The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel

by Patry Francis

  “What a twisted interpretation of something that was meant to be innocent and good. You have no right to even talk about it.”

  “I have every right. Neil is my husband,” Ava yells, briefly attracting the attention of the guard. “I’ve lived with the consequences of your blindness for the last ten years.”

  “If I was blind, or if Gus was, it was only because Neil was so good at hiding his dark side. You, on the other hand, were obviously aware of it from the start. Why don’t we talk about what he did out of love for you?”

  At that, Ava emits a caustic sound from her throat. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s a kind of choked laughter. Now that the focus had turned to her marriage, the present, she seems distinctly uncomfortable. “Neil has obsessions, not loves. And, yes, for a while I was one of them. But as I said, I never had the power over him that you did. Or the good Father. Him above all.”

  Ava gets up and shivers like she is cold. She begins to pace in circles around the little room, which arouses the guard’s attention. But she doesn’t seem to notice or care.

  “Did you ever wonder how we met—your Neil and me?” she asks stopping abruptly. “I mean—think of the unlikelihood of it. A scared, reclusive wife, living in a coastal town, and a gregarious actor from New York. Fun-loving. Wasn’t that the adjective most used to describe him? What on God’s earth would such a man want with someone like me?”

  “You went to see one of his plays in Wellfleet. Maybe you ran into him somewhere afterwards. Obviously, you’re an attractive woman.”

  “The playhouse was an hour away, and you have no idea how constricted my life was. You remember, Milena,” she says to me, though her eyes remain on Hallie. “I could scarcely take my child to the beach without arousing Robert’s suspicion, much less wander off to the bohemian end of the Cape, as he called it. But that summer something happened inside me. That summer I was free in spite of him. Love did that for me—but not the love you think. Before I met Neil, there was someone else.”

  Hallie refuses to ask the question my mother is leading her toward. When she fingers her keys, I think we might escape relatively unscathed. But never one to back down, she clatters the keys on the table like a challenge. “Go ahead.”

  “I met Gus first. It was such a desperate time for me. The only hope I had was a vial of sleeping tablets I’d hidden in my closet. I counted them every morning, waiting for nothing, hoping for nothing but the day when I would have the courage to use them.”

  “You didn’t even know Gus; he told us that himself,” I interrupt, trying to forget the day I found that vial of sleeping pills. I was nine—surely old enough to know better, but I was hungry for anything that was hers. I can still remember the bitter taste of the pill I tested on my tongue.

  But Ava is so focused on Hallie she doesn’t hear me. “Robert and I had fought—argued, as he called it—the morning I first walked into Gus’s church. I don’t know what started it—I almost never did—but it was bad. When it was over, my eye was swollen shut; and my side hurt so much I could hardly breathe.”

  “A fractured rib,” Hallie muttered.

  Without answering, Ava continues. “When he began to dress for work, I ran to the bathroom and turned on the light. I had a secret fascination with my injuries. My scars. They were how I measured my life’s progress. Worse than last time. Much worse. Almost there, I thought. You don’t know how much I wanted to die.

  “But this time, Robert followed me. He was so furious when he saw my face in the mirror; I thought he would hit me again—especially when he shut the door. ‘You always have to push me, don’t you, Ava? There’s no way you can go to Mila’s school play looking like that, and what about the wine tasting on Friday? I’ll have to come up with some excuse for you—again.’ I can still see his eyes, the way he shook his head in disgust.”

  “Then you apologized,” I whisper. “He hurt you so bad, he could have killed you, and you apologized. Why would you do that?”

  “You heard that, Mila? My God, you knew?”

  “Of course, I knew. I followed you. I cried when you couldn’t. I was standing in the hallway when he yelled at you for what he’d done. Your voice was so small, but it felt like a jackhammer to my heart. Why would you say you were sorry?”Ava lowers her head, revealing the vulnerable whiteness of her neck. “I pray to God that you will never understand the answer to that question. I apologized because this man—your father—had convinced me that I was wrong. It wasn’t just what I did that was wrong. Or what I said. I was wrong, Mila. Every breath I took.”

  She almost looks afraid, as if she’s still trapped in that bathroom, in her terror. “Do you remember his radio?” she asks.

  I’m ashamed that this woman still has the power to draw tears from me. “He turned it on whenever you fought—always to a news station. He was so afraid that someone might hear the truth of who he was. What went on in that house. Even now, I still can’t listen to radio news.”

  “Neither can I,” my mother admits.

  Then she turns back to Hallie. “That morning, the announcer was talking about a storm—a n’oreaster he called it, high winds, heavy rain. People were advised to stay off the beaches. I can’t tell you the joy I felt. Not just relief, Doctor, but real joy. Fortunately, Robert always left for work at dawn, and even earlier when I provoked him.

  “ ‘You won’t want to go outside looking like that,’ he said before he left. And, yes, I think I said I was sorry again. Sorry for my bruised face, for the pain in my side that is with me to this day in certain weather. Sorry that I was an affront to all the good people who shouldn’t have to look at lives like mine. Who didn’t want to see it. As it turned out, when Robert left the house, it was the last time he would ever have power over me.

  “It was still dark and so wild when I reached the beach, but I didn’t care. I got out and walked against the wind toward the water. My plan—if you could call it that—was to dive into the ocean and swim until I couldn’t go any further. But as soon as I felt the undertow at my ankles, I knew I couldn’t do it.”

  “If only you had,” Hallie can’t keep from saying, making me understand why she didn’t want me to be there.

  “Not until I found someone to look after Mila,” Ava continues, ignoring Hallie’s words. “Someone who would make sure my daughter would not become my replacement.”

  “But you didn’t go to the rectory and ask for Gus’s help until a year later. Are you really trying to tell me you met him before that night? Because that’s impossible.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. That was not the first time.” Ava’s eyes remain closed, as if to lock Hallie and me out of the private story that is unfolding in her head. “I had no faith left, none; in fact, I hated the Church. But the morning of the storm I was so desperate. I could think of nowhere else to go. I don’t know why—perhaps, I thought I would find something I had lost when I was a little girl. A remnant of innocence. Some sense of goodness and light.

  “It was so early, I never expected anyone would be there. I thought the door would be locked, the church empty.”

  “But it wasn’t.” The resignation in Hallie’s voice breaks my heart.

  “Do you want to know the strangest thing? Just the way the light came through the windows, that certain hush, I felt like I was at home in my little chapel in Bratislava. I felt like a child again.”

  “And Gus—”

  “The Father was on the altar, saying mass. Saying it for no one but himself and his God. Honestly, my first thought was: What’s wrong with him? He was so handsome, so young. I couldn’t fathom why he would choose such a life. But he performed his ritual with such reverence, such—there’s no other word for it, love—it became obvious. Just the sight of him filled me with shame. To this day, I can’t explain it. I wanted to run away from it, but I couldn’t. I was transfixed.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  Ava shakes her head. “When he went into the sanctuary, I left
. Then I went out into my car and cried.”

  “You say you had no faith. Why would you be so moved?”

  “I wept because I had betrayed everything that was good. Because I was so filled with darkness. I cried because I loved nothing and no one but my daughter. And what good did my love do her? I was too weak to protect anyone—even myself.”

  “So you went back to look for him,” Hallie says, and it is not a question.

  “Every day at the same time. At first I hid in the candle room like I had the first day, and watched him say his private mass. But one day I dropped my bag, and he stopped. He looked back to see if anyone was there. After that, I waited outside on the street. The man’s habits were so predictable. He said his mass, and then he went to the beach to run with his dogs, and, finally, winter or summer, he pulled off his shirt and swam in the ocean.”

  “You stalked him. If you can’t tell the truth to me, at least stop lying to yourself.”

  Ava shrugs. “Call it what you wish. I stalked. I spied. I followed. To me, it was something else: I loved. For the first time since I came to America, I loved.”

  Every word my mother speaks seems to make Hallie more incensed. “You never even spoke to him. How could you say you loved him?”

  “That’s right. I never spoke. I never wanted anything from him like you did, or like Neil did. Nothing but a chance to see him with his dogs, to hear the words he said in the church. To be reminded that there are such people in this foul world.”

  “That explains one thing. Gus always said that from the first time you came to the rectory, he felt as if he knew you. He even checked the records at the hospital to see if you’d been a patient. Did you go to Sunday mass, too?”

  “Only once with Mila and her father. It was torture. Robert played at piety, but he sat there like a blind man in his polished shoes. He saw nothing. He heard nothing. Little did he know how that day would change all our lives. When we passed the priest, I heard him tell someone he was going to a play in Wellfleet that afternoon. His friend was in it,” he said. He even bragged about his name, as if he was famous. Neil Gallagher.”

  Hallie looks at her skeptically. “But you said you weren’t allowed to go anywhere on your own. How did you get away?”

  “I just went—like free people do, like women who are not married to madmen do. I didn’t care anymore. I took the credit card I had applied for but never used, then I got in my car and drove down Route 6 and bought a ticket. The only thing that mattered to me was seeing the Father, watching him in his ordinary clothes, blending in with the crowd. I even had a glass of wine during the intermission. Beginning that afternoon, I no longer belonged to Robert. I belonged to myself. I knew I would pay with my life for it, but I didn’t care.”

  “So Gus recognized you during the intermission and introduced you to Neil,” Hallie guesses.

  “No. The priest, your Gus, he was focused on other things. Other people. Sure, he saw me that day. He even smiled at me—but he didn’t remember how he knew me. And before he had time to think about it, Neil came out. Within minutes, they were in the center of a circle. They were laughing, and talking—especially Neil. In all the years we were together, I don’t think I ever saw my husband as happy as he was that day. Even when our son was born.”

  “And Gus?”

  “I could see that something was wrong. In the Father’s world—at the beach or the hospital or in his church, he was always at ease, but not there. Not among his old friends. He watched the exit like I did when I was forced to attend an event with Robert.”

  She pauses a moment before she continues. “After the play, I looked for him, but I knew he was gone. It was as if the light, the sound had been drained from the building. I was so disappointed I didn’t even notice that someone had followed me out to my car.”

  “Neil.”

  Ava nods. “ ‘Excuse me, but I saw you watching my friend in there,’ he said. I’m not a woman who blushes—not at all, but that day I did. ‘You are mistaken,’ I said, climbing into my car and locking the door. But it was useless. It was a hot afternoon and the windows were open. He put his long arms on the roof, leaned into the window, and laughed. ‘When it comes to women checking out my holy friend, I’m never mistaken. Anyway, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s been happening since he was about ten. There’s something just so—I don’t know—tragic—about the guy, don’t you think? So young. So good-looking. So fucking unavailable.’ ”

  “He said that?”

  “There were no masks between my husband and me. Not even then. From the start, we recognized something in each other. I suppose that was why I said yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “When he asked me to go for a drink. Oh, I protested a little at first. ‘I’m a married woman,’ I said. ‘I have to get home and make dinner.’ As soon as I’d said the words, I felt how provincial they probably sounded to a man like Neil. After all, he’d only asked me to share a drink. But instead of laughing at me, he said, ‘I know. You’re a married woman, and obviously an unhappy one, but you haven’t “made dinner” in years—if ever.’ ” He took in things that other people didn’t see. The quality of my haircut. My jewelry.

  “ ‘There’s a little place about a mile from here where we could grab a beer,’ he said. ‘Or if you’d feel more comfortable, we could go to my cottage . . .’ Imagine the audacity. I suppose that was why I agreed—because he was the first man I’d met who was more audacious than Robert.”

  “So you went?” Hallie asks incredulously. “To a stranger’s cottage? You must have been mad.”

  “I was mad; that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Doctor. Mad with fear. Mad with loneliness. Mad with self-hatred. But, no, I didn’t go to the cottage—not that day.

  “I didn’t know his reasons for asking me to the bar, but I had my own. I hoped he might tell me something about the Father. That he would explain why the man who was more at home in the world than anyone I’d ever known, had looked so uncomfortable. Why he had left the theater early.”

  “Did he tell you?”

  Ava shakes her head again. “All we spoke about was my unhappiness. Or rather he spoke. Even though there were no visible bruises on me that day, he saw everything I took such pains to hide. When I asked him how he knew so much about me, he called for the check. He got so quiet I was afraid I’d angered him in some way. But instead of taking me back to my car, he drove down Route 6 in the opposite direction.”

  “And you let him?”

  “I was frightened at that point—frightened of Robert, yes, but probably even more scared of this stranger. ‘I really need to go home. My husband—’ I said.”

  “ ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you home in time to put your apron on and make dinner,’ he teased. We were probably doing eighty, but I grabbed the door handle, and insisted he let me out. Immediately, he pulled into a patch of sand and sea grass.”

  She pauses for a moment, as if considering what would have happened if she had taken the opportunity to get away. “He covered my hand with his and said, ‘I’m sorry. I realize you don’t know me, Ava, but I swear—you can trust me.’ If there was an instant when my life changed, that was it. I hadn’t felt any genuine affection from a man in such a long time. And there was something so intense about him I believed him.”

  Hallie looks away. “My God, I think I know where he took you.”

  “Yes, it was to the cemetery in Provincetown. The same place where you fell in love with Gus.”

  Though the visiting room is overheated, I feel Hallie shiver.

  “At first, I had no idea why he brought me there,” Ava continues. “And then I saw the dates beneath Maria Botelho’s name. She was thirty-one when she died—two years younger than I was.

  “ ‘That’s how I knew,’ Neil said when he saw the flash of light in my eyes. ‘The last time I saw such a quietly desperate woman I was nine years old.’ He took my hand again, this time with a kind of certainty. ‘Let me take care o
f you, Ava.’ You have no idea how hungry I was to hear those words—and to believe them. Little did I know that he was playing the role of a lifetime.”

  Hallie looks confused. “But it was Gus who had promised himself and his mother that he would never allow another woman to be hurt the way she was—not if he could do anything to prevent it. And right there in that spot. Nothing meant more to him. Not even his vows to the Church.”

  “Now you’re beginning to understand. At that moment, my husband was Gus—though it took me years to see it. Believe it or not, we didn’t talk about the Father again for nearly a year. By then, Robert began to suspect there was someone else—and I hadn’t had my period in two months. Then it was three. We had to act.

  “Neil had thought of everything. People he knew in New York helped me to get a new identity. and once the time came, he had a nurse at the hospital draw my blood and store it. We needed enough to convince the police—and especially Robert—that there was no chance I could have survived my injuries.”

  “A nurse? Are you sure it wasn’t Liam?”

  Ava shakes her head. “He would never have agreed. They weren’t close, though Neil did his best to pretend they were. He showed up at the hospital cafeteria almost every day for lunch, making friends with Liam’s colleagues, until he found the right person.”

  “The nurse,” Hallie says. “But I still don’t understand why anyone would—”

  “She was a married woman with three children, and, as you know, Neil can be very charming. There was never even an affair, just a few steamy e-mails and some voice messages. But it was enough.”

  “You mean he threatened her?”

  “He would have ruined her life without blinking an eye. You must know that by now.”

  Hallie gets up and begins to pace, nodding as she absorbs the story. “So after Neil blackmailed her, he sent you to the rectory, where he knew you would find the perfect fall guy. Were you even hurt or was that a lie, too? A little theatrical makeup maybe?”