The Leftovers

soft and sleek as ever, miraculously impervious to the noxious chemicals in which it had been steeped. The big surprise wasn’t that nothing bad had happened, it was how good she looked as a blonde, far better than she had with her natural hair color.
    The stylist had been right, of course: There was something jarring about the contrast between Nora’s Mediterranean complexion and this pale Swedish hair, but it was a riveting mismatch, the kind of mistake that made you want to stare, to try to figure out why something that should have looked so tacky actually looked kind of cool. All her life she’d been pretty, but it was an unremarkable, vaguely reassuring sort of beauty, the kind of everyday good looks people barely even noticed. Now, for the first time, she struck herself as exotic, and even a bit alarming, and she liked the way it felt, as if her body and soul had come into closer alignment.
    Some selfish part of her was tempted to call Kevin and invite him over for a farewell drink—she wanted him to see her in this new incarnation, tell her how great she looked, and beg her not to leave—but the more reasonable part of her understood that this was a terrible idea. It would just be cruel, getting his hopes up one last time before crushing them forever. He was a good man, and she’d already hurt him enough.
    That was the main thing she was hoping to express in her letter—the guilt she felt for the way she’d behaved on Valentine’s Day, walking out on him without a word, and then ignoring his calls and e-mails in the weeks that followed, sitting quietly in the darkness of her living room until he got tired of ringing the bell and slipped one of his plaintive notes under the door.
    What did I do wrong? he wrote . Just tell me what it was so I can apologize.
    You didn’t do anything, she’d wanted to tell him, though she never had. It was all my fault.
    The thing was, Kevin had been her last chance. From the very beginning—the night they’d talked and danced at the mixer—she’d had a feeling that he might be able to save her, to show her how to salvage something decent and functional from the ruins of her old life. And for a little while there, she’d thought it had actually started to happen, that a chronic injury was slowly beginning to heal.
    But she was just kidding herself, mistaking a wish for a change. She’d suspected it for a while, but didn’t see it clearly until that night at Pamplemousse, when he tried to talk to her about his son, and all she’d felt was bitterness and envy so strong it was indistinguishable from hatred, a burning, gnawing emptiness in the middle of her chest.
    Fuck you, she kept thinking to herself. Fuck you and your precious son.
    And the awful thing was, he didn’t even notice. He just kept talking like she was a normal person with a functioning heart, someone who’d understand a father’s happiness and share in a friend’s joy. And she just had to sit there in agony, knowing that there was something wrong with her that could never be repaired.
    Please, she’d wanted to tell him. Stop wasting your breath.
    *   *   *
    THEY WERE sleeping together now, in the same king-size bed that had previously been used by Gus and Julian. It was a little creepy at first, but they’d gotten past the awkwardness. The bed was huge and comfy—it had some kind of high-tech Scandinavian mattress that remembered the shape of your body—and the window on Laurie’s side opened on to the backyard, which was teeming with spring vitality, the scent of lilacs wafting in on the morning breeze.
    They hadn’t become lovers—not the way the guys had been, anyway—but they weren’t just friends anymore, either. A powerful sense of intimacy had grown between them in the past few weeks, a bond of complete trust that went beyond anything Laurie had shared with her husband. They were partners now, connected for all eternity.
    For the moment, nothing was required of them. Their new housemates would arrive soon, and their little idyll would be over, but for now it felt like a sweet vacation, cuddling in bed until late morning, drinking tea and talking in quiet voices. Sometimes they cried, but not as often as they laughed. On pleasant afternoons, they walked together in the park.
    They didn’t talk too much about what was coming. There wasn’t much to say, really; they had a job to do, and they would do it, just like Gus and Julian had, and the pair before them. Talking about