Empire Falls

entered the room where Justin Dibble and Doris Roderigue and Otto Meyer Jr. lay dead. Several policemen and county officials were conversing quietly, as if they had no wish to be overheard by one another or the deceased. Jimmy Minty was among them too, with two black eyes and a metal protective plate over his nose, trying to talk to his son, who kept turning away and finally pushing his father hard with both hands, one of which was wrapped in a bloody bandage.
    Miles was only vaguely aware of the officer who grabbed his elbow to keep him from tromping through the blood and glass and water, or of Bill Daws’s guiding hand on his shoulder—amazingly strong, he would marvel later, for a man so ill. It was Bill who finally asked, his voice filling the room, this man who would himself be dead by Christmas, “Where is this man’s daughter?”
    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