Empire Falls

the window and stood there looking across the parking lot and through a line of bare trees to where the gray river flowed.
    He’d had one other visitor. Last night, sometime. He couldn’t remember exactly when. Maybe early this morning. He’d drifted off into a narcotic sleep and awakened with a start to find Cindy Whiting sitting at his bedside. Her appearance had stunned him almost as much as her presence. She looked, Miles couldn’t help thinking, astonishingly like her mother. Or rather the way Miles imagined Mrs. Whiting might look after a long illness, assuming there existed a virus with the temerity to use her for a host. It was hard to tell how much weight Cindy had lost since the football game—what, three weeks ago? Her face was pale and gaunt, the flesh along her upper arms sagging.
    “You’re awake,” she said.
    “How long have you been here?”
    “A while,” she admitted. “Do you know what I was just thinking about? How strange it is that you and I happened to be born on the same day in this very hospital.”
    “Almost the same hour.”
    “For a long time I thought of it as a sign. That we were meant to be together. And that almost happened, didn’t it, Miles?” When he didn’t respond, she continued. “Do you remember the time we kissed?”
    He did. It had been an impulse born of confusion, but still, impossible to either call back or erase from memory. God knew, over the years he’d tried. It had happened the night before Grace, in the final stages of her illness, was moved from the Whiting home to the hospital, where she would live another forty-eight hours, most of them in a coma. June was hot that year, and at Grace’s insistence Max, newly returned from the Keys, had taken David to the coast with him two weeks before, ostensibly to help on the house-painting crew, but in fact so he wouldn’t have to watch his mother die. Roger Sperry’s illness had already killed him, and Miles, who’d been home since the previous October, was working long hours at the Empire Grill. He was grateful for the distraction, and lengthened the hours whenever possible, though he was ashamed of himself for leaving school to be with his dying mother, only to hide out at the restaurant, no more prepared at twenty-one to watch his mother die than David was at twelve. What little strength Grace had left she used to express her anger—it was rage, really—about his decision to leave St. Luke’s. Even though the academic year was finished—he’d driven down for Peter and Dawn’s graduation the month before—and though it was pointless for her to be angry over something that no longer pertained, Grace, in her confusion and pain, clung to her anger as if that alone might keep her alive. Didn’t he realize, she kept asking, that the mere sight of him only increased her suffering? As her condition worsened, he delayed his visits as much as possible, often arriving at the Whiting house at a time when, according to the rhythms of her illness, she was likely to be asleep or heavily sedated with morphine.
    It was Cindy Whiting—having returning to Empire Falls herself from Augusta—who had been his mother’s constant nurse and companion. Miles often found her crying quietly at Grace’s bedside when he arrived after closing the restaurant. On the night Cindy was now recalling, his mother was awake when he appeared, and upon seeing him in the doorway she’d simply turned her head and looked away, a gesture so eloquent in its futility that it had backed him out into the hall. Cindy had risen to follow him, leaning heavily on her cane in order to close the door quietly behind her. Her eyes were swollen with her own suffering, and it hadn’t seemed so wrong for him to take her in his arms. When she raised her head to his, they’d kissed, and where was the harm in a kiss so full of need? He should have broken it off, of course, but he hadn’t, the moment proceeding recklessly until he slid his hand up under her sweater, then under her brassiere, cupping her breast, feeling her shudder against him. They’d remained like that until there was a moan of pain from inside the room, and Cindy whispered, “I’ll be right back,” and returned to his mother’s bedside.
    Poor, crippled girl, she could do nothing quickly, however, and by the time she returned, he was gone.
    “Yes, I remember,” he told her, blinking at the memory.
    Then she said something that surprised him. “You do know I’ve had lovers,