Empire Falls (66 page)

Just that quickly, everything in his life changed. How long had it taken to make the arrangements? Fifteen minutes? Had he spoken or merely listened? Later, he was unable to reconstruct much of the conversation, but he had not resisted. Of that much he was sure. After all, he wasn’t in the Witness Protection Program. He
was
Miles Roby, and his mother was dying
.

The reason Mrs. Whiting hadn’t been able to reach him was that his roommate, Peter, and his girlfriend, Dawn, had convinced him to join them on Martha’s Vineyard over the long Columbus Day weekend. It was Indian summer in southern Maine, and it would be even warmer in Massachusetts. Besides, wasn’t it Miles who was always telling them how beautiful the island was? (He’d told them about the Vineyard so that they’d understand that he’d been
somewhere
besides Empire Falls.) Except that he couldn’t really afford it, there was no reason not to go. He’d already made an excuse not to go home over the long weekend, telling his mother that between his regular classwork and his editorial responsibilities at the school literary magazine, he was swamped. It occurred to him now that when they’d spoken on the phone last week, she’d sounded almost relieved
.

He’d gotten good at coming up with excuses to avoid Empire Falls and, since his sophomore year, had managed to spend very little time there. Peter’s
parents owned a seafood restaurant on the Rhode Island coast, and the last two summers Miles had worked for them—in the kitchen the first year, out front as a waiter the second. It wasn’t a fancy restaurant. They served mostly clam and shrimp baskets to tourists, but the money was good and Miles had very few expenses. He’d been allowed to stay for free in a spare bedroom that had been Peter’s older brother’s, so he was able to save nearly all of his earnings for tuition. Peter’s parents seemed to like him, and he liked them too, especially their easy affection for each other and their common cause when it came to doing things in the restaurant, always making each other’s tasks lighter, their eyes constantly feeling out the other from across the room
.

His experience at the Empire Grill stood him in good stead, and he’d made himself indispensable, unlike Peter, who seemed determined to convince his parents that he was entirely dispensable. He was always wanting days off to go to the beach or to visit the three different girls he was stringing along, one of whom was Dawn. If Peter’s parents hadn’t forced Miles to take a day off now and then, usually a slow Monday or Tuesday evening, he would’ve worked straight through the summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day. When they offered him time off to go home, they accepted his excuses without actually believing them. Peter, Miles suspected, had explained that his parents were poor and that the money he was earning was nothing short of a godsend
.

The truth was that Miles had come to dread even the rare, brief, unavoidable visits to Empire Falls. He hadn’t been a college freshman for more than a few weeks before deciding that this was where he belonged, among people who loved books and art and music, enthusiasms he was hard-pressed to explain to the guys lazing around the counter at the Empire Grill, talking the Bruins and the Sox. Even harder to accept—did he even understand it himself?—was his increasing sense of estrangement from his own family. Getting to know his roommate’s parents so well, witnessing how much they loved each other, he’d seen clearly for the first time that his own parents’ marriage, far from a sacred union, was a kind of sad mockery, a realization that made him especially angry with his mother. He’d have been angry with his father, too, except there wasn’t much point, since Max wouldn’t notice, for one thing, and wouldn’t care, for another
.

Grace’s feelings, however
, could
be hurt, so Miles hurt them by suggesting in various subtle ways what a fool she was for not leaving a man like Max. Anyone so foolish, he implied, probably deserved what she got. Could leaving have resulted in more misery than
staying
had? He was even prepared to tell his mother she’d have done better to run off with that Charlie Mayne fellow they’d met when he was a boy. At least the two of them
might’ve been happy, instead of
everybody
being miserable. Except for Max, of course, who remained Max in any scenario
.

The problem was that Grace hadn’t obliged him by saying what he’d expected her to, never once claimed to have sacrificed her own happiness for his and his brother’s—a claim he felt sure he himself would’ve made, had the shoe been on the other foot. Stranger still, Grace had simply smiled at his characterization of her “not leaving” Max. “I wonder what you mean by that, Miles,” she’d asked him, and of course he immediately saw what she meant. How do you go about leaving a man who was so seldom around to begin with?
Why
would you? “Do you mean that I didn’t divorce him?” Well, yes, that was what he’d meant, though his shrug was intended to suggest that he’d meant that and a lot more. She responded by regarding him patiently until he finally saw the truth, then concluded the issue for him. “Have you ever seen a husband and wife more completely ‘put asunder’ than your father and me?”

She also seemed to want him to understand that what she’d done was precisely what he’d blamed her for not doing. She not only had walked away from the life he considered her to be trapped in but also had acquired another new whole family, or hadn’t he noticed? And it was the second family, he realized, not the first, that was the true source of his confusion. On each dreaded vacation from St. Luke’s he’d witnessed his mother’s increasing absence from their own home, even when she was present in the house. It was as if they’d both gone off to college, not just him. And just as his real life was now at St. Luke’s, his mother’s real life now lay across the river with Mrs. Whiting and her daughter. Miles had seen all this coming even back in high school, but he’d looked away, because on the surface, things weren’t so very different. His father, as far back as Miles could remember, had always been either gone or on his way to the nearest pub
.

The difference now was that Grace no longer cared. Nor did she seem to comprehend the difficulties her own absence was causing. Right before her eyes David was turning from a sickly, sweet-mannered child into a healthy, angry, troubled adolescent, a transition that appeared to puzzle and sadden Grace without moving her to action. With each visit to Empire Falls it became clearer to Miles that his brother was, in essence, an abandoned child who was developing his own survival strategies, one of which was to ape his father’s careless indifference and self-sufficiency. Miles could tell just by looking at David that he was one of those kids who featured in faculty negotiations each fall. The teacher who got stuck with David Roby would want to be compensated with two or three good students of his or her own choosing. “He’s just trying to get attention,” Grace told the high school principal when David got into
trouble, and then more trouble, and then worse trouble. She said the same thing to Miles when she explained over the phone what his brother had done this time. She seemed genuinely lost and brokenhearted about the boy, but in the rueful way you might worry about a niece or nephew you’d always been fond of, but who was, after all, your sister’s child and not your responsibility
.

But Grace also seemed unaware of what was happening to herself. With each passing season, she grew more gaunt, more ghostlike. When he asked if she wasn’t feeling well, she told him she was just going through the change early. Some women did. Far from being troubled by this, Grace seemed almost grateful. Was it possible that only a dozen years ago this same woman was still in radiant bloom, that in her white summer dress she’d turned the head of every man on Martha’s Vineyard? That Grace seemed to have no recollection of that woman was enough to break his heart. Enough to make him find excuses to stay away. Enough to enter, had the opportunity been offered, the Witness Protection Program. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that this was precisely what college is
.

“S
HE’LL BE FURIOUS,”
he warned Mrs. Whiting on the phone, after it was all decided. First thing in the morning he would see the dean of students, explain the situation and take a leave of absence. Mrs. Whiting would send a car for him, and by midafternoon he’d be at his mother’s bedside. Grace would remain at home for the time being and continue with her chemotherapy and radiation treatments—was it possible that these had begun nearly six weeks ago and Grace hadn’t told him?—but eventually she would be moved to Mrs. Whiting’s single-floor house, where it would be easier to care for her. Neither Grace nor anyone else in the Roby family had had health insurance since she lost her job at the shirt factory, but Mrs. Whiting told him not to worry about medical bills. Old Roger Sperry, it so happened, was also ill, and needed help at the Empire Grill. If Miles was willing to gradually take over and run the restaurant for a year or so, until they could find and train a new manager, Mrs. Whiting would see to it that Grace had what she needed. Eventually, of course, he would return to school and finish his degree. “She’ll hate us both, Mrs. Whiting. You do realize that?”

“You always did worry about the oddest things, dear boy,” the old woman replied nostalgically. Miles had no idea what she meant by this remark and was afraid to ask. “Your mother will no doubt be angry at first, but she will never find it in her heart to hate you. Whether or not she hates
me
is rather beside the point, don’t you think?”

“What about—?”

“My daughter?” Mrs. Whiting guessed, rather uncannily, Miles thought. “She’ll want to be here, of course. You know how devoted she is to your mother. Far more than to her own, I dare say. And when she finds out
you’ll
be here.… Still, I suppose she might be kept in Augusta for the most part, if you’d prefer.”

“Mrs. Whiting,” Miles said, “why would I want that?”

In response to this, silence. Meaning that he shouldn’t ask questions he didn’t want answered
.

“I understand she’s doing better?” Miles ventured. The summer before last he’d received an envelope at the restaurant in Rhode Island, addressed to him in his mother’s small, neat hand. Folded carefully inside a single sheet of Grace’s pale green note paper
—Cindy is not doing well,
she’d written
. A card from you would mean the world
—was a newspaper clipping. C. B. Whiting’s obituary from the
Empire Gazette
stated that Mr. Whiting, who had recently returned from Mexico, had died at home as the result of an accidental gunshot wound, the weapon having discharged while he was cleaning it
.

Miles would not learn the truth for nearly two months. He’d come home on Labor Day for the briefest of visits—registration at St. Luke’s started on Tuesday—and mentioned C. B. Whiting’s accident to his father. “What accident?” Max had snorted, then chuckled. “You put a loaded gun to your head and pull the trigger, the hole the bullet makes is no accident.”

Which caused Miles to think back. Some part of his brain had registered that something about the obituary and his mother’s note was odd. It was unlike her to have so little to say about such a tragedy, especially one that touched her second family so directly. And had he thought about it, he might have noted another curious thing. The obituary was long, as befitted an important man, its details filling two columns. At the top of the second was “C. B. WHITING,” in boldface type that resembled the caption to a photo. It hadn’t occurred to Miles when he opened his mother’s letter, or later when his father revealed that the “accident” had been a suicide, to wonder why Grace had clipped around the photo. After all, Miles had never met the man, and wouldn’t have known him, to borrow one of Max’s favorite phrases, from a bag of assholes
.

“And on what basis do you understand that she’s doing better?” Mrs. Whiting said flatly
.

“My mother wrote—”

“Yes, of course. But then, your mother is as devoted to my daughter as Cindy is to her. If wishing made it so, people the world over would visit our Grace instead of Lourdes.”

Miles couldn’t help smiling ruefully. The woman still had the ability to nonplus him. In three and a half years at St. Luke’s, he’d never met anyone remotely like her
.

“Mrs. Whiting,” he said, “I owe you an apology.”

“Whatever for, dear boy?”

“I haven’t been back home much these last couple years. But when I was there, I should’ve come to see you.”

“Well, never mind that,” she told him, without, he noted, denying the truth of his assertion. “You’re going to be home now. Aren’t you, dear boy?”

O
F COURSE
,
part of the reason that Miles hadn’t realized in high school that his mother was undergoing a transformation was that he attributed her increasing vagueness about their own family to years of disappointment and exhaustion and too much responsibility. He noticed—as Max did not, or didn’t appear to—that she was no longer vested in her husband, and he was troubled that Grace was so forgetful about his brother. But she was only rarely vague or distant with Miles himself. More often her concern for his future, far from abstract, bordered on mania. In fact, during Miles’s junior and senior years, Grace had two obsessions, equally powerful. She was determined that Miles would go to college and that Cindy Whiting would attend her senior prom. Each goal seemed like a long shot to Miles. Together, they might be seen as evidence that Grace was purposely setting herself up for some sort of emotional train wreck
.

And it wasn’t just college she had in mind for Miles. He was to go out of state, which rendered the difficult virtually impossible. Gaining admission to the University of Maine presented no particular problem, and paying for tuition, board and books there was relatively inexpensive. The problem was that word “relative,” because Miles had no idea where even that small sum would come from. Add out-of-state tuition on top of such expenses and the idea became laughable. When he pressed his mother about why distance was so important to her, she surprised him by saying, “So you won’t be able to come home whenever you want to.” The Farmington branch of the U of M was less than forty-five minutes away, the main campus at Orono about an hour. Kids who went there, she explained, often flocked home on weekends, and this, she was determined, he would not do. “I don’t cross that river every day of my adult life so my son can come running back to Empire Falls.”