The Leftovers

nonetheless.
    He was almost finished when Jill came in through the back door, pausing in the mudroom to drop her heavy backpack on the floor. She must’ve been in the library, he thought. That was what she’d been doing lately, making sure she didn’t get home from school until Aimee had left for work. They had it down to a science, at least on the weekdays, timing their arrivals and departures so that they never overlapped in the house unless one of them was sleeping, though they both insisted that they were getting along just fine.
    He smiled sheepishly when she entered the kitchen, expecting her to tease him about his multimedia meal, but she didn’t even notice. She was too busy squinting at her phone, looking surprised and impressed at the same time.
    “Hey,” she said. “You hear about Holy Wayne?”
    “What’s going on?”
    “He pled guilty.”
    “Which charges?”
    “Bunch of them,” she said. “Looks like he’s going away for a long time.”
    Kevin woke up his laptop and checked the news. The story was right there at the top. HOLY WAYNE FESSES UP: EXTRAORDINARY MEA CULPA FROM DISGRACED CULT LEADER. He clicked the link and started to read:
Surprise deal … prosecutors recommend twenty-year sentence … eligible for parole in twelve … “After my boy disappeared, I lost my bearings … All I wanted to do was help people who were in pain, but the power went to my head … I took advantage of so many vulnerable kids … betrayed my wife and the memory of my son, not to mention the trust of the young people who looked to me for healing and spiritual guidance … Especially the girls … They weren’t my wives, they were my victims … I wanted to be a holy man, but I turned into a monster.”
    Kevin tried to concentrate on the words, but his eyes kept straying to the picture that accompanied the story, the all-too-familiar mug shot of a sullen, unshaven man in a pajama top. He was surprised to realize that he felt no satisfaction, no vengeful pleasure at the thought of Holy Wayne rotting in prison. All he felt was a dull throb of sympathy, an unwelcome sense of kinship with the man who’d broken his son’s heart.
    He loved you, Kevin thought, staring at the mug shot as if he expected it to reply. And you failed him, too.
     

SO MUCH TO LET GO OF
    BEFORE SHE STARTED HUNTING IN earnest for a new name, Nora changed the color of her hair. That was the proper order, she thought, the only sequence that made any sense. Because how could you know who you were until you saw what you looked like? She’d never understood those parents who had their baby’s name picked out months or even years before it was born, as if they were putting a label on an abstract idea rather than a flesh-and-blood person. It seemed so presumptuous, so dismissive of the actual child.
    She would have preferred to do the dye job at home, in secret, but she could tell it would be too elaborate and risky an operation to handle on her own. Her hair was very dark brown, and every website she consulted warned her to think twice about trying to go blond without professional assistance. It was a complicated, time-consuming process that required harsh chemicals and often resulted in what the experts liked to call “unfortunate outcomes.” The comments that followed the articles were full of second thoughts from rueful brunettes who wished they’d been a little more accepting of their natural coloration. I used to have pretty brown hair, one woman wrote. But I bought into the propaganda and bleached it blond. The color came out fine, but now my hair’s so dull and lifeless my boyfriend says it feels like plastic grass growing out of my scalp!
    Nora read these testimonies with some trepidation, but not enough to change her mind. She wasn’t dyeing her hair for cosmetic purposes, or because she wanted to have more fun. What she wanted was a clean break with the past, a wholesale change of appearance, and the quickest, surest way to do that was to become an artificial blonde. If her pretty brown hair turned into plastic grass in the process, that was collateral damage she could live with.
    In her whole life, she’d never once colored her hair, or added any highlights, or even touched up the smattering of gray that had appeared over the past few years, despite the repeated urging of her stylist, a stern and judgmental Bulgarian named Grigori. Let me get rid of that, he told her at every appointment, in his ominous Slavic