Empire Falls

his brother would say, Good Lord, Miles, you’re just figuring that out?
    It would’ve been easier to confide in Father Mark, but for some reason Miles hadn’t told him either. In fact, he hadn’t even been back to St. Cat’s since that afternoon he’d scraped the south face and imagined Father Tom sending his mother across the Iron Bridge to perform her penance. Now he wasn’t sure he’d ever go back, not even to the Rectum. For some reason the secret’s tentacles had wrapped themselves around his easy friendship with Father Mark and squeezed all the enjoyment out of it. The priest had visited him in the hospital, but he didn’t stay long and seemed distracted. Their conversation had been as uneasy as it was the afternoon Father Tom had gone missing, when it had seemed that each man was aware of having failed the other by not imagining what these two old men were capable of. If this was a matter of simple embarrassment, in time it would surely go away, but Miles feared it was something more complex. For the moment, he’d concluded that the church—or at least its representative, Father Tom—had been worse than no help to his mother when she desperately needed it, and for now he’d decided to steer his own course, much as Grace had.
    “I shouldn’t butt in,” David said, “but I’ll tell you one more thing. You ought to call that woman.”
    Miles sighed, aware that his brother wasn’t talking about Mrs. Whiting anymore but rather her daughter, who’d called him at the hospital last week and twice since then at the restaurant. He’d managed to fend her off with vague promises of dinner at the Empire Grill as soon as he was recovered, a promise he’d not kept.
    Yet more tentacles here. Was it conceivable that Cindy already knew the truth? Was that the reason she’d taken him to the cemetery, to stand before the two lovers’ graves? Would he even have made the connection in the newspaper the next morning if Cindy hadn’t foreshadowed it? Miles found himself recasting their entire past in light of the cruel possibility that Cindy had known more than he did from the start. He recalled in particular the high school afternoons when they’d waited together for Mrs. Whiting’s black Lincoln to pull up, and how willful the young Cindy had been in her disdain for Emily Dickinson. Out of dark necessity had she become expert at not understanding things she didn’t want to be true? Miles could almost imagine Mrs. Whiting whispering, This woman who’s been so kind to you? She’s the one your father loved, the one he wanted to run off with. This boy you like so much? The very child he preferred to you . Miles remembered, too, that book of Cindy Whiting’s: “How it made her pussy pucker!” Was this, in its own cheap way, helping the poor girl understand how such things could happen between men like her father and women like Grace? Was it possible Cindy herself had fallen in love with Miles because she’d been told he was her father’s preference?
    He tried to reason through these questions toward logical answers, but reason seemed to lead him instead to further questions. Probably, he’d concluded, Cindy’s devotion to her father’s memory suggested that she didn’t know the truth. She seemed to blame his desertion on her mother, not on Grace, whom she remembered with genuine affection. If the two were linked in her mind, it was in their love for herself, not for each other. On the other hand, what was more mysterious and confusing, to child and adult alike, than love? Yes, he should call her. His brother was right. But he wouldn’t, not yet.
    “Listen,” David said, when Miles greeted his recommendation with silence. “Forget I said anything. It’s none of my business, I know.”
    “No,” Miles told him. “It’s good advice. In fact, you’ve been giving me good advice right along. I should’ve been listening.”
    “Well, I never listened to you when I needed to. I just hope you don’t have to hit a tree doing fifty like I did.”
    “Maybe that’s exactly what I need,” Miles said, feeling that in a sense he already had. “You’ve been the one on the ball lately, not me.”
    David shook his head. “It’s not the tree that did it. I was so fucked up for so long that by the time I got straightened out, not many people had any expectations left. I’m not so much on the ball as off the board. No, hitting the tree isn’t a strategy I’d recommend. There are too many people