The Leftovers (15 page)

“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 DAILY
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.

There were twelve of them in the smoke-filled room, tonight’s contingent of Watchers, passing the folders in a clockwise direction. It was meant to be a solemn activity, but there were times when Laurie forgot her purpose and began to enjoy herself, culling juicy tidbits of local gossip from the logs, or simply renewing her connection to the sinful but colorful world she was supposed to have renounced. She felt herself falling into this temptation as she read the file of Alice Souderman, her old friend from the Bailey Elementary School PTA. The two of them had cochaired the auction committee for three years in a row and had remained close, even during the turbulent period that preceded Laurie’s conversion. She couldn’t help but be intrigued by the news that, just last week, Alice had been observed having dinner at Trattoria Giovanni with Miranda Abbott, another of Laurie’s good friends, a harried mother of four with a great sense of humor and a wicked talent for mimickry. Laurie hadn’t known that Alice and Miranda were friends, and felt pretty sure that they must have spent a good part of the meal talking about
her
and how much they missed her company. Probably they were mystified by her decision to withdraw from their world and scornful of the community in which she now lived, but Laurie chose not to think about that. She focused instead on the vegetarian lasagna at Giovanni’s—it was the specialty of the house, the cream sauce luscious but not too rich, the carrots and zucchini sliced to an almost translucent thinness—and on an image of herself as the third person at the table, drinking wine and laughing with her old friends. She felt an urge to smile, and had to consciously tighten her mouth against it.

Please help Alice and Miranda,
she prayed as she closed the folder.
They’re good people. Have mercy on them.

What mostly struck her, reading the files, was how deceptively
normal
things seemed in Mapleton. Most people just put on blinders and went about their trivial business, as if the Rapture had never even happened, as if they expected the world to last forever. Tina Green, age nine, attended her weekly piano lesson. Martha Cohen, twenty-three, spent two hours at the gym, then stopped at CVS on the way home for a box of tampons and a copy of
US Weekly
. Henry Foster, fifty-nine, walked his West Highland terrier around the path at Fielding Lake, stopping frequently so the dog could interact with its peers. Lance Mikulski, thirty-seven, was seen entering the Victoria’s Secret store at Two Rivers Mall, where he purchased several unspecified items of lingerie. This was an awkward revelation, given that Lance’s wife, Patty, happened to be sitting across the room from Laurie at that very moment and would soon have a chance to review the file for herself. Patty seemed like a nice enough woman—of course, most people seemed nice enough when they weren’t allowed to talk—and Laurie’s heart went out to her. She knew exactly how it felt, reading embarrassing revelations about your husband while a roomful of people who’d read the same information pretended not to notice. But you knew they were looking, wondering if you’d be able to maintain your composure, to detach yourself from petty emotions like jealousy and anger and keep your mind where it belonged, firmly fixed on the world to come.

Unlike Patty Mikulski, Laurie hadn’t made a Formal Request for surveillance of her husband; the only request she’d made was for her daughter. As far as she was concerned, Kevin was on his own: He was a grown man and could make his own decisions. It just so happened that those decisions included going home with two different women whose files she’d had the bad luck to review, and whose souls she was supposed to pray for, like that was ever gonna happen.

It had hurt more than she expected to imagine her husband kissing a strange woman, undressing her in an unfamiliar bedroom, lying peacefully beside her after they’d finished making love. But she hadn’t cried, hadn’t betrayed an iota of the pain she was feeling. That had only happened once since she’d come to live here, the day she opened her daughter’s file and discovered that the familiar photo on the inside cover—a soulful school portrait of a long-haired, sweetly smiling sophomore—had been replaced by what looked to her like a mug shot of a teenage criminal with big dead eyes and a shaved head, a girl in desperate need of a mother’s love.

*   *   *

THEY CROUCHED
behind some bushes on Russell Road, peering through the foliage at the front door of a white colonial with a brick sunporch that belonged to a man named Steven Grice. There were lights on both downstairs and up, and it seemed likely that the Grice family was in for the night. Even so, Laurie decided to sit tight for a while—it would be a lesson in persistence, the most important quality a Watcher could cultivate. Meg shifted beside her, hugging herself to ward off a chill.

“Damn,” she whispered. “I’m freezing.”

Laurie pressed a finger to her lips and shook her head.

Meg grimaced, mouthing the word
Sorry.

Laurie shrugged, trying not to make too big a deal of the faux pas. This was Meg’s first shift on the Night Watch; it would take some time for her to get used to it. Not just the physical hardship and the boredom, but the social awkwardness—the
rudeness,
even—of not being able to fill the silence with conversation, of more or less ignoring the person who was breathing right next to you. It went against every social impulse that had been drummed into you as a child, especially if you were a woman.

And yet Meg would get used to it, just as Laurie had. She might even come to appreciate the freedom that came with silence, the peace that followed surrender. That was one thing Laurie had learned the winter after the Rapture, when she’d spent all that time with Rosalie Sussman. When your words are futile, you’re better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.

A car turned off Monroe onto Russell, catching them in a silvery wash of light as it rumbled by. The hush seemed deeper in its wake, the stillness more complete. Laurie watched a leaf from a nearly bare curbside maple topple through the glow of a streetlamp and drop soundlessly onto the pavement, but the perfection of the moment was overtaken by the bustle of Meg rooting around in her coat pocket. After what sounded like a prolonged struggle, she managed to extract her notebook and scrawl a brief question, barely legible in the moonlight:

What time is it?

Laurie raised her right arm, tugging at her sleeve and tapping several times on her watchless wrist, a gesture meant to convey the idea that time was irrelevant to a Watcher, that you had to empty yourself of expectations and sit quietly for however long it took. If you were lucky you might even come to enjoy it, to experience the waiting as a form of meditation, a way of connecting with God’s presence in the world. Sometimes it happened: There had been nights over the summer when the air seemed infused with divine reassurance; you could just close your eyes and breathe it in. But Meg looked frustrated, so Laurie took out her own pad—something she’d been hoping not to do—and wrote a single word in big block letters:

PATIENCE.

Meg squinted at it for a few seconds, as if the concept were unfamiliar to her, before venturing a small nod of comprehension. She smiled bravely as she did so, and Laurie could see how grateful she was for this little scrap of communication, the simple kindness of a reply.

Laurie smiled back, remembering her own training period, the feeling she’d had of being completely isolated, cut off from everyone she’d ever loved—Rosalie Sussman had transferred out of Mapleton by then, helping to launch a start-up chapter on Long Island—a loneliness made even harder by the fact that she’d chosen it of her own free will. It hadn’t been an easy decision, but in retrospect it seemed not only right, but inevitable.

After Rosalie moved to Ginkgo Street, Laurie had done her best to reclaim her life as wife and mother and involved citizen. For a little while it felt like a blessing to escape the force field of her best friend’s grief—once again doing yoga and volunteer work, taking long walks around the lake, monitoring Jill’s homework, worrying about Tom, and trying to repair her relationship with Kevin, who made no secret of the fact that he’d been feeling neglected—but that sense of liberation didn’t last for long.

She told her therapist that it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that
that
was her real life now, that
this,
despite everything she’d ever loved about it, was finished for good.

Of course what she was missing this time around wasn’t the excitement and romance of college; it was the sadness she’d shared with Rosalie, the oppressive gloom of their long, silent days, sorting through photographs of Jen, taking the measure of a world that no longer contained this sweet and beautiful girl. It had been horrible, living inside that knowledge, accepting its brutal finality, but it felt real in a way that paying the bills didn’t, or planning the spring library benefit, or reminding yourself to pick up a box of linguine at the supermarket, or congratulating your own daughter on the 92 she got on a math quiz, or waiting patiently for your husband to finish grunting and extract himself from your body. That was what she’d needed to escape now, the unreality of pretending things were more or less okay, that they’d hit a bump on the road and should just keep on going, attending to their duties, uttering their empty phrases, enjoying the simple pleasures that the world still insisted on offering. And she’d found what she was looking for in the G.R., a regimen of hardship and humiliation that at least offered you the dignity of feeling like your existence bore some sort of relationship to reality, that you were no longer engaged in a game of make-believe that would consume the rest of your life.

But she was a middle-aged woman, a forty-six-year-old wife and mother whose best years were behind her. Meg was a sexy, wide-eyed girl in her midtwenties with waxed eyebrows, blond highlights, and the vestiges of a professional manicure. There was an engagement ring taped into her Memory Book, a pebble-sized rock that must have made her friends scream with envy. These were terrible days to be young, Laurie thought, to have all your hopes and dreams stripped away, to know that the future you’d been counting on was never going to arrive. It must have felt like going blind or losing a limb, even if you believed that God had something better for you just around the corner, something wonderful that you couldn’t quite imagine.

Flipping to a fresh page of the notepad, Meg started to write a new message, but Laurie never saw what it was. A door scraped open and they turned in unison to see Steven Grice stepping onto his front stoop, an average-looking guy with glasses and a little paunch, wearing a warm-looking fleece pullover, which Laurie couldn’t help coveting. He hesitated for a moment or two, as if acclimating himself to the night, then headed down the steps and across the lawn to his car, which flashed a chirpy welcome as he approached.