Little Children (34 page)

“Oh-ho, man. You are so fucked.”

McGorvey shook his head.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m fucked any way you look at it.”

A stunned silence descended upon the playground, a hush so sudden and profound that Sarah was momentarily startled by the sound of her own breathing. She stared at McGorvey with an open-mouthed expression of bewilderment that would have seemed unthinkably rude under any other circumstances, trying to comprehend the fact that this harmless-looking man—this man she’d just
hugged
—was a murderer.

Of a child.

More out of embarrassment than anything else, Sarah turned away from him to check on her daughter, who was still dozing peacefully in the swing, her head slumped to one side, her lips parted as if she were about to speak.

Poor girl,
Sarah thought, reaching out to brush a strand of hair away from Lucy’s clammy cheek.
I’m all you have
.

She knew she’d been a bad mother, that she’d signed on for a job that demanded more of her than she knew how to give. If she’d been alone, she might have gotten down on her knees to beg her daughter’s forgiveness.

I’ll do better,
she promised the sleeping child.
I have to
.

Sarah smelled chocolate on Lucy’s breath as she leaned forward to plant a soft kiss on the tip of her cute little nose. A vision came to her as her lips touched Lucy’s skin, a sudden vivid awareness of the life they’d lead together from here on out, the hothouse intimacy of a single mother and her only child, the two of them sharing everything, breathing the same air, inflicting their moods on each other, best friends and bitter rivals, competing for attention, relying on each other for companionship and emotional support, forming the intense, convoluted, and probably unhealthy bond that for better and worse would become the center of both of their identities, fodder for years of therapy, if they could ever figure out a way to pay for it. It wasn’t going to be an easy future, Sarah understood that, but it felt
real
to her—so palpable and close at hand, so in keeping with what she knew of her own life—that it almost seemed inevitable, the place they’d been heading all along. It was enough to make her wonder how she’d ever managed to believe in the alternate version, the one where the Prom King came and made everything better.

She smoothed Lucy’s hair again, then turned back around, rejoining the circle of adults, none of whom had spoken for some time. What was there to say, really, after someone had confessed to a murder? Another endless minute ticked by before McGorvey finally addressed Mary Ann.

“Mind if I bum a cigarette?”

With a certain reluctance, Mary Ann reached into her purse and withdrew a pack of Camel Lights.

“Since when do you smoke?” Sarah asked her.

“I don’t,” said Mary Ann, taking another amateurish drag. “This is just a one-time thing.”

“Got an extra?” Sarah asked.

Mary Ann extended the pack first to her, and then, out of politeness, to Moon. He waved her off, but then suddenly reconsidered.

“Ah, what the hell,” he said.

The four of them stood in a circle on the playground, smoking and exchanging furtive glances. Every couple of puffs, Sarah reached back and gave Lucy’s swing a gentle push.

“Hey, Ronnie,” Moon said, after a long interval of silence.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” He sounded sincere. “I wish it hadn’t happened like that.”

“Thank you,” said McGorvey. “She was a good woman. Took good care of me.”

Mary Ann dropped her cigarette on the ground and stepped on it with unnecessary vigor. McGorvey turned to Sarah.

“Can I ask you something?” he said. “I mean, I wouldn’t want you to take this wrong, but it’s not such a great idea to be out here with your kid after dark.”

“Yeah,” said Moon. “I was kinda wondering about that myself.”

“You want to know what I’m doing here?” Sarah said, as if she hadn’t understood the question.

Moon and McGorvey nodded, while Mary Ann looked on with an oddly sympathetic expression. Sarah started to speak, but instead of words, only a small, embarrassed giggle escaped from her mouth. How could she explain? She was here because she’d kissed a man in this very spot, and tasted happiness for the first time in her adult life. She was here because he said he’d run away with her, and she believed him—believed, for a few brief, intensely sweet moments, that she was something special, one of the lucky ones, a character in a love story with a happy ending.

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THE LEFTOVERS

LAURIE GARVEY HADN’T BEEN RAISED
to believe in the Rapture. She hadn’t been raised to believe in much of anything, except the foolishness of belief itself.

We’re agnostics,
she used to tell her kids, back when they were little and needed a way to define themselves to their Catholic and Jewish and Unitarian friends.
We don’t know if there’s a God, and nobody else does, either. They might say they do, but they really don’t.

The first time she’d heard about the Rapture, she was a freshman in college, taking a class called Intro to World Religions. The phenomenon the professor described seemed like a joke to her, hordes of Christians floating out of their clothes, rising up through the roofs of their houses and cars to meet Jesus in the sky, everyone else standing around with their mouths hanging open, wondering where all the good people had gone. The theology remained murky to her, even after she read the section on “Premillennial Dispensationalism” in her textbook, all that mumbo jumbo about Armageddon and the Antichrist and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It felt like religious kitsch, as tacky as a black velvet painting, the kind of fantasy that appealed to people who ate too much fried food, spanked their kids, and had no problem with the theory that their loving God invented AIDS to punish the gays. Every once in a while, in the years that followed, she’d spot someone reading one of the Left Behind books in an airport or on a train, and feel a twinge of pity, and even a little bit of tenderness, for the poor sucker who had nothing better to read, and nothing else to do, except sit around dreaming about the end of the world.

And then it happened. The biblical prophecy came true, or at least partly true. People disappeared, millions of them at the same time, all over the world. This wasn’t some ancient rumor—a dead man coming back to life during the Roman Empire—or a dusty homegrown legend, Joseph Smith unearthing golden tablets in upstate New York, conversing with an angel. This was real. The Rapture happened in her own hometown, to her best friend’s daughter, among others, while Laurie herself was in the house. God’s intrusion into her life couldn’t have been any clearer if He’d addressed her from a burning azalea.

At least you would have thought so. And yet she managed to deny the obvious for weeks and months afterward, clinging to her doubts like a life preserver, desperately echoing the scientists and pundits and politicians who insisted that the cause of what they called the “Sudden Departure” remained unknown, and cautioned the public to avoid jumping to conclusions until the release of the official report by the nonpartisan government panel that was investigating the matter.

“Something tragic occurred,” the experts repeated over and over. “It was a Rapture-like phenomenon, but it doesn’t appear to have been the Rapture.”

Interestingly, some of the loudest voices making this argument belonged to Christians themselves, who couldn’t help noticing that many of the people who’d disappeared on October 14th—Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Eskimos and Mormons and Zoroastrians, whatever the heck they were—hadn’t accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior. As far as anyone could tell, it was a random harvest, and the one thing the Rapture couldn’t be was random. The whole point was to separate the wheat from the chaff, to reward the true believers and put the rest of the world on notice. An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all.

So it was easy enough to be confused, to throw up your hands and claim that you just didn’t know what was going on. But Laurie knew. Deep in her heart, as soon as it happened, she
knew
. She’d been left behind. They all had. It didn’t matter that God hadn’t factored religion into His decision-making—if anything, that just made it worse, more of a personal rejection. And yet she chose to ignore this knowledge, to banish it to some murky recess of her mind—the basement storage area for things you couldn’t bear to think about—the same place you hid the knowledge that you were going to die, so you could live your life without being depressed every minute of every day.

Besides, it was a busy time, those first few months after the Rapture, with school canceled in Mapleton, her daughter home all day, and her son back from college. There was shopping and laundry to do, just like before, meals to cook, and dishes to wash. There were memorial services to attend as well, slide shows to compile, tears to wipe away, so many exhausting conversations. She spent a lot of time with poor Rosalie Sussman, visiting her almost every morning, trying to help her through her unfathomable grief. Sometimes they talked about her departed daughter, Jen—what a sweet girl she was, always smiling, etc.—but mostly they just sat together without speaking. The silence felt deep and right, as if there was nothing either of them could say that could possibly be important enough to break it.

YOU STARTED
seeing them around town the following autumn, people in white clothing, traveling in same-sex pairs, always smoking. Laurie recognized a few of them—Barbara Santangelo, whose son was in her daughter’s class; Marty Powers, who used to play softball with her husband, and whose wife had been taken in the Rapture, or whatever it was. Mostly they ignored you, but sometimes they followed you around as if they were private detectives hired to keep track of your movements. If you said hello, they just gave you a blank look, but if you asked a more substantive question, they handed over a business card printed on one side with the following message:

WE ARE MEMBERS OF THE GUILTY REMNANT. WE HAVE

TAKEN A VOW OF SILENCE. WE STAND BEFORE YOU AS

LIVING REMINDERS OF GOD’S AWESOME POWER.

HIS JUDGMENT IS UPON US.

In smaller type, on the other side of the card, was a Web address you could consult for more information:
www.guiltyremnant.com.

That was a weird fall. A full year had passed since the catastrophe; the survivors had absorbed the blow and found, to their amazement, that they were still standing, though some were a bit more wobbly than others. In a tentative, fragile way, things were starting to return to normal. The schools had reopened and most people had gone back to work. Kids played soccer in the park on weekends; there were even a handful of trick-or-treaters on Halloween. You could feel the old habits returning, life assuming its former shape.

But Laurie couldn’t get with the program. Besides caring for Rosalie, she was worried sick about her own kids. Tom had gone back to college for the spring semester, but he’d fallen under the influence of a sketchy self-appointed “healing prophet” named Holy Wayne, failed all his classes, and refused to come home. He’d phoned a couple of times over the summer to let her know he was okay, but he wouldn’t say where he was or what he was doing. Jill was struggling with depression and post-traumatic stress—of course she was, Jen Sussman had been her best friend since preschool—but she refused to talk to Laurie about it or to see a therapist. Meanwhile, her husband seemed bizarrely upbeat, all good news all the time. Business was booming, the weather was fine, he just ran six miles in under an hour, if you could believe that.

“What about you?” Kevin would ask, not the least bit self-conscious in his spandex pants, his face glowing with good health and a thin layer of perspiration. “What’d you do all day?”

“Me? I helped Rosalie with her scrapbook.”

He made a face, disapproval mingled with forbearance.

“She’s still doing that?”

“She doesn’t want to finish. Today we did a little history of Jen’s swimming career. You could watch her grow up year by year, her body changing inside that blue bathing suit. Just heartbreaking.”

“Huh.” Kevin filled his glass with ice water from the built-in dispenser on the fridge. She could tell he wasn’t listening, knew that he’d lost interest in the subject of Jen Sussman months ago. “What’s for dinner?”

LAURIE COULDN’T
say that she was shocked when Rosalie announced that she was joining the Guilty Remnant. Rosalie had been fascinated by the people in white since the first time she saw them, frequently wondering out loud how hard it would be to keep a vow of silence, especially if you happened to bump into an old friend, someone you hadn’t seen in a long time.

“They’d have to give you some leeway in a case like that, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Laurie said. “I kind of doubt it. They’re fanatics. They don’t like to make exceptions.”

“Not even if it was your own brother, and you hadn’t seen him for twenty years? You wouldn’t even be able to say hi?”

“Don’t ask me. Ask them.”

“How can I ask them? They’re not allowed to talk.”

“I don’t know. Check the website.”

Rosalie checked the website a lot that winter. She developed a close I.M. friendship—evidently, the vow of silence didn’t extend to electronic communications—with the Director of Public Outreach, a nice woman who answered all her questions and walked her through her doubts and reservations.

“Her name’s Connie. She used to be a dermatologist.”

“Really?”

“She sold her practice and donated the proceeds to the organization. That’s what a lot of people do. It’s not cheap to keep an operation like that afloat.”

Laurie had read an article about the Guilty Remnant in the local paper, so she knew that there were at least sixty people living in their “compound” on Ginkgo Street, an eight-house subdivision that had been deeded to the organization by the developer, a wealthy man named Troy Vincent, who was now living there as an ordinary member, with no special privileges.

“What about you?” Laurie asked. “You gonna sell the house?”

“Not right away. There’s a six-month trial period. I don’t have to make any decisions until then.”

“That’s smart.”

Rosalie shook her head, as if amazed by her own boldness. Laurie could see how excited she was now that she’d made the decision to change her life.

“It’s gonna be weird, wearing white clothes all the time. I kind of wish it was blue or gray or something. I don’t look good in white.”

“I just can’t believe you’re gonna start smoking.”

“Ugh.” Rosalie grimaced. She was one of those hard-line nonsmokers, the kind of person who waved her hand frantically in front of her face whenever she got within twenty feet of a lit cigarette. “That’s gonna take some getting used to. But it’s like a sacrament, you know? You have to do it. You don’t have a choice.”

“Your poor lungs.”

“We’re not gonna live long enough to get cancer. The Bible says there’s just seven years of Tribulation after the Rapture.”

“But it wasn’t the Rapture,” Laurie said, as much to herself as to her friend. “Not really.”

“You should come with me.” Rosalie’s voice was soft and serious. “Maybe we could be roommates or something.”

“I can’t,” Laurie told her. “I can’t leave my family.”

Family:
She felt bad even saying the word out loud. Rosalie had no family to speak of. She’d been divorced for years and Jen was her only child. She had a mother and stepfather in Michigan, and a sister in Minneapolis, but she didn’t talk to them much.

“That’s what I figured.” Rosalie gave a small shrug of resignation. “Just thought I’d give it a try.”

A WEEK
later, Laurie drove Rosalie to Ginkgo Street. It was a beautiful day, full of sunshine and birdsong. The houses looked imposing—sprawling three-story colonials with half-acre lots that probably would have sold for a million dollars or more when they were built.

“Wow,” she said. “Pretty swanky.”

“I know.” Rosalie smiled nervously. She was dressed in white and carrying a small suitcase containing mostly underwear and toiletries, plus the scrapbooks she’d spent so much time on. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“If you don’t like it, just give me a call. I’ll come get you.”

“I think I’ll be okay.”

They walked up the steps of a white house with the word headquarters painted over the front door. Laurie wasn’t allowed to enter the building, so she hugged her friend goodbye on the stoop, and then watched as Rosalie was led inside by a woman with a pale, kindly face who may or may not have been Connie, the former dermatologist.

Almost a year passed before Laurie returned to Ginkgo Street. It was another spring day, a little cooler, not quite as sunny. This time she was the one dressed in white, carrying a small suitcase. It wasn’t very heavy, just underwear, a toothbrush, and an album containing carefully chosen photographs of her family, a short visual history of the people she loved and was leaving behind.