The Leftovers

about their new teachers, then turning on the computer when they ran out of things to say. Jen had a phone number scribbled on the back of her hand—Jill noticed it when she pressed the power switch, and wondered whose it was—and chipped pink polish on her nails. The screen saver on her laptop was a picture of the two of them, Jill and Jen, taken a couple of years earlier during a snowstorm. They were all bundled up, red-cheeked and grinning, both of them with braces on their teeth, pointing proudly at a snowman, a lovingly constructed fellow with a carrot nose and borrowed scarf. Even then, with Jen sitting right beside her, not yet an angel, it felt like ancient history, a relic from a lost civilization.
    *   *   *
    IT WASN’T until her mother joined the G.R. that Jill began to understand for herself how absence could warp the mind, make you exaggerate the virtues and minimize the defects of the missing individual. It wasn’t the same, of course: Her mother wasn’t gone gone, not like Jen, but it didn’t seem to matter.
    They’d had a complicated, slightly oppressive relationship—a little closer than was good for either of them—and Jill had often wished for a little distance between them, some room to maneuver on her own.
    Wait’ll I get to college, she used to think. It’ll be such a relief not to have her breathing down my neck all the time.
    But that was the natural order of things—you grew up, you moved out. What wasn’t natural was your mother walking out on you, moving across town to live in a group house with a bunch of religious nuts, cutting off all communication with her family.
    For a long time after she left, Jill found herself overwhelmed by a childlike hunger for her mother’s presence. She missed everything about the woman, even the stuff that used to drive her crazy—her off-key singing, her insistence that whole-wheat pasta tasted just as good as the regular kind, her inability to follow the storyline of even the simplest TV show ( Wait a second, is that the same guy as before, or someone else? ). Spasms of wild longing would strike her out of nowhere, leaving her dazed and weepy, prone to sullen fits of anger that inevitably got turned against her father, which was totally unfair, since he wasn’t the one who’d abandoned her. In an effort to fend off these attacks, Jill made a list of her mother’s faults and pulled it out whenever she felt herself getting sentimental:
Weird, high-pitched totally fake laugh
Crappy taste in music
Judgmental
Wouldn’t say hi if she met me on the street
Ugly sunglasses
Obsessed with Jen
Uses words like hoopla and rigamarole in conversation
Nags Dad about cholesterol
Flabby arm Jello
Loves God more than her own family
    It actually worked a little, or maybe she just got used to the situation. In any case, she eventually stopped crying herself to sleep, stopped writing long, desperate letters asking her mother to please come home, stopped blaming herself for things she couldn’t control.
    It was her decision, she learned to remind herself. No one made her go.
    *   *   *
    THESE DAYS, the only time Jill consistently missed her mother was first thing in the morning, when she was still half-asleep, unreconciled to the new day. It just didn’t feel right, coming down for breakfast and not finding her at the table in her fuzzy gray robe, no one to hug her and whisper, Hey, sleepyhead, in a voice full of amusement and commiseration. Jill had a hard time waking up, and her mother had given her the space to make a slow and grumpy transition into consciousness, without a whole lot of chitchat or unnecessary drama. If she wanted to eat, that was fine; if not, that was no problem, either.
    Her father tried to pick up the slack—she had to give him that—but they just weren’t on the same wavelength. He was more the up-and-at-’em type; no matter what time she got out of bed, he was always perky and freshly showered, looking up from the morning paper—amazingly, he still read the morning paper—with a slightly reproachful expression, as if she were late for an appointment.
    “Well, well,” he said. “Look who’s here. I was wondering when you were gonna put in an appearance.”
    “Hey,” she muttered, uncomfortably aware of herself as the object of parental scrutiny. He eyeballed her like this every morning, trying to figure out what she’d been up to the night before.
    “Bit of a hangover?” he inquired, sounding more curious