The Leftovers (25 page)

There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of a ten-thousand-dollar massage chair would have seemed obscene to her, a shameful form of self-indulgence. But really, when you thought about it, it wasn’t that high a price to pay for something so therapeutic, especially if you spread out the cost over ten or twenty years. In the end, a massage chair wasn’t all that different from a hot tub or a Rolex or a sports car, any of the other luxury items people bought to cheer themselves up, many of them more cheerful than Nora to begin with.

Besides, who would even know? Karen, maybe, but Karen wouldn’t care. She was always encouraging Nora to pamper herself, buy some new shoes or a piece of jewelry, take a cruise, spend a week at Canyon Ranch. Not to mention that Nora would let her sister use the chair anytime she wanted. They could make it a regular thing, a Wednesday-night massage date. And even if the neighbors did find out, what did Nora care? What were they gonna do, say mean things and hurt her feelings?

Good luck with that,
she thought.

No, the only thing holding her back was the thought of what would happen if she actually owned the chair, if she could feel this good anytime she wanted. What would happen if there were no other customers milling around, no salesman hovering nearby, no Karen to meet in five or ten minutes? What if it were just Nora in an empty house, the whole night ahead of her, and no reason to hit the off switch?

THE BALZER METHOD

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING THEY WATCHED
a PowerPoint presentation, the eighteen female residents of Blue House gathered in the chilly basement meeting room. That was how they did it for now, simultaneous showings in each house within the compound, as well as the various outposts scattered throughout town. There had been some talk within the Mapleton Chapter about the necessity of building or acquiring a structure large enough to accommodate the entire membership, but Laurie preferred it this way—more intimate and communal, less like a church. Organized religion had failed; the G.R. had nothing to gain by turning into a new one.

The lights went out and the first slide appeared on the wall, a photo of a wreath hanging on the door of a generic suburban house.

TODAY IS “CHRISTMAS.”

Laurie shot a quick sidelong glance at Meg, who still looked a bit shaky. They’d stayed up late the night before, working through Meg’s conflicted feelings about the holiday season, the way it made her miss her family and friends and question her commitment to her new life. She’d even found herself wishing that she’d waited to join the G.R., so she could have had one last Christmas with her loved ones, just for old times’ sake. Laurie told her it was natural to feel nostalgia at this time of year, that it was similar to the pain amputees felt in a phantom limb. The thing was gone, but it was still somehow a part of you, at least for a little while.

The second slide showed a shabby Christmas tree festooned with a few meager scraps of tinsel, lying by the curb on a bed of dirty snow, waiting for a garbage truck to cart it away.

“CHRISTMAS” IS MEANINGLESS.

Meg sniffled softly, like a child trying to be brave. During last night’s Unburdening, she’d told Laurie about a vision she’d had when she was four or five years old. Unable to sleep on Christmas Eve, she’d tiptoed downstairs and seen a fat bearded man standing in front of her family’s tree, checking items off a list. He wasn’t wearing a red suit—it was more like a blue bus driver’s uniform—but she still recognized him as Santa Claus. She watched him for a while, then snuck back upstairs, her body filled with an ecstatic sense of wonder and confirmation. As a teenager, she convinced herself that the whole thing had been a dream, but it had seemed real at the time, so real that she reported it to her family the next morning as a simple fact. They still jokingly referred to it that way, as though it were a documented historical event—the Night Meg Saw Santa.

In the slide that followed, a group of young carolers stood in a semicircle, their mouths open, their eyes shining with joy.

WE WON’T JOIN THE CELEBRATION.

Laurie barely remembered her own childhood Christmases. Being a parent had obscured all that; what stuck in her memory was the excitement on the faces of her own kids, their contagious holiday pleasure. That was something Meg would never get to experience. Laurie assured her that it was okay to feel anger about that, and healthy to acknowledge and express her anger, much better than feeding it with denial.

The vow of silence forbade laughter as well as speech, but a few people forgot themselves and chuckled at the next slide, a house lit up like a Vegas bordello, the front yard crowded with random yuletide statuary—a nativity scene, a herd of reindeer, an inflatable Grinch, some elves and toy soldiers and angels and a plastic snowman, plus a sour, top-hatted fellow who must have been Ebenezer Scrooge.

“CHRISTMAS” IS A DISTRACTION. WE CAN NO LONGER AFFORD TO BE DISTRACTED.

Laurie had watched a lot of PowerPoints over the past six months, and had even helped to put a few of them together. They were an essential mode of communication within the G.R., a kind of portable, preacherless sermon. She understood the structure by now, knew that they always took a turn somewhere in the middle, away from the topic at hand to the only subject that really mattered.

“CHRISTMAS” BELONGS TO THE OLD WORLD.

The caption remained constant while a series of images flashed by, each one representing the world of the past: a Walmart superstore, a man on a riding lawn mower, the White House, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, a rapper whose name Laurie didn’t know, a pizza she couldn’t bear to look at, a handsome man and an elegant woman sharing a candlelit dinner, a European cathedral, a jet fighter, a crowded beach, a mother nursing an infant.

THE OLD WORLD IS GONE. IT DISAPPEARED THREE YEARS AGO.

In G.R. PowerPoints, the Rapture was illustrated by photos from which particular individuals had been clumsily deleted. Some of the Photoshopped people were famous; others were of more local interest. One picture in this series had been taken by Laurie, a candid snapshot of Jill and Jen Sussman on an apple-picking expedition when they were ten years old. Jill was grinning and holding up a shiny red apple. The Jen-shaped space beside her was empty, a pale gray blob ringed by brilliant autumnal colors.

WE BELONG TO THE NEW WORLD.

Familiar faces filled the screen, one after the other, the entire, unsmiling membership of the Mapleton Chapter. Meg appeared near the end, along with the other Trainees, and Laurie squeezed her leg in congratulations.

WE ARE LIVING REMINDERS.

Two male Watchers stood on a train platform, staring at a well-dressed businessman who was trying to pretend they weren’t there.

WE WON’T LET THEM FORGET.

A pair of female Watchers accompanied a young mother down the street as she pushed her baby in a stroller.

WE WILL WAIT AND WATCH AND PROVE OURSELVES WORTHY.

The same two pictures reappeared, with the Watchers obliterated, conspicuous by their absence.

THIS TIME WE WON’T BE FORGOTTEN.

A clock, the second hand ticking.

IT WON’T BE LONG NOW.

A worried-looking man gazed at them from the wall. He was middle-aged, a bit puffy, not particularly handsome.

THIS IS PHIL CROWTHER. PHIL IS A MARTYR.

Phil’s face was replaced by that of a younger man, bearded, with the burning eyes of a fanatic.

JASON FALZONE IS A MARTYR, TOO.

Laurie shook her head. Poor boy. He was hardly older than her own son.

WE ARE ALL PREPARED TO BE MARTYRS.

Laurie wondered how Meg was taking this, but couldn’t read her expression. They’d talked about Jason’s murder and understood the danger they were in every time they left the compound. Nonetheless, there was something about the word
martyr
that gave her chills.

WE SMOKE TO PROCLAIM OUR FAITH.

An image of a cigarette appeared on the wall, a white and tan cylinder floating over a stark black background.

LET US SMOKE.

A woman in the front row opened a fresh pack and passed it around the room. One by one, the women of Blue House lit up and exhaled, reminding themselves that time was running out, and that they weren’t afraid.

*   *   *

THE GIRLS
slept late, leaving Kevin to fend for himself for a good part of the morning. He listened to the radio for a while, but the cheerful holiday music grated on him, a depressing reminder of busier and happier Christmases past. It was better to turn it off, to read his newspaper and drink his coffee in silence, to pretend that it was just an ordinary morning.

Evan Balzer,
he thought, the name floating up, unbidden, from the swamp of his middle-aged memory.
That’s how he did it.

Balzer was an old college friend, a quiet, watchful guy who’d lived on Kevin’s floor sophomore year. He mostly kept to himself, but spring semester he and Kevin had the same Econ lecture class; they got into the habit of studying together a couple of nights a week, and then heading out for a few beers and a plate of wings when they were finished.

Balzer was a fun guy to hang out with—he was smart, wryly funny, full of opinions—but hard to get to know on a personal level. He talked fluently about politics and movies and music, but clammed up like a P.O.W. if anyone asked about his family or his life before college. It took months before he trusted Kevin enough to share a little about his past.

Some people have interesting crappy childhoods, but Balzer’s was just plain crappy—a father who walked out when he was two, a mother who was a hopeless drunk but pretty enough that there was usually a man or two hanging around, though rarely for very long. Out of necessity, Balzer learned to take care of himself at an early age—if he didn’t cook or shop or do the laundry, then it probably wasn’t going to get done. Somehow he also managed to excel in school, getting good enough grades to earn a full scholarship at Rutgers, though he still had to bus tables at Bennigan’s to keep himself afloat.

Kevin marveled at his friend’s resilience, his ability to thrive in the face of adversity. It made him realize how lucky he’d been by comparison, growing up in a stable, reasonably happy family that had more than enough love and money to go around. He’d gone through the first two decades of his life taking it for granted that everything would always be okay, that he could only fall so far before someone would catch him and set him back on his feet. Balzer had never assumed that for a minute; he knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling, that people like him couldn’t afford a moment’s weakness, a single big mistake.

Though they remained close until graduation, Kevin never succeeded in convincing Balzer to come home with him for Thanksgiving or Christmas. It was a shame, because Balzer had broken off contact with his mother—he claimed to not even know where she was living—and never had any plans of his own for the holidays, except to spend them alone in the tiny off-campus apartment he’d rented at the beginning of junior year, hoping to save a little money by cooking his own meals.

“Don’t worry about me,” he always told Kevin. “I’ll be fine.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Nothing much. Just read, I guess. Watch TV. The usual.”

“The usual? But it’s Christmas.”

Balzer shrugged. “Not if I don’t want it to be.”

On some level, Kevin admired Balzer’s stubbornness, his refusal to accept what he saw as charity, even from a good friend. But it didn’t make him feel any better about his inability to help. He’d be home, sitting at the crowded table with his big extended family, everyone talking and laughing and chowing down, when, out of nowhere, he’d be struck by a sudden, bleak vision of Balzer alone in his cell-like apartment, eating ramen noodles with the shades pulled down.

Balzer headed off to law school right after they graduated, and he and Kevin eventually fell out of touch. Sitting in his kitchen on Christmas morning, Kevin thought it might be interesting to look him up on Facebook, find out what he’d been up to for the past twenty years. Maybe he’d be married by now, maybe a father, living the full, happy life he’d been denied in his youth, allowing himself to love and be loved in return. Maybe he’d appreciate the irony if Kevin confessed that he was now the one hiding from the holidays, employing the Balzer Method with pretty good results.

But then the girls came down and he forgot about his old friend, because all at once it really did feel like Christmas, and they had things to do—stockings to empty and presents to unwrap. Aimee thought it would be nice to have some music, so Kevin turned the radio back on. The carols seemed fine this time, corny and familiar and somehow reassuring, the way they were supposed to be.

There weren’t all that many presents under the tree—at least not like there used to be back when the kids were little and it took most of the morning to open them all—but the girls didn’t seem to mind. They took their time with each gift, studying the box and removing the paper with great deliberation, as if you got extra points for neatness. They tried on the clothing right there in the living room, modeling shirts and sweaters over their pajama tops—in Aimee’s case, a precariously thin sleeveless T-shirt—telling each other how great they looked, even making a big deal over stuff like warm socks and fuzzy slippers, having such a good time that Kevin wished he’d gotten a few more gifts for both of them, just to prolong the fun.

“Cool!” Aimee said, tugging on the woolen hat Kevin had found at Mike’s Sporting Goods, the kind with goofy-looking earflaps that snapped beneath the chin. She wore it low on her forehead, almost level with her eyebrows, but it looked good on her all the same, just like everything else. “I can use one of these.”

She got up from the couch, her arms unfolding as she approached, and gave him a thank-you hug. She did this after every gift, to the point where it had become a kind of joke, a rhythmic punctuation to the proceedings. It was a little easier for him now that her skimpy morning ensemble had been augmented by a new sweater, a scarf, the hat, and a pair of mittens.