World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  “We should use it for target practice,” Clarissa says, and in frustration at everything—at Leo’s dying, at her mother, at Saddam Hussein himself—she takes a spoon and tosses it at the corkboard.

  She emerges into the foyer, where the rest of the family is silently standing, everyone still pinioned to their spots.

  “I’m beyond exhausted,” she says, and she goes upstairs and Nathaniel follows her; Noelle, Amram, and Lily ascend the stairs, too. It’s exactly, Lily thinks, how it used to be, the line for the bathroom, and somehow, as always, Noelle has gotten there first. Lily waits outside, needing to pee, her bladder pounding against her pelvis. Then the door opens, Noelle emerges, and it’s Lily’s turn to go in.

  When she steps out of the bathroom, she sees Thisbe standing in the dark hallway, her head leaning against a picture frame.

  “Careful, you. You don’t want to topple the art.”

  “That would be some end to the evening.”

  “It would be the coup de grâce.” Lily can barely make out Thisbe in the darkness. The only illumination is from the crack beneath the bathroom door and from the dwindling glow of the nightlight.

  “I should have stayed in Berkeley,” Thisbe says. “I’m an interloper here.”

  “Oh, Thisbe, how can you say that? You’re part of our family.”

  “And now I’m watching your parents’ marriage split up. I just want to close my eyes.”

  “I wish I hadn’t opened them in the first place.” Through the skylight, Lily can see a glistening shard of moon hanging like a comma in the darkness. She hears breathing down the hall. “Our snoring nephews.”

  Snoring nephews, Thisbe thinks. Kissing cousins. She closes her eyes, wishes she were far away, back in Berkeley with Wyeth. “Where’s your father?”

  “In their old bedroom,” Lily says.

  “And your mother?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “On the couch?”

  “Presumably.”

  “Oh, Lily,” Thisbe says. “We can’t let her do that. She’s almost seventy years old. If only …”

  “What?”

  “If only I’d stayed in better touch. If only I’d been a more accommodating daughter-in-law.”

  “Then everything would be perfect?”

  “Do you know how often I called last year? Once every few weeks, at most. They’re Calder’s grandparents. I could have brought him east more. I could have made them feel more welcome in Berkeley. If only Leo were here.”

  “Well, yes,” Lily says. “That would be nice.”

  Leaning against the wall, Thisbe runs her hands through her hair. She presses her palms to her eyes so she can’t see anything but her own skin. “I should go to bed.”

  “Stay up here,” says Lily.

  “Where would I sleep?”

  “In my room. We can have a slumber party. Girls’ night out.”

  “Calder will wonder what happened to me.”

  Lily’s thinking how she misses Malcolm, how tonight, of all nights, she doesn’t want to sleep alone.

  Now Noelle emerges from her bedroom in a complicated caking of moisturizer and face cream. She’s wearing a long pink nightgown, which makes swishing sounds across the floor. “Thisbe,” she says, seeing her sister-in-law. “Lily.”

  Thisbe reaches out and takes her hand, and now Lily does, too. They’re standing, the three of them, in the hallway, in a dark little huddle.

  “I can’t believe this,” Noelle says. “Oh, God.” From beneath the doorway, they see the light go off in Clarissa and Nathaniel’s room.

  Thisbe walks softly down the stairs, trying not to creak as she goes. But it’s an old house, and with every step she sends a noise through the hall. She gets to the bottom of the stairs, and there Marilyn is, lying on the couch, a mohair throw blanket tossed haphazardly over her, her fuzzy slippers lined up on the floor. She’s on her back, with a medical journal open across her face, as if she’s at the beach, sunning herself. Thisbe tiptoes past her, but Marilyn whispers, “I’m awake.” She’s sitting up now, her pale yellow nightgown tucked under her, her back straight against the pillow.

  Thisbe points at the journal. “That’s quite an eye mask you’ve got on.”

  “Now all I need are ear plugs.”

  “Anything interesting in there?” Thisbe wouldn’t mind flipping through the journal herself, a break from her own journals, all those hidden truths about dead civilizations when there’s so much she doesn’t know about the living ones.

  “Just the usual array of malady and disease. I figure I’ll drown my sorrows in death and disfigurement.”

  “Does it work?”

  “It can prove distracting.” Marilyn makes as though to get up, but then she hesitates, as if she doesn’t want Thisbe to see her half dressed. “Can I get you anything?”

  Thisbe shakes her head.

  “There’s food in the kitchen. No one touched dessert. You can have yourself an entire key lime pie.”

  “I don’t think that would be good for my girlish figure.”

  “Oh, come on, Thisbe. You have the metabolism of—”

  “Someone who can eat an entire key lime pie?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ll have some tomorrow.” Thisbe hears the clock in the kitchen, those chirping birds going at it once more. “I feel terrible that you’re sleeping here. It’s like you’re a college kid sacked out on the floor.”

  Marilyn laughs. “Do I look tawdry?”

  “Not tawdry. Just uncomfortable.”

  “I can sleep anywhere,” Marilyn says. “It’s a gift I have.” Growing up, she tells Thisbe, she used to sleep on a captain’s bed, her mattress perched on top of her drawers. “My parents used to call it my bed of nails. It trained me well.”

  “Calder and I could switch with you. I’m a lot closer to college than you are. Calder is, too, from the other direction.”

  “Don’t worry,” Marilyn says. “I’ll be okay.”

  Thisbe hesitates for a moment, then leans over the couch and kisses her mother-in-law goodnight.

  Then she’s down the stairs to the basement. She hears water dripping, thinks there may be a leak, but she realizes it’s coming from the bathroom: someone left the faucet on. Calder is lying precariously on the edge of the bed. She considers rolling him back on, but she fears she’ll wake him. Though falling off the bed will wake him, too. Back in Berkeley, she doesn’t share a bed with him, but they’re away now, far from home, and she doesn’t want to sleep alone tonight, so she nudges him over, and he gives a small, resigned sigh. Then she pulls back the covers and gets into bed beside him.

  5

  Alone in her old bedroom as the clock approaches one, Lily feels wretched and heartsick and angry at everybody. She didn’t want to come here in the first place, and now she really wishes she hadn’t come. Years ago she loved Lenox, loved even the drive up, pressed against her siblings in her parents’ old Volvo, the perennial fighting of the car ride. But now she finds the town suffocating, her parents’ house especially. She’s always opening doors, looking through closets, half believing she’ll come upon some portal she hasn’t discovered in her decades of vacationing here. She resolved long ago never to live in a city that has no subway system; that’s her threshold for a habitable hometown. D.C. itself only barely qualifies; the Metro resembles a toy train set, a Madurodam-like version of a real subway, its five color-coded lines like proto-nerves stretching out from the spine of the capital, as if in some lower-level vertebrate. She mocks D.C. with the best of them. Its self-importance, its isolation, a city without so much as a congressional representative. But though she’s ashamed to admit it, she’s still awed by the buildings. The Lincoln Memorial lit up at night, the Washington Monument, the White House, the Supreme Court: she’s more seduced by power than she lets on.

  She picks up her cell phone and calls Malcolm.

  “Lily?”

  She’s quiet.

  “Are you in Lenox?”r />
  “Of course I’m in Lenox.” She feels impatient with him for so many things. For not knowing what’s going on, for having allowed this to happen, most of all for being there while she’s here, though she knows she can’t blame him for that either. The clock says 1:29, the green glare of the digits reflecting back at her like Silly Putty. “Did you make it to the beach?” She thinks she can hear waves, as if her ear is pressed to a shell.

  “About an hour ago,” Malcolm says. “There’s talk of spending the night in the sand. Forget the hotel. We’ll sleep by the ocean until the police wake us up with their billy clubs.”

  “Sounds nice,” Lily says. She wouldn’t mind being there herself.

  “I miss you,” Malcolm says.

  She misses him, too, she wants to say, but right now she can’t say it. He’s there and she’s here; she needs to get through the next couple of days. She’s determined to divest herself of feeling, to strip herself of all sentiment, to hunker down. “Malcolm, you’re not going to believe this. My parents are splitting up.”

  “They’re what?”

  She says it again.

  “Jesus, Lily. I don’t believe it.”

  “Well, you better start.”

  “Is it because of Leo?”

  She thinks: what isn’t because of Leo? Yet it feels like excuses to her, glib and insincere and downright insulting, as if her brother is being forced to take responsibility for this.

  “I’m so, so sorry.”

  And all she can think to say is she’s sorry, too.

  “Where are they now?”

  “In their respective quarters. My father’s in their old bedroom and my mother’s downstairs on the couch. Because I guess when you’re getting separated it’s bad form to sleep together.”

  Malcolm doesn’t respond.

  “It’s crazy,” she says. “They’ll be seventy next year. Isn’t it a little …”

  “Unseemly?”

  “Well, there’s that. They’ve been married for forty-two years. I thought there was a no-returns policy.”

  But Malcolm stays silent, and Lily hears in that silence that there are always returns. “You must think this is normal.”

  “Not exactly, Lil.”

  But for Malcolm it is normal. His own family is fractured and far-flung. A mother in Georgia, a father in Indiana, a sister in Utah, a brother in New Jersey. He gets along with each of them, but things go best when he sees them one on one: a dinner when somebody’s coming through town, a stop for a few hours at a roadside pool, he and his brother sipping cherry slurpies on beach chairs before one of them has to depart. Malcolm enjoys people, yet he’s also wary of them. It’s one reason he likes being a chef; he’s in the company of others, but at the same time he’s alone. He thinks of family reunions as Jewish traditions, probably because Lily’s family reunions are the ones he’s most familiar with. Malcolm’s parents got divorced when he was so young he can’t remember their ever having been together. And Lily now realizes she’s always counted on that, on having that bedrock feeling that her family was okay, and that it was Malcolm, his family, that was the fucked-up one.

  He appears to have guessed what she’s thinking, because now he says, gently, “You can’t lord it over me any longer.”

  “Come on, Malcolm. I never lorded it over you.” But she understands what he’s saying. She thought he was the one from the post-nuclear family. Now it seems there’s room for them both. “Everything I thought about my family turns out not to be true.”

  “I imagine that’s hard.”

  But that’s the problem: Malcolm can only imagine it. And Lily wants someone who can more than imagine it. She wants someone who can live it, who can feel what she feels. There are her sisters, of course. But their situations seem different, she doesn’t know why. She thinks of Leo—he would understand—and she misses him more than she’s missed him all year.

  She’s sitting on the bed, her feet resting against the floor. Her mother once said it was good to be married because you’d take care of each other when you were old and infirm. “And now my parents are old,” she tells Malcolm, “and eventually they’ll be infirm, and they’ve decided they don’t want to be together anymore, which makes me wonder why they got married in the first place.” She closes her eyes, tries to launch herself far away. “And on top of everything else, Clarissa’s trying to get pregnant.”

  “As we speak?”

  “For all I know. I’m doing my best not to listen.” She swings her legs back onto the bed, and as she does so, her head bangs against the headboard. “And Leo’s memorial is tomorrow and I haven’t even written my speech.”

  “Have you started it?”

  “I’ve tried, but every sentence is riddled with platitudes. My brother was so amazing! What zest for life!”

  “In his case, it’s true.”

  “Someone dies tragically and young, and they’re automatically thought of as amazing. Which makes them less amazing than they actually were.” She drums her hands against the bed. Her shadow dances along the ceiling, a jittery figure in the darkness. “I’m probably just jealous.”

  “Of what?”

  Until a year ago, she reminds Malcolm, she wasn’t anyone’s sister. Now everybody she meets asks her about Leo. She’s at the doctor’s office, he has that stick down her throat, and he’s telling her what a hero her brother was, which makes her gag even more than she already would. “Malcolm, promise me something? Promise me if I die you won’t stand in front of the assembled mourners and tell them how tremendous I was? Promise you’ll tell them I was a jerk?”

  “Okay,” he says, laughing.

  “Because I feel like a jerk. Maybe I didn’t love him enough.”

  “Lily, of course you loved him.”

  “Then why can’t I get with the program?”

  “What program?”

  “Even Noelle is carrying on, and she and Leo couldn’t stand each other. Do you know what Noelle used to do when Leo was a baby? She would dangle him by his ankles so she could watch the blood rush to his head. She would blow her recorder in his ear. I tell myself I was five years older than Leo.”

  “You were five years older than him.”

  “When I left for college he was barely a teenager. In a way, I was more like an aunt to him.”

  “And you were a girl,” Malcolm says, “and he was a boy. From the first time I met him, he was off on his own adventures.”

  “What about Clarissa?” Lily says. “She was six years older. Yet when he died, she was undone.”

  “It sounds like you’re engaged in competitive grieving.”

  “If I am, I’ve lost.”

  “Come on, Lily. Have you forgotten what you did after Leo died? You and your mother campaigned for Kerry together. You did that in your brother’s name.”

  Lily remembers, of course. She and her mother signed up as volunteers, first in Missouri, and then, when the state polls looked bad and the campaign had pulled out, they moved to Ohio, where they lived out of a hotel the last month of the campaign. Leo had been dead for nearly four months, but Lily’s mother still hadn’t gone back to work. Lily herself took a leave from her job so she could campaign with her mother. They left Ohio the night before the election and flew to Pennsylvania, where the next day, in the Philadelphia suburbs, they handed out campaign literature door to door. “And then I went back to work.”

  “What were you supposed to do?” Malcolm says. “Not go back to work? Everyone else went back to work, too.”

  “Clarissa, my parents—their lives haven’t returned to normal. My parents’ lives will never return to normal. They’re making sure of it. They’re splitting up.”

  “Lily …”

  “Please, Malcolm. Don’t Lily me.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “People used to say these things about me. That Lily, she picks herself up and dusts herself off. She gets back in the saddle. I was six years old, I didn’t even understand what the
y were saying, but they were right.” She takes a quick breath, emits air like the click of a shutter. It’s almost two in the morning and she’s in the dark, and the only thing she can see is the light from her cell phone. She’s thirty-eight years old, and she’s lying naked in her childhood bed.

  She tries to picture Malcolm in his swim trunks, kneeling over a grill, her boyfriend tan, low-slung, crouching in the sand in his rolled-up shirt and flip-flops, eyes burning from the charcoal smoke. “Malcolm,” she says, “let’s move far away. I want to start over someplace new.”

  “Where in the world would we move?”

  “Auckland?” she says. “The moon?”

  “What would I cook on the moon?”

  “Moon pie.”

  “Lily, we’re settled in D.C.”

  And he’s right, of course. They’ve each been in Washington for over a decade now. Their rent is reasonable, and they have an extra bedroom, which they use as an office. It’s where they’re staying put, though their friends are buying homes and moving to the suburbs. The thirties affliction, Lily calls it. She detests the suburbs and finds all of D.C. unvaried and dull. People bemoan it so frequently there’s no point in complaining it’s a one-industry town; it’s like complaining about the traffic in L.A. But it’s true, no matter how often people say it, and it’s not her industry, even if she went to law school and has been interested in politics since she was small. If she and Malcolm could live anywhere, she’d rather it be in New York or San Francisco. But people know Malcolm in D.C.; it’s where he’ll have the best chance of opening his own restaurant. And her work is there, too. If you’re going to be a lawyer for government whistle-blowers, it’s probably best to be near government.

  She met Malcolm in Iowa, in the summer of 1991, working on the Democratic presidential campaign. She had volunteered for Tom Harkin and Malcolm had signed on with Paul Tsongas. It was a bunch of kids in their twenties staying up late playing Trivial Pursuit and smoking pot. Afterward, when they came down with the munchies, Malcolm would try out new recipes on the group in the small makeshift kitchen in the back of campaign headquarters. A number of romances had begun that summer, but Lily wouldn’t sleep with Malcolm because he worked for a different campaign.