The Leftovers

THE CARPE DIEM

JILL AND AIMEE HEADED OUT right after dinner, cheerfully informing Kevin that they didn’t know where they were going, what they were doing, who they would be with, or when they might be home.

“Late,” was all Jill could tell him.

“Yeah,” agreed Aimee. “Don’t wait up.”

“It’s a school night,” Kevin reminded them, not bothering to add, as he sometimes did, that it was odd how going nowhere and doing nothing could take up so much time. The joke just didn’t seem that funny anymore. “Why don’t you try to stay sober for once? See what it’s like to wake up in the morning with a clear head.”

The girls nodded earnestly, assuring him that they had every intention of heeding this excellent advice.

“And be careful,” he continued. “There are a lot of freaks out there.”

Aimee grunted knowingly, as if to say that no one needed to tell her about freaks. She was wearing kneesocks and a short cheerleader skirt — light blue, not the maroon and gold of Mapleton High — and had deployed her usual unsubtle arsenal of cosmetics.

“We’ll be careful,” she promised.

Jill rolled her eyes, unimpressed by her friend’s good-girl act.

“You’re the biggest freak of all,” she told Aimee. Then, to Kevin, she added, “She’s the one people need to watch out for.”

Aimee protested, but it was hard to take her seriously, given that she looked less like an innocent schoolgirl than a stripper halfheartedly pretending to be one. Jill gave the opposite impression — a scrawny child playing dress-up — in her cuffed jeans and the oversized suede coat she’d borrowed from her mother’s closet. Kevin experienced the usual mixed feelings seeing them together: a vague sadness for his daughter, who was so clearly the sidekick in this duo, but also a kind of relief rooted in the thought — or at least the hope — that her unprepossessing appearance might function as a form of protective camouflage out in the world.

“Just watch out for yourselves,” Kevin told them.

He hugged the girls good night, then stood in the doorway as they headed down the stairs and across the lawn. He’d tried for a while to restrict his hugs to his own child, but Aimee didn’t like being left out. It was awkward at first — he was far too conscious of the contours of her body and the length of their embraces — but it had gradually become part of the routine. Kevin didn’t exactly approve of Aimee, nor was he thrilled to have her living under his roof — she’d been staying there for three months and showed no signs of leaving anytime soon — but he couldn’t deny the benefits of having a third person in the mix. Jill seemed happier with a friend around, and there was a lot more laughter at the dinner table, fewer of those deadly moments when it was just the two of them, father and daughter, and neither had a word to say.

KEVIN LEFT the house a little before nine. As usual, Lovell Terrace was lit up like a stadium, the big houses preening like monuments in the glow of their security floodlights. There were ten dwellings in all, “Luxury Homes” built in the last days of SUVs and easy credit, nine of them still occupied. Only the Westerfelds’ house was empty — Pam had died last month, and the estate remained unsettled — but the Homeowners’ Association made sure the lawn was cared for and the lights stayed on. Everyone knew what happened when deserted houses fell into disrepair, drawing the attention of bored teenagers, vandals, and the Guilty Remnant.

He headed out to Main Street and turned right, setting off on his nightly pilgrimage. It was like an itch — a physical compulsion — this need to be among friends, away from the gloomy, frightened voice that often held court in his head but always seemed so much louder and surer of itself in a quiet house after dark. One of the most frequently noted side effects of the Sudden Departure had been an outbreak of manic socializing — impromptu block parties that lasted for entire weekends, potluck dinners that stretched into sleepovers, quick hellos that turned into marathon gabfests. Bars were packed for months after October 14th; phone bills were exorbitant. Most of the survivors had settled down since then, but Kevin’s urge for nocturnal human contact remained as powerful as ever, as if a magnetic force were propelling him toward the center of town, in search of like-minded souls.

THE CARPE Diem was an unassuming place, one of the few blue-collar taverns that had weathered Mapleton’s late-twentieth-century transformation from factory town to bedroom community. Kevin had been going there since he was a young man, back when it was called the Midway Lounge, and the only drafts you could get were Bud and Mich.

He entered through the restaurant door — the bar was in an adjoining room — nodding at the familiar faces as he made his way to the booth in the back, where Pete Thorne and Steve Wiscziewski were already deep in conversation over a pitcher of beer, passing a legal pad back and forth across the table. Unlike Kevin, both men had wives at home, but they usually arrived at the Carpe Diem long before he did.

“Gentlemen,” he said, sliding in beside Steve, a bulky, excitable guy who Laurie always said was a heart attack waiting to happen.

“Don’t worry,” Steve said, filling a clean glass with the dregs from the pitcher and handing it to Kevin. “There’s another on the way.”

“We’re going over the roster.” Pete held up the legal pad. The top page featured a rough sketch of a baseball diamond with names scrawled in the filled positions and question marks by the empty ones. “All we really need is a center fielder and a first baseman. And a couple of subs for insurance.”

“Four or five new players,” said Steve. “That should be doable, right?”

Kevin studied the sketch. “What happened with that Dominican guy you were telling me about? Your housecleaner’s husband?”

Steve shook his head. “Hector’s a cook. He works nights.”

“He might be able to play on the weekends,” Pete added. “That’s at least something.”

Kevin was gratified by the amount of thought and effort the guys were giving to a softball season that was still five or six months away. It was exactly what he’d been hoping for when he convinced the town council to restore funding for the adult recreation programs that had been suspended after the Sudden Departure. People needed a reason to get out of their houses and have a little fun, to look up and realize that the sky hadn’t fallen.

“I’ll tell you what would help,” said Steve. “If we could find a couple left-handed hitters. Right now every guy on the squad is a righty.”

“So what?” Kevin polished off his flat beer in a single gulp. “It’s slow-pitch. None of that strategy stuff really matters.”

“No, you gotta mix it up,” Pete insisted. “Keep the other guys off balance. That’s why Mike was so great. He really gave us that extra dimension.”

The Carpe Diem team had lost only one player on October 14th — Carl Stenhauer, a mediocre pitcher and second-string outfielder — but Mike Whalen, their cleanup hitter and star first baseman, was an indirect casualty as well. Mike’s wife was among the missing, and he still hadn’t recovered from his loss. He and his sons had painted a crude, almost unrecognizable portrait of Nancy on the back wall of their house, and Mike spent most of his nights alone with the mural, communing with her memory.

“I talked to him a few weeks ago,” Kevin said. “But I don’t think he’s gonna play this year. He says his heart’s just not in the game.”

“Keep working on him,” Steve said. “The middle of our lineup’s pretty weak.”

The waitress came by with a new pitcher and refilled everyone’s glasses. They toasted to fresh blood and a winning season.

“It’ll be good to get back on the field,” Kevin said.

“No kidding,” agreed Steve. “Spring’s not spring without softball.”

Pete put down his glass and looked at Kevin.

“So there’s one other thing we wanted to run by you. You remember Judy Dolan? I think she was in your son’s class.”

“Sure. She was a catcher, right? All-county or something?”

“All-state,” Pete corrected him. “She played varsity in college. She’s graduating in June, moving back home for the summer.”

“She’d be quite an asset,” Steve pointed out. “She could take over for me behind the plate, and I could move to first. It would solve a lot of our problems.”

“Wait a second,” Kevin said. “You want the league to go coed?”

“No,” Pete said, exchanging a wary glance with Steve. “That’s exactly what we don’t want.”

“But it’s the Men’s Softball League. If you have women playing, then it’s coed.”

“We don’t want women,” Steve explained. “We just want Judy.”

“You can’t discriminate,” Kevin reminded them. “If you admit one woman, you gotta admit them all.”

“It’s not discrimination,” Pete insisted. “It’s an exception. Besides, Judy’s bigger than I am. If you didn’t look too close, you wouldn’t even know she was a girl.”

“You ever play coed softball?” Steve asked. “It’s about as much fun as all-male Twister.”

“They do it with soccer,” Kevin said. “Everybody seems fine with that.”

“That’s soccer,” Steve said. “They’re all pussies to begin with.”

“Sorry,” Kevin told them. “You can have Judy Dolan or you can have a men’s league. But you can’t have both.”

THE MEN’S room was a tight squeeze — a dank, windowless space outfitted with a sink, a hand dryer, a trash can, two side-by-side urinals, and a toilet stall — in which it was theoretically possible to have five individuals rubbing shoulders at the same time. Usually this only happened late at night, when guys had drunk so much beer that waiting politely was no longer an option, and by then, everybody was cheerful enough that the obstacle-course aspect of it just seemed like part of the fun.

Right now, though, Kevin had the whole place to himself, or at least he would have if he hadn’t been so aware of Ernie Costello’s friendly face gazing down at him from a framed photograph hanging above and between the two urinals. Ernie was the Midway’s former bartender, a big-bellied guy with a walrus mustache. The wall around his portrait was full of heartfelt graffiti scrawled by his friends and former customers.

We miss you buddy.

You were the best!!!

It’s not the same without you

You’re in our hearts.…

Better make it a double!

Kevin kept his head down, doing his best to ignore the bartender’s beseeching gaze. He’d never been a fan of the memorials that had sprung up all over town in the wake of the Sudden Departure. It didn’t matter if they were discreet — a roadside flower arrangement, a name soaped on the rear window of a car — or big and flashy, like the mountain of teddy bears in a little girl’s front yard, or the question WHERE’S DONNIE? burned into the grass along the entire length of the high school football field. He just didn’t think it was healthy, being reminded all the time of the terrible and incomprehensible thing that had happened. That was why he’d pushed so hard for the Heroes’ Day Parade — it was better to channel the grief into an annual observance, relieve some of the day-to-day pressure on the survivors.

He washed his hands and rubbed them under the useless dryer, wondering if Pete and Steve had inadvertently stumbled onto something with their idea of inviting Judy Dolan onto the team. Like those guys, Kevin preferred to play in a competitive all-male league, where you didn’t have to watch your language or think twice about barreling into the catcher to break up a close play at the plate. But it was starting to look like finding enough players for a serious league was going to be a heavy lift, and he thought a fun coed league might be an alternative worth considering, the greatest good for the greatest many.

KEVIN LITERALLY bumped into Melissa Hulbert on his way out of the restroom. She was leaning against the wall in the dim alcove, waiting her turn for the ladies’ room, which could accommodate only one person at a time. Later on, he realized that their meeting probably wasn’t a coincidence, but it felt like one. Melissa acted surprised and seemed happier to see him than he might have expected.

“Kevin.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Wow. Where’ve you been hiding?”

“Melissa.” He made an effort to match the warmth of her greeting. “It’s been a while, huh?”

“Three months,” she informed him. “At least.”

“That long?” He pretended to do the math in his head, then expelled a grunt of fake wonderment. “So how’ve you been?”

“Good.” She shrugged to let him know that good was a bit of an overstatement, then studied him for an anxious moment or two. “Is this okay?”

“What?”

“Me being here.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“I don’t know.” Her smile didn’t quite cancel out the edge in her voice. “I just assumed—”

“No, no,” he assured her. “It’s not like that.”

An older woman Kevin didn’t know emerged from the ladies’ room, mumbling an apology as she slipped by, trailing a vapor cloud of sweet perfume.

“I’m at the bar,” Melissa said, touching him lightly on the arm. “If you feel like buying me a drink.”

Kevin groaned an apology. “I’m here with some friends.”

“Just one drink,” she told him. “I think you owe me that much.”

He owed her a lot more than that, and they both knew it.

“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough.”

MELISSA WAS one of three women Kevin had attempted to sleep with since his wife had left, and the only one close to his own age. They’d known each other since they were kids — Kevin was a year ahead of her in school — and they’d even had a little teenage fling the summer before his senior year, a heavy makeout session at the end of a keg party. It was one of those free-pass things — he had a girlfriend, she had a boyfriend, but the girlfriend and the boyfriend both happened to be on vacation — that hadn’t gone nearly as far as he would’ve liked. She was a hottie back then, a wholesome, freckle-faced redhead, with what were widely considered to be the nicest tits in all of Mapleton High. Kevin managed to put his hand on the left one, but only for a tantalizing second or two before she removed it.

Some other time, she told him, with a sadness in her voice that sounded sincere. I promised Bob I’d be good.

But there was no other time, not that summer, and not for the next quarter century. Bob and Melissa went steady all the way through high school and college and ended up getting married. They bounced around a bit before coming home to Mapleton, right around the time Kevin moved back with his own family. Tom was just two at the time, the same age as Melissa’s younger daughter.

They saw each other a lot when the kids were small, at playgrounds and school events and spaghetti dinners. They were never close — never socialized or exchanged more than the usual parental small talk — but there was always that little secret between them, the memory of a summer night, the awareness of a road not taken.

HE ENDED up buying her three drinks, the first to discharge his debt, the second because he’d forgotten how easy it was to talk to her, and the third because it felt good to have her leg pressing against his while he sipped his bourbon, which was exactly how he’d gotten into trouble the last time.

“Any word from Tom?” she asked.

“Just an e-mail a few months ago. He didn’t say much.”

“Where is he?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Somewhere on the West Coast, I think.”

“But he’s okay?”

“Seemed like it.”

“I heard about Holy Wayne,” she said. “What a creep.”

Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell my son was thinking.”

Melissa’s face clouded over with maternal concern.

“It’s hard being young now. It was different for us, you know? It was like a Golden Age. We just didn’t realize it.”

Kevin wanted to object on principle — he was pretty sure most people thought of their own youth as some kind of Golden Age — but in this case she had a point.

“What about Brianna?” he asked. “How’s she doing?”

“Okay.” Melissa sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “Better than last year anyway. She’s got a boyfriend now.”

“That’s good.”

Melissa shrugged. “They met over the summer. Some kind of survivors’ network. They sit around and tell each other how sad they are.”

IN THEIR previous meeting at the Carpe Diem — the night they ended up going home together — Melissa had talked a lot about her divorce, which had been a minor local scandal. After almost twenty years of marriage, Bob had left her for a younger woman he’d met at work. Melissa was only in her early forties at the time, but it had felt to her as if her life were over, as if she’d been abandoned like some crappy old car on the side of the highway.

Aside from alcohol, the main thing that kept her going was her hatred of the woman who’d stolen her husband. Ginny was twenty-eight, a slim, athletic woman who’d worked as Bob’s assistant. They married as soon as the divorce was final, and tried to start a family. They were apparently having trouble getting pregnant, but Melissa didn’t take much comfort in that. The very thought of Bob even wanting children with another woman was infuriating. What made it even more galling was the fact that her own kids actually liked Ginny. They were more than happy to call their father a cheating bastard, but all they would ever say about his new wife was that she was really nice. As if to prove their point, Ginny made multiple attempts to smooth things over with Melissa, writing several letters in which she apologized for the pain she’d caused, and asking for forgiveness.

I just wanted to hate her in peace, Melissa said. And she wouldn’t even let me do that.

Melissa’s rage was so pure that her main thought on October 14th — once she’d ascertained that her kids were safe — was a wild, unspoken hope that Ginny would be among the victims, that her problematic existence would simply be erased from the world. Bob would suffer as she had suffered; the score would be settled. It might even be possible, under those circumstances, for her to take him back, for the two of them to start over and find a way to reclaim some of what they’d lost.

Can you imagine? she said. That’s how bitter I was.

Everybody had thoughts like that, Kevin reminded her. It’s just that most of us won’t admit it.

Of course it wasn’t Ginny who vanished; it was Bob, while riding the elevator in a parking garage next to his office. There were disruptions in phone and Internet service that day, and Melissa didn’t find out he was missing until around nine o’clock that night, when Ginny herself showed up to break the news. She seemed dazed and groggy, like someone had just awoken her from a long afternoon nap.

Bobby’s gone, she kept muttering. Bobby’s gone.

You know what I said to her?

Melissa had closed her eyes, as if she were trying to wish away the memory.

I said, Good, now you know how it feels.

THE YEARS had changed some things but not others. Melissa’s freckles had faded, and her hair was no longer red. Her face was fuller, her figure less defined. But her voice and eyes were exactly the same. It was like the girl he’d known had been absorbed into the body of a middle-aged woman. It was Melissa, and it wasn’t.

“You should’ve called me,” she said, pouting sweetly as she laid her hand on his thigh. “We wasted the whole summer.”

“I was embarrassed,” he explained. “I felt like I let you down.”

“You didn’t let me down,” she assured him, her long fingernails tracing cryptic designs on the fabric of his jeans. She was wearing a gray silk blouse, unbuttoned to reveal the scalloped edge of a maroon bra. “It’s no big deal. It happens to everyone.”

“Not to me,” he insisted.

This wasn’t exactly true. He’d had similar malfunctions with Liz Yamamoto, a twenty-five-year-old grad student he’d met on the Internet, and then again with Wendy Halsey, a thirty-two-year-old marathon-running paralegal, but he’d chalked those up to performance anxiety caused by the relative youth of his partners. It was sadder with Melissa, and harder to account for.

They’d gone back to her house, had a glass of wine, and then headed into the bedroom. It felt good, relaxed and natural and totally right — like they were finishing what they’d started back in high school — until the very last moment, when all the life drained out of him. That was a defeat of a different magnitude, a blow from which he still hadn’t recovered.

“It’s scary the first time with a new partner,” she told him. “It hardly ever works right.”

“The voice of experience, huh?”

“Trust me, Kevin. The second time’s a charm.”

He nodded, fully prepared to accept this as a general rule, but just as willing to bet he’d be the exception that proved it wrong. Because even now, with the back of her thumb resting ever so lightly against his crotch, he still wasn’t feeling much of anything beyond a dull throb of anxiety, the vestigial guilt of a married man out in public with another woman. It didn’t seem to matter that his wife had moved out, or that people his age hooked up all the time at the Carpe Diem. Some were married, some weren’t; things were a lot looser on that front than they used to be. It was as if his conscience were stuck in the past, tethered to a set of conditions that no longer existed.

“I don’t know.” He smiled sadly, trying to let her know it was nothing personal. “I just don’t think it’s gonna work.”

“I’ve got some pills,” she whispered. “They’ll fix you right up.”

“Really?” Kevin was intrigued. He’d been thinking about asking his doctor to prescribe something, but hadn’t worked up the nerve. “Where’d you get them?”

“They’re around. You’re not the only guy with this issue.”

“Huh.” His eyes drifted south. Unlike her face, her breasts were still freckled. He remembered them fondly from their previous encounter. “That might work.”

Melissa leaned closer, until her nose was almost touching his. Her hair smelled good, a subtle aura of almonds and honeysuckle.

“If you have an erection that lasts for more than four hours,” she told him, “I’m probably gonna need a break.”

IT WAS funny — once Kevin knew that pharmaceutical assistance would be available in case of emergency, he realized that he probably wouldn’t need it. He sensed this even before they left the bar, and his optimism only grew on the way to Melissa’s house. It felt good to be walking down a dark, tree-lined street, holding hands with an attractive woman who’d made it quite clear that he was welcome in her bed. It felt even better when she stopped him in front of Bailey Elementary, pushed him against a tree, and kissed him long and hard. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d experienced that distinctive, double-sided sensation, warm body softening against his front, cold bark jabbing roughly into his back. Sophomore year? he wondered. Debbie DeRosa? Melissa’s hips were rocking gently, creating some sweet, intermittent friction. He reached around and cupped her ass; it was soft and womanly, heavy in his hand. She made a purring sound as her tongue swirled around the inside of his mouth.

Nothing to worry about, he thought, picturing the two of them on the living room floor, Melissa on top, his cock as hard as a frat boy’s. I got this covered.

It was the smell of smoke that made them pull apart, a sudden awareness of company. They turned and saw the two Watchers hurrying toward them from the direction of the school — they must have been hiding in the bushes by the main entrance — moving with that strange sense of urgency they all had, as if you were an old friend they’d just spotted at the airport. He was relieved to see that neither one of them was Laurie.

“Oh, Jesus,” Melissa muttered.

Kevin didn’t recognize the older woman, but the younger one — a thin girl with a bad complexion — was familiar to him from the Safeway, where she’d worked as a cashier. She had a strange name he couldn’t quite remember, something that always seemed misspelled on her name tag.

“Hi, Shana,” he said, trying to be polite, treating her the way he’d treat anyone else. “It’s Shana, right?”

The girl didn’t answer, not that he expected her to. She hadn’t been all that chatty even when she’d been free to talk. She just locked eyes with him, as if she were trying to read his mind. Her partner did the same to Melissa. There was something harsher in the older woman’s gaze, Kevin thought, a smug note of judgment.

“You bitch,” Melissa told her. She sounded angry and a little drunk. “I warned you about this.”

The older Watcher brought her cigarette to her lips, the wrinkles around her mouth deepening as she inhaled. She blew the smoke right in Melissa’s face, a thin, contemptuous jet.

“I told you to leave me alone,” Melissa continued. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

“Melissa.” Kevin put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t do this.”

She jerked away from his touch. “This bitch is stalking me. It’s the third time this week. I’m sick of it.”

“It’s okay,” Kevin told her. “Let’s just walk away.”

“It’s not okay.” Melissa stepped closer to the Watchers, shooing them like pigeons. “Go on! Get the fuck outta here! Leave us alone!”

The Watchers didn’t retreat, nor did they flinch at the foul language. They just stood there, calm and expressionless, sucking on their cigarettes. It was supposed to remind you that God was watching, keeping track of your smallest actions — at least that was what Kevin had heard — but the effect was mostly just annoying, something a little kid would do to get on your nerves.

“Please,” Kevin said, not quite sure if he was addressing Melissa or the Watchers.

Melissa gave up first. She shook her head in disgust, turned away from the Watchers, and took a tentative step in Kevin’s direction. But she stopped, made a hawking sound in her throat, then whirled and spit in the face of her tormentor. Not a fake spit, either — the kind that’s more noise than saliva — but a juicy schoolboy gob that struck the woman directly on the cheek, landing with an audible splat.

“Melissa!” Kevin cried out. “Jesus Christ!”

The Watcher didn’t flinch, didn’t even wipe at the foamy spittle as it dripped off her chin.

“Bitch,” Melissa said again, but the conviction had gone out of her voice. “You made me do that.”

THEY WALKED the rest of the way in silence, no longer holding hands, doing their best to ignore their white-clad chaperones, who were following so close behind it felt like they were a single group, four friends out for the evening.

The Watchers stopped at the edge of Melissa’s lawn — they rarely trespassed on private property — but Kevin could feel their eyes on his back as he made his way up the front steps. Melissa stopped by the door, reaching into her purse, groping for the keys.

“We can still do this,” she told him, without a whole lot of enthusiasm. “If you want to.”

“I don’t know.” There was a melancholy weight in his chest, as if they’d skipped right past the sex to the disappointment afterward. “You mind if I take a rain check?”

She nodded, as if she’d suspected as much, squinting past him to the women on the sidewalk.

“I hate them,” she said. “I hope they all get cancer.”

Kevin didn’t bother to remind her that his wife was one of them, but then she remembered it herself.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I just don’t understand why they have to ruin it for the rest of us.”

“They think they’re doing us a favor.”

Melissa laughed softly, as if at a private joke, then kissed Kevin chastely on the cheek.

“Give me a call,” she told him. “Don’t be a stranger.”

The Watchers were waiting on the sidewalk, their faces blank and patient, freshly lit cigarettes in their hands. He thought about making a break for it — they usually wouldn’t chase you — but it was late and he was tired, so they set off together. He sensed a certain lightness in their steps as they moved beside him, the satisfaction that comes from a job well done.

BLUE RIBBON

NORA DURST HATED TO ADMIT it, but SpongeBob wasn’t working anymore. It was probably inevitable — she’d seen some episodes so many times she basically had them memorized — but that didn’t make it any easier. The show was a ritual she’d come to depend on, and these days rituals were pretty much all she had.

For about a year — the last year they had together — Nora and her family had watched SpongeBob in the evening, right before bed. Erin was too young to get most of the jokes, but her brother, Jeremy — he was three years older, a kindergarten man of the world — stared at the TV with an awestruck expression, as if a miracle were unfolding before his eyes. He chuckled at almost every line, but when he really cut loose, the laughter exploded from his mouth in loud whoops that mixed approval and amazement in equal measure. Every so often — usually in response to physical violence, bodies being stretched, flattened, spun, distorted, dismembered, or propelled at high speed across improbable distances — hilarity got the better of him, and he had to launch himself off the couch and onto the floor, where he could pound on the rug until he managed to calm down.

Nora was surprised by how much she enjoyed the show herself. She’d gotten used to the bland crap her kids insisted on watching—Dora and Curious George and the Big Red Dog — but SpongeBob was refreshingly clever, and even a bit edgy, a harbinger of better days down the road, when they’d all be liberated from the ghetto of children’s programming. Because she was such a fan, she was puzzled by her husband’s indifference. Doug sat with them in the living room, but rarely bothered to lift his eyes from his BlackBerry. That was the way he was those last few years, so absorbed in his work that he was rarely more than half there, a hologram of himself.

“You should watch,” she told him. “It’s really pretty funny.”

“No offense,” he said. “But SpongeBob’s a little retarded.”

“He’s just sweet. He gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, even if they don’t deserve it.”

“Maybe,” Doug conceded. “But retarded people do that, too.”

She didn’t have much more luck with her friends, the mothers she went to yoga class with on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and occasionally out for drinks with at night, if their husbands were around to hold down the fort. These women didn’t share Doug’s Olympian disdain for childish things, but even they grew skeptical when she rhapsodized about her favorite cartoon invertebrate.

“I can’t stand that show,” Ellen Demos said. “But the song at the beginning’s a real hoot.”

“The squid is awful,” added Linda Wasserman. “He’s got that creepy phallic nose. I hate the way it just dangles there.”

After October 14th, of course, Nora forgot about SpongeBob for a long, long time. She moved out of her house and spent several heavily medicated months at her sister’s, trying to come to grips with the nightmare that had replaced her life. In March, against the advice of her friends, family, and therapist, she returned home, telling herself that she needed some quiet time alone with her memories, a period of reflection in which she might be able to answer the question of whether it would be desirable, or even possible, to go on living.

The first few weeks passed in a fog of misery and confusion. She slept at odd hours, drank too much wine to substitute for the Ambien and Xanax she’d sworn off, and spent entire days wandering through the cruelly empty house, opening closets and peering under beds, as if she half expected to find her husband and children hiding out, grinning like they’d just pulled off the best practical joke ever.

“I hope you’re happy!” she imagined scolding them, pretending to be upset. “I was going out of my mind.”

One evening, aimlessly flipping through the channels, she happened upon a familiar episode of SpongeBob, the one where it snows in Bikini Bottom. The effect on her was instantaneous and exhilarating: Her head was clear for the first time in ages. She felt okay, better than okay. It wasn’t just that she could sense her little boy in the room, sitting right beside her on the couch; at times it was almost as if she were Jeremy, as if she were watching the show through his eyes, experiencing a six-year-old’s wild pleasure, laughing so hard she almost lost her breath. When it was over, Nora cried for a long time, but it was a good cry, the kind that makes you stronger. Then she grabbed a notepad and wrote the following:

I just saw the episode of the snowball fight. Do you remember that one? You liked playing in the snow, but only if it wasn’t too cold or windy out. I remember the first time we went sledding on that old wooden toboggan, and you cried because you got snow on your face. It was a whole year before you let us take you again, but then you liked it better because instead of the toboggan we had snow tubes, which took a really long time to blow up. You would have enjoyed watching SpongeBob tonight, especially the part where he jams a funnel in his head and turns his face into a snowball machine gun. I’m sure you would have tried to imitate the sound he made while he was shooting them, and I bet you would have done it really well, because I know how much you like to make funny noises.

The next morning, she drove to Best Buy, picked up a complete set of SpongeBob DVDs, and spent the better part of the day watching several episodes from Season One, a marathon that left her feeling cranky, hollowed out, and in desperate need of fresh air. For this very reason, she’d been careful about rationing her kids’ TV time, and understood that she needed to do the same for herself.

Before long, she’d developed what turned out to be a surprisingly durable strategy: She allowed herself to watch SpongeBob twice a day, once in the morning and then again at night, never failing to write a brief entry about each episode in her notebook. This practice — it came to feel vaguely religious — gave structure and focus to her life, and helped her not to feel so lost all the time.

There were a couple of hundred episodes in all, which meant that she saw each one three or four times in the course of a year. It was okay, though, at least until recently. Nora still had something to write after each rerun, some fresh memory or observation triggered by what she’d just seen, even the handful of shows that she’d grown to actively dislike.

In the past few months, however, something fundamental had changed. She almost never laughed at SpongeBob’s antics anymore; shows that she’d found amusing in the past now struck her as desperately sad. This morning’s episode, for example, felt like some sort of allegory, a bitter commentary on her own suffering:

Today was the dance contest, the one where Squidward takes over SpongeBob’s body. To do this, he climbs inside SpongeBob’s conveniently empty head, then pulls off SpongeBob’s arms and legs so he can replace them with his own. Yes, I realize that SpongeBob’s limbs can regenerate themselves, but come on, it’s still horrible. During the competition, Squidward gets a cramp and SpongeBob’s body ends up writhing on the floor in agony. The audience thinks this is pretty cool and gives him First Prize. Quite a metaphor. The person in the most pain wins. Does that mean I get a Blue Ribbon?

In her heart, she understood that the real problem wasn’t the show so much as the feeling that she was losing her son again, that he was no longer there in the room with her. It made sense, of course: Jeremy would be nine now, probably past the age where he would be watching SpongeBob with any real enthusiasm. Wherever he was, he was onto something else, growing up without her, leaving her more alone than she already was.

What she needed to do was retire the DVDs — donate them to the library, put them out for garbage, whatever — before SpongeBob and everything associated with him got permanently poisoned in her mind. It would have been easier if she had something to replace him with, some new show to fill the empty space, but every time she tried to ask her old friends what their boys were watching, the women just hugged her and said, Oh, honey, in their smallest, most sorrowful voices, as if they hadn’t understood the question.

BEFORE LUNCH, Nora took a long ride on the Mapleton-to-Rosedale Bike Trail, a seventeen-mile stretch of land that used to be a railroad line. She liked riding there on weekday mornings when it was relatively uncrowded and the people using it were mostly adults, a lot of them retired, out for some joyless, life-prolonging exercise. Nora made it a point to stay far away on sunny weekend afternoons, when the path was crowded with families on bikes and Rollerblades, and the sight of a little girl with a too-big helmet, or a scowling boy pedaling furiously on a bike equipped with rickety training wheels, could leave her bent over and gasping on the grassy margin of the path, as if she’d been punched in the stomach.

She felt strong and blissfully empty gliding through the crisp November air, enjoying the intermittent warmth of the sun as it filtered down through the overhanging trees, which were mostly stripped of their foliage. It was that trashy, post-Halloween part of the fall, yellow and orange leaves littering the ground like so many discarded candy wrappers. She’d keep riding into the cold weather for as long as she could, at least until the first big snowfall. That was the lowest time of the year, dim and claustrophobic, a funk of holidays and grim inventories. She was hoping that she could escape to the Caribbean or New Mexico for a while, anyplace bright and unreal, if she could only find someone to go with who wouldn’t drive her crazy. She’d visited Miami on her own last year, and it had been a mistake. As much as she liked solitude and strange places, the two of them together did a number on her, releasing a flood of memories and questions that she managed to keep a fairly tight lid on at home.

THE PATH was more or less a straight shot, a car’s width of aging blacktop that took you from Point A to Point B without a whole lot of fanfare. In theory, you were free to double back at any point, but Nora either went halfway — turning around at the edge of Mapleton for an easy sixteen-mile round-trip — or all the way to the terminus in Rosedale, for a grand total of thirty-four, a distance that was no longer the least bit daunting to her. If the path had continued for another ten miles, she would have followed it to the end without complaint.

Not too long ago she would have laughed if someone had suggested that a three-hour bike ride would become an unremarkable part of her daily routine. Back then her life was so crowded with tasks and errands, the everyday emergencies and constantly expanding to-do list of a full-time wife and mother, that she could barely squeeze in a couple of yoga classes a week. But these days she literally had nothing better to do than ride her bike. Sometimes she dreamed about it right before falling asleep, the hypnotic sight of the ground disappearing beneath her front wheel, the jittery sensation of the world humming up through her handlebars.

One day she’d have to get a job, she understood that, not that there was any particular hurry on that front. With the generous survivor’s benefits she’d received — three lump-sum six-figure payments from the federal government, which had stepped in after the insurance companies had ruled the Sudden Departure an “Act of God” for which they could not be held accountable — she figured she’d be okay for at least five years, even more if she ever decided to sell the house and move into someplace smaller.

Still, the day would eventually come when she’d have to start supporting herself, and she did her best to think about it sometimes, not that she ever got too far. She could see herself getting up in the morning full of purpose, putting on clothes and makeup, and then heading out the door, but her fantasy always petered out right there. Where was she going? To an office? A school? A store? She had no idea. She had a degree in Sociology and had spent several years with a research firm that rated corporations based on their records of social and environmental responsibility, but the only thing she could really imagine herself doing at this point was working with children. Unfortunately, she’d tried that last year, helping out a couple of afternoons a week at Erin’s old day care, and it hadn’t gone very well. She’d cried too much in front of the kids, and hugged a few of them a little too hard, and had been gently and respectfully asked to take a leave of absence.

Oh well, she told herself. Maybe it won’t matter. Or maybe none of us will even be around in five years.

Or maybe she’d meet a nice man, get married, and start a new family — maybe even a family just like the one she’d lost. It was a seductive idea, until she got around to thinking about the replacement children. They would be a disappointment, she was sure of it, because her real children had been perfect, and how could you compete with that?

She turned off her iPod and checked her jacket pocket to make sure her pepper spray was handy before crossing Route 23 and entering the long, slightly freaky stretch of the trail that ran between an industrial wasteland to the south and a scrubby forest that was under the nominal control of the County Parks Commission to the north. Nothing bad had ever happened to her there, but she’d seen some weird stuff in the past few months — a pack of dogs shadowing her at the edge of the woods, a muscular man whistling cheerfully as he pushed an empty wheelchair down the path, and a stern-looking Catholic priest with a salt-and-pepper beard who reached out and squeezed her arm as she rode by. Then, just last week, she happened upon a man in a business suit sacrificing a sheep in a small clearing near an algae-covered pond. The man — a chubby middle-aged guy with curly hair and round glasses — had a large knife pressed to the animal’s throat, but hadn’t yet begun his incision. Both the man and the sheep gazed at Nora with startled, unhappy expressions, as if she’d caught them in an act they would have preferred to remain private.

MOST EVENINGS she ate dinner at her sister’s house. It got a little tedious sometimes, being a perpetual appendage to someone else’s family, having to play the role of Aunt Nora, pretending to be interested in her nephews’ inane banter, but she was grateful nonetheless for a few hours of low-stress human contact, a respite from what would otherwise start to feel like a long and very lonely day.

Afternoons remained her biggest problem, a dull, amorphous chunk of solitude. That’s why she’d been so upset about losing the day care job — it filled the empty hours so perfectly. She ran errands when she was lucky enough to have some — they weren’t nearly as plentiful or pressing as they used to be — and occasionally cracked open a book she’d borrowed from her sister: one of the Shopaholics, Mr. Right, Good in Bed, the kind of fun, frothy stuff she used to enjoy. But these days reading just made her sleepy, especially after a long ride, and the one thing she couldn’t afford to do was nap, not if she didn’t want to find herself wide-awake in the dark at three in the morning, with nothing but the inside of her own head to keep her company.

Today, though, Nora had an unexpected visitor, the first in a long time. Reverend Jamison pulled up in his Volvo just as she was wheeling her bike into the garage, and she was surprised by how pleased she was to see him. People used to drop by all the time, just to check up on her, but some sort of statute of limitations seemed to have kicked in about six months ago. Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they’d ruined, got a little stale after a while.

“Hey, there,” she called out, pressing the button that lowered the automatic door, and then heading down the driveway to meet him, moving with the stiff-legged waddle of a newly dismounted cyclist, the cleats of her bike shoes clicking against the pavement. “How are you?”

“Okay.” The Reverend smiled unconvincingly. He was a lanky, troubled-looking man in jeans and a partially untucked white Oxford shirt, tapping a manila envelope against the side of his leg. “Yourself?”

“Not bad.” She brushed some hair out of her eyes, then immediately regretted the gesture, which revealed the decorative pattern of pink dents her helmet left in the tender skin of her forehead. “All things considered.”

Reverend Jamison nodded somberly, as if to acknowledge all the things that needed to be considered.

“You have a few minutes?” he asked.

“Now?” she said, feeling suddenly self-conscious about her spandex tights and sweaty face, the yeasty odor of exertion that was undoubtedly trapped beneath her Gore-Tex windbreaker. “I’m kind of a mess.”

Even as she said this, she took a moment to marvel at the persistence of her own vanity. She’d thought she was through with all that — what use could she possibly have for it anymore? — but apparently it was too deep a reflex to ever really go away.

“Take your time,” he said. “I can wait out here while you get cleaned up.”

Nora couldn’t help smiling at the absurdity of the offer. Reverend Jamison had sat up with her on nights when she was out of her mind with grief, and had cooked her breakfast when she woke up wild-haired and drooling on the living room couch, still in yesterday’s clothes. It was a little late in the day to get all girly and modest on him.

“Come on in,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

UNDER OTHER circumstances, Nora might have found it vaguely exciting, stepping into a steamy shower while a reasonably handsome man who wasn’t her husband waited patiently downstairs. But Reverend Jamison was too grim and preoccupied, too wrapped up in his own bitter obsessions to be conscripted into even the flimsiest romantic scenario.

Actually, Nora wasn’t even sure if Matt Jamison on was a Reverend anymore. He no longer preached at the Zion Bible Church, no longer seemed to do much of anything except research and distribute that horrible newsletter, the one that had turned him into a pariah. From what she’d heard, his wife and kids had abandoned him, his friends no longer spoke to him, and total strangers sometimes found it necessary to punch him in the face.

She was pretty sure he deserved whatever he got, but she still harbored a soft spot for the man he’d been, the one who’d helped her through the blackest hours of her life. Of all the would-be spiritual advisors who’d inflicted themselves on her after October 14th, Matt Jamison was the only one she’d been able to tolerate for more than five minutes at a time.

She’d resented him at first, the way she’d resented all the others. Nora wasn’t religious and couldn’t understand why every priest, minister, and New Age quack within a fifty-mile radius of Mapleton thought they had a right to intrude upon her misery, and assumed she would find it comforting to hear that what had happened to her — the annihilation of her family, to be precise — was somehow part of God’s plan, or the prelude to a glorious reunion in heaven at some unspecified later date. The Monsignor of Our Lady of Sorrows even tried to convince her that her suffering wasn’t all that unique, that she was really no different than a parishioner of his, a woman who’d lost her husband and three children in a car accident and still somehow managed to live a reasonably happy and productive life.

“Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones,” he said. “We all have to suffer, every last one of us. I stood beside her while she watched all four of those coffins go into the ground.”

Then she’s lucky! Nora wanted to scream. Because at least she knows where they are! But she held her tongue, understanding how inhuman it would sound, calling a woman like that lucky.

“I want you to leave,” she told the priest in a calm voice. “Go home and say a million Hail Marys.”

Reverend Jamison had been foisted upon her by her sister, who’d been a member of the Zion Bible Church for many years, along with Chuck and the boys. The whole family claimed to have been born again at the exact same moment, a phenomenon that Nora found highly improbable, though she kept this opinion to herself. At Karen’s urging, Nora and her kids had once attended a worship service at Z.B.C. — Doug had refused to “waste a Sunday morning”—and she’d been a little put off by the Reverend’s evangelical fervor. It was a style of preaching she’d never encountered close up, having spent her childhood as a halfhearted Catholic and her adulthood as an equally passionless nonbeliever.

Nora had been living at her sister’s for a few months when the Reverend started dropping by — at Karen’s invitation — for informal, once-a-week “spiritual counseling” sessions. She wasn’t happy about it, but by that point she was too weak and beaten down to resist. It wasn’t quite as bad as she’d feared, though. In person, Reverend Jamison turned out to be far less dogmatic than he’d been in the pulpit. He had no platitudes or canned sermons to offer, no obnoxious certainty about God’s wisdom and good intentions. Unlike the other clergymen she’d dealt with, he asked a lot of questions about Doug and Erin and Jeremy and listened carefully to her answers. When he left, she was often surprised to realize that she felt a little better than she had when he’d arrived.

She terminated the sessions when she moved back home, but soon found herself calling him late at night, whenever her insomniac reveries turned suicidal, which was fairly often. He always came right over, no matter what time it was, and stayed for as long as she needed him. Without his help, she never would have made it through that dismal spring.

As she grew stronger, though, she began to realize that it was the Reverend who was falling apart. There were nights when he seemed just as despondent as she was. He wept frequently and kept up a running monologue about the Rapture and how unfair it was that he’d missed the cut.

“I gave everything to Him,” he complained, his voice infused with the bitterness of a spurned lover. “My entire life. And this is the thanks I get?”

Nora didn’t have a lot of patience for this kind of talk. The Reverend’s family had emerged unscathed from the disaster. They were still right where he’d left them, a lovely wife and three sweet kids. If anything, he should get down on his knees and thank God every minute of the day.

“Those people were no better than I was,” he continued. “A lot of them were worse. So how come they’re with God and I’m still here?”

“How do you know they’re with God?”

“It’s in the Scriptures.”

Nora shook her head. She’d considered the possibility of the Rapture as an explanation for the events of October 14th. Everyone had. It couldn’t be avoided, not when so many people were proclaiming it from the rooftops. But it never made any sense to her, not even for a second.

“There was no Rapture,” she told him.

The Reverend laughed as if he pitied her. “It’s right there in the Bible, Nora. ‘Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left.’ The truth is right in front of us.”

“Doug was an atheist,” Nora reminded him. “There’s no Rapture for atheists.”

“It’s possible he was a secret believer. Maybe God knew his heart better than he did.”

“I don’t think so. He used to brag about how there wasn’t a religious bone in his body.”

“But Erin and Jeremy — they weren’t atheists.”

“They weren’t anything. They were just little kids. All they believed in was their mommy and daddy and Santa Claus.”

Reverend Jamison closed his eyes. She couldn’t tell if he was thinking or praying. When he opened them, he seemed just as bewildered as before.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I should’ve been first in line.”

Nora remembered that conversation later in the summer when Karen informed her that Reverend Jamison had suffered a nervous breakdown and taken a leave of absence from the church. She considered stopping by his house to see how he was doing, but she couldn’t find the strength. She just mailed him a get-well-soon card and left it at that. Not long afterward, right around the first anniversary of the Sudden Departure, his newsletter made its first appearance, a self-published five-page compendium of scurrilous accusations against the missing of October 14th, none of whom were in any kind of position to defend themselves. This one embezzled from his employer. That one drove drunk. Another one had disgusting sexual appetites. Reverend Jamison stood on street corners and passed them out for free, and even though most people claimed to be appalled by what he was doing, he never had any shortage of takers.

*

AFTER HE left, Nora wondered how she could have been so stupid, so utterly unprepared for something that should have been obvious the moment he’d stepped out of his car. And yet she’d invited him into her kitchen and even made him a cup of tea. He was an old friend, she told herself, and they had some catching up to do.

But it was more than that, she’d realized, studying his sallow, haunted face from across the breakfast island. Reverend Jamison was a wreck, but some part of her respected him for that, the same part that sometimes felt ashamed of her own shaky sanity, the way she’d managed to keep going after everything that had happened, clinging to some pathetic idea of a normal life — eight hours of sleep, three meals a day, lots of fresh air and exercise. Sometimes that felt crazy, too.

“How are you?” she asked in a probing tone, letting him know that she wasn’t just making small talk.

“Exhausted,” he said, and he looked it. “Like my body’s full of wet cement.”

Nora nodded sympathetically. Her own body felt great just then, warm and loose from the shower, her muscles pleasantly sore, her wet hair gathered snugly in a terry-cloth turban on top of her head.

“You should take a rest,” she told him. “Go on vacation or something.”

“Vacation.” He chuckled scornfully. “What would I do on vacation?”

“Sit by the pool. Forget about things for a while.”

“We’re past that, Nora.” He spoke sternly, as if addressing a child. “There’s no sitting by the pool anymore.”

“Maybe not,” she conceded, remembering her own misguided attempts at fun in the sun. “It was just a thought.”

He stared at her in a way that didn’t feel particularly friendly. As the silence grew strained, she wondered if it would be a good idea to ask him about his kids, find out if they’d had some sort of reconciliation, but she decided against it. If people had good news, you didn’t have to drag it out of them.

“I saw your speech last month,” he said. “I was impressed. It must have taken a lot of courage for you to do that. You had a really natural delivery.”

“Thank you,” she said, pleased by the compliment. It meant something coming from a veteran public speaker like the Reverend. “I didn’t think I could, but … I don’t know. It just felt like something I needed to do. To keep their memory alive.” She lowered her voice, trusting him with a confession. “It’s just three years, but sometimes it feels like ages ago.”

“A lifetime.” He lifted his mug, sniffed at the steam curling up from the liquid, then set it back down without taking a sip. “We were all living in a dreamworld.”

“I look at pictures of my kids,” she said, “and sometimes I don’t even cry. I can’t tell if that’s a blessing or a curse.”

Reverend Jamison nodded, but she could tell that he wasn’t really listening. After a moment, he reached down for something on the floor — it turned out to be the manila envelope he’d been holding in the driveway — and set it down on the countertop. Nora had forgotten all about it.

“I brought you the new issue of my paper,” he said.

“That’s okay.” She raised her hand in a gesture of polite refusal. “I really don’t—”

“No.” There was a sharp note of warning in his voice. “You really do.”

Nora stared dumbly at the envelope, which the Reverend was nudging toward her with the tip of his index finger. A strange sound came out of her mouth, something between a cough and a laugh.

“Are you kidding me?”

“It’s about your husband.” To his credit, he looked genuinely embarrassed. “I could’ve run it in the October issue, but I held it until after your speech.”

Nora shoved the envelope back across the counter. She had no idea what secret it contained, and no desire to find out.

“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.

They set off in pursuit, but lost sight of the vehicle when it turned right at the end of the block. Laurie’s hypothesis, based on nothing more than a hunch, was that Grice was probably headed to the Safeway for some kind of nighttime treat, blueberry pound cake or butter pecan ice cream or maybe a slab of dark chocolate studded with almonds, any one of the many, many foods she found herself fantasizing about at odd moments throughout the day, usually in the vast famished interlude that separated the morning bowl of oatmeal from the evening bowl of soup.

The supermarket was a brisk ten-minute walk from Russell Road, which meant that if she was right and if they hurried, they might be able to catch up with Grice before he left the store. Of course, he’d probably just get back in his car and drive right back home after that, but there was no point in getting too far ahead of herself. Besides, she wanted Meg to understand that Watching was a fluid, improvisational activity. It was entirely possible that Grice wasn’t going to the Safeway and that they’d lose track of him altogether. But it was just as likely that, while searching for him, they’d bump into someone else on the list and could shift their attention to that subject. Or they could stumble upon some wholly unforeseen situation involving individuals whose names they didn’t even know. The goal was to keep your eyes open and go wherever you’d be able to do the most good.

At any rate, it was a relief to be on the move, no longer hiding in the shrubbery. As far as Laurie was concerned, the exercise and fresh air were the best parts of the job, at least on a night like this, when the sky was clear and the temperature was still above forty. She tried not to think about what it was going to be like in January.

At the corner, she stopped to light a cigarette and offered one to Meg, who recoiled slightly before raising her hand in a futile gesture of refusal. Laurie jabbed the pack more insistently. She hated being a hardass, but the rule was absolutely clear: A Watcher in Public View Must Carry a Lit Cigarette at All Times.

When Meg continued to resist, Laurie jammed a cigarette — the G.R. provided a generic brand with a harsh taste and suspiciously chemical odor, purchased in bulk by the regional office — between the younger woman’s lips and held a match to it. Meg choked violently on the first drag, as she always did, then released a small whimper of revulsion after the fit had passed.

Laurie patted her on the arm, letting her know she was doing just fine. If she could’ve spoken, she would’ve recited the motto both of them had learned in Orientation: We don’t smoke for enjoyment. We smoke to proclaim our faith. Meg smiled queasily, sniffling and wiping at her eyes as they resumed their walk.

In a way, Laurie envied Meg her suffering. That was how it was supposed to be — a sacrifice for God, a mortification of the flesh, as if every puff were a profound personal violation. It was different for Laurie, who’d been a smoker throughout college and into her twenties, only quitting with difficulty at the beginning of her first pregnancy. For her, starting again after all those years was like a homecoming, an illicit pleasure smuggled into the grueling regimen of privations that made up life in the G.R. The sacrifice in her case would have been quitting a second time, not being able to savor that first cigarette in the morning, the one that tasted so good she sometimes found herself lying in her sleeping bag and blowing smoke rings at the ceiling just for the fun of it.

THERE WEREN’T many cars in the Safeway lot, but Laurie couldn’t rule out the possibility that one of them belonged to Grice — he drove a nondescript, dark-colored sedan, and she’d neglected to note the make, model, or license plate — so they headed inside to search the store, splitting up to cover more ground.

She started in the Produce section, circling the fruit to avoid temptation — it was painful to look at the strawberries, to even think their name — and hustling past the vegetables, which looked so impossibly fresh and inviting, each one an advertisement for the doomed planet that had produced it: dark green broccoli, red peppers, dense orbs of cabbage, damp heads of romaine lettuce, their broad leaves held in place by shiny wire bands.

The Bakery aisle was torture, even this late in the day — just a few stray baguettes here, a sesame bagel and banana nut muffin there, leftovers bound for tomorrow’s day-old bin. A lingering odor of fresh-baked bread permeated the area, mingling with the bright lights and piped-in music—“Rhinestone Cowboy,” oddly enough, a song she hadn’t heard in years — to induce a kind of sensory overload. She felt almost giddy with desire, amazed to remember that the supermarket had once seemed painfully dull to her, just another obligatory stop on the mundane circuit of her life, no more exciting than the gas station or post office. In a matter of months, it had become exotic and deeply affecting, a garden from which she and everyone she knew had been expelled, whether they knew it or not.

She didn’t breathe any easier until she turned her back on the deli counter and took refuge among the packaged foods — cans of beans and boxes of dried pasta and bottles of salad dressing — all sorts of good stuff, but nothing you had to stop yourself from grabbing and shoving into your mouth. The sheer variety of products was overwhelming, somehow ridiculous and impressive at the same time: four shelves devoted to barbecue sauce alone, as if each brand possessed its own unique and powerful properties.

The Safeway felt half asleep, only one or two customers per aisle, most of them moving slowly, scanning the shelves with dazed expressions. To her relief, all of them drifted by without saying a word or even nodding hello. According to G.R. protocol, you were supposed to return a greeting not with a smile or a wave, but by looking directly into the eyes of the person who’d greeted you and counting slowly to ten. It was awkward enough with strangers and casual acquaintances, but completely unnerving if you found yourself face-to-face with a close friend or family member, both of you blushing and uncertain — hugs were expressly prohibited — a flood of unspeakable sentiments rising into your throat.

She’d expected to reconnect with Meg somewhere around the frozen food aisle — the geographical center of the store — but didn’t get alarmed until she made her way through Beverages, Coffee and Tea, and Chips and Snacks without catching a glimpse of her. Was it possible that they’d crossed without realizing it, each one rounding the corner of the aisle the other one had just vacated at exactly the same time?

Laurie was tempted to backtrack, but she kept going all the way to the dairy case, where Meg had begun her search. It was empty, except for a single shopper standing in front of the sliced cheese, a bald man with a wiry runner’s build she recognized too late as Dave Tolman, the father of one of her son’s former schoolmates. He turned and smiled, but she pretended not to notice.

She knew she’d been irresponsible, letting Meg out of her sight like that. The first few weeks at the compound could be hard and disorienting; newcomers had a tendency to flee back to their old lives if given half a chance. That was okay, of course: The G.R. wasn’t a cult, as lots of ignorant people liked to claim. Every resident was free to come and go as they pleased. But it was a Trainer’s job to provide guidance and companionship during this vulnerable time, helping the Trainee through the inevitable crises and moments of weakness, so she didn’t lose heart and do something she’d regret for all of eternity.

She thought about making a quick loop around the perimeter of the store to double-check, then decided to head straight out into the parking lot in case Meg was making a run for it. She cut between two unmanned checkout counters, trying not to think about what it would be like, arriving back at the compound without her Trainee, having to explain that she’d left her alone in the supermarket, of all places.

The automatic doors parted sluggishly, releasing her into the night, which seemed to have gotten noticeably colder. She was just about to break into a run when she saw, to her immense relief, that it wouldn’t be necessary. Meg was standing right in front of her, a contrite young woman in shapeless white clothes, holding a piece of paper in front of her chest.

Sorry, it read. I couldn’t breathe in there.

IT WAS way past midnight when they got back to Ginkgo Street, slipping between two concrete barriers and signing in at the sentry house. These security measures had been put in place a couple of years earlier, after the police raid that resulted in the martyrdom of Phil Crowther — a forty-two-year-old husband and father of three — and the wounding of two other residents. The cops had entered the compound in the middle of the night, armed with search warrants and battering rams, hoping to rescue two little girls who, their father claimed, had been abducted and were being held against their will by the Guilty Remnant. Angered by what they saw as Gestapo tactics, some residents threw rocks and bottles at the invaders; the outnumbered cops panicked and responded with gunfire. A subsequent investigation exonerated the officers, but criticized the raid itself as “legally flawed and badly executed, based on the uncorroborated allegations of an embittered, noncustodial parent.” Since then — and Laurie had to give Kevin most of the credit for the change — the Mapleton Police had adopted a less confrontational attitude toward the G.R., doing their best to employ diplomacy rather than force when inevitable disputes and crises arose. Even so, the memory of the shootings remained fresh and painful on Ginkgo Street. She’d never heard anyone even speculate about the possibility of removing the traffic barriers, which in any case doubled as memorials, spray-painted with the words WE LOVE YOU, PHIL — SEE YOU IN HEAVEN.

They’d been assigned a bedroom on the third floor of Blue House, which was reserved for female Trainees. Laurie normally lived in Gray House, the women’s dorm next door, where an average-sized room accommodated as many as six or seven people, all of them in sleeping bags on a bare floor. Every night was a somber, adults-only slumber party — no giggles or whispers, just lots of coughing and farting and snoring and groaning, the sounds and smells of too many stressed-out people packed into too small a space.

Blue House was highly civilized by comparison, almost luxurious, just the two of them in a child-sized room with twin beds and pale green walls, a soft beige carpet that felt good against your bare feet, and, best of all, a bathroom right across the hall. A little vacation, Laurie thought. She got undressed while Meg was showering, exchanging her dirty clothes for a loose-fitting G.R. nightgown — an ugly but comfortable garment sewn from an old sheet — then knelt to say her prayers. She took her time, focusing on her children and then moving down the list to Kevin, her mother, her siblings, her friends and former neighbors, trying to visualize every one of them dressed in white garments and bathed in the golden light of forgiveness, as she’d been taught to do. It was a luxury to pray like this, in an empty room with no distractions. She knew that God didn’t care if she was kneeling or standing on her head, but it just felt better to do it right, her mind clear and her attention undivided.

Thank you for bringing Meg to us, she prayed. Give her strength and grant me the wisdom to guide her in the right direction.

The Night Watch had gone pretty well, she thought. They’d lost track of Grice and hadn’t run into anyone else whose files they’d reviewed, but they saw a fair amount of action in the town center, accompanying people from bars and restaurants to their cars, and walking home with a trio of teenage girls who chatted cheerfully among themselves about boys and school as if Laurie and Meg weren’t even there. They’d had only one unpleasant encounter, with a couple of twentysomething jerks outside the Extra Inning. It wasn’t horrible, just the usual insults and a crude sexual invitation from the drunker of the two, a good-looking guy with an arrogant grin, who put his arm around Meg as if she were his girlfriend. (“I’ll fuck the pretty one,” he told his buddy. “You can have Grandma.”) But even that was a useful lesson for Meg, a little taste of what it meant to be a Watcher. Sooner or later, someone would hit her, or spit on her, or worse, and she’d have to be able to endure the abuse without protesting or trying to defend herself.

Meg emerged from the bathroom, smiling bashfully, her face pink, her body lost inside her tentlike nightgown. It was almost cruel, Laurie thought, draping a lovely young woman in such a dull and baggy sack, as if her beauty had no place in the world.

It’s different for me, she told herself. I’m just as happy being hidden.

The water in the bathroom was still warm, a luxury she no longer took for granted. In Gray House there was a chronic lack of hot water — it was inevitable, with so many people living there — but regulations required two showers a day regardless. She stayed in for a long time, until the air was thick with steam, which wasn’t much of a problem since the G.R. prohibited mirrors. It still felt weird to her, brushing her teeth in front of a blank wall, using chalky no-name paste and a crappy manual brush. She’d accepted most of the hygiene restrictions without complaint — it was easy to see why perfumes and conditioners and antiaging creams might be considered extravagances — but she remained unreconciled to the loss of her electric toothbrush. She’d pined for it for weeks before realizing that it was more than the sensation of a clean mouth that she missed — it was her marriage, all those years of mindless domestic happiness, long, crowded days that culminated with her and Kevin standing side by side in front of the dual sinks, battery-operated wands buzzing in their hands, their mouths full of minty froth. But that was all over. Now it was just herself in a quiet room, her fist moving doggedly in front of her face, no one smiling into the mirror, no one smiling back.

DURING THE Training Period, the Vow of Silence wasn’t absolute. There was a brief interlude after lights-out — usually no more than fifteen minutes — when you were allowed to speak freely, to verbalize your fears and ask any questions that had gone unanswered during the day. The Unburdening was a recent innovation, meant to function as a kind of safety valve, a way to make the transition to not talking a little less abrupt and intimidating. According to a PowerPoint Laurie had seen — she was a member of the Committee on Recruitment and Retention — the dropout rate among Trainees had declined by almost a third since the new policy had been adopted, which was one of the main reasons why the compound had become so crowded.

“So how you doing?” Laurie asked, just to get the ball rolling. Her own voice sounded strange to her, a rusty croak in the darkness.

“Okay, I guess,” Meg replied.

“Just okay?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to just walk away from everything. I still can’t believe I did it.”

“You seemed a little nervous at the Safeway.”

“I was afraid I was gonna see somebody I knew.”

“Your fiancé?”

“Yeah, but not just Gary. Any of my friends.” Her voice was a bit wobbly, like she was trying hard to be brave. “I was supposed to get married this weekend.”

“I know.” Laurie had read Meg’s file and understood that she was going to require some special attention. “That must’ve been hard.”

Meg made a funny sound, something between a chuckle and a groan.

“I feel like I’m dreaming,” she said. “I keep waiting to wake up.”

“I know what that’s like,” Laurie assured her. “I still feel like that sometimes. Tell me a little about Gary. What’s he like?”

“Great,” Meg said. “Really cute. Broad shoulders. Sandy hair. This sweet little cleft in his chin. I used to kiss him there all the time.”

“What’s he do?”

“He’s a securities analyst. Just got his MBA last spring.”

“Wow. He sounds impressive.”

“He is.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if there weren’t any room for debate. “He’s a great guy. Smart, good-looking, lots of fun. Loves to travel, goes to the gym every day. My friends call him Mr. Perfect.”

“Where’d you meet?”

“In high school. He was a basketball player. My brother was on the team, so I went to a lot of games. Gary was a senior and I was a sophomore. I didn’t think he even knew I was alive. And then, one day, he just walked up to me and said, Hey, Chris’s sister. You want to go to a movie? Can you believe that? He didn’t even know my name and he asked me on a date.”

“And you said yes.”

“Are you kidding? I felt like I won the lottery.”

“You hit it off right away?”

“God, yeah. The first time he kissed me, I thought, This is the boy I’m gonna marry.”

“It took you long enough. That must’ve been what, eight or nine years ago?”

“We were in school,” Meg explained. “We got engaged right after I graduated, but then we had to postpone the wedding. Because of what happened.”

“You lost your mother.”

“It wasn’t just her. One of Gary’s cousins, he also … two girls I knew in college, my father’s boss, a guy Gary used to work out with. A whole bunch of people. You remember what it was like.”

“I do.”

“It just didn’t feel right, getting married without my mother. We were really close, and she was so excited when I showed her the ring. I was gonna wear her wedding dress and everything.”

“And Gary was okay with the postponement?”

“Totally. Like I said, he’s a really nice guy.”

“So you rescheduled the wedding?”

“Not right away. We didn’t even talk about it for two years. And then we just decided to go for it.”

“And you felt ready this time?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just finally accepted the fact that my mother wasn’t coming back. Nobody was. And Gary was starting to get impatient. He kept telling me that he was tired of being sad all the time. He said my mom would have wanted us to get married, to start a family. He said she would’ve wanted us to be happy.”

“What did you think?”

“That he was right. And I was tired of being sad all the time, too.”

“So what happened?”

Meg didn’t speak for a few seconds. It was almost like Laurie could hear her thinking in the dark, trying to formulate her answer as clearly as she could, as if a lot depended on it.

“We made all the arrangements, you know? We rented a hall, picked out a DJ, interviewed caterers. I should’ve been happy, right?” She laughed softly. “It felt like I wasn’t even there, like it was all happening to someone else, someone I didn’t even know. Look at her, designing the invitations. Look at her, trying on the dress.”

“I remember that feeling,” Laurie said. “It’s like you’re dead and you don’t even know it.”

“Gary got mad. He couldn’t understand why I wasn’t more excited.”

“So when did you decide to bail out?”

“It was on my mind for a while. But I kept waiting, you know, hoping it would get better. I went to a therapist, got medication, did a lot of yoga. But nothing worked. Last week I told Gary that I needed another postponement, but he didn’t want to hear it. He said we could get married or we could break up. It was my choice.”

“And here you are.”

“Here I am,” she agreed.

“We’re glad to have you.”

“I really hate the cigarettes.”

“You’ll get used to them.”

“I hope so.”

Neither one of them spoke after that. Laurie rolled onto her side, savoring the softness of the sheets, trying to remember the last time she’d slept in such a comfortable bed. Meg only cried for a little while, and then she was quiet.

GET A ROOM

NORA HAD BEEN LOOKING FORWARD to the dance, less for the event itself than for the chance to make a public statement, to let her little world know that she was okay, that she’d recovered from the humiliation of Matt Jamison’s article and didn’t need anyone’s pity. She’d felt defiantly upbeat all day long, trying on the sexiest clothes in her closet — they still fit, some even better than before — and practicing her moves in front of the mirror, the first time she’d danced in three years. Not bad, she thought. Not bad at all. It was like traveling back in time, meeting the person you used to be, and recognizing her as a friend.

The dress she’d finally settled on was a slinky red-and-gray wraparound with a plunging neckline that she’d last worn to Doug’s boss’s daughter’s wedding, where it had received a slew of compliments, including one from Doug himself, the master of withholding. She knew she’d made the right choice when she modeled it for her sister and saw the sour look on Karen’s face.

“You’re not wearing that, are you?”

“Why? Don’t you like it?”

“It’s just a little … flashy, isn’t it? People might think—”

“I don’t care,” Nora said. “Let them think whatever they want.”

A jittery, mostly pleasant sense of anticipation — Saturday-night butterflies — took hold of her in Karen’s car, a feeling she remembered from college, back when every party seemed like it had the potential to change her life. It stuck with her through the entire drive and the short walk through the middle school parking lot, only to abandon her at the front entrance of the building when she saw the flyer advertising the dance:

MAPLETON MEANS FUN PRESENTS:

NOVEMBER ADULT MIXER

DJ, DANCING, REFRESHMENTS, PRIZES

8 P.M. — MIDNIGHT

HAWTHORNE SCHOOL CAFETERIA

Mapleton means fun? she thought, catching a sudden mortifying glimpse of herself in the glass door. Is that a joke? If it was, then the joke was on her, a no-longer young woman in a party dress about to enter a school her children would never get a chance to attend. I’m sorry, she told them, as if they were hiding in her mind, judging everything she did. I didn’t think this through.

“What’s the matter?” Karen asked, peering over her shoulder. “Is it locked?”

“Of course it’s not locked.” Nora pushed open the door to show her sister what a stupid question it was.

“I didn’t think it was,” Karen said testily.

“Then why’d you ask?”

“Because you were just standing there, that’s why.”

Shut up, Nora thought as they stepped into the main hallway, a bright tunnel with a waxed brown floor and a multitude of institutional green lockers stretching into the distance on either side. Just please shut up. A collection of student self-portraits hung on the wall across from the main office, above a banner that read: WE ARE THE MUSTANGS! It hurt her to look at all those fresh, hopeful, clumsily rendered faces, to think of all the lucky mothers sending them off in the morning with their backpacks and lunch boxes, and then picking them up at the curb in the afternoon.

Hey, sweetie, how was your day?

“They have an excellent art program,” Karen said, as if she were giving a tour to a prospective parent. “They’re strong on music, too.”

“Great,” Nora muttered. “Maybe I should enroll.”

“I’m just making conversation. You don’t have to get all huffy about it.”

“Sorry.”

Nora knew she was being a bitch. It was especially unfair given that Karen was the only date she could scrounge up on such short notice. That was the thing about her sister — Nora didn’t always like her and hardly ever agreed with her, but she could always count on her. Everyone else she’d called — her allegedly close friends from the mommy group in which she could no longer claim membership — had begged off, citing family obligations or whatever, but only after trying to talk her out of coming here at all.

Are you sure it’s a good idea, honey? Nora hated the condescending way they called her “honey,” as if she were a child, incapable of making her own decisions. Don’t you want to wait a little longer?

What they meant was wait a little longer for the dust to settle from the article, the one that everyone in town was probably still whispering about: PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS: “HERO” DAD’S STEAMY TRYST WITH PRESCHOOL HOTTIE. Nora had only read it once, in her kitchen after Matt Jamison’s surprise visit, but once was enough for all the grisly details of Doug’s torrid affair with Kylie Mannheim to permanently engrave themselves on her memory.

Even now, two weeks later, it was still hard for her to accept the idea of Kylie as the Other Woman. In Nora’s mind, she was still her kids’ beloved teacher from the Little Sprouts Academy, a lovely, energetic girl, fresh out of college, who somehow managed to seem innocent and wholesome despite having a pierced tongue and a tattoo sleeve on her left arm that fascinated the toddlers. She was the author of a beautiful evaluation letter that Nora had once believed she would treasure forever, a carefully observed three-page analysis of Erin’s first year at Little Sprouts that praised her “uncommon social skills,” her “inexhaustibly curious mind,” and her “fearless sense of adventure.” For a couple of months after October 14th, Nora had carried the letter everywhere, so she could read it whenever she wanted to remember her daughter.

Unfortunately, there was no doubt about the veracity of the Reverend’s accusations. He’d rescued an old, apparently broken laptop of Kylie’s from the trash — the guy at the computer store had told her the hard drive was shot — and used his recently acquired data recovery skills to unearth a treasure trove of incriminating e-mails, compromising photos, and “shockingly explicit” chat sessions between “the handsome father of two” and “the fetching young educator.” The newsletter included several damning excerpts from this correspondence, in which Doug revealed a hitherto hidden flair for erotic writing.

Nora had been devastated, not only by the tawdry revelations — she hadn’t suspected a thing, of course — but also by the Reverend’s obvious delight in making them public. She hid out for several days after the scandal broke, mentally reviewing her entire marriage, wondering if every minute of it had been a lie.

Once the initial shock wore off, she noticed that she also felt a kind of relief, a lightening of her burden. For three years she’d been grieving for a husband who didn’t really exist, at least not in the way she’d imagined. Now that she knew the truth, she could see that she’d lost a little less than she thought she had, which was almost like getting something back. She wasn’t a tragic widow, after all, just another woman betrayed by a selfish man. It was a smaller, more familiar role, and a lot easier to play.

“You ready?” Karen asked.

They were standing in the doorway of the cafeteria, watching the activity on the dimly lit dance floor. It was surprisingly crowded, a bunch of middle-aged people, mostly women, moving enthusiastically, if a bit awkwardly, to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” trying to find a way back to their younger, more limber selves.

“I think so,” Nora replied.

She could sense the heads turning as they entered the cavernous party space, the attention of the room swiveling in their direction. This was what her friends had been hoping to protect her from, but she really didn’t care one way or the other. If people wanted to look at her, they were welcome to look.

Yup, it’s me, she thought. The Saddest Woman in the World.

She waded straight into the fray, raising her arms overhead and letting her hips take the lead. Karen was right there with her, elbows and knees chugging away. Nora hadn’t seen her sister dance in years and had forgotten how much fun it was to watch her, a short, heavy woman with lots of moving parts, sexy in a way you couldn’t have predicted from encountering her in any other context. They leaned in close, smiling at each other as they sang along: Little red Corvette, baby you’re much too fast! Nora spun to the left, then snapped her upper body back to the right, her long hair whipping across her face. For the first time in ages, she felt almost human again.

THE GAME they played was called Get a Room. It was a lot like Spin the Bottle, except the group as a whole got to vote on whether a couple could leave the circle and retire to a private space. The voting added an element of strategy into what was otherwise a simple game of chance. You had to keep track of a whole range of possibilities, recalculating with every spin who you wanted to keep around and who you wanted to eliminate as a rival. The goal — aside from the obvious one of hooking up with someone you were attracted to — was to avoid being one of the last two players in the circle, because they had to get a room, too, though Jill knew from experience that they mostly just sat around feeling like losers. In a way it was better with an uneven number of players, despite the embarrassment of finding yourself alone at the end, the odd one out.

Aimee rubbed her hands together for luck, smiled at Nick Lazarro — he was every girl’s first choice — and flicked the spinner, which came from a game of Twister. The arrow blurred, then slowed, regaining its shape as it ticked around the circle, inching past Nick to land squarely on Zoe Grantham.

“Jesus,” Zoe groaned. She was a pretty, voluptuously chunky girl with Cleopatra bangs and juicy red lips that left their marks all over people’s necks and faces. “Not again.”

“Oh, come on,” Aimee pouted. “It’s not that bad.”

They scuttled toward each other on their hands and knees and kissed in the center of the circle. It was nothing special — no tongue, no groping, just a polite liplock — but Jason Waldron started clapping and hooting as if they were going at it like porn stars.

“Hell, yeah!” he bellowed, the way he always did when there was lesbian action under way, no matter how listless. “These bitches need to get a room!”

No one seconded the motion. Nick spun next, but the arrow landed on Dmitri, so he got to go again. Those were the sexist rules they played by: Girls had to make out with each other, but the guys didn’t, for reasons that were supposed to be self-explanatory. Jill was annoyed by this double standard, not because she had anything against kissing girls — she liked it just fine, with the single exception of Aimee, who was a little too much like a sister — but because it was bound up with a second injustice: Girls could kiss, but they could never get a room, on the grounds that that would mean stranding two guys without female partners, disturbing the heterosexual symmetry of the game. Jill had tried a couple of times to get the others to reconsider this policy, but no one backed her up on it, not even Jeannie Chun, who would have been the most obvious beneficiary of the change.

On his second spin, Nick got Zoe, and they went at it enthusiastically enough that Max Connolly suggested they get a room. Jeannie seconded the motion, but everyone else voted no — Jill and Aimee because they wanted to keep Nick in the game, Dmitri because he had a crush on Zoe, and Jason because he was Nick’s lackey and never voted for Nick to get a room with anyone but Aimee.

That was the problem these days — there weren’t enough players, and all the suspense was gone. Back in the summer, it had been crazy; on some nights they had close to thirty people in the circle — this was out in Mark Sollers’s backyard — many of whom were strangers to one another. The voting was raucous and unpredictable; you were just as likely to get a room for a lame kiss as a steamy one. The first time she played, Jill ended up with a college guy who turned out to be a good friend of her brother’s. They fooled around a bit, but then gave up and spent a long time talking about Tom, a conversation that taught her more about her brother than she knew from living in the same house with him for all those years. The second time she got a room with Nick, whom she knew from school but had never spoken to. He was beautiful, a quiet, dark-eyed boy with lank hair and a watchful expression, and she felt beautiful with him, absolutely certain that she belonged in his arms.

The game got smaller and duller in September, when the college kids headed back to school, and it continued to shrink throughout the fall, their number dwindling down to a hard core of eight players, and every session was more or less the same: Aimee went off with Nick, Jill and Zoe duked it out for Max and Dmitri, and Jeannie and Jason ended up together by default. Jill didn’t even know why they bothered anymore — the game mostly felt like a bad habit to her, a ritual that had outlived its usefulness, but it was always accompanied by a slender hope that the group dynamic might shift in such a way that she’d find herself alone with Nick again and could remind him of how perfectly their bodies and minds fit together.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to happen tonight. She got him on her fourth spin, felt the familiar jolt of excitement as his face moved toward hers, and the equally familiar letdown when they kissed. He wasn’t even pretending to be interested, his lips dry and only slightly parted, his tongue stubbornly passive in response to the eager, questioning flicks of her own. It was such a lethargic performance — way less hot than the kiss he’d given Zoe; Jill wasn’t even in second place anymore! — that nobody even bothered to suggest that they get a room. When it was over, he wiped his mouth, gave a languid nod of approval, and said, “Thanks, that was great,” but it was just good manners. They might as well have just shaken hands, or waved at each other from across the street. It made her wonder if their summer hookup had even happened, if the glorious hour and a half they’d spent on Mark’s parents’ bed wasn’t just a figment of her imagination, a bad case of wishful thinking.

But it wasn’t — the sheets had been cool and white, with little blue flowers on them, really delicate and innocent-looking, and Nick had been really into it. The only thing that had changed since then was that he’d fallen in love with Aimee, the way every guy eventually did. You could see it in the way his face lit up when the arrow finally pointed in her direction, and in the slow, serious way he kissed her, as if there were no one else in the room, as if what they were sharing wasn’t part of a game at all. Aimee couldn’t match his sincerity — there was something inescapably theatrical about the way she melted onto the floor, pulling him on top of her and arching her back so she could grind her pelvis against his — but the combination of the two styles had a potent effect on the judges. When Jason suggested that they get a room, Zoe seconded the motion, and the vote in favor was unanimous, not a single abstention.

THE BARRIER that separated Nora from the people around her thinned and softened as she danced; the others didn’t seem as far away or strange as they often did when she passed them in the supermarket or on the bike path. When they bumped into her on the dance floor, the contact wasn’t intrusive or unpleasant. If someone smiled at her, she smiled back, and most of the time it felt okay, like something her face was meant to do.

She took a break after a half hour and headed for the refreshment table, where she poured herself a plastic cup of chardonnay and downed it in two big gulps. The wine was lukewarm, a bit too sweet, but she thought it might be okay with ice and a little seltzer.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Durst?”

Nora turned toward the voice, which was soft and eerily familiar. For a long, blank moment, it felt like she’d lost the powers of thought and speech.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Kylie said. She’d cut her hair boyishly short, and it looked cute on her, a nice contrast to all that hipster ink on her arm, which Doug had apparently found so arousing. I luv ur tats, he’d told her in one of the text messages Reverend Jamison had published in his newsletter. I asked my wife to get one but she said no:(. “Can we talk for a minute?”

Nora remained mute. The crazy thing was, she’d imagined a version of this moment so clearly that she knew it by heart. For the first couple of days after learning about Doug’s affair, she’d fantasized repeatedly, and in great detail, about barging into Little Sprouts in the middle of naptime and slapping Kylie across the face, really hard, with all the other teachers and kids looking on.

Slut, she would say matter-of-factly, as if this were Kylie’s real name. (She’d experimented with an alternate scenario in which she screamed the word like a curse, but it was too melodramatic, not nearly as satisfying.) You are a disgusting person.

And then she would slap her on the other side of her cheating face, the sound of the blow reverberating like a gunshot in the darkened playroom. There were a bunch of other things she planned to say after that, but the words weren’t really the point. The slaps were.

“I totally understand if you don’t want to,” Kylie went on. “I know this is awkward.”

Nora stared at her, remembering how good — how cathartic and even righteous — it had felt to confront her in those daydreams, as if she were an instrument of divine justice. But she understood now that it was an imaginary Kylie that she’d wanted to punish, a prettier and more confident woman than the one standing in front of her. The real Kylie looked too flustered and contrite to slap. She also seemed a lot shorter than Nora remembered, maybe because she wasn’t surrounded by a sea of toddlers.

“Mrs. Durst?” Kylie squinted worriedly at Nora. “Are you okay, Mrs. Durst?”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“I don’t know.” Kylie studied her retro suede sneakers. In her skinny jeans and tight little T-shirt — it was also black, with a white exclamation point between what Doug had called her “little cheerleader boobs”—she looked like she belonged in a basement rock club, not a middle school cafeteria. “I just don’t feel like I have the right to use your first name anymore.”

“How considerate.”

“I’m sorry.” Kylie’s face turned a more intense shade of pink. “I just didn’t expect to see you here. You never came to the mixers before.”

“I don’t get out much,” Nora explained.

Kylie ventured a tentative smile. Her face was a little fuller than it used to be, a little more ordinary. Not so young anymore, are we? Nora thought.

“You’re a really good dancer,” Kylie told her. “It looked like you were having fun out there.”

“I’m all about the fun,” Nora said. She could sense people watching them from a distance, homing in on the drama. “How about you? Enjoying yourself?”

“I just got here.”

“Lots of older guys,” Nora pointed out. “Maybe even some married ones.”

Kylie nodded, as if she appreciated the dig.

“I deserve that,” she said. “And I just want you to know how sorry I am for what happened. Believe me, you can’t even imagine how terrible I’ve felt…”

She kept talking, but all Nora could think about was the silver piercing in the middle of her tongue, the dull metallic pearl she could occasionally glimpse when Kylie opened her mouth a little wider than usual. This was another of Doug’s favorite things, the subject of an e-mail rhapsody that Nora been unable to expunge from her memory:

Your BJs are amazing!!! Four fucking stars! Best I ever had. I love the way u go down on me so slow and sexy and lick me with your magic tongue and I love how much u love it too. What was it u said — better than an ice cream cone? I gotta stop now — I’m gonna cum just thinking about your hot little mouth. Love, kisses, and ice cream,

D.

Best I ever had. That was the line that had killed her, the one that had seemed like more of a betrayal than the actual sex. During the twelve years she and Doug had been together, she’d given him a lot of blowjobs, and he’d seemed happy enough about them at the time. Maybe even a little too happy, she’d come to think, and a little too entitled. She’d complained on a couple of occasions about the way he used to just shove her head down toward his crotch — no words, no tenderness, just a silent command — and he’d made a show of listening carefully, promising to be more considerate in the future. And he always was, for a little while, until he wasn’t anymore. It reached the point, near the end, where the whole act got poisoned for her, and she could no longer tell if she was doing it because she wanted to or because he expected it. Apparently Kylie was a much better sport.

“I wanted to call you,” she was saying, “but then I just, I don’t know, after everything that happened—”

She stopped in midstream, her eyes widening as she spotted Karen moving toward them with belligerent urgency, big sister to the rescue. She stepped protectively in front of Nora, getting right in Kylie’s face.

“What is wrong with you?” she demanded, her voice stoked with indignation. “Are you crazy?”

“It’s okay,” Nora muttered, laying a restraining hand on her sister’s arm.

“No, it’s not okay,” Karen said, never taking her eyes off Kylie. “I’m just amazed that you have the nerve to show your face around here. After what you did…”

Kylie leaned to one side, trying to reestablish eye contact with Nora.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I better go.”

“Good idea,” Karen told her. “You never should have come here in the first place.”

Nora stood beside her sister and watched, along with just about everybody else at the dance, as Kylie turned and made the long walk of shame across the cafeteria to the exit doors. She kept her shoulders back and her chin up the whole way there, compensating with good posture for the fact that she was no longer welcome.

THE RULES didn’t require a couple to have sex once they got behind closed doors, but they did require both players to strip to their underwear. Jill and Max knew the drill and began undressing as soon as they entered Dmitri’s little sister’s pink-walled bedroom.

“You again,” he said, flopping onto the bed in a pair of tartan-plaid boxers that Jill had seen a couple of times before.

“Yup.” Jill was pretty sure he was equally familiar with her black panties and beige bra. “It’s Groundhog Day.”

“Oh, well.” He plucked a bit of fluff from his navel and dropped it on the floor. “Could be worse, right?”

“Definitely.” She climbed in beside him, using her hip to shove him close to the wall. “It could totally be worse.”

She wasn’t just being nice. Max was a sweet, smart guy, and she was always relieved to find herself alone with him. He was easy to talk to, and they’d figured out a long time ago that they didn’t click as sexual partners, so there was no pressure on that front. It was more complicated with Dmitri, who was better-looking than Max and more interested in sex, but who also made it clear in all sorts of ways that he would have preferred to be with Aimee or Zoe. Sometimes they hooked up, but she was always a little sad afterward. The real disaster was getting stuck with Jason, but that almost never happened. She didn’t know how Jeannie could stand it. Maybe they just surfed girl-on-girl porn together.

Max poked her arm. “You cold?”

“A little.”

He unfurled the duvet at the foot of the bed and spread it over them.

“Better, huh?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

She patted him on the thigh, then rolled onto her side to turn off the lamp, because they both liked lying in the dark. Sometimes it felt like they were an old married couple, the way her parents used to be. She remembered going into their room to say good night, the two of them looking so cozy and contented in their pajamas, reading with their glasses on. These days, her father seemed a little lost up there, the bed off balance, like it was about to tip over. She figured that was why he slept on the couch so much.

“You have Mr. Coleman for Biology?” Max asked.

“No, I had Ms. Gupta.”

“Coleman was really good. I don’t think they should’ve fired him.”

“He said some pretty mean things.”

“I know. I’m not defending what he said.”

A few weeks earlier, Mr. Coleman had told one of his classes that the Sudden Departure was a natural phenomenon, a kind of global autoimmune reaction, a way for the earth to fight off the raging infection of humanity. It’s us, he’d said. We’re the problem. We’re making the planet sick. A couple of kids had been upset by this — one of them had lost his mother on October 14th — and some parents lodged an official complaint. Just last week the school board announced that Mr. Coleman had agreed to take an early retirement.

“I don’t know,” Max said. “I really don’t think what he said was so crazy.”

“It was harsh,” Jill reminded him. “He said the people who got taken were Rejects. The families didn’t like it.”

“A lot of people say it the other way,” Max pointed out. “They say the rest of us are the Rejects.”

“That sucks, too.”

They were quiet for a while. Jill felt pleasantly drowsy — not sleepy, just relaxed. It felt good to be lying there in the dark, under the covers, a warm body beside her.

“Jill?” Max whispered.

“Mmm?”

“You mind if I jerk off?”

“No,” she told him. “Go right ahead.”

KYLIE WAS all the way down by the main office by the time Nora caught up with her. The hallway was empty, the fluorescent lights oppressively bright; Kylie’s face was wet with tears. Embarrassed, Nora diverted her gaze to the bewildering stain on her arm, a multicolored explosion of vines, leaves, bubbles, and flowers that must have hurt like hell going on.

“Don’t you have a coat?”

Kylie sniffled and wiped her eyes. “It’s in the car.”

“Can I ask you something?” Nora’s voice was oddly calm, despite her inner agitation. “Was he gonna leave me?”

Kylie shook her head. “At the beginning I thought he might, but it was just wishful thinking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. After the first few times, we stopped talking about it. It just kinda dropped off the agenda.”

“You were okay with that?”

“Not really.” Kylie tried to smile, but she didn’t look any happier. “I just wasn’t thinking straight. I mean, I know better than to get involved with a married guy. But I did it anyway. What’s that about?”

Nora assumed the question was rhetorical. In any case, Kylie would have to work it out on her own.

“I’m curious,” she said. “How did it start?”

“It just kinda happened.” Kylie shrugged, as if the affair remained a mystery to her. “I mean, we flirted a little in the mornings, you know, when he dropped Erin off. I’d compliment his tie, and he’d tease me about looking tired, ask me what I’d been up to the night before. But lots of the dads—”

“When did it turn…?”

Kylie hesitated. “You sure you want to hear this?”

Nora could hear music wafting out of the cafeteria—“Burning Down the House,” a song she’d always liked — but it sounded watery and remote, like it was emanating from the past, rather than from a room down the hall. She nodded for Kylie to go ahead.

“Okay.” Kylie looked unhappy, like she knew she was making a mistake. “It was the holiday party. You took the kids home, but Doug stuck around to help with the cleanup. We ended up going out for a drink afterward. We just kinda hit it off.”

Nora could remember the party — Erin hadn’t napped that day and spent most of the evening in tears — but she couldn’t remember Doug even being there, let alone what time he’d come home, or how he’d acted when he did. All that was gone, irretrievable.

“You kept it up for a long time. Almost a year.”

Kylie frowned, as if something was wrong with Nora’s math. “It didn’t feel like that. We hardly ever saw each other. He’d drop by once a week for an hour or two, if I was lucky, and then he’d leave. And I couldn’t complain, right? That was what I’d signed up for.”

“But you must’ve talked about the future. What was gonna happen. I mean, you couldn’t just go on indefinitely.”

“I tried, believe me. But he had no patience for relationship talk. He was always like, Not tonight, Kylie. I can’t deal with this right now.”

Nora couldn’t help laughing. “Sounds like Doug.”

“He was such a guy.” Kylie shook her head, smiling fondly at the memory. But then her expression clouded over. “I think I just made him feel like he was cool again, you know? Mr. Dull Corporate Family Man, with a girlfriend like me. Like he was a secret agent.”

Nora grunted, struck by the plausibility of this theory. Doug had been a bit of a hipster when she’d met him in college — he wrote music reviews for the school paper, cultivated scruffy facial hair, and played ultimate Frisbee — but he’d discarded that version of himself the day he started business school. It happened so suddenly and irrevocably that Nora had spent the whole first semester trying to figure out where the guy she’d been sleeping with had gone. Hey, he told her, if you’re gonna sell out, at least have the guts to admit it. But maybe he missed his old self more than he’d let on.

“He loved my crappy apartment,” Kylie went on. “I have this studio over on Rankin, behind the hospital? Kind of a dump, but I just got tired of psycho roommates, you know? Anyway, it’s basically one big room, with a foldout futon and a little table with two chairs that I found in the garbage. Totally cluttered. Doug thought it was hilarious. He thought my car was funny, too. It’s like twelve years old.”

“He could be a little snobby about stuff like that.”

“He wasn’t mean about it. More just amazed that I could live that way. Like I had a choice, right? I mean, your house is so beautiful, he must have thought that everybody…” Her voice trailed off as she belatedly recognized her mistake.

“You were in my house?”

“Just once,” Kylie assured her. “During the spring vacation? You took your kids to your parents’ and Doug stayed home to work?”

“Oh, God.” That trip had been a minor disaster. She and the kids had gotten stuck in a brutal traffic jam on the Garden State Parkway, and she’d had to pull over so Jeremy could take an emergency dump on the shoulder of the highway. She’d just stood there holding his hand, staring up at the sky while he did his business, that sluggish river of cars crawling past, moving more slowly than a person could walk. When Doug caught up with them on the weekend, he’d seemed strangely cheerful, much nicer to her parents than usual. “Did you sleep there? In our bed?”

Kylie looked mortified. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s all right.” Nora gave a little shrug, as if nothing could hurt her anymore. Some days she actually felt like that. “I don’t even know why I’m asking you all these questions. It’s not like it matters anymore.”

“Of course it matters.”

“Not really. I mean, he left me anyway. He left both of us.”

“Not on purpose,” Kylie said. She seemed pleased to be included.

They both turned at the same time, startled by the rapid clop of footsteps in the otherwise quiet hallway. Nora knew it was Karen even before she burst into view, rounding the corner like she was late for class.

“I’m fine,” Nora said, holding up her hand like a traffic cop.

Karen stopped. Her gaze shifted warily from Nora to Kylie and back to Nora.

“You sure?”

“We’re just talking.”

“Forget about her,” Karen said. “Come back to the dance.”

“Just give me a minute, okay?”

Karen raised both hands in a gesture of saintly surrender. Then she gave a little suit-yourself shrug and headed back toward the cafeteria, her heels tapping out a reproachful rhythm. Kylie waited for the sound to die out.

“Is there anything else you want to know? It’s kind of a relief to tell you about it.”

Nora knew what she meant. As distressing as it was to learn the details of Doug’s affair, it also felt therapeutic, as if a missing chunk of the past were being returned to her.

“Just one more thing. Did he ever talk about me?”

Kylie rolled her eyes. “Only all the time.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He always said he loved you.”

“You’re kidding.” Nora couldn’t hide her skepticism. “He hardly ever said that to me. Not even when I said it first.”

“It was like a ritual. Right after we had sex, he’d get all serious and say, This isn’t about me not loving Nora.” She uttered these words in a deep, manly voice, not at all like Doug’s. “Sometimes I said it along with him. This isn’t about me not loving Nora.”

“Wow. You must’ve hated me.”

“I didn’t hate you,” Kylie said. “I was just jealous.”

“Jealous?” Nora tried to laugh, but the sound died in her throat. It had been a long time since she’d thought of herself as someone other people could be jealous of. “Why?”

“You had everything, you know? The husband, the house, those beautiful kids. All your friends and your nice clothes, the yoga and the vacations. And I couldn’t even make him forget you when he was in my bed.”

Nora closed her eyes. Doug had been foggy in her mind for a long time, but all at once he was clear again. She could see him lying beside Kylie, naked and smug after fucking her, earnestly reminding her of his family commitments, his enduring love for his wife, letting her know that she could only have so much, and nothing more.

“He didn’t care about me,” Nora explained. “He just couldn’t stand to see you happy.”

JUDGING FROM the careless way she was slumped against the locker, Kevin thought at first that Nora Durst might be asleep, or possibly drunk. As he got closer, though, he saw that her eyes were open and reasonably alert. She even managed a wan smile when he asked if she was okay.

“Fine,” she told him. “I’m just taking a little break.”

“Me, too,” he said, because that seemed more diplomatic than the truth, which was that he’d come to check on her after a couple of different people had reported seeing her alone in the hall, looking pretty distraught. “It’s kinda loud in there. You can barely hear yourself think.”

She nodded the way you do when you’re not actually listening to the other person and are just waiting for them to go away. Kevin didn’t want to impose on her, but he also had a feeling that she could use a little company.

“It’s great that you came,” he said. “It looked like you were having a good time. You know, earlier.”

“I was.” Nora had to tilt her head at what looked like an uncomfortable angle to meet his eyes. “Earlier.”

It was awkward looming over her like that, especially since it afforded him what felt like an unfair glimpse of her cleavage. Without asking, he lowered himself onto the floor beside her and stuck out his hand.

“I’m Kevin.”

“The Mayor,” she said.

“That’s right. We met at the parade.”

He was about to withdraw his hand when she reached up and shook it, sparing him the embarrassment. She had bony fingers and a surprisingly firm grip.

“I remember.”

“You gave a nice speech.”

Nora turned her head to get a better look at him, as if to judge his sincerity. She was wearing makeup, so the bruised-looking skin below her eyes was less noticeable than usual.

“Don’t remind me,” she said. “I’m trying to forget about that.”

Kevin nodded. He wanted to say something sympathetic about the article in Matt Jamison’s newsletter — it was an incredibly low blow, even for the bottom-feeder Matt had become — but he figured she was trying to forget about that, too.

“I wish I’d kept my mouth shut,” she muttered. “I feel like such an idiot.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Nothing’s my fault. But I still feel like shit.”

Kevin wasn’t sure what to say to that. Without thinking, he stretched out his legs so they were parallel to hers on the floor, his dark jeans next to her bare skin. The symmetry reminded him of an article he’d read about body language, how we unconsciously mirror the postures of people we’re attracted to.

“So, how do you like the DJ?” he asked.

“Good.” She sounded like she meant it. “A little old-school, but pretty good.”

“He’s new. The last guy talked too much. He had a microphone and he used to yell at people to get on the dance floor, and not in a nice way. He’d be like, What’s the matter, Mapleton? It’s a party, not a funeral! Sometimes it got kinda personal. Yo, Tweed Jacket? Are you even breathing? We got a lot of complaints.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “You were Tweed Jacket?”

“No, no.” Kevin smiled. “That was just an example.”

“You sure?” she said. “’Cause I didn’t see you out on the dance floor.”

“I wanted to. I just got sidetracked.”

“By what?”

“It’s like a council meeting in there. Every time I turn around, somebody’s yelling at me about potholes or the planning commission or nobody collected their yard waste. I can’t really loosen up, not the way I used to.”

She leaned forward and gathered her knees to her chest. There was something girlish in the posture, a touching counterpoint to her face, which seemed older than the rest of her. It startled him when she smiled, like someone had turned on a light beneath her skin.

“Yo, Tweed Jacket,” she said.

“Just for the record, I don’t even own a tweed jacket.”

“You should get one,” she told him. “With patches on the sleeves. I bet it’d look good on you.”

JILL LAY awake in the darkness for a long time before getting up and putting her clothes on. She planted a soft kiss on Max’s forehead, but he didn’t stir. He’d fallen asleep right after jerking off and looked like he was out for the count. Next time she’d have to ask him to keep the light on while he did it, so she could watch his face. That was the best part of the whole thing as far as she was concerned, the way a guy’s face contorted so violently and then relaxed, as if some terrible mystery had just been solved.

She headed downstairs, surprised to find the living room empty, eerie and unfamiliar-looking in the light of the muted TV. That stupid “Miracle Spotters” infomercial was on again, the one that showed a family of four — Mom, Dad, their son and daughter — walking through the woods with military-style night-vision goggles strapped over their eyes. On cue, they all stopped and looked up, pointing in amazement at something in the sky. She knew the narration by heart: Buy two Miracle Spotters at our everyday low price, and get two more ABSOLUTELY FREE! That’s right, buy two and get another pair free! As an added bonus, we’ll throw in a set of four Home Safe Family Communication Devices for NO CHARGE WHATSOEVER! That’s a sixty-dollar value! On-screen, the little boy cowered in the forest, speaking worriedly into his Family Communication Device, which looked to Jill like a garden-variety walkie-talkie. His face broke into a wide grin as his parents and sister emerged from the trees, clutching their own devices, and rushed to embrace him. Order now! You’ll thank God you did! Jill would’ve died before she admitted it, but the cheesy commercial always got her choked up, the joy of the reunited family, all that sentimental crap.

Not that it was her job, but she took a few minutes to tidy up while she waited for Aimee. She knew how depressing it could be to wake up in a messy house, how it could make you feel like the new day was already old. Of course, Dmitri’s house was party central — his parents and two little sisters had been “away” for as long as Jill had known him, and no one expected them back anytime soon — so maybe he didn’t mind so much. Maybe chaos was the normal state for him, order the puzzling exception.

She carried a bunch of empty beer bottles into the kitchen and rinsed them under the faucet. Then she wrapped up the cold pizza, put it in the fridge, and crammed the box into the trash can. She’d just finished loading the dishwasher when Aimee came in, smiling sheepishly, holding one arm straight out in front of her. A pair of panties was dangling from her hand, pinched between her thumb and forefinger like a piece of suspicious roadside trash.

“I am such a slut,” she said.

Jill stared at the panties. They were light blue, with a pattern of yellow daisies.

“Are those mine?”

Aimee opened the cabinet under the sink and shoved the underwear deep into the trash can.

“Believe me,” she said. “You don’t want them back.”

*

AS MUCH as he enjoyed it, Kevin had never been much of a dancer. It was the football, he thought — he was too tense in the hips and shoulders, a little too rooted to the ground, as if he expected dancers from an opposing team to come crashing into him. As a result, he tended to get locked into simple repetitive motions that made him feel like he was impersonating a cheap battery-operated toy.

Nora made him even more conscious of his shortcomings in this department than usual. She moved with a relaxed grace, apparently unaware of any distinction between her body and the music. Luckily, she didn’t seem the least bit put off by Kevin’s incompetence. Most of the time, she didn’t even seem to know he was there. She kept her head down, her face partially concealed by a swaying curtain of dark, sleek hair, so fine it looked almost liquid. On those rare occasions when their eyes met, she gave him a sweet, startled smile, as if she’d forgotten all about him.

The DJ played “Love Shack” and “Brick House” and “Sex Machine,” and Nora knew most of the words. She shimmied and spun and kicked off her shoes, dancing barefoot on the hardwood floor. The exuberance she displayed was especially impressive because she must have known how closely she was being watched. Kevin could feel it himself, as if he’d accidentally wandered into the beam of a harsh spotlight. The scrutiny wasn’t exactly rude, he thought — there was something furtive and helpless about it — but it was relentless, and he grew increasingly self-conscious in its glare. He glanced around, smiling sheepishly, apologizing to the room for his clumsiness.

They danced for seven songs straight, but when Kevin asked if Nora wanted a break — he certainly could have used one himself — she shook her head. Her face was gleaming with sweat, her eyes bright.

“Let’s keep going.”

He was exhausted after the one-two punch of “I Will Survive” and “Turn the Beat Around.” Luckily, the song after that was “Surfer Girl,” the first slow number since they’d started. There was a moment of awkwardness during the opening arpeggio, but she answered his questioning glance by stepping forward and draping her arms around his neck. He completed the embrace, placing one hand on her shoulder and the other on the small of her back. She dropped her head on his shoulder, as if he were her prom date.

He took a little shuffle step forward and one to the side, breathing in the mingled scents of her sweat and shampoo. She followed his lead, her body pressing into his as they moved. He could feel the humid heat of her skin rising through the thin fabric of her dress. Nora murmured something, but her words got lost in his collar.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t hear you.”

She lifted her head. Her voice was soft and dreamy.

“There’s a pothole on my street,” she told him. “When are you gonna fix it?”