There were twelve of them in the smoke-filled room, tonight’s contingent of Watchers, passing the folders in a clockwise direction. It was meant to be a solemn activity, but there were times when Laurie forgot her purpose and began to enjoy herself, culling juicy tidbits of local gossip from the logs, or simply renewing her connection to the sinful but colorful world she was supposed to have renounced. She felt herself falling into this temptation as she read the file of Alice Souderman, her old friend from the Bailey Elementary School PTA. The two of them had cochaired the auction committee for three years in a row and had remained close, even during the turbulent period that preceded Laurie’s conversion. She couldn’t help but be intrigued by the news that, just last week, Alice had been observed having dinner at Trattoria Giovanni with Miranda Abbott, another of Laurie’s good friends, a harried mother of four with a great sense of humor and a wicked talent for mimickry. Laurie hadn’t known that Alice and Miranda were friends, and felt pretty sure that they must have spent a good part of the meal talking about her and how much they missed her company. Probably they were mystified by her decision to withdraw from their world and scornful of the community in which she now lived, but Laurie chose not to think about that. She focused instead on the vegetarian lasagna at Giovanni’s—it was the specialty of the house, the cream sauce luscious but not too rich, the carrots and zucchini sliced to an almost translucent thinness—and on an image of herself as the third person at the table, drinking wine and laughing with her old friends. She felt an urge to smile, and had to consciously tighten her mouth against it.
Please help Alice and Miranda, she prayed as she closed the folder. They’re good people. Have mercy on them.
What mostly struck her, reading the files, was how deceptively normal things seemed in Mapleton. Most people just put on blinders and went about their trivial business, as if the Rapture had never even happened, as if they expected the world to last forever. Tina Green, age nine, attended her weekly piano lesson. Martha Cohen, twenty-three, spent two hours at the gym, then stopped at CVS on the way home for a box of tampons and a copy of US Weekly. Henry Foster, fifty-nine, walked his West Highland terrier around the path at Fielding Lake, stopping frequently so the dog could interact with its peers. Lance Mikulski, thirty-seven, was seen entering the Victoria’s Secret store at Two Rivers Mall, where he purchased several unspecified items of lingerie. This was an awkward revelation, given that Lance’s wife, Patty, happened to be sitting across the room from Laurie at that very moment and would soon have a chance to review the file for herself. Patty seemed like a nice enough woman—of course, most people seemed nice enough when they weren’t allowed to talk—and Laurie’s heart went out to her. She knew exactly how it felt, reading embarrassing revelations about your husband while a roomful of people who’d read the same information pretended not to notice. But you knew they were looking, wondering if you’d be able to maintain your composure, to detach yourself from petty emotions like jealousy and anger and keep your mind where it belonged, firmly fixed on the world to come.
Unlike Patty Mikulski, Laurie hadn’t made a Formal Request for surveillance of her husband; the only request she’d made was for her daughter. As far as she was concerned, Kevin was on his own: He was a grown man and could make his own decisions. It just so happened that those decisions included going home with two different women whose files she’d had the bad luck to review, and whose souls she was supposed to pray for, like that was ever gonna happen.
It had hurt more than she expected to imagine her husband kissing a strange woman, undressing her in an unfamiliar bedroom, lying peacefully beside her after they’d finished making love. But she hadn’t cried, hadn’t betrayed an iota of the pain she was feeling. That had only happened once since she’d come to live here, the day she opened her daughter’s file and discovered that the familiar photo on the inside cover—a soulful school portrait of a long-haired, sweetly smiling sophomore—had been replaced by what looked to her like a mug shot of a teenage criminal with big dead eyes and a shaved head, a girl in desperate need of a mother’s love.
* * *
THEY CROUCHED behind some bushes on Russell Road, peering through the foliage at the front door of a white colonial with a brick sunporch that 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 h
er 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 missing this time around wasn’t the excitement and romance of college; it was the sadness she’d shared with Rosalie, the oppressive gloom of their long, silent days, sorting through photographs of Jen, taking the measure of a world that no longer contained this sweet and beautiful girl. It had been horrible, living inside that knowledge, accepting its brutal finality, but it felt real in a way that paying the bills didn’t, or planning the spring library benefit, or reminding yourself to pick up a box of linguine at the supermarket, or congratulating your own daughter on the 92 she got on a math quiz, or waiting patiently for your husband to finish grunting and extract himself from your body. That was what she’d needed to escape now, the unreality of pretending things were more or less okay, that they’d hit a bump on the road and should just keep on going, attending to their duties, uttering their empty phrases, enjoying the simple pleasures that the world still insisted on offering. And she’d found what she was looking for in the G.R., a regimen of hardship and humiliation that at least offered you the dignity of feeling like your existence bore some sort of relationship to reality, that you were no longer engaged in a game of make-believe that would consume the rest of your life.
But she was a middle-aged woman, a forty-six-year-old wife and mother whose best years were behind her. Meg was a sexy, wide-eyed girl in her midtwenties with waxed eyebrows, blond highlights, and the vestiges of a professional manicure. There was an engagement ring taped into her Memory Book, a pebble-sized rock that must have made her friends scream with envy. These were terrible days to be young, Laurie thought, to have all your hopes and dreams stripped away, to know that the future you’d been counting on was never going to arrive. It must have felt like going blind or losing a limb, even if you believed that God had something better for you just around the corner, something wonderful that you couldn’t quite imagine.
Flipping to a fresh page of the notepad, Meg started to write a new message, but Laurie never saw what it was. A door scraped open and they turned in unison to see Steven Grice stepping onto his front stoop, an average-looking guy with glasses and a little paunch, wearing a warm-looking fleece pullover, which Laurie couldn’t help coveting. He hesitated for a moment or two, as if acclimating himself to the night, then headed down the steps and across the lawn to his car, which flashed a chirpy welcome as he approached.
They set off in pursuit, but lost sight of the vehicle when it turned right at the end of the block. Laurie’s hypothesis, based on nothing more than a hunch, was that Grice was probably headed to the Safeway for some kind of nighttime treat, blueberry pound cake or butter pecan ice cream or maybe a slab of dark chocolate studded with almonds, any one of the many, many foods she found herself fantasizing about at odd moments throughout the day, usually in the vast famished interlude that separated the morning bowl of oatmeal from the evening bowl of soup.
The supermarket was a brisk ten-minute walk from Russell Road, which meant that if she was right and if they hurried, they might be able to catch up with Grice before he left the store. Of course, he’d probably just get back in his car and drive right back home after that, but there was no point in getting too far ahead of herself. Besides, she wanted Meg to understand that Watching was a fluid, improvisational activity. It was entirely possible that Grice wasn’t going to the Safeway and that they’d lose track of him altogether. But it was just as likely that, while searching for him, they’d bump into someone else on the list and could shift their attention to that subject. Or they could stumble upon some wholly unforeseen situation involving individuals whose names they didn’t even know. The goal was to keep your eyes open and go wherever you’d be able to do the most good.
At any rate, it was a relief to be on the move, no longer hiding in the shrubbery. As far as Laurie was concerned, the exercise and fresh air were the best parts of the job, at least on a night like this, when the sky was clear and the temperature was still above forty. She tried not to think about what it was going to be like in January.
At the corner, she stopped to light a cigarette and offered one to Meg, who recoiled slightly before raising her hand in a futile gesture of refusal. Laurie jabbed the pack more insistently. She hated being a hardass, but the rule was absolutely clear: A Watcher in Public View Must Carry a Lit Cigarette at All Times.
When Meg continued to resist, Laurie jammed a cigarette—the G.R. provided a generic brand with a harsh taste and suspiciously chemical odor, purchased in bulk by the regional office—between the younger woman’s lips and held a match to it. Meg choked violently on the first drag, as she always did, then released a small whimper of revulsion after the fit had passed.
Laurie patted her on the arm, letting her know she was doing just fine. If she could’ve spoken, she would’ve recited the motto both of them had learned in Orientation: We don’t smoke for enjoyment. We smoke to proclaim our faith. Meg smiled queasily, sniffling and wiping at her eyes as they resumed their walk.
In a way, Laurie envied Meg her suffering. That was how it was supposed to be—a sacrifice for God, a mortification of the flesh, as if every puff were a profound personal violation. It was different for Laurie, who’d been a smoker throughout college and into her twenties, only quitting with difficulty at the beginning of her first pregnancy. For her, starting again after all those years was like a homecoming, an illicit pleasure smuggled into the grueling regimen of privations that made up life in the G.R. The sacrifice in her case would have been quitting a second time, not being able to savor that first cigarette in the morning, the one that tasted so good she sometimes found herself lying in her sleeping bag and blowing smoke rings at the ceiling just for the fun of it.
* * *
THERE WEREN’T many cars in the Safeway lot, but Laurie couldn’t rule out the possibility that one of them belonged to Grice—he drove a nondescript, dark-colored sedan, and she’d neglected to note the make, model, or license plate—so they headed inside to search the store, splitting up to cover more ground.
She started in the Produce section, circling the fruit to avoid temptation—it was painful to look at the strawberries, to even think their name—and hustling past the vegetables, which looked so impossibly fresh and inviting, each one an advertisement for the doomed planet that had produced it: dark green broccoli, red peppers, dense orbs of cabbage, damp heads of romaine lettuce, their broad leaves held in place by shiny wire bands.
The Bakery aisle was torture, even this late in the day—just a few stray baguettes here, a sesame bagel and banana nut muffin there, leftovers bound for tomorrow’s day-old bin. A lingering odor of fresh-baked bread permeated the area, mingling with the bright lights and piped-in music—“Rhinestone Cowboy,” oddly enough, a song she hadn’t heard in years—to induce a kind of sensory overload. She felt almost giddy with desire, amazed to remember that the supermarket had once seemed painfully dull to her, just another obligatory stop on the mundane circuit of her life, no more exciting than the gas station or post office. In a matter of months, it had become exotic and deeply affecting, a garden from which she and everyone she knew had been expelled, whether they knew it or not.
She didn’t breathe any easier until she turned her back on the deli counter and took refuge among the packaged foods—cans of beans and boxes of dried pasta and bottles of salad dressing—all sorts of good stuff, but nothing you had to stop yourself from grabbing and shoving into your mouth. The sheer variety of products was overwhelming, somehow ridiculous and impressive at the same time: four shelves devoted to barbecue sauce alone, as if each brand
possessed its own unique and powerful properties.
The Safeway felt half asleep, only one or two customers per aisle, most of them moving slowly, scanning the shelves with dazed expressions. To her relief, all of them drifted by without saying a word or even nodding hello. According to G.R. protocol, you were supposed to return a greeting not with a smile or a wave, but by looking directly into the eyes of the person who’d greeted you and counting slowly to ten. It was awkward enough with strangers and casual acquaintances, but completely unnerving if you found yourself face-to-face with a close friend or family member, both of you blushing and uncertain—hugs were expressly prohibited—a flood of unspeakable sentiments rising into your throat.
She’d expected to reconnect with Meg somewhere around the frozen food aisle—the geographical center of the store—but didn’t get alarmed until she made her way through Beverages, Coffee and Tea, and Chips and Snacks without catching a glimpse of her. Was it possible that they’d crossed without realizing it, each one rounding the corner of the aisle the other one had just vacated at exactly the same time?
Laurie was tempted to backtrack, but she kept going all the way to the dairy case, where Meg had begun her search. It was empty, except for a single shopper standing in front of the sliced cheese, a bald man with a wiry runner’s build she recognized too late as Dave Tolman, the father of one of her son’s former schoolmates. He turned and smiled, but she pretended not to notice.
She knew she’d been irresponsible, letting Meg out of her sight like that. The first few weeks at the compound could be hard and disorienting; newcomers had a tendency to flee back to their old lives if given half a chance. That was okay, of course: The G.R. wasn’t a cult, as lots of ignorant people liked to claim. Every resident was free to come and go as they pleased. But it was a Trainer’s job to provide guidance and companionship during this vulnerable time, helping the Trainee through the inevitable crises and moments of weakness, so she didn’t lose heart and do something she’d regret for all of eternity.