Empire Falls

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