The Leftovers

got, but she still harbored a soft spot for the man he’d been, the one who’d helped her through the blackest hours of her life. Of all the would-be spiritual advisors who’d inflicted themselves on her after October 14th, Matt Jamison was the only one she’d been able to tolerate for more than five minutes at a time.
    She’d resented him at first, the way she’d resented all the others. Nora wasn’t religious and couldn’t understand why every priest, minister, and New Age quack within a fifty-mile radius of Mapleton thought they had a right to intrude upon her misery, and assumed she would find it comforting to hear that what had happened to her—the annihilation of her family, to be precise—was somehow part of God’s plan, or the prelude to a glorious reunion in heaven at some unspecified later date. The Monsignor of Our Lady of Sorrows even tried to convince her that her suffering wasn’t all that unique, that she was really no different than a parishioner of his, a woman who’d lost her husband and three children in a car accident and still somehow managed to live a reasonably happy and productive life.
    “Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones,” he said. “We all have to suffer, every last one of us. I stood beside her while she watched all four of those coffins go into the ground.”
    Then she’s lucky! Nora wanted to scream. Because at least she knows where they are! But she held her tongue, understanding how inhuman it would sound, calling a woman like that lucky.
    “I want you to leave,” she told the priest in a calm voice. “Go home and say a million Hail Marys.”
    Reverend Jamison had been foisted upon her by her sister, who’d been a member of the Zion Bible Church for many years, along with Chuck and the boys. The whole family claimed to have been born again at the exact same moment, a phenomenon that Nora found highly improbable, though she kept this opinion to herself. At Karen’s urging, Nora and her kids had once attended a worship service at Z.B.C.—Doug had refused to “waste a Sunday morning”—and she’d been a little put off by the Reverend’s evangelical fervor. It was a style of preaching she’d never encountered close up, having spent her childhood as a halfhearted Catholic and her adulthood as an equally passionless nonbeliever.
    Nora had been living at her sister’s for a few months when the Reverend started dropping by—at Karen’s invitation—for informal, once-a-week “spiritual counseling” sessions. She wasn’t happy about it, but by that point she was too weak and beaten down to resist. It wasn’t quite as bad as she’d feared, though. In person, Reverend Jamison turned out to be far less dogmatic than he’d been in the pulpit. He had no platitudes or canned sermons to offer, no obnoxious certainty about God’s wisdom and good intentions. Unlike the other clergymen she’d dealt with, he asked a lot of questions about Doug and Erin and Jeremy and listened carefully to her answers. When he left, she was often surprised to realize that she felt a little better than she had when he’d arrived.
    She terminated the sessions when she moved back home, but soon found herself calling him late at night, whenever her insomniac reveries turned suicidal, which was fairly often. He always came right over, no matter what time it was, and stayed for as long as she needed him. Without his help, she never would have made it through that dismal spring.
    As she grew stronger, though, she began to realize that it was the Reverend who was falling apart. There were nights when he seemed just as despondent as she was. He wept frequently and kept up a running monologue about the Rapture and how unfair it was that he’d missed the cut.
    “I gave everything to Him,” he complained, his voice infused with the bitterness of a spurned lover. “My entire life. And this is the thanks I get?”
    Nora didn’t have a lot of patience for this kind of talk. The Reverend’s family had emerged unscathed from the disaster. They were still right where he’d left them, a lovely wife and three sweet kids. If anything, he should get down on his knees and thank God every minute of the day.
    “Those people were no better than I was,” he continued. “A lot of them were worse. So how come they’re with God and I’m still here?”
    “How do you know they’re with God?”
    “It’s in the Scriptures.”
    Nora shook her head. She’d considered the possibility of the