Empire Falls

suggesting that he’d had no idea Grace would be willing to take Cindy with them, but the damage was done. In that moment she’d seen him as a man prepared to abandon a child. Maybe she didn’t immediately understand what effect such knowledge would have, but C. B. Whiting did .
    The child he would’ve left behind, who so many years before had to be convinced that her memory of the crippling accident was incorrect, was the last to notice his homecoming, perhaps seeing some movement reflected in the glass. Cindy alone was glad to see him. She spun, nearly losing her balance, and lunged toward him crying, “Daddy!” And in that word he heard a second, far better purpose for the weight in his pocket .
    B Y TAKING HIS OWN LIFE when he did, C. B. Whiting robbed himself of the opportunity to become, in his remaining years, a somewhat less deluded man. Had he lived, he might gradually have learned that his wife was not quite the monster he believed her to be, that for her, affection was not impossible so much as unnatural and difficult, that she resembled the soil her family had tended for so long before selling out: blighted, but not entirely barren. And had he lived long enough to see his beloved Grace grow ill and die, had he found the courage to help her along in this journey, he might have come to understand that he’d expected too much of her good heart, which being human was fragile, imperfect and destined to fail. That his poor opinion of himself would have changed is unlikely, however, and it might have been this realization that compelled him to quit the earth.
    One thing is certain. By ending his life when he did, C. B. Whiting died in the mistaken belief that like his forebears, he had failed to kill his wife, which wasn’t entirely true. Had he lived, it would have surprised and perhaps even cheered him to learn that he actually had sealed her doom the year he proposed to her, not long after the dead moose washed up on his bank. That was the summer his engineers warned him that dynamiting the Robideaux Blight and cutting a new channel might increase the severity of floods, to which the river was already prone. In fact, afterward the river did become less manageable, though none of its previous floods came close to matching the one that occurred the spring that Miles and Tick Roby were still living on Martha’s Vineyard. More snow had fallen that winter than the previous three combined, and when an early thaw came that first week in April—temperatures reaching into the seventies all the way to Canada—the snow melted in torrents and the Knox River roared through Empire Falls ten feet above flood stage, halfway up the tall first-floor windows of the old textile mill, which was in the process of being converted to a brew pub on the ground floor and the lavish offices of a credit-card company above. At the river’s crest, half of downtown was underwater, including the old Empire Grill.
    There was less damage on the other side of the river, where the bank was steeper. While the water never reached the Whiting hacienda, it did wash the gazebo clean away. Why Francine Whiting was in it at the time, of course, was impossible to know. Perhaps she imagined that so long as she herself commanded this stage, the river would never have the temerity to approach. She was not, like her daughter, a believer in swift, powerful, life-changing forces, and she might not have recognized this one when it arrived. Or perhaps she simply got trapped, a sudden surge of water cutting her off from the house.
    The day the river crested was warm, with a high blue sky, the kind of afternoon, after a long gray winter and several days of warm spring rains, when she could have fallen asleep, the rays of the sun warming her skin. Though no one actually saw her get swept away, downstream in Fairhaven, where the flood damage was even worse than in Empire Falls, an emergency worker on a sandbag brigade near the dam saw what he believed was a woman’s body glide by in the raging water. The corpse hung up briefly at the dam, but out there in the middle of the torrent, lodged at the top of a dam that might collapse at any second, and nothing could be gained by attempting a rescue. Besides, whoever this woman might have been, she was dead now, and under such circumstances the workers would not have been inclined to risk their own lives, even if the spectacle before them hadn’t revealed a ghoulish aspect. For astride the body, crouched at