“I could have told you that the first day you showed up here.” It was the first time Hugo had spoken that day.
Now she stepped off the ladder, rested her hands on her hips, and beheld their accomplishments. “Looks like we’ll be ready to start painting tomorrow.”
“You still planning to paint that door purple?”
“Absolutely. What have you got against purple?”
“It’s supposed to be red,” he muttered, not looking at her.
“I loved Nick’s red door, too, but I’m not him, Hugo. People might as well get used to the idea.”
Hugo peered down the street, apparently wondering if it was too early to stop at the Pilgrims Club for a drink, then began polishing his tools. Hallie admired his meticulousness. “You’re the boss. If you want to quit early, fine with me,” he said, forgetting about the door.
Once she stopped working, Hallie felt the bite of the east wind. She was carrying logs inside to start the fire when she thought of Sam standing in the door at the condo.
“You know what really gets me?” she said to Hugo as he was preparing to leave. “He knew I would come back here and that I’d reopen Nick’s practice. Damn, he probably even knew I’d paint the door purple.”
Hugo laughed acidly before spitting on the sidewalk. “Kind of like my ex. In fact, right about now, Brenda’s probably telling someone I’m about to head over to that bar. One of these days, though, she’s gonna be wrong.”
“You mean you’re going to quit?”
“Nah. I’m just gonna start drinkin’ in another town. I get sick of lookin’ at the same old bastards every night.”
Hallie laughed. “Sam was wrong about one thing though.”
“What was that?”
“He said Gus needed me.”
Hugo’s head snapped sharply in her direction. “Man’s a priest. He ain’t supposed to need anyone. Don’t tell me you’re one of those jailhouse chicks. You know, the kind that get turned on by a man in an orange jumpsuit.”
Hallie shook her head vehemently, clearly exasperated. “I haven’t seen Gus since the trial.”
She could hardly bear to remember the day when she had taken the stand in a defiantly red suit. She had been confident during Lunes’s questioning, and fierce in her defense of Gus when the prosecutor challenged her.
No, Gus had not assaulted her on Race Point, she’d said in a clear, sure voice. It had been an accident.
But as the lawyer paced and raged and pummeled her with his questions, his voice started to feel like the relentless, staccato blows Gus had unleashed on Neil. The flashback didn’t last long—maybe less than a minute—but during that time, she was there on the Point, a terrified eighteen-year-old in a torn blue dress, screaming the words that sometimes still resounded in her dreams. Stop, Gus! Stop before you kill him!
Hallie, who valued honesty above all other virtues, had lied about it in court, even as Gus and Neil looked on. Gus hadn’t attacked Neil, she insisted. It had been a fight, a silly drunken fight, and Neil had been an equal participant in it. She couldn’t even say for certain who had landed the first blow, or which one of the boys had knocked her onto the cement bumper.
From his seat, Neil watched her with an emotionless expression. And then he closed his eyes and nodded, giving his assent.
“Want my advice? Stay the hell away from him,” Hugo said gruffly, tossing a hammer vehemently into his toolbox. “Shit Hallie, I liked Gus Silva as much as anyone else back in the day, but the man went into prison a convicted killer. You think a couple of years in Millette has brought out his better nature?”
“That’s what bothers me, Hugo. I don’t know what it’s done to him. He’s cut off everyone in his life. His friends, even his precious church. The only one who’s seen him is his cousin.”
“Like I say, Gus was a great football player in high school. But nothin’ he’s done since has made a helluva lot of sense to me—starting with the priest thing. Why would you want to—”
“Because he’s a friend, Hugo, and he has been since we were nine years old. Forget all the stuff that happened between us when we were teenagers.”
Hugo snorted. “You really think you can forget that stuff, Hallie? You think he forgot?”
“You’re starting to sound more like my husband every day.”
Hugo flashed a broken-toothed grin. “I don’t suppose that means I get the privileges that go along with the job?”
“Not in this lifetime, buddy,” Hallie grabbed the rag he’d been using to wipe his tools and swatted him before she started inside. “Now get out of here—and don’t be late tomorrow. We’ve got a lot of work to do if we’re going to get this office open by the first of March.”
Inside, Hallie realized she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. She surveyed the contents of her refrigerator. There were almonds and apricots and a bit of sweet bread—enough to pass for a meal. In the cabinet she found an old bottle of Portuguese vinho. She was about to throw it out when she reconsidered. How bad could it be?
The wine was surprisingly dry and good, and the view from her back window always comforted her. The sun hadn’t gone down yet, and through its gray light, she could see the houses on stilts, the wharf, and the boats, bobbing in unpredictable waters. But her eyes were drawn to the narrowing arc of wild land that culminated with the lighthouse. Impulsively, she leaped up, finished her wine as if it were a shot, and grabbed her jacket. There was something she’d been avoiding, but with the office opening so soon, she needed to take care of it now.
She hadn’t seen Alvaro Silva since the encounter in the bakery. His glare had chased her out of town that day, but now that she no longer had a family to protect, she actually looked forward to running into Gus’s cousin. This time, she wouldn’t back down until she got answers to the questions that haunted her, no matter how furiously he reacted. How was Gus? And why didn’t he respond to his friends’ letters? Why had he turned down their requests to visit?
Halfway up Point of Pines Road, she could see that the old Silva place was dark. She opened the iron gate and walked up the narrow stone walkway to the house. When no one answered the door, she took in what was left of the garden Gus’s mother had tended with such love: weeds, trash that had blown in from the street or been dropped there by Alvaro himself, an empty bottle of sambuca, and a large pile of cigarette butts. Hallie sat down on the stoop, inhaled the acrid smell of rotting garbage nearby, and lit a cigarette. She tried to imagine Gus, sitting on these steps as a small boy.
When she was finished with her smoke, she found a scrap of paper and a pencil in her bag and scrawled a terse message asking him to call her.
But she wasn’t surprised when a week passed and she got no response. She and Hugo were hanging her new sign out front, HALLETT COSTA, M.D., INTERNAL MEDICINE, when she brought up the subject.
“I haven’t seen Alvaro Silva around town much. Did he move away or something?” she said as casually as she could.
“Alvaro—leave? There’s about ten people in this town who aren’t goin’ anywhere—even if a tsunami rolls down Commercial Street. One of ’em’s Alvaro, and another one’s me.”
“And who are the other eight?”
“All those lonely nights you spend in that big-ass house, you should have plenty of time to figure that out.” Hugo made a slight adjustment to the sign, and then stood back to study his handiwork.
“Excuse me, but I happen to like being alone.”
“A Portagee who likes bein’ alone? Hah! Creature doesn’t exist. Never see one without seeing six cousins, and probably their grandmother, too.”
“I’m only half Portuguese. Did you ever think I might take after my mother?”
“Nope, I never thought that—and neither did anyone else around here. Except for the blond hair, you’re Nick’s to the bone.” After a moment’s hesitation, Hugo cocked back his head. “What the hell you want with Alvaro Silva anyway?”
Hallie folded her arms across her ches
t. “I just want to talk to him, that’s all,” she said. Then, before she could stop herself, she added, “I went to his house, and it looked unoccupied. I even left a note, but—”
“Shit, Hallie,” Hugo said. “That house has been a dead zone since they carried Maria out the front door in a bag. Why the hell would you want to go over there?”
“So you’re saying Alvaro doesn’t live there anymore?” Ignoring his question—and the image he’d conjured, Hallie’s mind drifted to the trampled fall flowers. Blue mums. Fading hydrangeas.
“From what I hear, he’s got a woman down in Harwich. But he still stops by the house. It’s Silva property, and a damn valuable piece of real estate. I wouldn’t expect him to answer no note, though.”
“Well, if you see him, tell him I want to talk to him, okay?” she called out as she started into the house. Then she turned around in the walkway and spoke in a resolute voice. “And that I’m not going to give up until I do.”
Chapter 29
By the end of April, Felicia was telling callers that Dr. Costa didn’t have an opening for six weeks. Some of the reactions were so loud that Hallie could hear them from across the room. “But you’re not even open yet! How can you be all booked up?” The most common complaint was that the caller had been one of Nick’s very best patients. Didn’t that count for something? If they were really angry, they might also point out that Felicia was a hairstylist, not a secretary. What was she doing working in Dr. Nick’s office?
When that happened, Felicia quickly retorted that this was not Nick’s office, and that she had made a career change—if it’s any of your business. Unless they were particularly rude, or had done her or any of her family wrong in some way over the years, she waited till after she hung up to add that last bit.
Once the office opened, the days were long and full; and when word got out that Hallie never turned anyone away, regardless of their ability to pay, people started to come from as far away as Yarmouth.
Hallie was seeing her last patient of the day when the nurse she’d added to the practice knocked on the door of the examining room. Paolo was a recent transplant, who’d come to Provincetown for vacation and fallen in love with a man who owned a gallery down the street.
“Felicia says someone’s here to see you. A personal matter.”
“Well, tell her I’ll be finished here in about fifteen minutes,” Hallie said, galled by the interruption. The man in her exam room had come all the way from Orleans with a serious case of emphysema. Then, out of curiosity, she asked, “Is it a patient?”
“I don’t think so. Some guy named Alvaro Silva. Says it’s important.”
Hallie felt a flutter of nervousness, wondering if he was finally ready to give her some news of Gus, but she hid it under her usual professional calm. “Tell him not to leave,” she said.
However, by the time she had finished with the patient, there was no one in the office but Paolo and Felicia. Paolo looked oddly nervous, while Felicia covered her mouth and suppressed a grin.
“So where is he? Didn’t want to wait?” Hallie said as she dropped her new patient’s file on the desk. “I thought it was important.”
“He was gone by the time I came out of the examining room,” Paolo said.
“But he left you a little present,” Felicia added. “Two of them, actually.”
They both pointed in the direction of the front porch. Hallie cautiously opened the door. At first, she didn’t notice anything unusual, but then she spotted them, tied to the gate: two of the most forlorn-looking animals she’d ever seen.
Puzzled, she turned back to her friends.
“Gus’s dogs,” they said simultaneously.
“What?” Hallie said, trying to avoid the dogs’ plaintive eyes. “Well, they’re going to the pound. I don’t have time for a dog, let alone two.” Then she eyed the larger one and something broke inside her. “You don’t look very healthy either, do you, girl.” She stepped forward to stroke her ears.
“I’ll make an appointment with the vet,” Felicia offered.
“Oh, and Hallie? One more thing. Apparently there’s someone who has visitation rights to these mutts. Alvaro said to expect the girl every other Sunday, precisely at two.”
Visitors were never a problem at Hallie’s house because, like her father before her, she favored meal-in-a-pot type concoctions like chili or curries that would serve guests if someone stopped in, or keep for a day or two if they didn’t. On the first Sunday that Julia Perez showed up, it was a particularly festive gathering. Stuart was there with a new friend bearing a chocolate raspberry torte for dessert, as well as Buddy, Felicia, and Felicia’s mother, Luanne. Hallie’s third cousin, Tony, who’d recently moved to town and was thinking of opening a café, was in charge of the CD player. He started with Chuck Berry, and moved on to Alicia Keys, but it was his Brazilian sambas that got everyone to their feet, hips swaying. Lunes Oliveira had stopped over just when the dancing began, and once he got a whiff of the fragrant smells coming from the kitchen, it hadn’t taken much to convince him to stay.
“Obviously, your intention from the start,” Buddy said, eyeing Lunes with inebriated pomposity. “What, may I ask, is your interest in my niece, anyway?”
Hallie wanted to remind him that he wasn’t exactly her uncle—as Nick had once done—but it was too late for that. Instead, she just shrugged in Lunes’s direction, as she poured him a glass of wine. “You better be careful. My uncle’s watching you.”
“And I’m watching you,” Lunes said, as he pulled her to her feet for a samba. Since that first antagonistic visit, he dropped in whenever one of his two boys, age eight and ten, had a game or a practice in town. Hallie saw a different side of him when he was with them, and she had even attended a couple of the boys’ Little League games with him in the spring. But when he hinted about going on a “grown-up date—you know the kind that involves wine and dinner and maybe even a kiss on the cheek at the end,” she had demurred.
“God, Lunes. The ink’s hardly dry on my divorce papers.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to say yes, but at least be honest. The ex has nothing to do with it.” Lunes smiled in a way that reminded her why she had initially found him so annoying. “Anyway, I was just throwing it out there. If you ever get over your pining, give me a call.”
Hallie had slammed the door, and avoided him for weeks, but to her surprise, she missed his friendship. She also missed the boys, who tore through the house, trailing sand everywhere and lured her and Lunes outside to throw a football on the beach.
Julia seemed uncomfortable from the moment she entered the room. Within the first five minutes, she’d declined an offer to dance with Lunes’s ten-year-old son, a plate of scallops with bacon pressed on her by Felicia, and an illegal drink from Uncle Buddy.
“I’m just here to see the dogs,” she said, nervously studying the floor. Hallie wondered how such an introvert survived the raucous atmosphere of a dorm. She led the girl into the bedroom where Jane, who had eaten little since she arrived, was sleeping heavily with Stella loyally at her side. Julia instantly forgot Hallie as she sunk to the floor and stirred them, prompting a joyful welcome.
Hallie sat on the bed and tried to strike up a conversation, asking about Jack, and her studies, but Julia answered tersely. Her straight, dark hair obscured her face as she focused on the animals, obviously waiting for Hallie to leave.
“A lot of the people I did my residency with went to Tufts, including my friend Abby. It’s an excellent program. Any thoughts of going into medicine?”
“No,” Julia answered, a little too quickly and much too sharply. It was the first time her voice had risen above a whisper since she entered the house.
Suspecting the girl had spent far too much time in hospitals already, Hallie instantly regretted her question. She had hoped she might ask the girl if she’d heard from Gus but decided that was probably a taboo subject, too.
Stepping out of the room, Hallie almost walked direct
ly into Stuart, who was just outside the door. His eyes were closed and he was holding a hand over his heart like he was about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
“My God, you scared the shit out of me,” Hallie said. Then, thinking of his cardiac condition, she took his arm. “You’re not having pain, are you?”
Stuart put a finger to his lips, then led her away from the door. “My heart has never been stronger, but it broke just a little when I saw that girl come through the door. She reminded me of myself those first months after Paul died.”
“You were nothing like that, Uncle Stuart. You went through the streets, wailing and telling your mournful story to anyone who would listen, even those who’d heard it a dozen times. And at night, you cried so loud that neither Nick nor I got any sleep for weeks.”
“Excuse me, young lady. I might have cried, but I most certainly did not wail.” Then, abruptly, Stuart’s tone changed. “That girl, on the other hand, looks like she needs to have herself a good keening. And she needs to tell her story as many times as it takes, to someone who understands—until she finally accepts it herself.”
“And I suppose that understanding someone would be you,” Hallie said. “Well, you can go in and talk to her if you want to, but don’t be offended if she ignores you.”
“Very little offends me these days. It’s one of the only advantages of my advanced years.” Stuart kissed her cheek before he started down the hall.
Hallie would never know what he had said in there, but when the two emerged he asked her to set another plate. “Julia has decided to stay, after all.”
Julia’s face was still closed, although she looked as if she had been crying. Hallie decided to sit her between Felicia and Luanne, partly as a buffer for their occasional mother-daughter sniping, and partly because Luanne talked so relentlessly, and with such animated outrage (usually about the latest “jerk” she was dating), that she hardly required a response.
The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel Page 28