The Leftovers (31 page)

They assured her that it was.

“Good.” For the first time since they’d arrived, Patti Levin smiled. “Outpost 17 is a very special place.”

*   *   *

THE ONE
thing life had taught Jill was that things change all the time—abruptly, unpredictably, and often for no good reason. But knowing that didn’t do you that much good, apparently. You could still get blindsided by your own best friend, right in the middle of a macaroni and cheese dinner.

“Mr. Garvey,” Aimee said. “I think it’s time I started paying some rent.”

“Rent?”
Her father chuckled, as if he enjoyed having his leg pulled as much as the next guy. He’d been in a pretty good mood for the past few weeks, ever since he’d come back from Florida. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I mean it.” Aimee looked completely serious. “You’ve been really generous to me. But I’m starting to feel like a freeloader, you know?”

“You’re not a freeloader. You’re a guest.”

“I’ve been living here a looong time.” She paused, daring him to disagree. “I’m sure you guys are really sick of me.”

“Don’t be silly. We enjoy your company.”

Aimee frowned, as if his kindness just made things harder.

“I’m not just sleeping here, I’m eating your food, using your washer and dryer, watching your cable TV. I’m sure there’s other stuff, too.”

Internet,
Jill thought.
Heat and AC, tampons, makeup, shampoo and conditioner and toothpaste, my underwear …

“It’s really okay.” He glanced at Jill, wondering if she had a different opinion. “Right?”

“Absolutely,” Jill said. “It’s been fun.”

And she meant it, too, despite her occasional complaints about Aimee’s lengthy, open-ended crash at their house. Sure, there’d been some rocky times in the fall, but things had gotten better in the past month or two. Christmas had been really nice, and they’d thrown a great New Year’s party while her father was on vacation. In the weeks since then, Jill had made a point of asserting her independence from Aimee, no longer going out every night, making a good-faith effort to keep up with her schoolwork and spend a little more time with her dad. It seemed like they’d finally come up with a balance everyone could live with.

“I’ve never paid rent before,” Aimee said, “so I have no idea what the going rate would be, especially in a beautiful house like this. But I guess the landlord decides that, right?”

Her father winced at the word
landlord.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You’re a high school student. How’re you going to pay rent?”

“That’s the other thing I wanted to tell you.” Aimee seemed suddenly unsure of herself. “I think I’m done with school.”

“What?”

Jill was startled to see that Aimee was blushing, because Aimee never blushed.

“I’m dropping out,” she said.

“Why would you do that?” he asked. “You’re gonna graduate in a few months.”

“You didn’t see my report card,” Aimee told him. “I failed everything last semester, even gym. If I want to graduate I’m going to have to go back next year, and I’d rather shoot myself than be a fifth-year senior.” She turned to Jill, requesting backup. “Go ahead, tell him what a fuckup I am.”

“It’s true,” Jill said. “She can’t even remember how to open her locker.”

“Look who’s talking,” he said.

“I’m gonna do better this term,” Jill promised, thinking how much easier it would be to buckle down with Aimee out of the picture. They wouldn’t be walking to school every morning, getting stoned behind the supermarket, or sneaking out for two-hour lunches.
I can be myself again,
she thought.
Grow my hair back, start hanging out with my old friends …

“Besides,” Aimee added. “I got a job. You remember Derek from the yogurt store? He’s managing the new Applebee’s over at Stonewood Plaza. He hired me as a server. Full-time, starting next week. The uniforms are ugly, but the tips should be pretty good.”

“Derek?”
Jill didn’t try to hide her disgust. “I thought you hated him.”

Their old boss was a sleazeball, a married guy in his mid-thirties—his key chain was an LCD cube that flashed pictures of his baby son—who liked to buy alcohol for his underage female employees and ask lots of probing questions about their sex lives.
Ever use a vibrator?
he’d asked Jill one night, totally out of the blue.
I bet you’d like it.
He’d even offered to buy her one, just because she seemed like such a nice person.

“I don’t
hate
him.” Aimee took a sip of water, then heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief. “God, I can’t wait to get out of that school. I get depressed every time I walk down the hall. All those
assholes
on parade.”

“Guess what?” her father said. “They’ll all come to Applebee’s, and you’ll have to be nice to them.”

“So? At least I’ll be getting paid for it. And you know what the best part is?” Aimee paused, smirking proudly. “I get to sleep in every day, as late as I want. No more waking up hungover at the crack of dawn. So I’d really appreciate it if you guys kept your voices down in the morning.”

“Ha ha,” Jill said, trying to fend off a sudden troubling vision of the house after she left for school, Aimee wandering through the kitchen in nothing but a T-shirt and panties, her father watching from the table as she guzzled OJ straight from the carton, every day a disaster waiting to happen. It made her really glad that he had a new girlfriend, a woman close to his own age, even if she was a little spooky.

“Listen.” He seemed seriously concerned, as if Aimee were his own daughter. “I really think you should reconsider. You’re too smart to quit school.”

Aimee exhaled slowly, like she was beginning to lose her patience.

“Mr. Garvey,” she said, “if you’re really uncomfortable with this, I guess I can find somewhere else to live.”

“This isn’t about where you live. I just don’t want you to sell yourself short.”

“I get that. And I really appreciate it. But you’re not gonna change my mind.”

“All right.” He closed his eyes and massaged his forehead with three fingertips, the way he did when he had a headache. “How about this? In a month or two, after you’ve been working for a while, we can sit down and figure out the rent situation. In the meantime, you’re our guest, and everybody’s happy, okay?”

“Sounds good.” Aimee smiled, as if this were the exact outcome she’d been hoping for. “I like it when everybody’s happy.”

*   *   *

LAURIE COULDN’T
sleep. It was her third night at the Outpost, and the transition wasn’t going as smoothly as she’d hoped. Part of it was the strangeness, after twenty-three years of marriage and nine months of communal living, of once again having a room of her own. She just wasn’t accustomed to solitude anymore, the way that lying alone on a comfortable mattress could feel like tumbling endlessly through outer space.

She missed Meg, too, missed their sleepy bedtime talks, the schoolgirl camaraderie of the Unburdening. Some nights they had stayed awake for hours, two soft voices bouncing back and forth, recounting their life stories in random installments. In the beginning, Laurie had made a good-faith effort to keep them focused on Meg’s training, to discourage idle gossip and nostalgic chatter, but the conversation always seemed to have a mind of its own. And the truth was, she enjoyed its meandering trajectory just as much as Meg did. She excused her weakness by reminding herself that it was a temporary condition, that Graduation Day would come soon enough, and she would, by necessity, have to resume her regimen of silence and self-discipline.

And here she was, trying to do just that, but with Meg in the very next room, so close that not being able to talk to her seemed absurd and almost cruel. It was hard to be alone under any circumstances, but even harder when you knew you didn’t have to be, when all you had to do was throw off the blankets and tiptoe down the hall. Because she had no doubt—none at all—that Meg was wide awake at that very moment, thinking the exact same thoughts she was, resisting the exact same temptation.

It had been simple to behave at the Compound, with so many people around, so many watchful eyes. At the Outpost there was no one to stop them from doing what they wanted, no one to even notice except Gus and Julian, and those guys were in no position to criticize. They were sharing the master suite on the ground floor—it had a king-size bed and a whirlpool tub in the adjoining bathroom—and Laurie sometimes thought she could hear their voices late at night, frail bubbles of speech drifting through the quiet house, popping just before they reached her ears.

What are they talking about?
she wondered.
Are they talking about us?

She wouldn’t have blamed them if they were. If she and Meg had been together, they would certainly have been talking about Gus and Julian. Not to complain—there wasn’t all that much to complain about—but just to swap impressions, the way you do when new people enter your life and you’re not quite sure what to make of them.

They seemed like sweet guys, she thought, though maybe a bit self-involved and entitled. They could also be a little bossy, but Laurie suspected that this attitude was more a fluke of circumstance than a flaw in their characters. They’d been the sole occupants of Outpost 17 for almost a month before Laurie and Meg had arrived, and they’d naturally come to think of the place as their own and to assume that the newcomers would have to abide by the rules they’d established. As a matter of principle, Laurie didn’t think this was fair—the G.R. was based on equality, not seniority—but she figured she’d wait a little while before making a fuss about the decision-making process.

Besides, it wasn’t like the house rules were particularly onerous. The only one that caused Laurie any personal inconvenience was the indoor smoking ban—she liked starting the day with a cigarette in bed—but she had no intention of trying to change it. The policy had been put in place to protect Gus, who suffered from a severe case of asthma. His breathing was often labored, and just the day before, he’d suffered a full-on attack right in the middle of dinner, leaping up from the table with a panicky expression, gulping and wheezing like he’d just been rescued from the bottom of a swimming pool. Julian ran to their room to retrieve an inhaler and rubbed Gus’s back for several minutes afterward until his respiration returned to something like normal. It had been terrifying to watch, and if Laurie had to smoke on the back patio to give him a little relief, that was a sacrifice she was more than willing to make.

As a matter of fact, she was grateful for the opportunity to practice any kind of self-denial, because the Outpost offered so few of them. Life here was so much easier than at the Compound. Food was plentiful, if not fancy—mostly pasta and beans and canned vegetables—and the thermostat was kept at a civilized sixty-two degrees. You could go to bed when you felt like it, and sleep in as long as you liked. As for work, you set your own hours and filled out your own reports.

It was almost disturbingly cushy, which was one of the reasons she was trying so hard to maintain her distance from Meg, to not fall back into the easy routine of friendship. It was bad enough being warm and well-fed and free to do as you pleased. If, on top of all that, you were happy, too, if you had a good friend to keep you company at night, then what was the point of even being in the G.R.? Why not just go back to the big house on Lovell Terrace, rejoin her husband and daughter, wear nice clothes again, renew her membership at the Mapleton Fitness Club, catch up on the TV she’d missed, redecorate the living room, cook interesting meals with seasonal produce, pretend that life was good and the world wasn’t broken?

After all, it wasn’t too late.

*   *   *

“YOU’VE BEEN
with us for quite a while,” Patti Levin had said at the end of their meeting last week. “I think it’s about time we made it official, don’t you?”

The envelope she pressed into Laurie’s hand contained a single sheet of paper, a Joint Petition for Divorce. Laurie had filled in the blanks, checked the necessary boxes, and signed her name in the space reserved for Petitioner A. All that remained for her to do was to take the form to Kevin and get him to sign as Petitioner B. She had no reason to believe he’d object. How could he? Their marriage was over—it had suffered what the state called an “irretrievable breakdown”—and they both knew it. The petition was a legal formality, a bureaucratic statement of the obvious.

So what was the problem? Why was the envelope still resting on the dresser, weighing so heavily on her conscience that it might as well have been glowing in the dark?

Laurie wasn’t naïve. She understood that the G.R. needed money to survive. You couldn’t run an organization that large and ambitious without incurring serious expenses—all those people needing food and housing and medical care. There were new properties to be acquired, old ones to be maintained. Cigarettes. Vehicles. Computers, legal advice, public outreach. Soap, toilet paper, whatever. It added up.

Naturally, members were expected to contribute whatever they could afford. If all you had was a monthly Social Security check, that was what you gave. If the sum total of your worldly goods consisted of a rusty Oldsmobile with a bad muffler, the G.R. could use that, as well. And if you were lucky enough to be married to a successful businessman, why shouldn’t you dissolve that union and donate your share of the proceeds to the cause?

Well, why not?

She wasn’t really sure how much money was involved—the lawyers would have to figure that out. The house alone was worth around a million—they’d paid one point six for it, but that was five years ago, before the market tanked—and the various retirement and investment accounts had to be worth at least that much. Whatever the final tally, fifty percent of it would be a serious outlay, substantial enough that Kevin might have to think about selling the house to meet his obligations.

Laurie wanted to do her part for the G.R., she really did. But the thought of walking over there, ringing the doorbell, and asking Kevin for half of everything she’d turned her back on filled her with shame. She had joined the G.R. because she had no choice, because it was the only path that made any sense to her. In the process, she’d lost her family and her friends and her place in the community, all the comfort and security money could buy. That was her decision, and she didn’t regret it. But Kevin and Jill had paid a high price, too, and they hadn’t gotten anything in return. It seemed greedy—unseemly—to suddenly show up at their door with her hand out, asking for even more.