Empire Falls

on the door, and drive off again.
    Meanwhile, Tick did a tally in her mind. In one day her mother had nearly dragged her down Empire Avenue by her backpack; she’d become best friends with Candace Burke; her father had broken Walt Comeau’s arm in a wrestling match, then gotten into a fight with a policeman and ended up in the hospital, from which he’d be taken directly to jail; and a sign had been posted on the Empire Grill reading CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE . And that wasn’t counting the horrible events earlier in the week.
    But everything would be back to normal before long?
    W HATEVER’S BOBBING OUT THERE , Tick notices, is still bobbing, but closer now. What it looks like is a human head, though of course that makes no sense. She watches curiously to see whether it will resolve itself as sense or remain nonsense, and she’s just about to bet on the latter—an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the irrational world, where people she knows, like her father, become people she doesn’t know, where the whole world tilts and solid things become as liquid as objects in a Dalí painting, where human heads disassociated from their bodies are borne along on waves of windblown grass—when this particular bobbing head resolves itself before her eyes, tilting the world back again, though not completely. Because the head, she realizes, belongs to John Voss, and in fact it’s not bobbing on water or waves of grass, but rather on his shoulders. What she’s been observing is the boy’s natural, loping stride as he approaches the school, crossing the distant field, and then the cinder track, his body hidden below the curvature of the land. Only when he reaches the gentle incline where her father once lost control of Mrs. Whiting’s new Lincoln do the boy’s neck, shoulders and torso become visible, a recognizably human form. And then just as suddenly he changes course and vanishes entirely behind the rows of cars, gone so completely that Tick wonders if she’s imagined him there.
    The best evidence that what she’s seen is real is that her left arm has gone numb.
    W HAT SHE REALIZES when he enters, a sixteen-year-old boy with a grocery bag folded under his arm, is how relieved she’d been by his disappearance. Though terribly ashamed to feel this, she can’t deny it. One look at him now—head down, shoulders hunched forward, resolutely silent, as if he thinks he can walk into art class and take up where he left off—brings back to her the thought she’d tried so hard to ignore last week, which she was too embarrassed to admit even to her father: that everyone is better off with this boy gone.
    Not that he is the cause of all this trouble, because she knows he isn’t. He’s not even really to blame for what happened with his grandmother. In a way, John Voss is like Jesus—blameless, perhaps, but nevertheless the center of all the trouble. If Jesus had gone away, things in Galilee would have returned to normal, just as her father promised they soon would here in Empire Falls. So, as Tick sees John again—and she’s the first to, because she’s been watching the classroom door, waiting for it to open—a wish escapes before she can call it back, that he should disappear again, this time for good. Dead? Is that what she means? She hopes not. No one could want this boy, this child who had dangled from a laundry bag inside a dark closet, not to exist. Merely for him not to exist here , because here has proven to be the wrong place. She feels like Jesus’ disciples must’ve felt. They never wanted him crucified, of course, but what a relief it must have been when the stone was rolled across the entrance to the tomb, sealing everything shut so they could go back to being fishermen, which they knew how to do, rather than fishers of men, which they didn’t. No wonder they didn’t recognize him later on the road to Emmaus. They didn’t want to, any more than Tick wants to welcome this poor boy back into their midst.
    Except for being blameless, John Voss is not, of course, at all like Jesus. What has he ever been but a silent, sullen, angry burden that no one, including Tick, has wanted to shoulder? Outside of her father, who’d given him a job, and Tick, who’d given him the bare minimum of kindness, the only person who’d showed him any generosity was his grandmother, and he’d repaid that kindness by tossing her lifeless body onto the landfill as if it were a threadbare rug. No, his disappearance has been