The World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  “And she was angry at me,” David says.

  “Livid,” says Marilyn. “Finally, I say, ‘Eight months after he dies, and you’re already saying we have three children?’ ”

  “And I’m thinking, well, we do have three children, and does Mom want me to tell this stranger who’s probably as bored at that party as we are, ‘We had four children, but one of them died tragically in Iraq, you’ve probably heard of us, we’ve been on TV’? Twenty years from now, if we’re even still alive, someone asks how many children we have, am I still supposed to say four?”

  “It wasn’t twenty years,” Marilyn says. “It was eight months.”

  Everyone is silent again, and Marilyn is thinking, Please don’t do this to me. But she doesn’t even know whom she’s addressing or what she’s begging them not to do.

  A beeping comes from the other room; the oven timer has gone off. She can’t look at any of them, so she stares through the open door into the kitchen, where a mesh bag of shallots dangles from a knob. A single onion skin pierces through the mesh, trapped like a sparrow’s wing.

  “You called one time,” David tells Lily, “and I remember what you said to us as we got off the phone. ‘Make sure you get out. Be good to each other.’ ”

  “But we weren’t,” Marilyn says, and she thinks this has been her great failure, that it will be the great failure of her life—that she hasn’t been able to be good to David, that now, when they should be cleaving together, they have instead been cleaved apart.

  Rain whips against the house. The tree branches lift over and again, as if trying to fly off.

  “Dad just wants to make things better,” Marilyn says.

  “What’s wrong with that?” says Lily.

  “Because it’s so damn teleological,” Marilyn says. “Therapy, couples counseling—it’s all there to deny the truth.”

  “What’s the truth?” David says.

  “That our son died and things will never be the same for us.”

  A crack of lightning illuminates the porch; thunder rolls in obligatorily. Besides that, no light comes in from outside, no sound either. Marilyn tries, vainly, to catch David’s glance, but he’s looking down, at his half-filled plate and cutlery.

  “Do you think Leo would have wanted this?” Noelle says.

  “I have no idea what Leo would have wanted. That’s the point. He’s not here.” Marilyn closes her eyes, and when she opens them again everyone is still staring at her exactly as they were. She had a feeling they would object, that they’d try to convince her she was being foolish, but she’s saddened now, disappointed in them, disappointed in herself for wishing they’d responded differently.

  Now dessert is before them, loosed from its box, sitting on a doily in the middle of the table, a key lime pie, with the words kosher and pareve on the discarded wrapping. A kosher key lime pie, Marilyn thinks, bought for their daughter who won’t eat it, and now it seems her other daughters won’t eat it, either: no one is hungry anymore. They sit silently around the pie, which is beginning to bleed beneath the chandelier bulbs, and presently, Lily rises to clear the table. The rest of them remain seated, listening to Lily in the kitchen as she topples the chicken and the half-eaten corncobs into the garbage pail.

  Then everyone disperses and it’s just Marilyn alone in the kitchen, feeling disgusted with herself. She leans over the grill and eats a chicken thigh with her hands, the marinade dripping onto the floor, and now it’s gotten onto her skirt and fallen onto her espadrilles.

  The sisters do the dishes, standing beside each other in such stupefied silence it’s as if they’ve been pummeled. The rest of the family is elsewhere, scattered to the living room and upstairs. Outside, the rain pelts the roof and comes at the windows sideways. Clarissa washes and Lily dries and Noelle puts the dishes back in the cabinets. They move with the mute efficiency of an assembly line.

  “Can you fucking believe it?” Lily says. She waits for Noelle to rebuke her for her language, but even Noelle knows better.

  “I saw them just last week,” Clarissa says, “and they seemed fine. I mean, they were bickering, sure, but I didn’t think anything of it.”

  “I always thought they had a good marriage,” Noelle says.

  “I did too,” says Lily. Though no one, she thinks, pays attention to their parents’ marriage until they’re forced to do so.

  Clarissa, letting the water decant onto a plate, is recalling a toast she gave at her wedding. Standing next to Nathaniel, she told the assembled guests that her parents were an inspiration for them, that the greatest gift they’d given her and Nathaniel was their relationship. “And, sure,” she tells her sisters, “weddings are these big public events where people get sentimental, but I meant what I said about Mom and Dad. I wouldn’t have said those words if I didn’t think they were true.” She looks down at the sink, filled with soap and dirt and mashed-up watermelon rind, everything a turbid gray.

  “They used to do everything together,” Lily says. “Remember in elementary school how all our friends got picked up by babysitters and we got picked up by Mom and Dad? I’d have soccer or music or swimming, and there they were, like conjoined twins. They were the most inefficient people in the world.”

  “Maybe Dad’s retiring was a bad idea,” Clarissa says. “Now he has his own activities. He goes running. He studies opera.”

  “He has his vegetable-chopping course,” Lily says. “Mom’s always making fun of him for that.” The plate she has been drying slips out of her hands, and it hovers momentarily in the air before she reaches out and catches it. Bravo, she thinks darkly. Someone should hire her. They should send her off to the circus.

  She takes over the washing because she can’t just stand there waiting to dry, and now she’s going through the dishes at an incredible clip, piling them in the drainer for her sisters.

  “Nathaniel and I see them every Tuesday,” Clarissa says. “We have a regular dinner date with them.”

  “And nothing seemed different?” Noelle says.

  “I mean, everything’s been different since Leo died. But in the last few weeks, the last month?” And she thinks: Was it obvious? Was there something she was missing, something right beneath her nose?

  “What about you?” Noelle asks Lily.

  “I saw them maybe six weeks ago. Mom was down for a meeting at NIH. Dad came along with her.”

  Noelle reaches into the cabinet to put a bowl away and she stops mid-motion. “Wait a minute. What was Dad doing coming down with her if they were about to split up?”

  “I have no idea.” Something has gotten stuck in the drain; without Lily’s noticing it, the water has risen to overflowing. She turns on the garbage disposal, but it makes a terrible cracking noise, so she turns it off. She removes a corn husk from the drain, and soon the water starts to seep out. A residue of endive and chicken skin settles on the dishes. She feels as if she might retch. She takes off the dish gloves and places them on the counter, where they lie, rubbery and immobile, like two dead fish.

  “That’s all you’re going to say?” says Noelle.

  “What do you want me to say? Malcolm and I took them out to dinner. We went to a nice restaurant.”

  “But what did you talk about?”

  Lily racks her brain for what they discussed, feels a panic overtake her at all the nothingness she retrieves. “It was six weeks ago,” she says. “Maybe more.”

  “Come on, Noelle,” Clarissa says. “Do you remember what you were doing six weeks ago?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen Mom and Dad since the funeral. I can’t be expected to know what’s going on.”

  “And if you’d seen them?” Lily says. “Do you think you’d have figured things out? What would you have done, anyway? Staged an intervention?”

  “I’m just saying,” Noelle says.

  “What?” Lily says. “What are you just saying?”

  The sink fills again, a few bay leaves bobbing to the surface, flipping over and over on themsel
ves.

  “You don’t notice things that are right in front of you, Noelle. Remember that guy you used to date who was so obviously, flamingly gay?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  And the words return to Lily, her own words, from years ago. Hey, Noelle, what are you, deaf?

  Though it’s Clarissa whom Noelle is attacking now. Because what, she wants to know, was Clarissa doing showing up at the house at nine at night when she was supposed to be here at seven? “You fell asleep in the car?”

  “What difference does it make?” Lily says. “She lost track of things.”

  “Well, the timing could have been better. It’s Leo’s memorial. Mom and Dad spent days making dinner for everyone.”

  “Mom and Dad spent days making dinner for you, and you refused to eat it.” Lily opens the refrigerator and rifles through the shelves. She finds a piece of watermelon wrapped in tinfoil and dispenses with it in a few bites.

  “You know how they worry about us,” Noelle says. “I call every Sunday night at seven, and if they’re not home I leave a message. Since Leo died, I haven’t missed it once.”

  “Well, that’s very noble of you,” Lily says.

  “It’s not noble,” says Noelle. “It’s just what I do.”

  Clarissa, meanwhile, remains silent. She’s doing the dishes again, the tendons in her forearms ballooning as she applies pressure to the steel wool. The water is as hot as she can tolerate, her hands turning pink as jellyfish. She’s thinking of their childhood, of the chorus that rang through their days. Go bring Noelle her knapsack, she forgot her homework. Go pick up Noelle from school, she lost her keys. Go take care of Noelle, she fucked the wrong guy. And now Noelle is lecturing her on responsibility. “You’re right,” she says. “Nathaniel and I should have gotten here sooner.”

  “Okay,” Noelle says. “That’s all I was saying.”

  “Jesus, Noelle. Would you leave her the fuck alone?”

  “Forget it,” Clarissa says.

  “I have forgotten it,” Noelle says. “It’s over.”

  Clarissa looks at them squarely. “You want to know why Nathaniel and I were late? We stopped at a motel.” She hasn’t told anyone she’s been trying to conceive, but she’s tired of all this secrecy.

  “You what?” Noelle says.

  “I’ve been trying to get pregnant,” she says. “I was in a 7-Eleven and I started to ovulate.” She explains it all to them, how she and Nathaniel have been trying for a year now. “I mean, I’m thirty-nine. Why did I think it would be so easy?” She lets her hands drop against her thighs. “Anyway, we stopped to have sex at a motel and then, when it was over …”

  “You fell asleep?” Noelle says.

  Clarissa says, “I know you’re Orthodox, Noelle, but don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what can happen after sex.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Lily says. “I honestly didn’t know.”

  “How could you have?” Clarissa hasn’t let Nathaniel breathe a word of it; she hasn’t breathed a word of it herself. And now she feels despicable. Because with her parents splitting up, what difference does any of this make? “Noelle’s right,” she says. “She lives in Israel and you live in D.C., and I see Mom and Dad every week. How could I have been so oblivious?” She slaps a dish towel against the counter: once, twice, three times, four times. A few drops of water come spraying off and land on her jeans.

  She hears footsteps now, and when she looks up her mother is in the entryway to the kitchen, her father behind her. Nathaniel is there, too. And Thisbe and Amram: all the adults in the family.

  “Is something wrong?” Marilyn asks.

  “We’re just doing the dishes,” Lily says.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” says Clarissa. “Everything’s fine.”

  Noelle, on tiptoe, hooks a skillet onto the pot rack hanging from the ceiling. Clarissa turns on the garbage disposal one last time. Standing over the sink, Lily wrings out the dish towels.

  “Thank you for cleaning up,” their father says.

  “We should be thanking you,” says Clarissa. “You’re the one who cooked dinner.” But she feels all formal and stiff making such ceremony out of this, the way her father has made such ceremony out of their having done the dishes.

  “It’s late,” Lily says. “Time for bed.”

  But they remain where they are, standing in the kitchen and just outside it, as if they’re soldered to the floor.

  Marilyn says, “I guess Dad and I really rained on the parade.”

  “Some parade,” Clarissa says. “Get out the floats for Leo’s memorial.”

  “Bad news on top of bad news,” Lily says.

  The clock above the stove chimes midnight. A bird is chirping, a mechanical bird, the clock a gift from one of the girls, for someone’s birthday, Marilyn thinks, though she can’t remember whose. It’s a different bird for every hour, care of the Audubon Society, and now it’s chirping, chirping, issuing its relentless call. “We could certainly use some better news.”

  Her mother, Clarissa thinks, is staring at her, asking her to be the bearer of good tidings, and standing there surrounded by her family, she blurts out, “Nathaniel won a prize.” Instantly, she regrets having said this, and Nathaniel, she can tell, regrets it, too.

  “What prize?” her mother says.

  “It’s nothing,” Nathaniel says. “It’s utterly irrelevant.”

  “Prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box?” Lily says.

  “Pretty much.”

  Clarissa hates herself for having brought this up, for having panicked in the silence. But she has no choice but to go on. She tells her family what little she knows, how Nathaniel won Columbia’s teaching prize. She listens to her own words as she says them, endures the sound of her voice bragging about her husband (oh, how she hates herself!), and now she endures their response, the congratulationses and the oh-that’s-wonderfuls and the where-did-you-get-such-a-talented husbands, even Amram participating, Amram, who, as the other brother-in-law in the family, has a history of feeling shown up and who may, for all Clarissa knows, actually be fuming. But he’s putting on a good show of it, offering his glum congratulations, and Nathaniel, in turn, is glumly receiving them, as is Clarissa, and now Thisbe, a graduate student herself, says, “I’m just happy when my students don’t throw spitballs at me,” and everyone is saying, “Now, now.”

  Soon they all disperse, and it’s just Clarissa alone in the kitchen. A minute passes, and Lily comes in. They’re standing at the corkboard beside the refrigerator, thumbtacked to which are their mother’s publications. There’s an op-ed from USA Today and another op-ed from the Washington Post. Beside them are letters from parents of other journalists who have been killed in the war. “Mom’s support group,” Clarissa says darkly.

  “She’ll have to start another one,” Lily says. “Mothers of dead journalists who dump their husbands. It will be a support group of one.”

  “It will be a support group of many,” Clarissa says. “There are a lot of idiots out there.” Also on the corkboard in their mother’s handwriting is the number of dead in the ongoing war, both U.S. and Iraqi. The same numbers are tacked up in their parents’ kitchen in the city, on the tiny chalkboard beside the phone. Constantly updated, Clarissa thinks, like the national debt. The Iraqi casualties are a matter of conjecture, but her mother has certainly educated herself. Every week she spends hours on the Web, keeping up with the news the papers don’t report. Pinned on the corkboard near one of her op-eds is a photo of the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. flag raised beside it. And, next to it, her mother’s commentary. So much for that.

  “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 b
eyond 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.”