Empire Falls

suspected, had ever faced: what precisely to say to a woman who has attempted to end her life on your behalf. “How are you, Cindy?”
    “Well , Miles,” she replied. “I’m so, so well. The doctors are amazed,” then adding, as if aware of the implausibility of this, “They say it’s a miracle. It’s as if my psyche just suddenly decided to heal. I haven’t had any setbacks in …”
    Here she stopped to think, apparently doing the math in her head, though Miles had no idea what numbers she might be adding or subtracting, whether they were large or small, representing days, weeks, months or years. While she calculated, Miles took in the entry hall and living room of the Whiting home and felt, as always, vaguely uncomfortable. While the rooms were spacious, the ceilings were low, creating in Miles, a large man, not so much a sense of claustrophobia as of a great weight bearing down. Mrs. Whiting was a collector, and the walls were covered with original art, but most of the paintings, he thought, were not well displayed. The larger pieces overpowered the walls on which they hung. Even his own favorites, some smaller John Marins, looked out of place, outdoor Maine scenes held captive indoors against their will. Conspicuously missing were family photos, all of which Mrs. Whiting had donated to the old Whiting mansion downtown. Neither Whitings nor Robideauxs were anywhere in evidence.
    “Anyway,” Cindy Whiting said, apparently having given up, “it seems I’m to begin life again, like a normal person, at age thirty-nine. You may congratulate me.”
    “That’s wonderful news, Cindy,” Miles said, swallowing this outrageous lie whole. Miles, having been born on the same day, was the one person in the world not likely to forget how old she really was. On the other hand, her desire to be thirty-nine instead of forty-two might, he supposed, be evidence that what she’d told him was true, that something in her psyche had healed. After all, shaving off a few years was something normal women were known to do. Maybe Cindy had learned to replace big lies—for instance, that Miles Roby was in love with her, or one day would be—that had compromised her sanity with smaller, more harmless and optimistic ones. Like imagining that one sunny day you’ll wake up able to climb a ladder and paint a church steeple, right up there in the middle of the blue sky. It could happen.
    “Where will you live?”
    These words were no sooner out than Miles realized they formed a hurtful question, which he hadn’t intended.
    “Why, right here, of course. Where else?”
    “Of course. That’s not what I meant,” he quickly lied. “I guess I was wondering if you’d live with your mother or—”
    “Only until I can find a place of my own,” she said, smiling at the thought. “A grown woman should be able to come and go as she pleases, don’t you think? Entertain who she pleases?”
    Before Miles could offer an opinion on the conduct of grown women, there was a loud hissing sound behind him, and he didn’t need to turn around to know that his nemesis had joined them. The cat had been called Timmy from kittenhood, when, despite her actual gender, she was still thought to be male because of her aggressive viciousness. The tiny animal—soaking wet, its fur matted, its yellow eyes wild with fright and rage—had appeared one morning on the Whiting patio, where it howled so balefully that Cindy Whiting, home on a furlough from the state facility in Augusta, had taken it in and nursed it to health. Someone presumably had tossed the kitten into the river somewhere upstream, expecting it either to drown or be dashed on the rocks at the falls. A scrap of burlap had been attached to one of its talons, suggesting that Timmy had started her river journey in a sack—perhaps, to judge from the depth of her psychosis, in the company of her siblings. At any rate, once she got her strength back, Timmy was one pissed-off little critter, whose single ambition in life seemed to be to shred the world around her. Neutering seemed a good idea, though, the vet she was taken to for castration had quickly pointed out, an impractical one, given her gender.
    To Miles, Timmy’s gender seemed less the issue than her metaphysical nature, which appeared to be less feline than demonic. Horace Weymouth, who in his capacity as an Empire Gazette reporter had interviewed Mrs. Whiting at her residence more than once, swore that Timmy was the old