The Leftovers. Tom Perrotta

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СКАЧАТЬ we’d say, at least it’s not as bad as that time we all got so sick.”

      It was around this point in Nora’s speech that the Guilty Remnant finally made their appearance, emerging en masse from the small patch of woods flanking the west side of the park. There were maybe twenty of them, dressed in white, moving slowly in the direction of the gathering. At first they seemed like a disorganized mob, but as they walked they began to form a horizontal line, a configuration that reminded Kevin of a search party. Each person was carrying a piece of posterboard emblazoned with a single black letter, and when they got to within shouting distance of the stage, they stopped and raised their squares overhead. Together, the jagged row of letters spelled the words STOP WASTING YOUR BREATH.

      An angry murmur arose from the crowd, which didn’t appreciate the interruption or the sentiment. Nearly the entire police force was present at the ceremony, and after a moment of uncertainty, several officers began moving toward the interlopers. Chief Rogers was onstage, and just as Kevin rose to consult him about the wisdom of provoking a confrontation, Nora addressed the officers.

      “Please,” she said. “Leave them alone. They’re not hurting anyone.”

      The cops hesitated, then checked their advance after receiving a signal from the Chief. From where he sat, Kevin had a clear view of the protesters, so he knew by then that his wife was among them. Kevin hadn’t seen Laurie for a couple of months, and he was struck by how much weight she’d lost, as if she’d disappeared into a fitness center instead of a Rapture cult. Her hair was grayer than he’d ever seen it—the G.R. wasn’t big on personal grooming—but on the whole, she looked strangely youthful. Maybe it was the cigarette in her mouth—Laurie had been a smoker in the early days of their relationship—but the woman who stood before him, the letter N raised high above her head, reminded him more of the fun-loving girl he’d known in college than the heavyhearted, thick-waisted woman who’d walked out on him six months ago. Despite the circumstances, he felt an undeniable pang of desire for her, an actual and highly ironic stirring in his groin.

      “I’m not greedy,” Nora went on, picking up the thread of her speech. “I’m not asking for that perfect day at the beach. Just give me that horrible Saturday, all four of us sick and miserable, but alive, and together. Right now that sounds like heaven to me.” For the first time since she’d begun speaking, her voice cracked with emotion. “God bless us, the ones who are here and the ones who aren’t. We’ve all been through so much.”

      Kevin attempted to make eye contact with Laurie throughout the sustained, somewhat defiant applause that followed, but she refused even to glance in his direction. He tried to convince himself that she was doing this against her will—she was, after all, flanked by two large bearded men, one of whom looked a little like Neil Felton, the guy who used to own the gourmet pizza place in the town center. It would have been comforting to think that she’d been instructed by her superiors not to fall into temptation by communicating, even silently, with her husband, but he knew in his heart that this wasn’t the case. She could’ve looked at him if she’d wanted to, could’ve at least acknowledged the existence of the man she’d promised to spend her life with. She just didn’t want to.

      Thinking about it afterward, he wondered why he hadn’t climbed down from the stage, walked over there, and said, Hey, it’s been a while. You look good. I miss you. There was nothing stopping him. And yet he just sat there, doing absolutely nothing, until the people in white lowered their letters, turned around, and drifted back into the woods.

      A WHOLE CLASS OF JILLS

      JILL GARVEY KNEW HOW EASY it was to romanticize the missing, to pretend that they were better than they really were, somehow superior to the losers who’d been left behind. She’d seen this up close in the weeks after October 14th, when all sorts of people—adults, mostly, but some kids, too—said all kinds of crazy stuff to her about Jen Sussman, who was really nobody special, just a regular person, maybe a little prettier than most girls their age, but definitely not an angel who was too good for this world.

      God wanted her company, they’d say. He missed her blue eyes and beautiful smile.

      They meant well, Jill understood that. Because she was a so-called Eyewitness, the only other person in the room when Jen departed, people often treated her with creepy tenderness—it was as if she were a grieving relative, as if she and Jen had become sisters after the fact—and an odd sort of respect. No one listened when she tried to explain that she hadn’t actually witnessed anything and was really just as clueless as they were. She’d been watching YouTube at the crucial moment, this sad but hilarious video of a little kid punching himself in the head and pretending like it didn’t hurt. She must have watched it three or four times in a row, and when she finally looked up, Jen was gone. A long time passed before Jill realized she wasn’t in the bathroom.

      You poor thing, they’d insist. This must be so hard on you, losing your best friend like that.

      That was the other thing nobody wanted to hear, which was that she and Jen weren’t best friends anymore, if they ever had been, which she doubted, even though they’d used the phrase for years without giving it a second thought: my best friend, Jen; my best friend, Jill. It was their mothers who were best friends, not them. The girls just tagged along because they had no choice (in that sense they really were like sisters). They carpooled to school, slept at each other’s houses, went on combined family vacations, and spent countless hours in front of the TV and computer screens, killing time while their mothers drank tea or wine at the kitchen table.

      Their makeshift alliance was surprisingly durable, lasting all the way from pre-K to the middle of the eighth grade, when Jen underwent a sudden and mysterious transfiguration. One day she had a new body—at least that’s the way it seemed to Jill—the next day new clothes, and the day after that new friends, a clique of pretty and popular girls led by Hillary Beardon, whom Jen had previously claimed to despise. When Jill asked her why she’d want to hang out with people she herself had accused of being shallow and obnoxious, Jen just smiled and said they were actually pretty nice when you got to know them.

      She wasn’t mean about it. She never lied to Jill, never mocked her behind her back. It was like she just drifted slowly away, into a different, more exclusive orbit. She made a token effort to include Jill in her new life, inviting her (most likely on instructions from her mother) on a day trip to Julia Horowitz’s beach house, but all that really did was make the gulf between them more obvious than it had been before. Jill felt like a foreigner the whole afternoon, a pale and mousy interloper in her hopeless one-piece bathing suit, watching in silent bewilderment as the pretty girls admired one another’s bikinis, compared spray-on tans, and texted boys on candy-colored phones. The thing that amazed her most was how comfortable Jen looked in that strange context, how seamlessly she’d merged with the others.

      “I know it’s hard,” her mother told her. “But she’s branching out and maybe you should, too.”

      That summer—the last one before the disaster—felt like it would never end. Jill was too old for camp, too young to work, and too shy to pick up the phone and call anyone. She spent way too much time on Facebook, studying pictures of Jen and her new friends, wondering if they were all as happy as they looked. They’d taken to calling themselves the Classy Bitches, and almost every photo had that nickname in the heading: Classy Bitches Chillin’; Classy Bitches Slumber Party; Hey CB what ru drinking? She kept a close eye on Jen’s status, tracking the ups and downs of her budding romance with Sam Pardo, one of the cutest guys in their class.

      Jen is holding hands with Sam and watching a movie.

      Jen is THE BEST KISS EVER!!!

      Jen is the longest two weeks of my life.

      Jen СКАЧАТЬ