Empire Falls (81 page)

How long he courted Grace without her even knowing! Weeks into months into years, watching her at work from his glassed-in office on the top floor, seeing her on weekends along Empire Avenue with her little boy in tow
,
her husband always off somewhere painting houses. Grace was the sort of woman whom sorrow actually made more beautiful, and C.B. knew instinctively that except for the little boy, Miles, she had precious little joy in her life
.

He also sensed that when other people experienced sorrow, her heart went out to them, as if the weight of her own burden allowed her to shoulder even more. It was after the accident that left his daughter a cripple that Grace seemed really aware of him, and although he was suffering the torments of the damned, not just over what he’d done but for the lie he’d allowed his wife to tell the police—how coldly and competently she’d invented that speeding green Pontiac!—deep in his heart he was thrilled by the knowledge that at last he’d made contact
.

What an astonishing fantasy his love for Grace Roby had become in the years that followed! How it at once filled and absorbed his days, as her little boy grew healthy as a weed and his own child bravely endured one complicated, unsuccessful operation after another. Grace became for C. B. Whiting a dream not only of love and happiness in life but also of redemption, for he began to see in her the very principle of human compassion, the one person in the whole world to whom he might one day reveal his terrible secret, who would not just understand but forgive. If he were able to tell her, and if she were still able to love him, then wouldn’t this be his salvation? And if such forgiveness were possible in a mortal woman, could less love and forgiveness be expected of God Himself? There were times when such fevered reasoning struck C. B. Whiting as sheer lunacy, and others when it seemed divine truth
.

Regardless, by slow, steady degrees he could feel this woman beginning to fall in love with him. First glances, then gestures, then words and solemn professions, and then, finally, a plan. Francine knew, of course; she probably had suspected from that first day in the hospital. Incapable of anything like love herself, she was expert at sniffing out the disease in others. His and Grace’s plan, which his wife had nearly succeeding in thwarting completely, had been to spend the entire week together on Martha’s Vineyard. He’d imagined it might take that long to convince her, even though he knew her heart now belonged to him. Of course, it was the boy who complicated things. Taking her son away from his father was something Grace would not do lightly, even though the man had done little enough to earn such consideration—and she would never, ever, leave without him
.

Ah, two days on that magical island offered almost enough beauty and happiness to justify one’s existence. And how close they’d come to making it work! It still took his breath away, imagining it, a lifetime with this woman. Even now he would’ve jumped at the chance, though the drawn, emaciated
woman standing with his wife on the other side of the patio door, apparently examining the garden, was almost unrecognizable as the one true love of his life. A single glance was enough for him to know what his years in Mexico had been like for her. The penance he’d once assumed for himself, he’d allowed her to perform in his stead. His wife, he was shocked to acknowledge, was now by any objective standard the more attractive woman
.

Of the three women, Francine became aware of him first, and in her thin smile he understood his folly in believing he would succeed where his father and grandfather, both better men, had failed. It was as if she knew all about the gun in his pocket, knew, too, how useless it had become
.

Then Grace looked up, and in her expression was the understanding he feared the most: that he had not suffered terribly these years since Martha’s Vineyard, that he had found a way to be happy with another woman, another little boy. No doubt she’d sensed it that final night on the island, when she had come to him in his cottage and they’d made love and talked about the future, and about the past. As he’d always imagined, she heard his confession and took what he’d done to his own child into her wonderful, forgiving heart and redeemed him. Only later, when they made plans to flee their lives and begin another together, and when she realized he meant for it to be just the three of them—himself, Grace and Miles—and had thought to leave his daughter behind or, worse, neglected to think of her at all, did he manage to ruin everything. He tried his best to cover the mistake, suggesting that he’d had no idea Grace would be willing to take Cindy with them, but the damage was done. In that moment she’d seen him as a man prepared to abandon a child. Maybe she didn’t immediately understand what effect such knowledge would have, but C. B. Whiting did
.

The child he would’ve left behind, who so many years before had to be convinced that her memory of the crippling accident was incorrect, was the last to notice his homecoming, perhaps seeing some movement reflected in the glass. Cindy alone was glad to see him. She spun, nearly losing her balance, and lunged toward him crying, “Daddy!” And in that word he heard a second, far better purpose for the weight in his pocket
.

B
Y TAKING HIS OWN LIFE
when he did, C. B. Whiting robbed himself of the opportunity to become, in his remaining years, a somewhat less deluded man. Had he lived, he might gradually have learned that his wife was not quite the monster he believed her to be, that for her, affection was not impossible so much as unnatural and difficult, that she resembled the soil her family had tended for so long before selling out: blighted, but not entirely barren. And had he lived long enough to see his beloved Grace grow ill and die, had he found the courage to help her along in this journey, he might have come to understand that he’d expected too much of her good heart, which being human was fragile, imperfect and destined to fail. That his poor opinion of himself would have changed is unlikely, however, and it might have been this realization that compelled him to quit the earth.

One thing is certain. By ending his life when he did, C. B. Whiting died in the mistaken belief that like his forebears, he had failed to kill his wife, which wasn’t entirely true. Had he lived, it would have surprised and perhaps even cheered him to learn that he actually had sealed her doom the year he proposed to her, not long after the dead moose washed up on his bank. That was the summer his engineers warned him that dynamiting the Robideaux Blight and cutting a new channel might increase the severity of floods, to which the river was already prone. In fact, afterward the river did become less manageable, though none of its previous floods came close to matching the one that occurred the spring that Miles and Tick Roby were still living on Martha’s Vineyard. More snow had fallen that winter than the previous three combined, and when an early thaw came that first week in April—temperatures reaching into the seventies all the way to Canada—the snow melted in torrents and the Knox River roared through Empire Falls ten feet above flood stage, halfway up the tall first-floor windows of the old textile mill, which was in the process of being converted to a brew pub on the ground floor and the lavish offices of a credit-card company above. At the river’s crest, half of downtown was underwater, including the old Empire Grill.

There was less damage on the other side of the river, where the bank was steeper. While the water never reached the Whiting hacienda, it did wash the gazebo clean away. Why Francine Whiting was in it at the time, of course, was impossible to know. Perhaps she imagined that so long as she herself commanded this stage, the river would never have the temerity to approach. She was not, like her daughter, a believer in swift, powerful, life-changing forces, and she might not have recognized this one when it arrived. Or perhaps she simply got trapped, a sudden surge of water cutting her off from the house.

The day the river crested was warm, with a high blue sky, the kind of afternoon, after a long gray winter and several days of warm spring rains, when she could have fallen asleep, the rays of the sun warming her skin. Though no one actually saw her get swept away, downstream in Fairhaven, where the flood damage was even worse than in Empire Falls, an emergency worker on a sandbag brigade near the dam saw what he believed was a woman’s body glide by in the raging water. The corpse hung up briefly at the dam, but out there in the middle of the torrent, lodged at the top of a dam that might collapse at any second, and nothing could be gained by attempting a rescue. Besides, whoever this woman might have been, she was dead now, and under such circumstances the workers would not have been inclined to risk their own lives, even if the spectacle before them hadn’t revealed a ghoulish aspect. For astride the body, crouched at the shoulders of the dead woman, was a red-mouthed, howling cat.

Together, dead woman and living cat bumped along the upstream edge of the straining dam, as if searching for a place to climb out and over. Bumping, nudging, seeking, until finally a small section of the structure gave way and they were gone.

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