The Leftovers

“There’s no rush.”
    She stood in the doorway and watched her former best friend in the world roll the suitcases out to a blue Mazda waiting by the curb. Aimee opened the back hatch, stowed the bags, and then turned to wave goodbye. Jill felt an emptiness open inside of her as she lifted her arm, a sense that something vital was being subtracted from her life. It was always like that when somebody you cared about went away, even when you knew it was inevitable, and it probably wasn’t your fault.
    *   *   *
    UNBELIEVABLE, TOM thought as he drove down Washington Boulevard for the first time in more than two years. It looks exactly the same .
    He wasn’t sure why this bothered him. Maybe just because he’d changed so much since the last time he’d been home, he figured that Mapleton should have changed, too. But everything was right where it was supposed to be—the Safeway, Big Mike’s Discount Shoes, Taco Bell, Walgreens, that ugly green tower looming over the Burger King, bristling with cell phone antennae and satellite dishes. And then that other landscape, when he turned off the main drag onto the quiet streets where people actually lived, the suburban dreamworld of perfect lawns and groomed shrubbery, tipped-over tricycles and little insecticide flags, their yellow banners hanging limp in the evening doldrums.
    “We’re almost there,” he told the baby.
    It was just the two of them now, and she’d been sleeping the whole way. They’d waited around the rest area for a half hour, in case Christine decided to turn up, but that was just a formality. He knew she was gone, had known it the moment he returned from the bathroom and found the baby girl alone in the car, buckled into her little seat, gazing up at him with glassy, reproachful eyes. And, even worse, Tom knew it was his own fault: He’d spooked Christine, shoving the child into her arms like that, when she clearly wasn’t ready.
    He searched the car, but there was no note, no apology, not a word of thanks or explanation, not even a simple goodbye to the loyal friend who’d supported and protected her when no one else would, her cross-country traveling companion and almost-boyfriend, surrogate father to her child. He scoured the parking lot, too, but found no trace of her, or of the van full of Barefoot People headed for the Poconos.
    Once the initial shock subsided, he tried to convince himself that it was all for the best, that his life would be easier without her. She was just dead weight in the car, one more burden he had to carry from place to place, every bit as selfish and demanding as the infant she’d abandoned, and a lot harder to satisfy. He’d been kidding himself, thinking she was going to wake up one morning and suddenly realize that she was better off with him than she would’ve been with Mr. Gilchrest.
    You missed out, he thought. I was the one who loved you.
    But that was the problem, the one his mind kept returning to as he steered the BMW toward the place that used to be home: He loved her and she was gone. It hurt to think of her rolling down the highway in that van full of Barefoot kids, all of them talking about the big party, all the crazy fun they would have. Christine probably wasn’t even listening, just sitting there thinking how good it was to be free, away from the baby and from Tom, too, the two people who couldn’t help reminding her of everything that had gone wrong, and what a fool she’d been.
    It hurt him even more to think of her emerging from the fog a week or maybe a month down the road, discovering that the worst was over, that she could laugh and dance again, maybe even hook up with some lucky stoned idiot. And where would Tom be? Back home in Mapleton with his father and sister, raising a child who wasn’t even his, still pining for a girl who’d left him at a rest stop in Connecticut? Was that where his long journey was going to deposit him? Right back where he started, just with a bullseye on his forehead and a dirty diaper in his hand?
    The sun had set by the time he turned onto Lovell Terrace, but the sky was still a deep blue above his family’s big white house.
    “Little baby,” he said. “What am I gonna do with you?”
    *   *   *
    DON’T HESITATE . That was guideline number one. The martyr’s exit should be swift and painless.
    “Come on,” Meg pleaded. She was leaning against a brick wall beneath an outdoor staircase at Bailey Elementary, her chest rising and