The Leftovers

said. “Tell everybody Merry Christmas for me.”
    The roads beyond the bike path were semirural, winding past isolated houses and the occasional small farm, corn stubble poking up from the frozen fields like the hairs on a leg that needed shaving. Nora didn’t know where she was going, but she didn’t mind getting lost. Now that she was off the hook for Christmas dinner, she didn’t care if the ride lasted all day.
    She wanted to be thinking about her kids, but for some reason, her mind kept returning to poor Aunt May. She’d been dead a long time, but Nora could still picture her with strange clarity. She used to sit quietly at family gatherings, her mouth slanted at a weird angle, her eyes swimming with desperation behind thick glasses. Every now and then she tried to talk, but nobody could understand a word she said. Nora remembered being coaxed into hugging her, and then given a piece of candy as a reward.
    Is that who I am? she wondered. Am I the new Aunt May?
    She rode for sixty-seven miles in all. When she finally got home, there were five messages blinking on her answering machine, but she figured they could wait. She headed upstairs, stripped off her clammy clothes—she was suddenly shivery—and took a long hot bath. While she soaked, she kept contorting her mouth so that the left side hung lower than the right, and trying to imagine how it would feel to live like that, your face permanently frozen, your voice garbled, everyone trying to be extra nice so you wouldn’t feel like a monster.
    *   *   *
    THERE WAS something pathetic about watching It’s a Wonderful Life all by yourself, but Kevin couldn’t think of anything else to do. The Carpe Diem was closed; Pete and Steve were busy with their families. He gave a fleeting thought to phoning Melissa Hulbert, but decided it was a bad idea. She probably wouldn’t be too thrilled to receive a halfhearted booty call on Christmas Day, especially since he hadn’t tried to get in touch with her since their last ill-fated encounter, the night she’d spit on the Watcher.
    The girls had left about an hour ago. The abruptness of their departure had startled him—they got a text and they were gone—but he couldn’t say he blamed them for wanting to spend some time with their friends. They’d hung out with him all morning and most of the afternoon, and it had been a lot of fun. After they finished with the presents, Aimee had made chocolate chip pancakes and then they’d gone for a long walk around the lake. When they got home, they played three games of Yahtzee. So, really, he had nothing to complain about.
    Except here he was, with the rest of the afternoon and all of the evening stretched out ahead of him, a vast expanse of solitude. It was incomprehensible how his once-crowded life had dwindled down to this, his marriage over, his son lost to the world, both his parents gone, his siblings scattered—brother in California, sister in Canada. A few relatives remained in the immediate area—Uncle Jack and Aunt Marie, a handful of cousins—but everybody just did their own thing. The Garvey clan was like the old Soviet Union, a once mighty power that had dissolved into a bunch of weak and cranky units.
    This must be Kyrgyzstan, he thought.
    On top of everything, he wasn’t loving the movie. Maybe he’d seen it too many times, but the story seemed so labored, all that effort just to remind a good man that he was good. Or maybe Kevin was just feeling a little too much like George Bailey himself, with no guardian angel in sight. He kept flipping channels, searching for something else to watch and ending up right back where he started, repeating the cycle over and over until the doorbell rang, three harsh buzzes so sudden and thrilling that he rose a little too quickly from the couch and almost fainted. Before he could greet his visitors, he had to stop and close his eyes, giving himself a moment to absorb the shock of being upright.
    *   *   *
    FOR A minute or two, Laurie couldn’t think of anything except how good it felt to be out of the cold. Slowly, though, as her body warmed, the strangeness of being back home began to settle in. This was her house! It was so big and lovingly furnished, nicer than she’d allowed herself to remember. This soft couch she was sitting on—she’d picked it out at Elegant Interiors, anguishing for days over the swatches, trying to decide whether the gray-green worked better with the rug than the brick