The Leftovers

pretty good.”
    “Where is he?”
    “He wouldn’t say. The cell phone he used had a Vermont area code, but it wasn’t his. I was just so relieved to hear the sound of his voice.”
    “Good for you,” she said a bit stiffly, making an effort to sound pleased and sincere.
    “Is this okay?” he asked. “We can talk about something else if you—”
    “It’s fine,” she assured him. “I’m happy for you.”
    Kevin decided not to press his luck.
    “What about you? Do anything fun this afternoon?”
    “Not really,” she said. “Got my eyebrows waxed.”
    “They look good. Nice and neat.”
    “Thanks.” She touched her forehead, tracing her fingertip over the top of her right eyebrow, which did seem a little more sharply defined than usual. “Is your son still part of that cult? That Holy Wayne thing?”
    “He says he’s done with that.” Kevin looked down at the fat candle in its stubby glass holder, the quivering flame floating on a puddle of melted wax. He felt an urge to plunge his finger into the hot liquid, letting it harden in the air like a second skin. “Says he’s thinking about maybe coming home, going back to school.”
    “Really?”
    “That’s what he said. I hope it’s true.”
    Nora picked up her knife and fork and cut into a ravioli. It was big and pillowy, crimped along the edges.
    “Were you close?” she asked, still looking down, slicing the halves into quarters. “You and your son?”
    “I thought we were.” Kevin was surprised by the shakiness in his voice. “He was my little boy. I was always so proud of him.”
    Nora looked up with an odd expression on her face. Kevin could feel his mouth stretching, the pressure building inside his eyeballs.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, in the instant before he clapped his hand over his mouth, trying to muffle the sound of his blubbering. “Just give me a second.”
    *   *   *
    IT WAS maybe fifteen degrees out, but the night air felt clean and invigorating. Jill stood on the sidewalk and took a good long look at Dmitri’s house, her home away from home for the past six months. It was a shabby little place, a generic suburban box with a concrete stoop and a picture window to the left of the front door. In the daytime the exterior was a dirty shade of beige, but right now it was no color at all, just a dark shape against an even darker background. An odd sense of melancholy took hold of her—it was the same feeling she got walking past her old ballet school, or the soccer fields at Greenway Park—as if the world were a museum of memories, a collection of places she’d outgrown.
    Good times, she thought, but only as an experiment, just to see if she believed it. Then she turned and started for home, the street so quiet and the air so thin that her footsteps sounded like a drumbeat on the pavement, loud enough to wake the neighbors.
    It wasn’t that late, but Mapleton was a ghost town, not a pedestrian or a stray dog in sight. She turned onto Windsor Road, reminding herself to look alert and purposeful. She’d taken a self-defense course a couple of years ago, and the instructor had said that not looking like a victim was Rule Number One. Keep your head up and your eyes open. Look like you know exactly where you’re going, even when you don’t.
    At the corner of North Avenue, she paused to consider her options. It was a fifteen-minute walk from here to Lovell Terrace, but only half that if she cut across the railroad tracks. If Aimee had been there she wouldn’t have hesitated—they took the shortcut all the time—but Jill had never done it on her own. To get to the crossing, you had to walk down a desolate stretch of road, past auto repair shops, the Department of Public Works, and mysterious factories with names like Syn-Gen Systems and Standard Nipple Works, and then slip through a hole in the chain-link fence at the rear of the school bus parking lot. Once you crossed the tracks and circled around the back of Walgreens, you were in a much better area, a residential neighborhood with lots of streetlights and trees.
    She didn’t hear the car. It just whooshed up from behind, a sudden alarming presence at the edge of her vision. She let out a gasp, then whirled into an awkward karate stance as the passenger window slid down.
    “Whoa.” A familiar blissed-out face was peering at her, framed by reassuring blond dreadlocks. “You okay?”
    “I was.” Jill tried to sound exasperated as she lowered her hands.