Empire Falls

don’t you, Miles?”
    “I’m glad, Cindy,” he said, feeling himself redden with embarrassment, because, no, he hadn’t suspected this.
    “I wanted you to know, because I’m leaving tomorrow. The truth is, I don’t do very well at home. I never have. There’s a man in Augusta who cares for me, and I like him well enough. It’s not a wonderful life, but I can see clearly there, and it’s important for me to see things clearly. I want you to know about this man, because you always imagine me unhappy, and that hurts my feelings. It’s like you decided a long time ago that someone like me is incapable of joy. It hurts you to think that my life is a misery, so you don’t think of me at all. You don’t call me to find out how I’m doing, because you think you already know. It doesn’t occur to you that I might be happy … that I might like to share it with you.”
    “I’m sorry, Cindy.”
    When it was clear he was unable to choke out any more than this, she said, “Is it so terrible for you to know I’ll always love you?”
    “No, of course not. It’s just that I’ve been such a poor friend to you, Cindy, right from the start.”
    “It’s true you always managed to hurt my feelings worse than all the others, but that was only because I had feelings for you. You never meant to hurt me. Not ever. I know that.”
    She got to her feet then.
    “Remember how you used to try to get me to understand poems?”
    He nodded.
    “Actually, I understood a lot more than you thought. It was just so much fun watching how frustrated you’d get.”
    “Thanks a lot.”
    “I’m more like my mother than you know.”
    “No one’s like your mother.”
    At the door she stopped, then turned back to regard him. “She’s not finished with you, Miles,” she said. He nodded.
    “I know.”
    I T TOOK HIM A WHILE , but he managed to dress, not wanting to traverse the corridor, which was strangely deserted, in his hospital gown. The door at the near end of the hall had just slammed shut, and the sound of people running and shouting still echoed in the stairwell. The nurses’ station was abandoned, and somewhere nearby a two-way radio barked loudly, but with too much static for the words to be comprehensible. He’d made it about halfway down the corridor when the double doors at the end swung open, and Bill Daws, the chief of police, looking pale, stepped through them. “I was down in radiology when the call came in, Miles,” he said.
    This explained why a man who was usually so meticulous about his appearance now stood before him with his shirt only half tucked in.
    “You better come with me,” he added.
    M ILES WOULD RECALL many of the details only later. Over long weeks and months, they returned the way flashes of lightning illuminate a nocturnal landscape, eventually coming together to form a narrative: the boy, John Voss, statue-like, his face bloody, locked alone and unattended in the backseat of the police cruiser; then, inside the modular addition that housed the art and shop classes, much of the horror visible from the doorway; in the studio itself, a small empty wooden table in the center of the room, at the base of which Doris Roderigue was sprawled, facedown, her legs splayed, her forehead resting in a puddle of water and broken glass; under a nearby table, the body of a boy Miles recognized from the grill, part of Zack Minty’s crowd, with a gaping wound in the head; and finally, slumped up against the wall near the door, one hand resting on his stomach and looking as if he were stricken by a severe attack of dyspepsia, the body of Otto Meyer Jr.
    Miles took in, really took in, none of this at the time, any more than he’d registered the crowd of students outside, some dazed, others crying, interspersed with shell-shocked teachers. Bill Daws had been waved through a blockade hastily set up at the street entrance to the school, but already the first frantic parents were arriving, abandoning their cars in driveways, on lawns, in the middle of the road, anywhere, and then running through backyards and across the school grounds from all directions, heavy, middle-aged women, many of them, some slipping and falling in the wet grass, then grunting back onto their feet again and moving forward, almost completely blinded by tears and a fear the likes of which they’d never known, never even imagined. Miles both saw and did not see any of this, nor did he really see any of the living once he and Bill Daws