Empire Falls

details flooded back over him. The Thirsty Whale, where he’d greedily devoured clams, was still a restaurant, but under another name and closed until Memorial Day. The village itself was somehow both larger and smaller than he remembered it. There were more buildings, and they seemed closer together, and the epic distance back to their cottage when he was sleepy and full of buttery clams wasn’t much more than a hundred winding yards.
    The gate was down across the dirt road that wound up the bluff among the beach shrubs, so Miles had to park and walk. The main inn, with its sweeping, wraparound porch, was exactly as he remembered it, and so, too, the cottages below, their rose trellises already greening in the warmer weather. He quickly found the one they’d stayed in, the name “Sojourner” above the door, the strange word returning to him across the decades on a wave of memory. Peering in the dusty window at what had been his tiny bedroom, he half expected to see his mitt sitting on the nightstand where he’d left it. Indulging such nostalgic emotions made him feel more than a little foolish, and they probably would be of little use in explaining why he’d ignored the NO TRESPASSING sign at the gate. Still, having come this far, he decided to complete the journey, which meant following the path down to the beach. Here, too, the beach grass was greening up, spring here already in full stride, nearly a month ahead of central Maine. The beach itself was still deserted, so he sat down for a while where he thought his mother had spread their blanket, and studied a fogbank resting a couple hundred yards offshore. Whose ghost did he expect to encounter here, he wondered—his mother’s, or that of his boyhood self?
    He didn’t become aware that the fog had moved in until he turned around and saw it had nearly engulfed the bluff, which now was visible only in vague, blurry outline. By the time he located the path again, the mist was so thick he was able to orient himself only by watching the ground at his feet, and once up the cliff he found “Sojourner” again by literally blind luck. From its front porch neither the main house nor the nearest cottage, where Charlie Mayne had stayed, was visible. As he rested there on the step—a grown man now, whether he felt like one or not—he realized it was Charlie Mayne’s ghost he’d come to commune with. Miles and his mother had left the island together that morning thirty years ago, returning to their lives in Empire Falls, and she now lay buried in the town cemetery. It was Charlie Mayne they’d left behind on the dock as the ferry steamed away, so of course it was appropriate that he should be here still. Even recognizing his face in the photograph of C. B. Whiting couldn’t change that. It was Charlie Whiting who lay buried up the hill from his mother, but Charlie Mayne was a different sort of man entirely, and it was he whom Miles wished to summon for questioning.
    So when the man emerged through the mist and sat down next to him on the porch step, Miles looked him over carefully and saw that it was indeed clean-shaven Charlie Mayne and not bearded C. B. Whiting. Still elegant and silver-haired, Charlie had not aged at all, nor was there a bullet hole in his right temple from the day that other fellow took a pistol he’d purchased in Fairhaven down to the river with him.
    When Miles saw the man’s familiar sad expression, he said, “My mother died, Charlie.” He didn’t want him to think she was inside “Sojourner” putting on her white dress so they could all go out to dinner.
    Charlie Mayne nodded, as if to suggest that, of course, this is exactly what would’ve happened.
    “She waited for you,” Miles said, when he didn’t speak.
    “I meant to come. I wanted to.”
    “Then why didn’t you?” Miles asked, having wondered for over thirty years.
    “When you’re older, you’ll understand. There are things that grown-ups intend and want to do, but somehow just can’t.”
    This explanation made Miles feel like a boy again, and when he spoke it was with a ten-year-old’s whine. “But you got steamer clams in a restaurant that didn’t even have them on the menu.”
    “Well, steamer clams are different,” Charlie Mayne explained.
    Which made Miles even more petulant. “You killed her,” he said. “You killed my mother.”
    “No,” Charlie Mayne said. “I’m afraid your mother died of cancer.”
    “How do you know? You weren’t