The Leftovers

by Tom Perrotta

  Patti Levin sucked on her cigarette, staring at Meg for a long moment, and then shifting her gaze to Laurie, filling the space between them with a cloud of grayish smoke.

  “The world went back to sleep,” she said. “It’s our duty to wake it up.”

  * * *

  KEVIN KNEW it was overkill, reading the paper with the TV on and his laptop open while eating his pregame sandwich, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked. He wasn’t really using the laptop—he just liked to keep it handy in case he felt like checking his e-mail—nor was he reading the paper in any formal sense. He was just sort of scanning it, exercising his eyes, letting them roam over the headlines in the Business section without absorbing any information. As for the TV, that was just background noise, an illusion of company in the empty house. All he was thinking about was the sandwich itself, turkey and cheddar on wheat, a little mustard and some lettuce, nothing fancy, but perfectly adequate nonetheless.

  He was almost finished when Jill came in through the back door, pausing in the mudroom to drop her heavy backpack on the floor. She must’ve been in the library, he thought. That was what she’d been doing lately, making sure she didn’t get home from school until Aimee had left for work. They had it down to a science, at least on the weekdays, timing their arrivals and departures so that they never overlapped in the house unless one of them was sleeping, though they both insisted that they were getting along just fine.

  He smiled sheepishly when she entered the kitchen, expecting her to tease him about his multimedia meal, but she didn’t even notice. She was too busy squinting at her phone, looking surprised and impressed at the same time.

  “Hey,” she said. “You hear about Holy Wayne?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “He pled guilty.”

  “Which charges?”

  “Bunch of them,” she said. “Looks like he’s going away for a long time.”

  Kevin woke up his laptop and checked the news. The story was right there at the top. HOLY WAYNE FESSES UP: EXTRAORDINARY MEA CULPA FROM DISGRACED CULT LEADER. He clicked the link and started to read:

  Surprise deal … prosecutors recommend twenty-year sentence … eligible for parole in twelve … “After my boy disappeared, I lost my bearings … All I wanted to do was help people who were in pain, but the power went to my head … I took advantage of so many vulnerable kids … betrayed my wife and the memory of my son, not to mention the trust of the young people who looked to me for healing and spiritual guidance … Especially the girls … They weren’t my wives, they were my victims … I wanted to be a holy man, but I turned into a monster.”

  Kevin tried to concentrate on the words, but his eyes kept straying to the picture that accompanied the story, the all-too-familiar mug shot of a sullen, unshaven man in a pajama top. He was surprised to realize that he felt no satisfaction, no vengeful pleasure at the thought of Holy Wayne rotting in prison. All he felt was a dull throb of sympathy, an unwelcome sense of kinship with the man who’d broken his son’s heart.

  He loved you, Kevin thought, staring at the mug shot as if he expected it to reply. And you failed him, too.

  SO MUCH TO LET GO OF

  BEFORE SHE STARTED HUNTING IN earnest for a new name, Nora changed the color of her hair. That was the proper order, she thought, the only sequence that made any sense. Because how could you know who you were until you saw what you looked like? She’d never understood those parents who had their baby’s name picked out months or even years before it was born, as if they were putting a label on an abstract idea rather than a flesh-and-blood person. It seemed so presumptuous, so dismissive of the actual child.

  She would have preferred to do the dye job at home, in secret, but she could tell it would be too elaborate and risky an operation to handle on her own. Her hair was very dark brown, and every website she consulted warned her to think twice about trying to go blond without professional assistance. It was a complicated, time-consuming process that required harsh chemicals and often resulted in what the experts liked to call “unfortunate outcomes.” The comments that followed the articles were full of second thoughts from rueful brunettes who wished they’d been a little more accepting of their natural coloration. I used to have pretty brown hair, one woman wrote. But I bought into the propaganda and bleached it blond. The color came out fine, but now my hair’s so dull and lifeless my boyfriend says it feels like plastic grass growing out of my scalp!

  Nora read these testimonies with some trepidation, but not enough to change her mind. She wasn’t dyeing her hair for cosmetic purposes, or because she wanted to have more fun. What she wanted was a clean break with the past, a wholesale change of appearance, and the quickest, surest way to do that was to become an artificial blonde. If her pretty brown hair turned into plastic grass in the process, that was collateral damage she could live with.

  In her whole life, she’d never once colored her hair, or added any highlights, or even touched up the smattering of gray that had appeared over the past few years, despite the repeated urging of her stylist, a stern and judgmental Bulgarian named Grigori. Let me get rid of that, he told her at every appointment, in his ominous Slavic accent. Make you look like teenager again. But Nora had no interest in looking like a teenager; if anything, she wished there was a little more gray up there, wished she was one of those still-youngish people whose hair had turned snow-white as a result of the shock they’d suffered on October 14th. It would’ve made her life easier, she thought, if strangers could take one look at her and understand that she was one of the stricken.

  Grigori was a highly respected colorist with an upscale clientele, but Nora didn’t want to involve him in her transformation, didn’t want to listen to his objections or explain her reasons for doing something so drastic and ill-advised. What was she supposed to say? I’m not Nora anymore. Nora’s all finished. That wasn’t the kind of conversation she wanted to have in a hair salon with a man who talked like a movie vampire.

  She made her appointment at Hair Traffic Control, a chain that catered to a younger, more budget-conscious consumer, and presumably handled lots of foolish requests without batting an eye. Even so, the punky, pink-haired stylist looked dubious when Nora told her what she wanted to do.

  “Are you super sure about this?” she asked, brushing the back of her hand across Nora’s cheek. “Because your skin tone doesn’t really—”

  “You know what I’m thinking?” Nora said, cutting her off in midsentence. “I’m thinking this’ll go a lot faster if we skip the small talk.”

  * * *

  JILL WASN’T making much headway with The Scarlet Letter. It was partly Tom’s fault, she thought; back when he was in high school, he’d complained so bitterly about the book that it must have poisoned her mind. Actually, he hadn’t just complained; she’d come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters that he sometimes had trouble pulling it out. When she asked what he was doing, he explained in a calm and serious voice that he was trying to kill the book before it killed him.

  So maybe she wasn’t approaching the text with the respect it deserved as a timeless classic of American literature. But she was at least making a good-faith effort. She’d sat down with the book on three separate occasions in the past week and still hadn’t made it through Hawthorne’s introduction, which Mr. Destry claimed was an important part of the novel that shouldn’t be skipped. It was like she was allergic to the prose; it made her feel slow and stupid, not quite fluent in English: These old gentlemen—seated, like Matthew, at the receipt of the custom, but very liable to be summoned thence, unlike him, for apostolic errands—were Custom-House officers. The longer she stared at a sentence like that, the less sense it made, as if the words were dissolving on the page.

  But the real problem wasn’t the book, and it wasn’t spring fever, or the fact that graduation was just around the corner.
The problem was Ms. Maffey and the I.M. chat they’d started up a few days ago. It had gotten under Jill’s skin and was pulling her in a direction she didn’t want to go. And yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself, couldn’t find a good reason to disengage, to sever a connection that had renewed itself so unexpectedly, after so many years.

  Ms. Maffey, Holly—Jill was still trying to get used to calling her by her first name—had been Jill’s fourth-grade teacher at Bailey Elementary and her all-time favorite, though it hadn’t started out that way. Holly had taken over the class in January, after Ms. Frederickson left to have a baby. All the kids resented her at first and treated her like the interloper she was. After a week or two, though, they began to realize that they’d lucked out: Ms. Maffey was young and vibrant, way more fun than stuffy old Ms. Frederickson (not that anyone had thought of Ms. Frederickson as stuffy or old until Holly showed up). Almost a decade later, Jill couldn’t remember much about fourth grade, or what had made that spring so special. All she remembered was the goldfish tattoo above Ms. Maffey’s ankle, and the feeling of being a little in love with her teacher, wishing every day that summer would never arrive.

  Ms. Maffey only taught in Mapleton those few months. The following September, Ms. Frederickson returned from her maternity leave, and Holly took a job at a school in Stonewood Heights, where she’d remained until a year ago. She’d been married for a short time to a man named Jamie, who’d disappeared in what she naturally referred to as the Rapture. They hadn’t had time to have kids, which was something Holly had mixed feelings about. She’d always wanted to be a mom and was sure that she and Jamie would have made beautiful babies, but she knew that this was no time to be reproducing, bringing new people into a world without a future.

  I guess it’s a blessing, she wrote to Jill in one of their first exchanges. To not have to worry about little ones.

  They’d met a couple of months ago, at the height of the murder investigation. Jill had gone to Ginkgo Street with Detective Ferguson, who’d arranged for what he called a “beauty pageant,” in the hope that she might be able to spot the asthmatic Watcher he was so keen on questioning. It had turned out to be a waste of time, of course, and a weird one at that—fifty grown men, all dressed in white, parading in front of her like contestants in a creepy religious version of The Bachelorette—but it had been redeemed at the very end by the reunion with her old teacher, whom she happened to pass on her way out of the main building. They recognized each other right away, Jill crying out with delight, Ms. Maffey spreading her arms, wrapping her former student in a long and heartfelt embrace. It wasn’t until Jill got home and found the handwritten note that had been slipped into her coat pocket—Please e-mail me if you want to talk about anything!—that she realized it hadn’t been a chance encounter at all.

  Jill wasn’t stupid; she understood that she was being recruited—probably with her mother’s blessing—and resented the fact that someone so important to her had been given the job. Ms. Maffey had even decorated the note with a smiley-face emoticon, the same little flourish she used to scrawl at the top of fourth-grade homework assignments. Jill took the note and tucked it away in her jewelry box, promising herself that she wouldn’t get in touch, wouldn’t allow herself to be manipulated like that.

  It would’ve been easier to keep this vow if she’d had a little more going on that spring, if she’d found some new friends to replace Aimee and the gang, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Most nights she was stuck at home, no one to talk to but her dad, who seemed a little more distracted than usual, depressed about Nora, consoling himself with dreams of softball glory. Max had been texting her a lot, encouraging her to come back to Dmitri’s, or maybe just hang out with him sometime, but she never replied. She was done with all that—the sex and the partying and all those people—and she wasn’t going back.

  After a while it started to feel inevitable, almost mathematical—Jill was looking to fill the vacuum in her life, and Holly was the only plausible candidate. It had been such a shock to see her that day, looking so washed out and dreamy in her white clothes, so unlike the vivacious woman Jill remembered. Please e-mail me if you want to talk about anything! Well, there was a lot Jill wanted to talk about, questions she wanted to ask about Ms. Maffey’s spiritual journey and her life at the compound. She thought it might help her to understand her mother a little better, give her some insight into the G.R. that so far had eluded her. Because if a person like Holly could be happy there, maybe there was something Jill was missing, something she needed to find out about.

  Do u like it there? she’d asked when she finally worked up the nerve to get in touch. It doesn’t seem like much fun.

  I’m content, Ms. Maffey had replied. It’s a simple life.

  But how can u live w.o. talking?

  There’s so much to let go of, Jill, so many habits and crutches and expectations. But you have to let go. It’s the only way.

  * * *

  THE DAY after she became a blonde, Nora sat down to write her goodbye letters. It turned out to be a daunting task, made even more difficult by the fact that she couldn’t seem to sit still. She kept getting up from the kitchen table and wandering upstairs to admire herself in the full-length bedroom mirror, this blond stranger with the oddly familiar face.

  The dye job was an unqualified success. It wasn’t just that the unfortunate outcomes she’d been warned about had failed to materialize: There were no bald spots or greenish undertones, and her bleached hair felt as soft and sleek as ever, miraculously impervious to the noxious chemicals in which it had been steeped. The big surprise wasn’t that nothing bad had happened, it was how good she looked as a blonde, far better than she had with her natural hair color.

  The stylist had been right, of course: There was something jarring about the contrast between Nora’s Mediterranean complexion and this pale Swedish hair, but it was a riveting mismatch, the kind of mistake that made you want to stare, to try to figure out why something that should have looked so tacky actually looked kind of cool. All her life she’d been pretty, but it was an unremarkable, vaguely reassuring sort of beauty, the kind of everyday good looks people barely even noticed. Now, for the first time, she struck herself as exotic, and even a bit alarming, and she liked the way it felt, as if her body and soul had come into closer alignment.

  Some selfish part of her was tempted to call Kevin and invite him over for a farewell drink—she wanted him to see her in this new incarnation, tell her how great she looked, and beg her not to leave—but the more reasonable part of her understood that this was a terrible idea. It would just be cruel, getting his hopes up one last time before crushing them forever. He was a good man, and she’d already hurt him enough.

  That was the main thing she was hoping to express in her letter—the guilt she felt for the way she’d behaved on Valentine’s Day, walking out on him without a word, and then ignoring his calls and e-mails in the weeks that followed, sitting quietly in the darkness of her living room until he got tired of ringing the bell and slipped one of his plaintive notes under the door.

  What did I do wrong? he wrote. Just tell me what it was so I can apologize.

  You didn’t do anything, she’d wanted to tell him, though she never had. It was all my fault.

  The thing was, Kevin had been her last chance. From the very beginning—the night they’d talked and danced at the mixer—she’d had a feeling that he might be able to save her, to show her how to salvage something decent and functional from the ruins of her old life. And for a little while there, she’d thought it had actually started to happen, that a chronic injury was slowly beginning to heal.

  But she was just kidding herself, mistaking a wish for a change. She’d suspected it for a while, but didn’t see it clearly until that night at Pamplemousse, when he tried to talk to her about his son, and all she’d felt was bitterness and envy so strong it was indistinguishable from hatred, a burning, gnawing emptiness in the middle of her chest.

  Fuck
you, she kept thinking to herself. Fuck you and your precious son.

  And the awful thing was, he didn’t even notice. He just kept talking like she was a normal person with a functioning heart, someone who’d understand a father’s happiness and share in a friend’s joy. And she just had to sit there in agony, knowing that there was something wrong with her that could never be repaired.

  Please, she’d wanted to tell him. Stop wasting your breath.

  * * *

  THEY WERE sleeping together now, in the same king-size bed that had previously been used by Gus and Julian. It was a little creepy at first, but they’d gotten past the awkwardness. The bed was huge and comfy—it had some kind of high-tech Scandinavian mattress that remembered the shape of your body—and the window on Laurie’s side opened on to the backyard, which was teeming with spring vitality, the scent of lilacs wafting in on the morning breeze.

  They hadn’t become lovers—not the way the guys had been, anyway—but they weren’t just friends anymore, either. A powerful sense of intimacy had grown between them in the past few weeks, a bond of complete trust that went beyond anything Laurie had shared with her husband. They were partners now, connected for all eternity.

  For the moment, nothing was required of them. Their new housemates would arrive soon, and their little idyll would be over, but for now it felt like a sweet vacation, cuddling in bed until late morning, drinking tea and talking in quiet voices. Sometimes they cried, but not as often as they laughed. On pleasant afternoons, they walked together in the park.

  They didn’t talk too much about what was coming. There wasn’t much to say, really; they had a job to do, and they would do it, just like Gus and Julian had, and the pair before them. Talking about it didn’t help; it only disturbed the peaceful bubble they were living in. Better to just concentrate on the present moment, the precious days and hours that remained, or let your mind drift backward, into the past. Meg spoke frequently about her wedding, the special day that had never happened.