The Leftovers

belonged to a man named Steven Grice. There were lights on both downstairs and up, and it seemed likely that the Grice family was in for the night. Even so, Laurie decided to sit tight for a while—it would be a lesson in persistence, the most important quality a Watcher could cultivate. Meg shifted beside her, hugging herself to ward off a chill.
    “Damn,” she whispered. “I’m freezing.”
    Laurie pressed a finger to her lips and shook her head.
    Meg grimaced, mouthing the word Sorry.
    Laurie shrugged, trying not to make too big a deal of the faux pas. This was Meg’s first shift on the Night Watch; it would take some time for her to get used to it. Not just the physical hardship and the boredom, but the social awkwardness—the rudeness, even—of not being able to fill the silence with conversation, of more or less ignoring the person who was breathing right next to you. It went against every social impulse that had been drummed into you as a child, especially if you were a woman.
    And yet Meg would get used to it, just as Laurie had. She might even come to appreciate the freedom that came with silence, the peace that followed surrender. That was one thing Laurie had learned the winter after the Rapture, when she’d spent all that time with Rosalie Sussman. When your words are futile, you’re better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.
    A car turned off Monroe onto Russell, catching them in a silvery wash of light as it rumbled by. The hush seemed deeper in its wake, the stillness more complete. Laurie watched a leaf from a nearly bare curbside maple topple through the glow of a streetlamp and drop soundlessly onto the pavement, but the perfection of the moment was overtaken by the bustle of Meg rooting around in her coat pocket. After what sounded like a prolonged struggle, she managed to extract her notebook and scrawl a brief question, barely legible in the moonlight:
    What time is it?
    Laurie raised her right arm, tugging at her sleeve and tapping several times on her watchless wrist, a gesture meant to convey the idea that time was irrelevant to a Watcher, that you had to empty yourself of expectations and sit quietly for however long it took. If you were lucky you might even come to enjoy it, to experience the waiting as a form of meditation, a way of connecting with God’s presence in the world. Sometimes it happened: There had been nights over the summer when the air seemed infused with divine reassurance; you could just close your eyes and breathe it in. But Meg looked frustrated, so Laurie took out her own pad—something she’d been hoping not to do—and wrote a single word in big block letters:
    PATIENCE.
    Meg squinted at it for a few seconds, as if the concept were unfamiliar to her, before venturing a small nod of comprehension. She smiled bravely as she did so, and Laurie could see how grateful she was for this little scrap of communication, the simple kindness of a reply.
    Laurie smiled back, remembering her own training period, the feeling she’d had of being completely isolated, cut off from everyone she’d ever loved—Rosalie Sussman had transferred out of Mapleton by then, helping to launch a start-up chapter on Long Island—a loneliness made even harder by the fact that she’d chosen it of her own free will. It hadn’t been an easy decision, but in retrospect it seemed not only right, but inevitable.
    After Rosalie moved to Ginkgo Street, Laurie had done her best to reclaim her life as wife and mother and involved citizen. For a little while it felt like a blessing to escape the force field of her best friend’s grief—once again doing yoga and volunteer work, taking long walks around the lake, monitoring Jill’s homework, worrying about Tom, and trying to repair her relationship with Kevin, who made no secret of the fact that he’d been feeling neglected—but that sense of liberation didn’t last for long.
    She told her therapist that it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that that was her real life now, that this, despite everything she’d ever loved about it, was finished for good.
    Of course what she was