The Leftovers (39 page)

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.

“I wanted it to be traditional, you know? Classic. The gown and the veil and the train, the organ playing, my father walking me to the altar, Gary standing there with a tear rolling down his cheek. I just wanted that dream, those few minutes when everybody who mattered was looking at me and saying,
Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t he the luckiest guy in the world?
Is that how it was for you?”

“My wedding was a long time ago,” Laurie said. “All I remember is being really stressed out. You plan for so long, and the actual event never measures up to what you wanted it to be.”

“Maybe it’s better this way,” Meg speculated. “Reality never messed up my wedding.”

“That’s a nice way to think about it.”

“Gary and I fought about the bachelor party. His best man wanted to hire a stripper and I thought that was tacky.”

Laurie nodded and did her best to look interested, though she’d already heard this story several times. Meg didn’t seem to realize she was repeating herself, and Laurie didn’t bother to point it out: This was the mental space in which her friend had chosen to dwell. Laurie herself was more focused on the years when her kids were little, when she had felt so necessary and purposeful, a battery all charged up with love. Every day she used it up, and every night it got miraculously replenished. Nothing had ever been as good as that.

“I just hated the idea,” Meg went on. “A bunch of drunk guys cheering for this pathetic girl who’s probably a drug addict from an abusive home. And then what? Does she actually …
service
them while the others watch?”

“I don’t know,” Laurie said. “I guess that happens sometimes. Depends on the guys, I guess.”

“Can you imagine?” Meg squinted, as if straining to visualize the scene. “You’re in church, on the biggest day of your life, and here comes your bride, walking down the aisle like a princess dressed in white, and your parents are right over there in the front row, maybe even your grandparents, and all you can think about is the skank who gave you a lap dance the night before. Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you ruin a beautiful moment?”

“People did all sorts of crazy things back then,” Laurie said, as if referring to ancient history, a bygone era barely visible through the mists of time. “They had no idea.”

*   *   *

Dear Kevin,

By the time you read this, Nora will no longer exist.

Sorry—I guess that sounds more ominous than I meant it to. I just mean that I’ll be leaving Mapleton, heading somewhere else to start a new life as another person. You won’t see me again.

I hope it’s not rude to be telling you this in a letter, instead of face-to-face. But it’s hard enough for me to even do it like this. What I’d really like to do is just dissolve into thin air like the rest of my family, but you deserve better than that (not that people always get what they deserve).

What I want to tell you is: Thanks. I know how hard you tried to make things work with me—how many allowances you made, and how little you got in return. It’s not that I didn’t want to hold up my end—I would have given a lot to have risen to that occasion. But I couldn’t find the strength to make it happen, or maybe just the mechanism. Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.

I know you wanted to know me, and that you had every right to try. That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too—their dreams and their scars and their stories. Every time we were together, I could feel you holding back, tiptoeing around my privacy, giving me room to guard my secrets. I guess I should thank you for that. For your discretion and compassion—for being a gentleman.

But the thing is, I knew what you wanted to know, and I resented you for it. How’s that for a catch-22? I was mad at you for the questions you didn’t ask, the ones you didn’t ask because you thought that asking them would upset me. But you were biding your time, waiting and hoping, weren’t you?

So let me at least try to give you an answer. I feel like I owe you that much.

We were having a family dinner.

It sounds so quaint when you put it that way, doesn’t it? You imagine everyone together, talking and laughing and enjoying their meal. But it wasn’t like that. Things were tense between me and Doug. I understand now why that was, but at the time it just felt to me like he was distracted by work, not fully present in our life. He was always checking that damn Blackberry, snatching it up every time it buzzed like it might contain a message from God. Of course it wasn’t God, it was just his cute little girlfriend, but either way, it was more interesting to him than his own family. I still kind of hate him for that.

The kids weren’t happy, either. They were rarely happy in the evening. Mornings could be fun in our house, and bedtimes were usually sweet, but dinners were often a trial. Jeremy was cranky because … why? I wish I could tell you. Maybe because it’s hard to be six years old, or maybe because it was hard to be him. Little things made him cry, and his crying over little things irritated his father, who sometimes spoke sharply to him and made Jeremy even more upset. Erin was only four, but she had an instinct for getting under her brother’s skin, pointing out in a matter-of-fact voice that Jeremy was crying again, acting like a little baby, which made him absolutely furious.

I loved them all, okay? My cheating husband, my fragile boy, my sneaky little girl. But I didn’t love my life, not that night. I had worked really hard on the meal—it was this Moroccan chicken recipe I’d found in a magazine—and nobody cared. Doug thought the breasts were a little dry, Jeremy wasn’t hungry, blah blah blah. It was just a crappy night, that’s all.

And then Erin spilled her apple juice. No big deal, except that she’d made a big fuss about drinking from a cup without a top, even though I told her it was a bad idea. So what, right? It happens. I wasn’t one of those parents who gets all upset about something like that. But that night I was. I said, “Damn it, Erin, what did I tell you!” And then she started to cry.

I looked at Doug, waiting for him to get up and get some paper towels, but he didn’t move. He just smiled at me like none of this had anything to do with him, like he was floating above it all on some superior plane of existence. So of course I had to do it. I got up and went into the kitchen.

How long was I there? Thirty seconds, maybe? I gathered a handful of towels, winding them off the roll, wondering if I’d taken enough sheets, or had I possibly taken too many, because I didn’t want to make a second trip but didn’t want to be wasteful, either. I remember being conscious of the chaos I’d left behind, feeling relieved to be away from it, but also resentful and overburdened and unappreciated. I think maybe I closed my eyes, let my mind go blank for a second or two. That was when it must have happened. I remember noticing that the crying had stopped, that the house felt suddenly peaceful.

So what do you think I did when I got back to the dining room and found them gone? Do you think I screamed or cried or fainted? Or do you think I wiped up the spill, because the puddle was spreading across the table and would soon start dripping onto the floor?

You know what I did, Kevin.

I wiped up the fucking apple juice and then I went back into the kitchen, put the soggy paper towels in the garbage can, and rinsed my hands under the faucet. After I dried them, I went back to the dining room and took another look at the empty table, the plates and the glasses and the uneaten food. The vacant chairs. I really don’t know what happened after that. It’s like my memory just stops there and picks up a few weeks later.

Would it have helped if I told you this story in Florida? Or maybe on Valentine’s Day? Would you have felt like you knew me better? You could have told me what I already think I know—that the crying and the spilled juice aren’t really that important, that all parents get stressed out and angry and wish for a little peace and quiet. It’s not the same as wishing for the people you love to be gone forever.