The Leftovers

really well, because I know how much you like to make funny noises.
    The next morning, she drove to Best Buy, picked up a complete set of SpongeBob DVDs, and spent the better part of the day watching several episodes from Season One, a marathon that left her feeling cranky, hollowed out, and in desperate need of fresh air. For this very reason, she’d been careful about rationing her kids’ TV time, and understood that she needed to do the same for herself.
    Before long, she’d developed what turned out to be a surprisingly durable strategy: She allowed herself to watch SpongeBob twice a day, once in the morning and then again at night, never failing to write a brief entry about each episode in her notebook. This practice—it came to feel vaguely religious—gave structure and focus to her life, and helped her not to feel so lost all the time.
    There were a couple of hundred episodes in all, which meant that she saw each one three or four times in the course of a year. It was okay, though, at least until recently. Nora still had something to write after each rerun, some fresh memory or observation triggered by what she’d just seen, even the handful of shows that she’d grown to actively dislike.
    In the past few months, however, something fundamental had changed. She almost never laughed at SpongeBob’s antics anymore; shows that she’d found amusing in the past now struck her as desperately sad. This morning’s episode, for example, felt like some sort of allegory, a bitter commentary on her own suffering:
Today was the dance contest, the one where Squidward takes over SpongeBob’s body. To do this, he climbs inside SpongeBob’s conveniently empty head, then pulls off SpongeBob’s arms and legs so he can replace them with his own. Yes, I realize that SpongeBob’s limbs can regenerate themselves, but come on, it’s still horrible. During the competition, Squidward gets a cramp and SpongeBob’s body ends up writhing on the floor in agony. The audience thinks this is pretty cool and gives him First Prize. Quite a metaphor. The person in the most pain wins. Does that mean I get a Blue Ribbon?
    In her heart, she understood that the real problem wasn’t the show so much as the feeling that she was losing her son again, that he was no longer there in the room with her. It made sense, of course: Jeremy would be nine now, probably past the age where he would be watching SpongeBob with any real enthusiasm. Wherever he was, he was onto something else, growing up without her, leaving her more alone than she already was.
    What she needed to do was retire the DVDs—donate them to the library, put them out for garbage, whatever—before SpongeBob and everything associated with him got permanently poisoned in her mind. It would have been easier if she had something to replace him with, some new show to fill the empty space, but every time she tried to ask her old friends what their boys were watching, the women just hugged her and said, Oh, honey, in their smallest, most sorrowful voices, as if they hadn’t understood the question.
    *   *   *
    BEFORE LUNCH, Nora took a long ride on the Mapleton-to-Rosedale Bike Trail, a seventeen-mile stretch of land that used to be a railroad line. She liked riding there on weekday mornings when it was relatively uncrowded and the people using it were mostly adults, a lot of them retired, out for some joyless, life-prolonging exercise. Nora made it a point to stay far away on sunny weekend afternoons, when the path was crowded with families on bikes and Rollerblades, and the sight of a little girl with a too-big helmet, or a scowling boy pedaling furiously on a bike equipped with rickety training wheels, could leave her bent over and gasping on the grassy margin of the path, as if she’d been punched in the stomach.
    She felt strong and blissfully empty gliding through the crisp November air, enjoying the intermittent warmth of the sun as it filtered down through the overhanging trees, which were mostly stripped of their foliage. It was that trashy, post-Halloween part of the fall, yellow and orange leaves littering the ground like so many discarded candy wrappers. She’d keep riding into the cold weather for as long as she could, at least until the first big snowfall. That was the lowest time of the year, dim and claustrophobic, a funk of holidays and grim inventories. She was hoping that she could escape to the Caribbean or New Mexico for a while, anyplace bright and