The Leftovers (26 page)

“You guys are so sweet to me,” she said, and for a second, Kevin thought she might start to cry. “I can’t remember the last time I had such a nice Christmas.”

Kevin got a few things, too, though only after suffering through the usual round of complaints about how hard it was to buy presents for a man his age, as if adult males were completely self-sufficient beings, as if a penis and a five o’clock shadow were all they would ever need to get by. Jill gave him a biography about the early years of Teddy Roosevelt, and Aimee got him a pair of spring-loaded hand exercisers, because she knew he liked to work out. The girls also presented him with two identical packages, dense little objects wrapped in silver paper. Inside the one from Jill was a novelty mug that proclaimed him
#1 DAD
.

“Wow,” he said. “Thanks. I knew I was in the top ten, but I didn’t think I’d made it all the way to number one.”

Aimee’s mug was exactly the same, except that this one was labeled
WORLD’S BEST MAYOR
.

“We should celebrate Christmas more often,” he said. “It’s good for my self-esteem.”

The girls started cleaning up after that, gathering the used wrapping paper and discarded packaging, jamming the debris into a plastic garbage bag. Kevin pointed at the solitary gift under the tree, a little box tied with ribbon that looked like it might contain jewelry.

“What about that one?”

Jill looked up. There was a red adhesive bow plastered to her scalp, making her look like a large, troubled baby.

“It’s for Mom,” she said, watching him closely. “In case she stops by.”

Kevin nodded, as if this made perfect sense to him.

“That’s really thoughtful,” he told her.

*   *   *

THEY RANG
Gary’s doorbell but no one answered. Meg shrugged and took a seat on the cold concrete stoop, content to wait in plain sight for her ex-fiancé to return from wherever he happened to be on Christmas morning. Laurie sat down beside her, doing her best to ignore the dull sense of dread that had plagued her since they’d set out from Ginkgo Street. She didn’t want to be here, and she didn’t want to go to the next stop on their itinerary, either.

Unfortunately, their instructions were clear. It was their job to visit their loved ones, to do what they could to disrupt the cozy rhythms and rituals of the holiday. Laurie could see the point of this in the grand scheme of things: If the G.R. had one essential mission, it was to resist the so-called Return to Normalcy, the day-to-day process of forgetting the Rapture, or, at the very least, of consigning it to the past, treating it as a part of the ongoing fabric of human history, rather than the cataclysm that had brought history to an end.

It wasn’t that the G.R. had anything special against Christmas—they disliked holidays across the board—nor were they enemies of Jesus Christ, as many people mistakenly assumed. The Jesus issue was a little confusing, Laurie had to admit that. She’d struggled with it herself before joining, puzzled by the way the G.R. seemed to embrace so many elements of Christian theology—the Rapture and Tribulation, of course, but also the inherent sinfulness of humanity, and the certainty of the Final Judgment—while completely ignoring the figure of Jesus himself. Generally speaking, they were much more focused on God the Father, the jealous Old Testament deity who demanded blind obedience and tested the loyalty of his followers in cruelly inventive ways.

It had taken Laurie a long time to figure this out, and she still wasn’t sure if she’d gotten it right. The G.R. wasn’t big on spelling out its creed; it had no priests or ministers, no scripture, and no formal system of instruction. It was a lifestyle, not a religion, an ongoing improvisation rooted in the conviction that the post-Rapture world demanded a new way of living, free from the old, discredited forms—no more marriage, no more families, no more consumerism, no more politics, no more conventional religion, no more mindless entertainment. Those days were done. All that remained for humanity was to hunker down and await the inevitable.

It was a sunny morning, much colder out than it looked, Magazine Street as still and silent as a photograph. Though he supposedly earned a good salary right out of business school, Gary was still living like a student, sharing the top floor of a shabby two-family house with two other guys, both of whom also had girlfriends. Weekends were crazy there, Meg had explained, so many people having sex in such a small space. And if you didn’t do it, if you weren’t in the mood or whatever, you almost felt like you were violating the terms of the lease.

They must have sat on the porch for a half hour before they saw another soul, a crabby old guy out walking his shivering chihuahua. The man glared at them and muttered something that Laurie couldn’t quite hear, though she was pretty sure it wasn’t
Merry Christmas.
Until she’d joined the G.R., she’d never really understood just how rude people could be, how free they felt to abuse and insult total strangers.

A few minutes after that a car turned onto Magazine from Grapevine, a sleek dark vehicle that looked like a shrunken SUV. Laurie could sense Meg’s excitement as it approached, and her disappointment as it rumbled past. She was all keyed up about seeing Gary, despite Laurie’s many warnings not to expect too much from the encounter. Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer—that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you’d left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn’t love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.

*   *   *

NORA HAD
been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them—not at all—but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For the same reason, she tried not to look too often at old photographs or videos. What happened in both cases was that you only remembered what you already knew, the same trusty handful of occasions and impressions.
Erin was so stubborn. Jeremy had a clown at his party. She had such fine flyaway hair. He sure liked applesauce.
After a while, these scraps hardened into a kind of official narrative that crowded out thousands of equally valid memories, shunting the losers to some cluttered basement storage area in her brain.

What she’d discovered recently was that these leftover memories were much more likely to surface if she wasn’t straining to retrieve them, if they were simply allowed to emerge of their own accord in the normal course of the day. Biking was an especially fruitful activity in this regard, the perfect retrieval engine, her conscious mind occupied by a multitude of simple tasks—scanning the road, checking the speedometer, monitoring her breathing and the direction of the wind—the unconscious part left free to wander. Sometimes it didn’t go far: There were rides when she just kept singing the same scrap of an old song over and over—
Shareef don’t like it! Rockin’ the Casbah, Rock the Casbah!
—or wondering why her legs felt so dead and heavy. But then there were those magical days when something just clicked, and all kinds of amazing stuff started popping into her head, little lost treasures from the past—Jeremy coming downstairs one morning in yellow pajamas that had fit the night before, but now seemed a full size too small; tiny Erin looking panicked, then delighted, then panicked again as she nibbled on her first sour cream and onion potato chip. The way his eyebrows turned lighter in the summer. The way her thumb looked after she’d been sucking it all night, pink and wrinkled, decades older than the rest of her. It was all there, locked in a vault, an immense fortune from which Nora could make only small, all-too-infrequent withdrawals.

She was supposed to go to her sister’s to open presents and eat a late breakfast of omelettes and bacon, but she called Karen and told her to go ahead without her. She said she was a bit under the weather, but thought she’d be okay with a little extra sleep.

“I’ll just meet you at Mom’s this afternoon.”

“You sure?” She could hear the suspicion in Karen’s voice, her almost uncanny ability to sense concealment or evasion. She must be a formidable parent. “Is there anything I can do? You want me to come over?”

“I’ll be fine,” Nora assured her. “Just enjoy the day. I’ll see you later, okay?”

*   *   *

SOMETIMES, WHEN
she waited too long in the cold, Laurie drifted into a kind of fugue state, losing track of where she was and what she was doing. It was a defense mechanism, a surprisingly effective way of blocking out physical discomfort and anxiety, though also a bit scary, since it seemed like the first step on the road to freezing to death.

She must have spaced out like that on Gary’s front stoop—they’d been sitting there for quite a while—because she didn’t register the fact that a car had pulled up in front of the house until the people inside it were climbing out, by which point Meg was already in motion, heading down the steps and striding across the dead brown lawn with an urgency that was almost alarming after such a protracted interlude of calm.

The driver circled around the hood of the car—it was a sporty little Lexus, freshly washed and gleaming in the wan winter sunlight—and took his place at the side of the woman who’d just vacated the passenger seat. He was tall and handsome in his camel-hair overcoat, and Laurie’s brain had thawed out just enough to recognize him as Gary, whose confident, smiling face she’d seen numerous times in Meg’s Memory Book. The woman seemed vaguely familiar as well. Both of them stared at Meg with expressions that combined varying degrees of pity and astonishment, but when Gary finally spoke, all Laurie heard in his voice was a note of weary annoyance.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

True to her training, Meg remained silent. It would have been better if she had a cigarette in her hand, but neither one of them had been smoking when the car pulled up. That was Laurie’s fault, a lapse of supervision.

“Did you hear me?” Gary’s voice was louder now, as if he thought Meg might have developed a hearing problem. “I asked you a question.”

His companion gave him a puzzled look. “You know she can’t talk, right?”

“Oh, she can talk,” Gary said. “She used to talk my fucking ear off.”

Looking vaguely mortified, the young woman turned back to Meg. She was short and curvy, a bit unsteady on her stiletto heels. Laurie couldn’t help admiring her coat, a shimmery blue parka with fur-lined cuffs and hood. The fur was probably synthetic, but it looked really warm.

“I’m sorry,” the young woman told Meg. “I know this must be weird for you. Seeing us together.”

Laurie leaned to the left, trying to get a look at Meg’s face, but the angle wasn’t right.

“Don’t apologize to
her,
” Gary snapped. “She’s the one who should apologize.”

“It started two weeks ago,” the young woman continued, as if Meg had requested an explanation. “A bunch of us went to Massimo’s and drank a lot of red wine, and I was too drunk to drive home. So Gary offered me a lift.” She raised her eyebrows, as if the story told itself. “I’m not sure if it’s serious or anything. We’re just kinda hanging out together. For now.”

“Gina.” Gary’s voice was sharp with warning. “Don’t do this. It’s none of her business.”

Gina,
Laurie thought.
Meg’s cousin. One of the bridesmaids.

“Of course it’s her business,” Gina said. “You guys were together all those years. You were gonna get married.”

Gary studied Meg with a disgusted expression.

“Look at her. I don’t even know who that is.”

“She’s still Meg.” Gina spoke so softly that Laurie could barely hear the words. “Don’t be mean to her.”

“I’m not being mean.” Gary’s expression softened a little. “I just can’t stand to see her like this. Not today.”

He gave his ex-fiancée a wide berth as he headed toward the house, as if he thought she might try to attack him, or at least block his way. Gina hesitated just long enough to shrug an apology, then set off after him. Neither one of them paid the slightest attention to Laurie as they trudged up the front steps, not a word, not even a glance in her direction.

After Gary and Gina went inside, Laurie lit a cigarette and headed across the lawn to join Meg, who was still standing with her back to the house, staring at the Lexus as if she were thinking about buying it. Laurie held out the cigarette, and Meg took it, sniffling quietly as she brought it to her lips. Laurie wished she could say a few words—
Nice going,
or
Good job—
to let Meg know how proud she was. But all she did was pat her on the shoulder, just once, very gently. She hoped that was enough.

*   *   *

NORA HADN’T
planned on going for a long ride. She was supposed to arrive at her mother’s between one and two in the afternoon, a timetable that only allowed for a fifteen- or twenty-mile spin, half her usual distance, but hopefully enough to clear her head and get her heart pumping, maybe even burn off a few calories before the big meal. Besides, it was freezing, only in the mid-twenties according to the thermometer outside her kitchen window, hardly ideal conditions for a strenuous workout.

But the cold turned out to be less of an impediment than she’d anticipated. The sun was out, the roads were clear—snow and ice were the real dealbreakers for winter riding—and the wind wasn’t all that stiff. She had high-tech gloves, neoprene shoe covers, and a polypropylene hood beneath her helmet. Only her face was exposed to the elements, and she could live with that.

She figured she’d turn around at the eight-mile mark, halfway out on the bike path, but when she got there she just kept going. It felt too good to be on the move, the pedals rising and falling beneath her feet, white vapor steaming from her mouth. So what if she was a little late to her mother’s? There would be a big crowd—all her siblings and their families, some aunts and uncles and cousins—and they wouldn’t even miss her. If anything, they’d be relieved. Without Nora around, they could laugh and open presents and compliment everyone else’s kids without wondering if they’d inadvertently said something to hurt her feelings, without giving her those sad, knowing glances or making those tragic little sighs.