The Leftovers

Golden Age. We just didn’t realize it.”
    Kevin wanted to object on principle—he was pretty sure most people thought of their own youth as some kind of Golden Age—but in this case she had a point.
    “What about Brianna?” he asked. “How’s she doing?”
    “Okay.” Melissa sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “Better than last year anyway. She’s got a boyfriend now.”
    “That’s good.”
    Melissa shrugged. “They met over the summer. Some kind of survivors’ network. They sit around and tell each other how sad they are.”
    *   *   *
    IN THEIR previous meeting at the Carpe Diem—the night they ended up going home together—Melissa had talked a lot about her divorce, which had been a minor local scandal. After almost twenty years of marriage, Bob had left her for a younger woman he’d met at work. Melissa was only in her early forties at the time, but it had felt to her as if her life were over, as if she’d been abandoned like some crappy old car on the side of the highway.
    Aside from alcohol, the main thing that kept her going was her hatred of the woman who’d stolen her husband. Ginny was twenty-eight, a slim, athletic woman who’d worked as Bob’s assistant. They married as soon as the divorce was final, and tried to start a family. They were apparently having trouble getting pregnant, but Melissa didn’t take much comfort in that. The very thought of Bob even wanting children with another woman was infuriating. What made it even more galling was the fact that her own kids actually liked Ginny. They were more than happy to call their father a cheating bastard, but all they would ever say about his new wife was that she was really nice . As if to prove their point, Ginny made multiple attempts to smooth things over with Melissa, writing several letters in which she apologized for the pain she’d caused, and asking for forgiveness.
    I just wanted to hate her in peace, Melissa said. And she wouldn’t even let me do that.
    Melissa’s rage was so pure that her main thought on October 14th—once she’d ascertained that her kids were safe—was a wild, unspoken hope that Ginny would be among the victims, that her problematic existence would simply be erased from the world. Bob would suffer as she had suffered; the score would be settled. It might even be possible, under those circumstances, for her to take him back, for the two of them to start over and find a way to reclaim some of what they’d lost.
    Can you imagine? she said. That’s how bitter I was.
    Everybody had thoughts like that, Kevin reminded her. It’s just that most of us won’t admit it.
    Of course it wasn’t Ginny who vanished; it was Bob, while riding the elevator in a parking garage next to his office. There were disruptions in phone and Internet service that day, and Melissa didn’t find out he was missing until around nine o’clock that night, when Ginny herself showed up to break the news. She seemed dazed and groggy, like someone had just awoken her from a long afternoon nap.
    Bobby’s gone, she kept muttering. Bobby’s gone.
    You know what I said to her?
    Melissa had closed her eyes, as if she were trying to wish away the memory.
    I said, Good, now you know how it feels.
    *   *   *
    THE YEARS had changed some things but not others. Melissa’s freckles had faded, and her hair was no longer red. Her face was fuller, her figure less defined. But her voice and eyes were exactly the same. It was like the girl he’d known had been absorbed into the body of a middle-aged woman. It was Melissa, and it wasn’t.
    “You should’ve called me,” she said, pouting sweetly as she laid her hand on his thigh. “We wasted the whole summer.”
    “I was embarrassed,” he explained. “I felt like I let you down.”
    “You didn’t let me down,” she assured him, her long fingernails tracing cryptic designs on the fabric of his jeans. She was wearing a gray silk blouse, unbuttoned to reveal the scalloped edge of a maroon bra. “It’s no big deal. It happens to everyone.”
    “Not to me,” he insisted.
    This wasn’t exactly true. He’d had similar malfunctions with Liz Yamamoto, a twenty-five-year-old grad student he’d met on the Internet, and then again with Wendy Halsey, a thirty-two-year-old marathon-running paralegal, but he’d chalked those up to performance anxiety caused by the relative youth of his partners. It was sadder with Melissa, and harder to account for.
    They’d