The Leftovers

by Tom Perrotta

  Oh well, she told herself. Maybe it won’t matter. Or maybe none of us will even be around in five years.

  Or maybe she’d meet a nice man, get married, and start a new family—maybe even a family just like the one she’d lost. It was a seductive idea, until she got around to thinking about the replacement children. They would be a disappointment, she was sure of it, because her real children had been perfect, and how could you compete with that?

  She turned off her iPod and checked her jacket pocket to make sure her pepper spray was handy before crossing Route 23 and entering the long, slightly freaky stretch of the trail that ran between an industrial wasteland to the south and a scrubby forest that was under the nominal control of the County Parks Commission to the north. Nothing bad had ever happened to her there, but she’d seen some weird stuff in the past few months—a pack of dogs shadowing her at the edge of the woods, a muscular man whistling cheerfully as he pushed an empty wheelchair down the path, and a stern-looking Catholic priest with a salt-and-pepper beard who reached out and squeezed her arm as she rode by. Then, just last week, she happened upon a man in a business suit sacrificing a sheep in a small clearing near an algae-covered pond. The man—a chubby middle-aged guy with curly hair and round glasses—had a large knife pressed to the animal’s throat, but hadn’t yet begun his incision. Both the man and the sheep gazed at Nora with startled, unhappy expressions, as if she’d caught them in an act they would have preferred to remain private.

  * * *

  MOST EVENINGS she ate dinner at her sister’s house. It got a little tedious sometimes, being a perpetual appendage to someone else’s family, having to play the role of Aunt Nora, pretending to be interested in her nephews’ inane banter, but she was grateful nonetheless for a few hours of low-stress human contact, a respite from what would otherwise start to feel like a long and very lonely day.

  Afternoons remained her biggest problem, a dull, amorphous chunk of solitude. That’s why she’d been so upset about losing the day care job—it filled the empty hours so perfectly. She ran errands when she was lucky enough to have some—they weren’t nearly as plentiful or pressing as they used to be—and occasionally cracked open a book she’d borrowed from her sister: one of the Shopaholics, Mr. Right, Good in Bed, the kind of fun, frothy stuff she used to enjoy. But these days reading just made her sleepy, especially after a long ride, and the one thing she couldn’t afford to do was nap, not if she didn’t want to find herself wide-awake in the dark at three in the morning, with nothing but the inside of her own head to keep her company.

  Today, though, Nora had an unexpected visitor, the first in a long time. Reverend Jamison pulled up in his Volvo just as she was wheeling her bike into the garage, and she was surprised by how pleased she was to see him. People used to drop by all the time, just to check up on her, but some sort of statute of limitations seemed to have kicked in about six months ago. Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they’d ruined, got a little stale after a while.

  “Hey, there,” she called out, pressing the button that lowered the automatic door, and then heading down the driveway to meet him, moving with the stiff-legged waddle of a newly dismounted cyclist, the cleats of her bike shoes clicking against the pavement. “How are you?”

  “Okay.” The Reverend smiled unconvincingly. He was a lanky, troubled-looking man in jeans and a partially untucked white Oxford shirt, tapping a manila envelope against the side of his leg. “Yourself?”

  “Not bad.” She brushed some hair out of her eyes, then immediately regretted the gesture, which revealed the decorative pattern of pink dents her helmet left in the tender skin of her forehead. “All things considered.”

  Reverend Jamison nodded somberly, as if to acknowledge all the things that needed to be considered.

  “You have a few minutes?” he asked.

  “Now?” she said, feeling suddenly self-conscious about her spandex tights and sweaty face, the yeasty odor of exertion that was undoubtedly trapped beneath her Gore-Tex windbreaker. “I’m kind of a mess.”

  Even as she said this, she took a moment to marvel at the persistence of her own vanity. She’d thought she was through with all that—what use could she possibly have for it anymore?—but apparently it was too deep a reflex to ever really go away.

  “Take your time,” he said. “I can wait out here while you get cleaned up.”

  Nora couldn’t help smiling at the absurdity of the offer. Reverend Jamison had sat up with her on nights when she was out of her mind with grief, and had cooked her breakfast when she woke up wild-haired and drooling on the living room couch, still in yesterday’s clothes. It was a little late in the day to get all girly and modest on him.

  “Come on in,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  * * *

  UNDER OTHER circumstances, Nora might have found it vaguely exciting, stepping into a steamy shower while a reasonably handsome man who wasn’t her husband waited patiently downstairs. But Reverend Jamison was too grim and preoccupied, too wrapped up in his own bitter obsessions to be conscripted into even the flimsiest romantic scenario.

  Actually, Nora wasn’t even sure if Matt Jamison on was a Reverend anymore. He no longer preached at the Zion Bible Church, no longer seemed to do much of anything except research and distribute that horrible newsletter, the one that had turned him into a pariah. From what she’d heard, his wife and kids had abandoned him, his friends no longer spoke to him, and total strangers sometimes found it necessary to punch him in the face.

  She was pretty sure he deserved whatever he got, but she still harbored a soft spot for the man he’d been, the one who’d helped her through the blackest hours of her life. Of all the would-be spiritual advisors who’d inflicted themselves on her after October 14th, Matt Jamison was the only one she’d been able to tolerate for more than five minutes at a time.

  She’d resented him at first, the way she’d resented all the others. Nora wasn’t religious and couldn’t understand why every priest, minister, and New Age quack within a fifty-mile radius of Mapleton thought they had a right to intrude upon her misery, and assumed she would find it comforting to hear that what had happened to her—the annihilation of her family, to be precise—was somehow part of God’s plan, or the prelude to a glorious reunion in heaven at some unspecified later date. The Monsignor of Our Lady of Sorrows even tried to convince her that her suffering wasn’t all that unique, that she was really no different than a parishioner of his, a woman who’d lost her husband and three children in a car accident and still somehow managed to live a reasonably happy and productive life.

  “Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones,” he said. “We all have to suffer, every last one of us. I stood beside her while she watched all four of those coffins go into the ground.”

  Then she’s lucky! Nora wanted to scream. Because at least she knows where they are! But she held her tongue, understanding how inhuman it would sound, calling a woman like that lucky.

  “I want you to leave,” she told the priest in a calm voice. “Go home and say a million Hail Marys.”

  Reverend Jamison had been foisted upon her by her sister, who’d been a member of the Zion Bible Church for many years, along with Chuck and the boys. The whole family claimed to have been born again at the exact same moment, a phenomenon that Nora found highly improbable, though she kept this opinion to herself. At Karen’s urging, Nora and her kids had once attended a worship service at Z.B.C.—Doug had refused to “waste a Sunday morning”—and she’d been a little put off by the Reverend’s evangelical fervor. It was a style of preaching she’d never encountered close up, having spent her childhood as a halfhearted Catholic and her adulthood as an equally passionless nonbeliever.

  Nora had been living at her sister’s for a few months when the Reverend started dropping by—at Karen’s invitation—for informal, once-a-week “spiritual counseling” sessions. She wasn’t happy about it, but by that point she was too weak and beaten down to
resist. It wasn’t quite as bad as she’d feared, though. In person, Reverend Jamison turned out to be far less dogmatic than he’d been in the pulpit. He had no platitudes or canned sermons to offer, no obnoxious certainty about God’s wisdom and good intentions. Unlike the other clergymen she’d dealt with, he asked a lot of questions about Doug and Erin and Jeremy and listened carefully to her answers. When he left, she was often surprised to realize that she felt a little better than she had when he’d arrived.

  She terminated the sessions when she moved back home, but soon found herself calling him late at night, whenever her insomniac reveries turned suicidal, which was fairly often. He always came right over, no matter what time it was, and stayed for as long as she needed him. Without his help, she never would have made it through that dismal spring.

  As she grew stronger, though, she began to realize that it was the Reverend who was falling apart. There were nights when he seemed just as despondent as she was. He wept frequently and kept up a running monologue about the Rapture and how unfair it was that he’d missed the cut.

  “I gave everything to Him,” he complained, his voice infused with the bitterness of a spurned lover. “My entire life. And this is the thanks I get?”

  Nora didn’t have a lot of patience for this kind of talk. The Reverend’s family had emerged unscathed from the disaster. They were still right where he’d left them, a lovely wife and three sweet kids. If anything, he should get down on his knees and thank God every minute of the day.

  “Those people were no better than I was,” he continued. “A lot of them were worse. So how come they’re with God and I’m still here?”

  “How do you know they’re with God?”

  “It’s in the Scriptures.”

  Nora shook her head. She’d considered the possibility of the Rapture as an explanation for the events of October 14th. Everyone had. It couldn’t be avoided, not when so many people were proclaiming it from the rooftops. But it never made any sense to her, not even for a second.

  “There was no Rapture,” she told him.

  The Reverend laughed as if he pitied her. “It’s right there in the Bible, Nora. ‘Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left.’ The truth is right in front of us.”

  “Doug was an atheist,” Nora reminded him. “There’s no Rapture for atheists.”

  “It’s possible he was a secret believer. Maybe God knew his heart better than he did.”

  “I don’t think so. He used to brag about how there wasn’t a religious bone in his body.”

  “But Erin and Jeremy—they weren’t atheists.”

  “They weren’t anything. They were just little kids. All they believed in was their mommy and daddy and Santa Claus.”

  Reverend Jamison closed his eyes. She couldn’t tell if he was thinking or praying. When he opened them, he seemed just as bewildered as before.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I should’ve been first in line.”

  Nora remembered that conversation later in the summer when Karen informed her that Reverend Jamison had suffered a nervous breakdown and taken a leave of absence from the church. She considered stopping by his house to see how he was doing, but she couldn’t find the strength. She just mailed him a get-well-soon card and left it at that. Not long afterward, right around the first anniversary of the Sudden Departure, his newsletter made its first appearance, a self-published five-page compendium of scurrilous accusations against the missing of October 14th, none of whom were in any kind of position to defend themselves. This one embezzled from his employer. That one drove drunk. Another one had disgusting sexual appetites. Reverend Jamison stood on street corners and passed them out for free, and even though most people claimed to be appalled by what he was doing, he never had any shortage of takers.

  * * *

  AFTER HE left, Nora wondered how she could have been so stupid, so utterly unprepared for something that should have been obvious the moment he’d stepped out of his car. And yet she’d invited him into her kitchen and even made him a cup of tea. He was an old friend, she told herself, and they had some catching up to do.

  But it was more than that, she’d realized, studying his sallow, haunted face from across the breakfast island. Reverend Jamison was a wreck, but some part of her respected him for that, the same part that sometimes felt ashamed of her own shaky sanity, the way she’d managed to keep going after everything that had happened, clinging to some pathetic idea of a normal life—eight hours of sleep, three meals a day, lots of fresh air and exercise. Sometimes that felt crazy, too.

  “How are you?” she asked in a probing tone, letting him know that she wasn’t just making small talk.

  “Exhausted,” he said, and he looked it. “Like my body’s full of wet cement.”

  Nora nodded sympathetically. Her own body felt great just then, warm and loose from the shower, her muscles pleasantly sore, her wet hair gathered snugly in a terry-cloth turban on top of her head.

  “You should take a rest,” she told him. “Go on vacation or something.”

  “Vacation.” He chuckled scornfully. “What would I do on vacation?”

  “Sit by the pool. Forget about things for a while.”

  “We’re past that, Nora.” He spoke sternly, as if addressing a child. “There’s no sitting by the pool anymore.”

  “Maybe not,” she conceded, remembering her own misguided attempts at fun in the sun. “It was just a thought.”

  He stared at her in a way that didn’t feel particularly friendly. As the silence grew strained, she wondered if it would be a good idea to ask him about his kids, find out if they’d had some sort of reconciliation, but she decided against it. If people had good news, you didn’t have to drag it out of them.

  “I saw your speech last month,” he said. “I was impressed. It must have taken a lot of courage for you to do that. You had a really natural delivery.”

  “Thank you,” she said, pleased by the compliment. It meant something coming from a veteran public speaker like the Reverend. “I didn’t think I could, but … I don’t know. It just felt like something I needed to do. To keep their memory alive.” She lowered her voice, trusting him with a confession. “It’s just three years, but sometimes it feels like ages ago.”

  “A lifetime.” He lifted his mug, sniffed at the steam curling up from the liquid, then set it back down without taking a sip. “We were all living in a dreamworld.”

  “I look at pictures of my kids,” she said, “and sometimes I don’t even cry. I can’t tell if that’s a blessing or a curse.”

  Reverend Jamison nodded, but she could tell that he wasn’t really listening. After a moment, he reached down for something on the floor—it turned out to be the manila envelope he’d been holding in the driveway—and set it down on the countertop. Nora had forgotten all about it.

  “I brought you the new issue of my paper,” he said.

  “That’s okay.” She raised her hand in a gesture of polite refusal. “I really don’t—”

  “No.” There was a sharp note of warning in his voice. “You really do.”

  Nora stared dumbly at the envelope, which the Reverend was nudging toward her with the tip of his index finger. A strange sound came out of her mouth, something between a cough and a laugh.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “It’s about your husband.” To his credit, he looked genuinely embarrassed. “I could’ve run it in the October issue, but I held it until after your speech.”

  Nora shoved the envelope back across the counter. She had no idea what secret it contained, and no desire to find out.

  “Please get out of my house,” she said.

  Reverend Jamison stood up slowly from his stool, as if his body really were full of wet cement. He stared regretfully at the envelope for a moment, then shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m just the messenger.”

  VOW OF SILENCE

  IN THE EVENING, AFTER DAIL
Y Sustenance and the Hour of Self-Accusation, they reviewed the folders of the people they were hoping to shadow. In theory, of course, they were open to shadowing everyone, but certain individuals had been singled out for special attention, either because one of the Supervisors thought they were ripe for recruitment, or because a resident had made a Formal Request for increased surveillance. Laurie glanced at the folder in her lap: ARTHUR DONOVAN, age 56, 438 Winslow Road, Apt. 3. The photo stapled to the inside cover showed a completely ordinary middle-aged man—balding, big-bellied, scared to death—pushing an empty shopping cart through a parking lot, his comb-over dislodged by a stiff breeze. A divorced father of two grown children, Mr. Donovan worked as a technician for Merck and lived alone. According to the most recent entry on the log, Donovan had spent the previous Thursday night at home, watching television by himself. He must have done that a lot, because Laurie had never once laid eyes on him in all her nocturnal wanderings.

  Without bothering to recite the required silent prayer for Arthur Donovan’s salvation, she closed the folder and handed it to Meg Lomax, the new convert she was helping to train. Every night in Self-Accusation, Laurie took herself to task for this exact failing, but despite her repeated vows to do better, she kept bumping against the limits of her own compassion: Arthur Donovan was a stranger, and she couldn’t work up a whole lot of concern about what happened to him on Judgment Day. That was the sad truth, and there wasn’t much sense in pretending otherwise.

  I’m only human, she told herself. There’s not enough room in my heart for everyone.

  Meg, on the other hand, studied Donovan’s photo with a melancholy expression, shaking her head and clucking her tongue at a volume that would have been unacceptable for anyone but a Trainee. After a moment, she took out her notepad, scribbled a few words, and showed the message to Laurie.

  Poor man. He looks so lost.

  Laurie nodded briskly, then reached for the next file on the coffee table, resisting the urge to take out her notepad and remind Meg that she didn’t need to write down every single thought that passed through her head. It was something she’d figure out soon enough on her own. Everybody did, eventually, once the initial shock of not speaking wore off. It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.