Empire Falls (77 page)

In the tormented aftermath, what Miles found hardest to forgive himself for was the fact that when they’d entered the room, he walked right past her. She was huddled in the corner, behind the classroom door, he kept reminding himself, trying to be rational about it, though his guilt was too profound to admit reason. He had walked right past her. Wasn’t there something in a father, he asked himself, some extra sense, that should’ve told him right where she’d be? Wasn’t she his only daughter? A better father would’ve been able to find her blindfolded, in the dark, attracted by the invisible beacon of her suffering. How long did he stand there in that room, his back to her, as if to suggest to this beloved girl that the rest of them were the important ones? This thought would wake him in the middle of the night for months, long after he’d come to terms with the other horrors.

The young policeman stationed at the door, the same one who’d given Miles a hard time back in September in front of his childhood home, was the one who tapped his chief on the shoulder and said, “Here, sir.” He seemed to notice Miles only after he’d taken a step toward his daughter, urging him, “Be careful.”

The girl in the corner didn’t look much like Tick, though of course he knew it was. Her expression was one he’d neither seen before nor imagined she was capable of forging. At first he didn’t realize what she was clutching to her chest: an Exacto knife held tightly with both hands, as if its blade were three feet long. And when Miles, perhaps not immediately recognizable with one eye swollen shut and two broken teeth, offered that first movement toward her, his daughter made a flicking motion with the knife, warning him away, and from her throat came a gargling hiss.

Sinking to his knees before her, he said, “Tick,” his own voice sounding only slightly less strange than hers, the stern voice he rarely used, only when he really wanted her attention. He wasn’t sure it was the right tone or that kneeling there saying her name again and again was the right thing to do, because he had no idea how far into herself she’d withdrawn. He wouldn’t remember later how many times he called to her before her eyes flickered, or how many more before they came into something like focus and she saw him for who he was. In that instant she was suddenly back, and her expression first relaxed, then came apart, and she was sobbing, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” as if she had no idea how far away he might be or else, wherever she’d just been, she’d been counting the number of times he’d spoken her name and was now counting them back to him.

David Roby would wonder later how a man in his brother’s condition was able to do what he did, to gather up his daughter into his arms and in that none-too-gentle bear hug of his, carry her out the door and away. Later, Miles himself would remember Jimmy Minty’s comment as they were leaving. “We gonna let him just walk out of here?”

And Bill Daws’s response. “You tend to your own kid, Jimmy. Let’s all just tend to our own kids, okay?”

CHAPTER 32

I
N EARLY
A
PRIL
it turned warm, and Miles could see from the weather map in the newspaper that the unseasonable temperatures extended all the way up into Maine, which had endured a particularly brutal winter, one nor’easter after another, dropping a foot of new snow every week. He’d spoken to his brother after the last of these, and David reported that as of April Fool’s Day half the residents of Empire Falls still had little red flags attached to their car antennas so they could be seen as they backed out their driveways between towering snowbanks. The town’s budget for snow removal had been exhausted in late January.

“Business will pick up soon,” David added. It had been slow most of the winter, partly due to the weather, partly because after the Empire Grill closed, a lot of their customers, especially those from the college in Fairhaven, were slow to follow them to Bea’s tavern, despite the ads they’d finally taken out in the school paper. “We could use you, sooner than later.”

“Sorry,” Miles told him, “I don’t think so.”

“How’s Tick?” his brother asked, both men aware that this hadn’t really changed the subject.

“Good,” Miles told him. “Better every day.”

“She doesn’t want to come home?”

The truth was, she did. Just last week she’d asked if they could visit during Vineyard High’s spring break, and had she claimed to miss her mother, Miles might’ve given in. But what she had in mind was to visit Candace, who remained hospitalized, and John Voss, who only last month was declared incompetent to stand trial and remanded to the state mental hospital in Augusta. Miles wasn’t sure that either of these visits was a good idea just yet.

In the months since the shooting, Tick had come to terms with the broad outline of what had happened that last afternoon. That John Voss had shot and killed Justin Dibble and Doris Roderigue, that he’d also shot Candace Burke in the neck, the bullet nearly severing her spine. She understood, too, that he’d then turned on Tick and would’ve shot her too if Otto Meyer Jr. hadn’t stepped between them. She even knew that the boy had then turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger several times but that only one bullet remained in the chamber—a bullet as old as the gun itself, his long-dead grandfather’s service revolver—and it had not fired.

This much Tick understood, but what Miles didn’t know was how much of this understanding was reinforced by memory. Though she’d had terrible nightmares for nearly two months, she wouldn’t talk about them, so he didn’t know if it was remembered horror she was experiencing or dream analogies. Over time he told her what he thought was important for her to know. He told her that Candace was alive as soon as he heard this news from his brother. And much later he told her about Otto, who once had lunged from the backseat of the car to save the baseball team from Miles’s inexperience at the wheel, and who had now saved Tick’s life at the cost of his own. Other things he kept silent about. Even now, in April, his daughter had given no indication of recalling that when John Voss had pointed the revolver at Candace, Tick had reached out and cut him from eyebrow to ear with an Exacto knife. Nor what happened when she returned to consciousness and saw Zack Minty leaning over her, how she’d sliced open his palm with the same weapon.

No, if she’d managed to repress these details, they could stay repressed. Coming back from the abyss had been a long haul, and he refused to risk a relapse by returning home too soon. He hadn’t even wanted to enroll her at the high school on Martha’s Vineyard in mid-January—and still wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing. Her new teachers, like everyone else, knew of the events in Empire Falls, but somehow didn’t connect them to her. They seemed fond of Tick and suspected she was intelligent, but didn’t know what to make of her vagueness and lapses of attention. Miles chose not to enlighten them.

Having devoted the last five months to her recovery, he only recently had begun to feel confident that she would make it all the way back. The part of the island where they were staying was mostly uninhabited during the winter, and rather than walk on the deserted beach or along the windy bike path, on weekends Miles had taken to driving into Edgartown, where they took long walks among the narrow, quiet streets, stopping at shops and galleries and the library, anyplace there were people and distraction. The shooting, he understood, had rendered his daughter’s world dangerous, and it was his belief that only the repetition of bad things
not
happening would restore her former relationship to it. Progress had been so slow at first that he’d started to doubt the wisdom of his plan. An angry conversation overheard in a restaurant would sometimes be enough to set her sobbing and shaking. But gradually she began to stabilize. One day in late February, they’d stopped in at the fish market, where a hand-lettered sign was affixed to the lobster tank:
DON’T TOUCH THE MALE AND FEMALE LOBSTERS
. “So,” she asked the man behind the counter, “exactly which lobsters
can
we touch?” It had taken all of Miles’s willpower not to seize her in his arms and dance a jig out the door and right up the middle of the street.

So when she asked last week why he was so dead set against going up to Empire Falls over the break, he’d lied, reminding her that he might very well be arrested. The dread possibility of being separated from him was still sufficiently scary for her to drop the idea immediately. He felt guilty playing on this fear, but what choice did he have? Predictably, his brother had been a tougher sell. The last time they spoke on the phone, David asked point-blank if they were remaining on the island for Tick or for himself. “Have you thought about Janine?” he asked. “This hasn’t been all that easy on her either, you know.”

Miles couldn’t dispute that fact. Not after putting their daughter in the Jetta and speeding away from the shooting as if he had legal custody, as if the child’s mother had no right to a voice in the decision. At the time, of course, he’d thought of nothing but escape. During the long, bleak Vineyard winter, though, he’d had the opportunity to think everything through, and the thinking had changed exactly nothing. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel bad for his ex-wife, who didn’t deserve this, and of course he was grateful to her for not coming after him with cops and lawyers. Six months after their flight from Empire Falls, he still hadn’t spoken to Janine, nor had Tick. In fact, he’d told only David where they were, though he assumed Janine knew. Once things had calmed down, she’d have figured it out, and if she’d called Peter and Dawn they’d have told her.

That had been their sole stipulation. Of course, they said, he could have the house for as long as he needed it. They’d seen the news, and agreed with Miles that the best thing for Tick might very well be to get her out of there, away from the school, the reporters and all the rest of it. But they’d both refused to lie to Janine. Fortunately, she hadn’t called, and neither had anyone else, like Horace Weymouth or Father Mark, both of whom were likely to have figured out where they’d gone. Maybe not exactly where, but it was a small island, especially when emptied of tourists.

He couldn’t help smiling at the idea of David, who’d barely spoken to Janine since she took up with Walt, being the one to point out his arrogant disregard for her. According to David, she’d gone through a transformation of her own, quitting her job at the health club and coming to work as a hostess and waitress at her mother’s restaurant, where she’d put back on most of the weight she’d Stairmastered off during the previous year. She had little to say about her marriage, which David suspected was already rocky. The Silver Fox had made the transition from the Empire Grill to the new Callahan’s smoothly enough, but he no longer stripped down to his muscle shirt and wouldn’t play gin with Horace anymore. If he was tempted to observe that his wife was gaining weight, he controlled the impulse, which was smart.

“I can’t get used to you siding with Janine,” Miles told his brother.

“Don’t be a jerk,” David said. “I’m siding with Tick. I think you enjoy having her all to yourself. You like having her need you. Keep it up and she always will.”

“She’s never going to get her hands on my daughter,” Miles told him.

Silence on the other end for a beat. “I assume we’re now talking about Mrs. Whiting?”

“We are,” Miles said, not so much embarrassed by his vague pronouncement as by how easily his brother could translate it.

“Miles, I have to tell you, I think you’ve gone a little crazy on this subject. She left town a week after you did. She’s been gone all winter. Her house is for sale.”

“Let me know when it sells.”

“She’s already unloaded most of her commercial real estate, right down to the Empire Grill. She’s made a fortune on the Knox River project, and since Bea turned down her offer and got a lawyer, she’s left us alone. She’s pulling out, Miles.”

“You could be right,” Miles said, though he didn’t believe it for an instant.

“If it’s Jimmy Minty you’re worried about, don’t bother. He’d have to sober up to cause any trouble, and he’s shitfaced over at the Lamplighter every night.”

Actually, Miles was aware of this development. Among the many newspaper clippings his brother had sent him through the winter, most having to do with the new Knox River Restoration Project, there were several detailing Officer Minty’s travails, and they came with annotations in Charlene’s small, careful hand. Not long after the shooting, which was national news until an even worse incident had occurred out West, Jimmy’s wife showed up in Empire Falls with her new fiancé and a downstate lawyer, who served her husband with divorce papers containing allegations of emotional and, in one instance, physical cruelty, the exact nature of which she threatened to make public if he chose to contest either the divorce or the custody arrangements detailed in the supporting documents. A week later, when she returned to Seattle, where she now lived, she took her son, Zack, with her.