Empire Falls (25 page)

It did, for which Miles was grateful. The patches of rough skin he’d scratched raw in the shower were now pulsing, and he’d been too cramped in the backseat to really get at them. Once he got out of sight, he intended to scratch himself into ecstasy. So when he scrambled over the dunes he was both surprised and discouraged to discover that the beach wasn’t deserted, as he’d expected. Spaced evenly, as far into the distance as he could make out, were fishermen casting way out into the gentle waves, then furiously reeling in, then casting again. Miles watched them for a few minutes, trying to make sense of it. Max had taken him fishing on the lake once, but there you just dropped a line over the side of the boat and waited for something to pull on it
.
These men seemed almost to be in a competition to see who could cast the farthest into the waves, and since every cast was a disappointment, they reeled in and tried again. The closest one called out a warning, and Miles saw why a second later when the man drew back his long rod and something silver flashed and whistled through the air behind him and then shot far out into the waves
.

Keeping what he hoped was a safe distance behind the casters, Miles trudged up the beach until he came to a secluded spot among the dunes and the tall sea grass. There he lowered his pants down around his ankles and began scratching. It was too dark to tell for sure, but the splotches of rough, red skin seemed to have doubled in size since his shower. Digging at them with his fingernails was midway between intense pleasure and pain, and he would have kept at it until he bled had he not heard a sound nearby, and then low voices. He quickly pulled up his trousers and hurried away
.

Back up the beach he heard another sound, more like flapping this time, and when he looked down he was surprised to see a large silver fish, bloody at the gills, flopping in the sand at his feet. “Careful,” said a voice a few feet away, where a man crouched, tying a silver lure onto his line. “They got teeth.”

It was almost completely dark by the time he arrived back at the parking lot, where he found Charlie Mayne’s little car more by the size and shape of its silhouette than anything else. He fully expected his mother to scold him for staying too long on the beach, but he was wrong. There’d been just enough light to see his mother’s head resting on Charlie Mayne’s shoulder before they heard him coming
.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
,
aware that he’d been dreaming vividly all night long, Miles awakened to the sound of his mother retching into the toilet of the cottage’s tiny bathroom. This was actually the second or third morning he’d heard this, and today he was angry with her, though he hadn’t been when he went to sleep. It seemed to have something to do with catching that glimpse of the two of them in the car, but even more he sensed that during the night things had somehow realigned themselves. His mother’s asking a stranger to join them at dinner did suggest that his own company left something to be desired. Not that he didn’t like Charlie—he did. But Miles found himself angry with the man, too. Charlie, who’d been so attentive during dinner, hadn’t seemed particularly interested in hearing about the gasping silver fish Miles had seen on the beach, and when he exaggerated his peril by telling them he’d nearly been snagged by the lure of one of the surf casters, neither
his mother nor Charlie seemed as frightened as he might have wished. Worse, he woke that morning almost nauseous with the understanding that the night before he’d actually eaten a snail
.

He discovered, however, that it was hard to stay mad at someone you love when she’s throwing up in the next room, and so, to preserve the satisfaction of his righteous anger, he went outside with his glove and ball to throw himself pop flies and await the picnic basket from the main house. When it arrived, it was heavier than usual, and he lugged it inside and set it on the breakfast table, where his mother, still in her nightgown, sat with her head in her hands. When she looked up at him, pale and discouraged and clearly exhausted, the anger he’d been trying to protect drained out of him completely
.

“Are you sick?” he asked, suddenly afraid
.

“I wish I were,” she said, with a rueful smile. “Then I could look forward to getting well.”

He noticed that as she spoke, she was idly scratching a patch of red skin on her forearm
.

“Don’t worry,” she added. “I’m not dying or anything.”

Miles was going through the picnic basket. The instant she told him not to worry, he’d taken her advice and quit. “There’s a lot more stuff today,” he informed her, holding up a small jar of what appeared to be inky little ball bearings
.

This news seemed to cheer her, and Grace rose from the table and threw open the curtains over the kitchen window and stood in the bright sunlight that flooded the room. She stood there for a long moment, her eyes closed, seeming to soak in the sun’s rays with something like a smile forming on her lips. For a woman who’d spent the last hour on her hands and knees in front of the commode, Miles thought she looked very beautiful, and he decided to forgive her for last night
.

After all, it was their last day on the island
.

T
HEY’D NOT BEEN
at the beach for more than half an hour, though, when Charlie Mayne showed up. Miles was pleased to note that he had scrawny, white, almost hairless legs, and when he pulled his sweatshirt over his head Miles saw a pale, concave chest with a few strands of coarse black hair encircling his nipples. Though his mother was not a large woman, Miles now realized, seeing them side by side, that she was a full size larger than Charlie. Last night, especially in the sports car, he’d seemed average-sized
,
but today, as he settled onto a corner of their blanket, he looked downright puny. Surely, Miles thought, his mother would notice this and send him packing
.

“Didn’t they make you a lunch basket?” she inquired
.

“Alas, they did not,” said Charlie, who didn’t look concerned
.

“Then you’ll share ours,” Grace told him. To look at her now, you’d never guess how sick she’d been an hour earlier. Nor did she display any inclination toward sending Charlie Mayne away
.

“You’ll be pleased to learn, however, that I’ve not come completely empty-handed.” And from the pocket of his swimming trunks he took out a long white tube, showed it to Grace, and then tossed it to Miles, who fielded it with his mitt
.

Grace clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, Charlie, you’re a lifesaver!”

“That’s me,” he agreed
.

“They told me up at the main house that they were all out,” she said, motioning for Miles to bring her the tube of ointment
.

“I drove in to Edgartown this morning,” Charlie explained while Grace applied the poison ivy cream to Miles’s legs and stomach, then to her own forearms and a patch Miles hadn’t noticed before, on her upper thigh. “In fact, I got the last tube at the drugstore. Apparently this is a banner year for poison ivy all over the island.”

Charlie Mayne watched her massage the cream into her thigh until he noticed Miles, who had yet to say hello, staring intently at him, and then turned his attention to the picnic basket. When he found the inky-looking jar, he held it up for Miles’s inspection. “Ever tasted caviar, big guy?”

Miles shook his head, still feeling tricked on the subject of specialty foods by last night’s snail. He made a mental note to refuse the caviar when it was offered, not because it wouldn’t be good, probably, but because Charlie Mayne would be doing the offering. Last night he’d been pleased to be recognized as a person who appreciated the finer things. This morning, everything had changed. In fact, he now wished he’d refused the ointment, because he could already feel it cooling the patches of infected skin, and stubbornly pretended that he preferred the itching
.

“I also found us a great place for dinner,” Charlie was saying to his mother. “But you have to promise to wear that white dress again.”

His mother had put on sunglasses and rolled onto her back. “It’s the only one I have.” She laughed, and Miles could feel his anger returning. Without even discussing it with him, she was letting Charlie Mayne come to dinner with them
.

“I want to eat at the Thirsty Whale tonight,” Miles said, nudging her foot with his. “I want steamer clams.”

His mother sighed contentedly. “Just feel that sun,” she purred
.

Miles nudged her foot again. “Did you hear me?” He could tell, even through the sunglasses, that her eyes were closed
.

She didn’t open them when she spoke. “No, I didn’t hear you,” she said. “And if you continue to be rude, I won’t hear you then, either.”

Charlie Mayne didn’t seem to understand they were having an argument. “So, it’s steamer clams you want?” he said cheerfully, stretching out on his stomach. His back also sported random curly black hairs. About a dozen of them. Ridiculous. “Look at his back,” Miles would’ve liked to tell his mother. Her problem, he was certain, was that she wasn’t paying attention
.

“Then it’s steamer clams you’ll get,” Charlie finished
.

L
ATE THAT AFTERNOON
,
when Grace came out of the bathroom freshly showered and dressed in her robe, Miles told her he didn’t want to go out to dinner with Charlie. He wanted for it to be just the two of them. They’d been having fun, he told her, before Charlie Mayne showed up
.

“Yeah?” Grace said, angry so instantly that it scared Miles, as if she’d been just waiting for him to say something like this. “Well, I’ve been having fun since he showed up. What do you think about that?”

Miles didn’t answer immediately. “Dad wouldn’t like it,” he said, looking right at her
.

“Tough.”

“I’ll tell.”

“Fine,” she said, surprising him again, increasing the sensation he’d been feeling all day that everything was adrift. She’d taken out the ointment and was applying cream to her skin. “Then tell.”

“I will,” he said, knowing it was the wrong thing but saying it anyway
.

“You’ll have to wait till he gets out of jail, though,” she said, her eyes suddenly harder than he’d ever seen them. She hadn’t so much spoken the words as let them out of their cages, and she watched him now as if purely curious as to the effect they’d have. If necessary, she had more of them to turn loose. “You didn’t know that, did you? That your father was in jail.”

She’d propped one foot up on the kitchen chair to apply the ointment, and when she put that one down and the other one up, her robe gaped and Miles caught a dark glimpse of what he knew he was not supposed to see, what he didn’t see, not really, because his eyes were already filling with tears
.

“You want to know why, Miles? Because last week he was arrested as a public nuisance, that’s why. Not for the first time, either. He becomes a public nuisance every now and then when he tires of being a private one. And I’ll tell you something else, too. You think Max Roby would care if you told him about Charlie Mayne? Think again. Your father cares only about your father. I wish that weren’t so, but it is, and you’re old enough to know it. The sooner you understand it, the better off you’ll be.”

Finished with applying the ointment, she stood facing him. “And I’ll tell you one more thing while I’m at it. When we get back home, things are going to be very different, so you can prepare yourself for that too.”

To punish her, when Grace went to change into the white dress, Miles, instead of getting into the shower as instructed, slipped out the back and returned to the now deserted beach beneath the bluff, where he threw towering pop flies as high as he could until an errant, angry throw sent the ball into the waves. Then he just sat down in the sand, pounding the palm of his glove and wishing they’d never come to Martha’s Vineyard. Suddenly he was no longer afraid of ground balls, no matter how sharply struck. If he got hit by one, so what? He understood now what Mr. LaSalle had been trying to teach him all summer. It didn’t matter if you got hit. It didn’t matter if it hurt
.

After a while he heard someone coming down the footpath behind him. When he turned around, he thought it would be his mother, furious, coming to fetch him, but it was Charlie Mayne walking across the sand in a pair of shiny black shoes. He had on a pair of nice pants, and Miles didn’t expect him to sit down, but he did
.

“What happened to the ball?”

Miles pointed at the waves
.

Charlie Mayne nodded. “You and your mother had an argument?”

Miles didn’t say anything
.

“She’s an awfully nice person, you know,” Charlie finally said
.

“I know she’s nice,” Miles said angrily, not wanting to be told something he already knew, not by somebody who’d only known his mother for two days
.

“She loves you.”

“I know,” Miles said
.

“She said for me to tell you she’s sorry about the things she said about your dad. That wasn’t such a good thing to do.”

Miles shrugged
.

“The thing is,” the man went on, “everyone deserves a chance to be happy, you know?”

“She is happy.”

“And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don’t take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.”

“She is happy,” Miles insisted
.

“Actually,” he said, “I was talking about me. Your mother is the kind of woman who—well, she’s like the sun suddenly coming out from behind a cloud.”