The Leftovers

couldn’t do it.
    Christine hadn’t hesitated. The night they’d arrived at the Falks’, she’d disappeared into the bathroom right after dinner and taken a long, hot shower. When she emerged, her forehead was clean, her face pink and deeply relieved, as if the memory of the road were a bad dream she’d been happy to wash away. Ever since then, she’d been lounging around the house—a spectacularly renovated Victorian on Fayerweather Street—in organic cotton maternity clothes. In an attempt to repair the damage inflicted by months of exposure to the elements, the Falks had arranged for a house call from a Korean pedicurist, though they’d made Christine wear a face mask to protect herself and the baby from potentially harmful fumes. There had also been visits from a massage therapist, a dental hygienist, a nutritionist, and the nurse/midwife who would be assisting with what everyone hoped would be a home delivery.
    All these professionals were devoted Holy Wayners, and they all treated Christine like royalty, like it was a rare privilege to buff her toenails or scrape the tartar from her teeth. Terrence and Marcella were the most obsequious of all; they’d actually knelt at Christine’s feet when she entered their house, bowing until their foreheads touched the ground. Christine was delighted by all the attention, happy to resume her life as Wife Number Four, the Special One, Mr. Gilchrest’s Chosen Vessel.
    It was different for Tom. Being around all these true believers made it clearer than ever that he was no longer one of them, that there was no former self left for him to reclaim. The Holy Wayne part of his life was over, and the next phase hadn’t begun, nor did he have the slightest clue what it would be. Maybe that was why he was so reluctant to shed his disguise: Being a fake Barefoot Person was the only real identity he had left.
    But it was more than that. He’d been happy on the road, happier than he’d realized at the time. The journey had been long and occasionally harrowing—they’d gotten mugged at knifepoint in Chicago and nearly froze to death in a blizzard in western Pennsylvania—but now that it was over, he missed the excitement and the closeness he’d shared with Christine. They’d been a good team, best friends and secret agents, improvising their way across the continent, dealing creatively with whatever obstacles came their way.
    The disguises they’d chosen had worked better than they could have imagined. Everywhere they went, they met local Barefoot People and were treated like family, given food and rides and, often, a place to sleep. Christine had gotten sick in Harrisburg, and they’d ended up spending three weeks in a run-down group house near the state capitol, eating rice and beans from a communal pot, sleeping together on the kitchen floor. They hadn’t become lovers, but there’d been a couple of close calls, mornings when they’d awakened in each other’s arms and needed a few seconds to remember why that was a bad thing.
    On the road, they rarely talked about Mr. Gilchrest. As the weeks went by, he became an abstraction, an increasingly hazy figure from the past. There were days when Tom forgot all about him, when he couldn’t help thinking of Christine as his own girlfriend, and the baby as his child. He let himself imagine that the three of them were a family, that they would soon settle down and build a life together.
    It’s up to me, he told himself. I have to take care of them.
    At the Falks’, though, this fantasy died of embarrassment. Mr. Gilchrest was everywhere, impossible to ignore, let alone forget. There were pictures of him in every room, including a gigantic photograph affixed to the ceiling of the master suite, right over Christine’s bed, so his face would be the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes in the morning. Everywhere he went, Tom could feel the great man smiling at him, mocking him, reminding him who the real father was. The image he hated most was the framed poster in the basement, on the wall beside the foldout couch where he slept, an action shot of Holy Wayne on an outdoor stage, one fist raised in triumph, his face streaming with tears.
    You motherfucker, Tom thought, last thing every night and first thing every morning. You don’t deserve her.
    He knew he needed to get out of that house and away from that face. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave, to just walk out on Christine and abandon her to the