Empire Falls

a blessing, allowing the whole horrible story to recede from public consciousness. True, for the last five days everyone in Dexter County was looking for him, but the truth is, nobody hoped to find him. Is there a term for that? Tick wonders. The thing everyone is searching for and hoping not to find? The thing you’re secretly glad has made a clean getaway, lest you yourself be blamed should it ever be located?
    John Voss moves deliberately across the room to the Blue table and stops just a few feet from Tick, no doubt confronting the fact that there’s no place for him to sit. In fact, starting the day after his disappearance, there’d been one less chair at this table, representing, Tick realizes, everyone’s secret wish. Mrs. Roderigue, she notes, has risen from behind her desk and actually seems to be contemplating a journey across the room. Everyone else is just staring, dumbfounded.
    Without looking at anyone, John sets his folded grocery bag down on the table with a dull thud. Now that he’s close, Tick can smell him. It’s the same rancid smell he’d had back in September before he started working at the restaurant. His clothes are wet and caked with dirt, his hair knotted with bits of leaves and twigs. The room is silent. Tick can feel nothing on the left side of her body. She reaches down to her backpack, where in one of the side pockets there is, in addition to the Exacto knife, the extra sandwich she’s brought along every day this week in case the boy showed up.
    Justin Dibble is the first to speak. “Hey, John,” he says, as if this were a normal day, just another class. “What’s in the bag?”
    At first he doesn’t appear to hear. When he finally reaches into the bag and takes out the revolver, it seems to Tick that he may have done so in response not to Justin but to a voice in his own head. The revolver looks like an antique, or maybe a stage prop, with its wooden grip and long barrel. He points it and pulls the trigger without hesitation, and then Justin Dibble vanishes in the roar. He simply isn’t sitting there anymore. Mrs. Roderigue, halfway across the room, stops next to the vase of still-life flowers, unable to move forward or back or even to scream, and before the echo of the first explosion dies there are two more and Mrs. Roderigue drops to her knees, a large peony blooming on her bosom, the vase tumbling off the table and shattering on the floor.
    “Oh-my-God-oh-my-God,” Candace whimpers, and Tick reaches out to the boy just before the fourth deafening shot. She isn’t sure if she has actually touched him, but apparently she has because John Voss slowly turns to look at her. Both of them are standing now, though she cannot remember rising to her feet. Behind her she hears or imagines hearing the classroom door open and other kids running out, something she wishes her own legs would allow her to do. She can feel her vision narrowing the way it does when she’s about to lose consciousness. She looks over at where Candace was sitting, but the girl is no longer there and she hopes this means that she has either fled or ducked under the table. She wants for Candace not to be harmed, now that they’re friends.
    It occurs to Tick that Zack Minty’s stupid game has prepared her for this moment. She faces John Voss as bravely as she can, knowing it will all be over soon. Her vision has now narrowed to the point where she can barely make him out, his face bloody, his eyes almost sad. When he speaks, his voice comes from a long way off. “ This is what I dream,” he tells her, in answer to the question she asked him so long ago. Then he squeezes the trigger, and she hears what she is certain will be the last sound she will ever hear, and feels herself thrust backward into blackness.

CHAPTER 31
    A CROSS TOWN , Miles Roby was sitting at the edge of the hospital bed compiling a mental list of all the people to whom he owed an apology when one of them, his former mother-in-law, walked in, sat down in a chair just inside the door and burst out laughing. Miles studied Bea through his good eye, the other still fused shut with mucus and blood and swelling. Finally she stopped and caught her breath. “I’m sorry, Miles,” she sighed. “I’m not laughing at you.”
    As lies went, this one seemed particularly feeble to a man dressed in a hospital gown so threadbare it verged on transparence. He had a room designed for two all to himself, so it wasn’t like there was anybody else