Then he gets up and stands in front of me. “Are you sure it was your mother?”
“Absolutely one hundred percent.”
“Of course she’s sure,” Hallie says, stepping between us as if she can protect me from the pain of that truth, or from what all this means for Ava. “A person doesn’t forget her own mother, Lunes!”
“It’s insane,” Lunes says when he resumes his pacing. “Completely insane. In fact—”
He leaves those two words dangling and an index finger in the air, as we take a huge simultaneous inhale. I’m so scared he’s going to say that in fact, he’s not buying it, and that if he leaves now, he’s still got time to get to the rink before the open skate is over. I don’t even dare to exhale.
But then he finishes his sentence. “In fact, it’s so insane there’s no way you could make it up. Damn, Hallie, let me see that bill again.”
Chapter 45
It’s only two days later when Lunes’s secretary calls and asks Hallie and me to come to his office. Immediately. The first irrational thing I do is look at the clock. It’s after five. Isn’t Lunes’s office supposed to be closed? And of course, I know.
“Oh my God, did they—” Hallie looks like she’s about to do one of those swoon things you read about in Victorian novels so I grab the phone from her hand, and finish the question.
“Did they . . . find them?” After Hallie’s exuberance, my voice is a scared, cheepy little bird.
“Lunes will explain everything when you get here,” Sue says, but her voice is screaming: Yes! Now get over here already, will you? Then she hangs up.
The reception area in Lunes’s office is in darkness, and we’re almost surprised when the door opens. Then we see the narrow rim of light coming from Lunes’s closed door.
“Hallie? Mila? That you?” he asks in a voice that’s pure silk. “Come on in.”
When we go in, he’s behind his desk as if he’s working, except that he’s pulled off his tie and is drinking from a snifter. A matching glass filled with golden-brown liquid is set in front of the chair that’s clearly meant for Hallie, and there’s a glass of ice and a soda for me.
Hallie hardly seems to notice. “Come on, Lunes. Tell me! Is it really—” she says. Or screams. Or maybe I just hear it that way.
Before she gets the words out, a slow smile consumes him. It starts in his eyes before it lifts his cheeks and exposes his teeth. Finally it pulls him to his feet and opens his arms. “Yes, it’s really truly over. All but the annoying details.”
Then he abandons all pretense of professional detachment as he comes out from behind the desk and hugs Hallie so hard he lifts her off her feet. “We got ’em, Hallie. The PI I hired found out Neil’s never worked in Chicago. Never lived anywhere near the place, though he apparently stopped there long enough to pick up a cell phone with a local area code.
“So he’s been—” Hallie says, and then shakes her head, unable to finish the sentence.
“That’s right. With the information Mila provided, we were able to track him to a little town less than a hundred miles from the post office where Ava posted her birthday card. Even acting occasionally in small productions, and teaching classes.”
It’s only a second before Hallie tugs me into their circle and strokes my cheek as if she understands that for me, happiness will come later. Right now I feel like I just stepped on a grenade.
“You need to sit, Mila—right here beside your stepmom,” Lunes pulls out my seat. Then he pours my soda and pushes the snifter in Hallie’s direction.
Hallie waves it away as she collapses into her chair. “Thanks, but I never drink that stuff,” she says. Then, before he can take it away, she abruptly seizes the glass and for a minute, she peers into the dark gold liquid as if she’s mesmerized by it.
“What is that—Jack Daniels?”
“Something like that,” Lunes laughs. “Why?”
But whatever she sees in the drink, Hallie isn’t about to share it with us. Instead, she throws it back like she does that kind of thing all the time.
“That was almost as sweet as the last time I had it,” she says mysteriously. Then she turns to me, and adds, “I hope you know you’re driving home.”
“In that case, how about one more?” Lunes asks, producing a bottle of Irish whiskey.
“No, thanks, that was perfect. The last thing I want to do is dull this moment. I want to feel this, Lunes. I want to feel every bit of it. Have you called Alvaro and Jack yet?”
“Nope,” Lunes says. “I called the next of kin first.”
Hallie just smiles—and then she starts crying. “What about Gus? Does he even know?”
“I thought you might want to take care of that. I talked to the warden a little while ago and he’s going to permit Gus a call tonight around nine.”
Hallie closes her eyes, shutting out everything but the idea of the call she will make. Tonight. Nine p.m. Until now, until they were found, no one has wanted to break the news of Neil’s involvement, or to let Gus know how close his release might be. It still felt too fragile to all of us. But now she will have to find a way to explain that it wasn’t only a desperate woman who conspired to send him to prison and keep him there. His childhood friend was part of it, too, probably even the mastermind.
When she opens her eyes, she takes my hand, as if she felt the wobbling inside me. “You okay?”
I want to say that I’m doing great. That this is the best day of my life. But instead, I hear myself saying, “What do you think they’ll do to her?”
“Whatever it is, it won’t be enough,” Hallie says. Then she puts her arm around me. “I know she’s your mother, Mila, but it’s hard—maybe even impossible—for me not to hate her.”
“It’s hard for me, too. But it’s also hard for me not to love her.”
“Of course it is. You wouldn’t be Mila if it wasn’t.”
And then, I ask Lunes if he’d mind if I used his bathroom.
Hallie’s chair scrapes against the wood floor as she rises to follow me, but Lunes stops her. “Let her have her time, Hallie.”
When I flick on the fluorescent lights, I come face-to-face with what feels like the biggest mirror in the world. I’ve always hated my reflection. It reminds me of the face I saw at the bus stop when I was a little girl. The face of a mother who hasn’t seen her child in two years. The hungry face. I also see the girl in the photograph Gus carried with him for all those years. The child who’d seen too much. The pathetic daughter Ava abandoned and betrayed, not once but with every breath she has taken for the last ten years. It’s an image that makes me want to run away.
But someone else is there, too. It’s the girl my surrogate mom showed me I could be. The girl who was stronger than anyone ever knew—even without her warrior jewelry. It’s the girl Ethan loves, the girl I dream into existence every night I fall asleep in Thorne House: Hallie’s daughter.
I come out of the bathroom, stand in the hallway, and listen to Lunes. “What I don’t understand is why Neil felt compelled to stay in touch with you. It’s almost as if he wanted to get caught.”
Hallie is quiet for a minute. “No, that’s not it,” she says with a certainty that floors me. “He called and visited and wrote because he had some kind of perverse need to control Gus and me. He couldn’t let it go. And also because he believed he was so smart, so completely in charge, that we would never figure him out.”
Lunes sips his drink. “Maniacal arrogance. It’s a common trait in cold-blooded killers—not that our friend Neil actually murdered anyone.”
“What he did was worse than murder,” I say, surprising them with my presence as much as my words. “He sentenced his enemy to a slow death, and then he sat back and watched.”
“His enemy. How could anyone in the world see Gus—” Hallie leaves her question unfinished—maybe because she’s afraid to contemplate the answer.
That night, just before nine, she places the portable phone on the table between us. “
I’ve been thinking about it for three hours, but I still have no idea how I’m going to tell him about Neil.”
Unconsciously, my eyes drift to the photograph on the wall in the kitchen that she hasn’t yet taken down. The picture of Hallie, Neil, and Gus on the beach.
“Just say it. However it comes out, it will be okay. Gus will be okay.” I think of how black his eyes had been when he told me about Xavier. Obviously, the dark potential of the human soul was not news to him. If he needed a reminder, he only had to look down at his own forearm where it was carved in the form of a ragged heart. It’s one secret that even Hallie will never know.
At 8:55, when I get up to go upstairs, she seems surprised—maybe even a little alarmed. “No, Mila. I want you to be here when I tell him. You were the one who made this happen. Without you, we never would have found them.”
But much as I’d like to take credit, I shake my head. “Maybe I helped, but you were always the driving force. And this right now? This is between you and Gus.”
Then I go up to my room and bolt the door, as if it’s possible to lock out twenty years of Hallie’s pent-up emotion.
Chapter 46
Around three, when I get up to go to the bathroom, I see the door to the attic is open and I know that Hallie is on the roof. It’s usually my cue that she wants to be left alone, so I almost go back to my room. But I know there’s a very particular loneliness waiting for me there and I’d do just about anything to avoid it.
Peering up the dark stairs, I truly understand why Hallie started making dangerous pilgrimages to the top of the house when she was a little girl. It was because she knew the ache I feel. Saudade, she calls it. Despite my bare feet, I walk through an attic littered with sharp objects and climb the rickety ladder to Hallie’s cathedral.
She is leaning against the chimney, looking out over the water, and at first I don’t think she even notices me. If there was any chance I could sneak downstairs without speaking, I would. But then Hallie looks up. The moon has illuminated a shadowy path of tears on her cheeks.
“Do you want to be alone?” I stammer.
But Hallie scoots over. “Sit with me, Mila.”
When I do, she wraps her arm around me, seeming to invite me to take in the wild beauty of the night that surrounds us.
I speak first. “I know why you’re crying. You’re thinking of what it will be like when Gus comes home.”
“I wish I could say those were happy tears, Mila,” she says, wiping her eyes. “But actually, they were the selfish variety. And this is the last—the absolute last—time I’m ever going to cry them.”
At that moment, I’m wishing Hallie had someone else to talk to. Someone wiser—and, okay, older. Like Abby, Jack, or maybe Stuart, who’s lived next door since she was a kid. Even shy Julia would know what to say. But I’m the only one here. “Selfish tears? I don’t understand.”
“As long as Gus was in prison, he needed me. He waited for me. He belonged to me like he did in high school.”
“But now that he’s coming home again, won’t you two—”
Before I get the words out, Hallie is shaking her head—not only in answer to my unfinished question, but to the tears that fill her eyes, despite her resolution to keep them back.
“I don’t think Gus has decided what he’ll do when he comes home. He hasn’t had time yet. But I know. Jack says I’ve always known—even when I wouldn’t allow myself to face it.”
“You mean he’ll go back to the Church? No chance! Gus has told me a million times he’s not a priest anymore. And it’s not like the institution gave him much support over the last ten years.”
“His friends in the Church—and there were a lot of them—never stopped believing in him. And, besides, it wasn’t about the institution for him. It was about something he found in a lonely pew in St. Peter’s all those years ago. Something he saw in people like Jack and Sandra, and in the experiences he shared with the sick and dying at the hospital. Prison almost took it away from him before you came along and reminded him.”
“But I’ve seen you two together. It’s so obvious you belong—”
Again, Hallie shakes her head. “There was a reason he decided not to be with me all those years ago, Mila,” she says. “In every way that counts, nothing has changed.”
“But he told me that you two—that he—I mean,” I stammer. “He said he loved you, Hallie. More than anyone else on earth.”
“You want to know what really breaks my heart? He does love me more than anyone else. But my competition was never another person, Mila.”
It’s then that I finally remember—and even begin to understand—the rest of what Gus said that day: He loved Hallie, but being in love was for people like me, not for people like him. I don’t want to cry in front of Hallie, but I can’t help myself.
“Don’t, Mila.” Hallie says with mother-style firmness. “This is a happy day. This is the day we waited for. It really is. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’m going to go inside and try to get some sleep.”
Chapter 47
Hallie and I don’t talk much on the way to the jail where Ava’s being held. It’s the sunniest day ever, but for us it’s the midnight hour. Within twenty-four hours, Neil and Ava will stand before a judge and hear their crimes pronounced out loud. Undoubtedly, the Bug will carry his sorry bag of flesh into the courtroom to stare down the woman he could never release, and Alvaro has made sure that the courtroom will be packed with Gus’s friends. People who used to brag about the almost famous actor they went to school with, who had faithfully come home to see Neil’s plays in Wellfleet during the summer and paid more than they could afford for good seats at his shows in New York. People like Hallie, who thought they knew him.
But the ones who love Gus best, Jack and Julia, and of course Hallie, will not be there. You see, they—or I should say we, because they’ve invited me to come along—will be at Millette State Prison. Or, rather, we’ll be standing outside that ugly fortress, watching a certain door. Yes, it’s true. In exactly twenty-one hours and thirty-seven minutes, Gus Silva is scheduled to be released.
“Are you sure you want to go in?” Hallie asks when we arrive at the jail where my mother is being held. Not imprisoned exactly. Just held. We’re standing outside, smoking a cigarette in the parking lot, her on one side of the car, me on the other. “You know how I feel.”
“Yeah, I do. And you’re aware of my opinion, too.” I mash out my cigarette with the heel of my new lace-up boots.
“There are some things I need to say to this woman—your mother—and, well, it just might be better if you didn’t hear them.”
“I know,” I repeat, but I’m already heading toward the entrance.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you’re the most stubborn girl on the Cape?”
“Just the Cape? Jeez, give a kid some respect.”
It’s a standing joke between us, but this time neither of us is laughing.
Even in her orange jumpsuit, Ava is stunning. Her pallor, the dark half-moons beneath her green eyes only add to her enigmatic appeal. She looks as vulnerable and alone as she must have been that first night she appeared at the rectory, asking for “Father Gus.” It’s hard not to notice her grace as she slips into her chair, the artful way she uses a tilt of her head, her hands. The hair that was platinum when I saw her last has been restored to a lustrous chestnut brown. Determined not to fall for it, I give her my coldest glare.
But a moment later, she greets me as my little Milena, the name I haven’t used for more than a decade, and something collapses inside me. No matter how hard I try, the abandoned six-year-old always betrays me. With more fortitude than I feel—and my best imitation of Hallie’s cortesia, I thank Ava for allowing us to visit.
“I don’t have much to say, but Hallie wanted to come,” I add, since Ava is obviously ignoring her.
Ava’s eyes openly settle on the woman beside me. She nods her head warily, not even pretending this is a friendly visit.
“But why? Did you come to prove that my daughter is more loyal to you than—”
“Mila is loyal to the truth, and she’s been incredibly brave. If you were any kind of mother, you’d be proud of her,” Hallie snaps.
Ava’s eyelashes flutter the way they did the last time I saw her. “So you’re here to judge me? Well, fine. But leave Mila out of it. You know nothing about my feelings for my child.”
“I’m here because I need answers, and Neil refused to see me. Why did you agree to the visit?”
Ava adjusts the rolled cuffs of her jumpsuit, but I can see that she is shaking. It frightens me that I can’t stop feeling her emotions. Will I ever? I have an irresistible urge to rise up and stand between them—though I’m no longer sure who I want to protect. Is my loyalty with Hallie—as Ava thinks—or not?
“Do you think I would miss a chance to meet the woman who has tormented my husband for so long? The rival I could never really fight? He tried to hide it at first, but a wife knows these things, Doctor.”
“Tormented? Rival? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hallie fires back. “Neil and I were friends—from the time we were nine years old. At least, I believed we were. Now I wonder how I was ever so deceived.”
“Neil also thought he had been deceived, and in the cruelest possible way. He told me all about it. You knew how strong his feelings were for you; you encouraged it. Then you used him to get close to Gus.”
“If he said those things, he’s delusional. I never used anyone—”
Ava raises her voice and continues as if she didn’t hear her. “And finally you both betrayed him. Do you have any idea what that did to my husband, Dr. Costa? He never had a good relationship with his family, but it almost didn’t matter. He had a friend who was closer than any brother—and he had you, the girl he’d loved as far back as he could remember. The orphans of Race Point, right?”
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