The Leftovers

sifting down, Laurie and Meg walked from Ginkgo Street to their new quarters on Parker Road, a quiet residential enclave on the eastern edge of Greenway Park.
    Outpost 17 was small, but nicer than Laurie had expected, a dark blue Cape Cod, dormered, with white trim around the windows. Instead of a concrete path, a walkway of clay-colored paving stones led to the main entrance. The only thing she didn’t like was the front door itself, which looked a little too ornate for the rest of the house, gleaming brown wood with an elongated oval of smoked decorative glass cut into it, the kind of thing you’d expect to see on a McMansion in Stonewood Heights, not a modest Mapleton dwelling like this one.
    “It’s cute,” Meg whispered.
    “Could be a lot worse,” Laurie agreed.
    They liked it even better once they saw the inside. The downstairs was cozy without feeling cramped, enlivened by lots of nice little touches—a gas fireplace in the living room, area rugs with bold geometric designs, comfortable mix-and-match furniture. The high point was the renovated kitchen, a bright open space with stainless steel appliances, a restaurant-quality stove, and a window over the sink that looked out on a soothing vista of wooded parkland, the bare tree limbs frosted with a thin layer of white powder. Laurie could easily imagine her old self standing at the soapstone counter on a weekend afternoon, chopping vegetables while NPR murmured in the background.
    The tour was guided by their new housemates, a pair of middle-aged men who’d answered the door with homemade name tags affixed to their shirts. “Julian” was tall and a bit stooped, with round, wire-framed glasses and a pointy nose that seemed to sniff inquisitively at the air. His face was clean-shaven, an anomaly in the G.R. “Gus” was a stocky, red-haired guy with a ruddy complexion; his beard was neatly trimmed, generously flecked with gray.
    Welcome, he wrote on a communication pad. We’ve been waiting for you.
    Laurie felt uneasy, but did her best to ignore it. She’d known the outposts could be coed, but hadn’t anticipated anything quite so intimate, two men and two women sharing a small house on the edge of the woods. But if that was the assignment, then so be it. She understood what an honor it was to be selected for the Neighborhood Settlement Program—it was at the heart of the G.R.’s long-term expansion plans—and wanted to prove herself worthy of the trust that had been placed in her by the leadership, who were undoubtedly doing the best they could with the resources at their disposal.
    Besides, she and Meg would have the whole second floor to themselves—two small bedrooms and a shared bathroom—so privacy shouldn’t be a problem. Meg chose the pink room overlooking the street; Laurie took the yellow one with the park view, which had probably belonged to a teenager. The bed—it looked like it came from IKEA—was built low to the floor, a thin, futon-style mattress resting inside a frame of blond wood. The walls were bare, but you could see the empty spaces where some posters had recently hung, three rectangles slightly brighter than the space that surrounded them.
    She’d only brought one suitcase—all her worldly belongings—and got unpacked in a matter of minutes. It felt anticlimactic somehow—more like checking into a hotel than settling into a new home—almost enough to make her nostalgic for the hectic moving days of her previous life: the weeks of preparation, the boxes and the tape and the markers, the big truck pulling up, the anxiety of watching your whole life disappear into its maw. And then the reverse peristalsis on the other end, all those boxes coming back out, the thud when they landed on the floor, the shriek when you ripped them open. The weird letdown of a new house, that nagging sense of dislocation that feels like it’ll never go away. But at least you knew in your gut that something momentous had happened, that one chapter in your life had ended and another had begun.
    A year, she used to say. It takes a year to really feel at home. And sometimes longer than that.
    After she’d placed her clothes in the chest of drawers—also blond, also IKEA—she stayed on her knees for a long time, not praying, just thinking, trying to get her mind around the fact that she lived here now, that this place was home. It helped to know that Meg was nearby, just a few steps away. Not quite as close as in Blue House, where they’d