple of miles from the rectory?”

  “That was a reckless move, but they only went there once when—when she tried to break up with him. He was desperate.” It’s a story he’s told himself for so long, he obviously can’t let it go.

  “So where do you think they went before that? There was nowhere in town where Gus wouldn’t be recognized.”

  “That’s why he took her to a quieter town where he’d be less likely to be seen, where no one knew her. Not his hometown, but somewhere close to that.”

  He doesn’t sound like he’s speculating. “What are you saying?”

  “Ava had a credit card and a post-office box. She thought I didn’t know about it. But of course I did. She could hide nothing from me. Almost all the charges were made in the same town.”

  If I were a dog, my head would be cocked to the side the way Stella’s is when she’s confused. I’m so shocked I can’t even utter the word that is screaming in my head: Where?

  “Wellfleet. That summer, while I was at work, she slipped off to meet him there three or four times a week.”

  I shudder, thinking of how she’d also stayed there in her recent visit. Even when she met me, she was probably mooning over her putrid love affair.

  “But what about me? Where was I when this was happening?” I wonder out loud, feeling abandoned all over again.

  “There was a full-time nanny in the house, of course. Your mother paid her not to tell me when she went out.”

  “But you knew anyway?”

  “Unfortunately, Crystal’s loyalty belonged to the highest bidder. Your mother gave away her trust foolishly—first to Crystal, and then to that priest.”

  Crystal. The name brings back the memory of plump, freckled fingers tugging my hair into a braid. Just that and nothing more, but it’s enough to trigger an ancient revulsion. She may have duped both my parents, but, obviously, six-year-old me knew what she was about.

  “And the post-office box—Crystal told you about that, too?”

  The Bug nods. “I got the bill before she did. There were charges from a package store on Route 6, numerous visits to a tawdry motel like the one she died in, and meals for two—all take-out from a place in Provincetown. I figured someone Gus knew delivered it. How else would they convince the driver to come that far?” He looks at me as if I could provide an answer—both to that mundane question, and to the deeper one: How could it be anyone but Gus?

  And though the Cape was undoubtedly swarming with tourists at that time of year, I don’t have an answer, either.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have those old bills?” I ask, already knowing what the response will be. When it came to Ava, the Bug saved everything—even, or maybe especially, the items that caused him the most misery. I wonder how many times he pulled out this tangible record of her duplicity and festered in his rage. And I wonder how many times he took it out on me.

  Without a word, the Bugman disappears up the wide marble staircase. He’s gone so long I sit down on the cold floor, leaning against the door. Stella falls asleep in my lap. We’re in the same position when he finally returns, holding an envelope. His face is dark with the moth-eaten shame of her betrayal. A shame that predictably morphs into anger.

  “Why would you want to look at this?” It sounds like an accusation.

  And the sorry truth is that at that moment, I don’t. The details of the affair that ended with my abandonment in the Dismal Kingdom, and Gus’s heart-shaped tattoo, already feel like pinpricks on my skin. But Hallie’s voice is so deep in my head—or in my heart—that there’s no escaping it: When there’s a choice, always do the brave thing.

  “You should have turned this over to the police during the investigation,” I tell him as I reach for it.

  “The police already had plenty of evidence. They didn’t need further proof of my humiliation.” The Bug’s fury is so concrete it feels like a buzzing in my head, and the word—humiliation—raises the noise several decibels.

  I pull out the thin piece of paper and wince when I see that the “tawdry” motel the Bug referred to was the Sandbar. Why am I not surprised? Obviously, my mother has been tempting fate for a decade. Why not return and revel in the scene of her crime?

  But then
something else jumps out at me so powerfully that my eyes blur: I count seven charges to the Wellfleet Theater. Always one ticket.

  “You didn’t say anything about theater tickets?” I say as calmly as I can.

  The Bug’s face is an interesting shade of purple. “It’s obviously where they met.” He leans down to grab the bill from my hand, his eyes bulging as if he’s reliving the discovery. Then he shakes the deadly piece of paper so close to my face I feel a harsh wind. “The very first charge was to the theater!”

  Instantly awake, Stella whines to get out of the Castle and I’m desperate to be gone, too. Away from the oppressive air, and the Bug’s escalating rage. My head hurts from thinking, but I can’t leave. Not yet.

  “But why did she only buy one ticket?” I wonder aloud, talking more to myself or the all-consuming emptiness of the Castle than to the Bug.

  “What?” the Bug blinks as if he’s just awakened from a decade of sleep. And maybe he has.

  “It looks like she bought wine and dinner for two, but every time she went to the theater, she went alone. It doesn’t make sense. Unless—”

  The Bug is so mystified that for a minute he forgets to be angry. “Unless what? Maybe the cheapskate bought his own ticket, but not hers.” It might even have been a “moment” for us, a chance for father and daughter to go over the facts that devastated our family. Maybe even to heal. But all I can think of is Hallie. And Gus.

  When it hits me, I leap up so quickly I stun the Bug. “Or maybe he didn’t need to buy a ticket. Did you ever think of that?” The phrase that Gus yelled in the prison is coming in increasingly handy, though this time it definitely needs an embellishment. “Holy fucking shit, Dad!”

  The Bug, who clearly has no idea what I’m thinking, mumbles something about not cursing. Not in his house. Meanwhile, Stella has caught my excitement and is doing her trademark triple spin and barking joyously.

  Is it really possible? I think, beginning to doubt myself. I want to snag the bill from my dad’s greedy hands, but he is clutching it so hard his knuckles blanch, and he’s looking even more Bug-eyed as he pores over the items to see what he missed. And what I saw. What I’m seeing.

  Unfortunately, what I’m seeing is not on the bill. Not in the Castle at all. It’s one of the photographs Hallie has tacked on the bulletin board in the kitchen. In it, she and her ex-husband loop arms with a third man in front of a small, unimpressive-looking building near the harbor. THE WELLFLEET THEATER.

  The third man is Neil Gallagher. When I asked about the photo, Hallie told me he had acted in a long-running play that summer. I’m trying to piece together other things I’ve heard, and I’m almost sure he left the East Coast right after the trial—just months after my mother disappeared. Of course, my rational side and the Bug’s dubious expression are already making me doubt myself. What does any of that actually prove? Couldn’t Neil’s move be a coincidence, and Ava’s presence at the playhouse only further incriminate Gus? As Neil’s friend, he almost surely attended the play that summer. But seven times?

  The chaplain’s log, which Jack had held on to all these years, listed all the evenings when Gus had been called to the hospital for an emergency. “There’s no way Gus could have had an affair—especially that summer, when it supposedly started,” he’d said whenever the subject came up. “The assistant chaplain had heart surgery in June and Gus was on call almost all the time for emergencies. As someone who had their sleep disrupted almost every night, I remember.”

  But it’s something else that finally convinces me. Something only I know. Something that, for me, obliterates all doubts. It’s the way Neil looked at me when he visited Hallie last summer. There was something about his expression that felt queasily familiar. Not because I’d met Neil before, but because I’d seen that expression on other faces. It was the same wary, surreptitious glance I got from the Bug’s sporadic girlfriends. The twisted-up smile of someone sizing up an adversary. The barely concealed glare of someone who knew I had a claim on a heart they wanted to own.

  “God, Mila, what’s wrong with you?” the Bug mutters, looking more confused—and older—in his ratty bathrobe. I almost wish I had time to explain, even to stay for breakfast like he wanted me to do. But I have to get home and talk to Hallie. Now! I’m so delirious and scared that I actually kiss my dad on the cheek, which freaks us both out. Then, before he can stop me, I grab his precious relic, stuff it in my pocket, and dash out the door with the frenzied Stella leaping at my heels.

  When I look back, I see the Bug standing in shadows behind the glass door, his hand clapped onto the cheek where I kissed him. As if it were a wound.

  But I’ve already left him behind. I’m on that highway, racing toward Provincetown. I’m bursting into the house with the purple door that’s already filling up with the inevitable visitors who usually wander in on Saturday. And even though I know it would be better to wait till the guests leave to tell Hallie, I’m pulling her outside onto the back deck. And there, with her beautiful bay shining in the background, I’m shaking and crying as I tell her the truth that just might free Gus Silva.

  Chapter 44

  As exasperating as he can be at times, there are three things I love about Lunes Oliveira:

  1. He knows how hot he is, but somehow it hasn’t ruined him.

  2. No matter when you call him, he’ll tell you how crazy busy he is. What, did you expect him to just drop everything and be there? Then he will.

  3. He’s got a laugh that can make the house shake, and I doubt he’s ever had a day so bleak that he hasn’t used it at least once.

  He was in Truro with his boys when Hallie called and told him we had something. Something important, she’d added, trying to keep the elation out of her voice and failing. Immediately, he launched into his spiel: this was his home she’d reached, not his office, in case she didn’t know, so if she wasn’t calling to ask for a date . . .

  Then, abruptly, he stopped. “Something important? Really?”

  Though he ended by telling her to come by the office on Monday, Hallie starts grinding his favorite coffee beans as soon as they hung up. By the time the coffee had brewed, Lunes walked through the door, in a pair of jeans and a cream-colored parka that emphasized the rich color of his skin.

  “Coffee? You’ve got to be kidding, right? You think I gave up time with my kids to sit around and drink coffee?” But even as he’s objecting, he’s pulling a mug from the cupboard and pouring himself a cup. “All I can say is this better be good.”

  He kisses me on the cheek like a favorite niece. “If you could give us a little time, sweetie, your stepmom and I have some business here.”

  Like I said, I have a minor crush on Lunes, and I love it when he calls Hallie my stepmom, as if a court or somebody official said that we belonged to each other legally and forever. But there’s no way I am going to disappear. Hallie and I speak at once—reminding him that their so-called business concerned my mother. My past. My life.

  Lunes puts up his hands in surrender. “This is starting to remind me of my mom’s kitchen. Can’t walk in the door without three women talkin’ at me all at the same time. If it’s not my mother and my sisters, it’s a couple of aunts and my bossy cousin Nicole.”

  “This could be it, Lunes,” Hallie says.

  “It?” Lunes raises his eyebrows, as if he didn’t know what she meant.

  I see her fingering something in her pocket, and I know what it is. The Visa bill. The evidence. Our flimsy piece of hope.

  “Okay, you’ve got my attention.” Lunes sits across from her at the table in what used to be Nick’s seat.

  I’m between them as Hallie starts to speak. For the next ten minutes, Lunes’s eyes flicker from her to me as we tell the story together, her picking up a thread, and then passing it to me until we’ve sewn up the taut, implausible theory that we’re convinced will free Gus. By the time we’re finished Hallie’s sprawling house is too small for Lunes. He is up and pacing from room to room. And ev
ery now and then we hear him emit a loud “Goddamn!” or a quieter “But what about . . .”

  A few minutes later, he leans against the doorway. “You know what’s really insane? I almost bought your story—and probably for the same reason you knuckleheads believed it. Because I want to. But there’s one little detail that keeps getting in the way.”

  Hallie and I wait for him to continue.

  “Ava Cilento is dead.” He looks in my direction as if he just gave me the bad news. “I don’t know who came and met you at the Oyster, Mila, but it wasn’t your mother. Maybe the Ptown police and some reporter from the Cape Cod Times bought your story, but they weren’t in the courtroom. They didn’t see the crime-scene photos. An estimated four quarts of blood were spilled in that motel. Her DNA. I’m sorry, Mila, but no one walks away from something like that.”

  “Not unless someone with a rudimentary knowledge of phlebotomy and a proper place to store the blood had been systematically drawing her blood weeks in advance,” Hallie says. “It just so happens Neil’s brother Liam was working the night shift in the ER—”

  “Whoa. Whoa,” Lunes interrupts. “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound? In fact, I’m glad you told this little story of yours to me. Anyone else would have the two of you in straitjackets by now.” But in spite of his words, a match is struck behind his eyes, and in a minute he’s pacing again.

  “Liam Gallagher is a doctor. Why would he risk—” he begins.

  “He believed he was saving a woman’s life, Lunes,” Hallie answers. “And maybe his brother’s life, too. Obviously, everything was falling apart for Neil in New York. He was almost as desperate for a new start as Ava was.”

  “But Ava was in California, right? I mean she had to be. She couldn’t have been flying across the country to pick up her mail. And you talked to Neil in Chicago on a regular basis, right? You had an address for him?”

  Lunes sinks into a chair, rubs his eyes, and answers his own question before Hallie has a chance to speak. “Don’t tell me. All you had was a post-office box, and every time you talked to him, it was on a cell phone. The man could have been anywhere.”