The World Without You (8 page)

At information, she asks to place an announcement, but no sooner does she do so than she hears her name being called out—“Lily! Lily!”—like some clarion call from years ago. It’s Noelle, followed by Amram and their four boys, two of whom are sliding shoeless through the terminal. Another of them (The second? Lily thinks. The third? There are so many of them, and they’re so closely spaced, it’s hard to keep track) has gotten hold of Noelle’s pocketbook and is sifting through the contents.

“Hello there,” Lily says, and she kisses Noelle on the cheek. Then she kisses her on the other cheek, in a show of gallantry, of Europeanism, she isn’t sure what. Mostly, she realizes, it’s a show of discomfort, because, Jesus, Noelle is her sister, but the fact is they can’t stand each other, and when Lily feels uncomfortable she goes for high drama; histrionics is her point at rest.

“Hello, Lily,” Amram says.

Lily takes a step toward her brother-in-law. Then, remembering that Orthodox Jewish men don’t kiss women they’re not married to, she reaches out and shakes Amram’s hand. “How are you, Amram?”

“I’m all right.” Amram looks warily at the crowd funneling past him.

“You’re here,” she tells them.

Amram nods. “Land of the free, home of the brave.”

It looks to Lily as if Amram has put on weight, but she can’t be sure; he has always been fleshy-faced and heavyset. He’s standing next to Noelle with his hands behind his back, looking ahead expressionlessly, as if waiting to be instructed what to do and already resenting those instructions. He has blue eyes, and blond, thinning hair pasted to his head by a sheen of sweat, on top of which lies a black velvet yarmulke. His face is tinged with color as if he’s been exerting himself. He’s exhibiting what appears to be a willed calm.

Lily trains her gaze on her four nephews, whom she hasn’t seen since Leo’s funeral. One by one, she takes them in a hug, and now she steps back, looking at Ari, the baby. Except he’s not a baby anymore. “My God.”

“What?” says Noelle.

“He looks so much like Leo.”

“You think?”

“It’s like I’ve been transported back thirty years.” Saying this, and looking at her nephew, Lily feels her throat constrict. It makes her soften for an instant, even toward Noelle. “Well, you made it.” She touches her sister on the sleeve. “Welcome home.”

“Thanks,” Noelle says, and for an instant she seems less guarded, too.

“How was your flight?” Lily asks.

“It was long,” Dov says.

“Twelve hours long,” says Yoni.

“It felt more like twenty-four,” Akiva says, looking at his brothers in exasperation. Lily remembers this about him, the way, in his siblings’ presence, he assumes the pose of an adult.

“Come here,” Lily says. “Let me have a look at you.” And now she’s crouching before her nephews in the middle of the terminal, two on one side, two on the other, her arms draped over them. “You probably don’t even remember me.”

“Of course we remember you,” Akiva says. He elbows his brother in the ribs, who elbows another brother, and soon they’re all nodding, one after the other, like dominoes that have been toppled.

They’re all blue-eyed and pale-faced, with delicate features: little Aryan Israelis, Lily thinks. What would the Nazis have made of this? Akiva, especially, is curious-seeming, as if absorbing some signal the world is sending out. Yoni, the second oldest, is slightly darker-complected, though he, too, has eyes the blue of quartz. All four of them look like they spend time in the sun; they appear remarkably healthy next to the other travelers wheeling their luggage into Wendy’s and Krispy Kreme and T.G.I. Friday’s and Sbarro. “So this is what the army does to you. It makes you handsome.”

“Hush, you,” Noelle says. “The army, thank God, is years away.”

“Seriously,” Lily says. “You could put these kids in commercials.”

“Okay,” Noelle says. “That’s enough.” But she says it gently, and Lily can tell she’s secretly pleased.

“What happened to Clarissa?” Amram asks. “Weren’t you supposed to meet up with her?”

“She didn’t show,” Lily says.

“What do you mean she didn’t show?”

Lily shrugs. “She left me a message saying she’ll meet us at the house. Luckily, I brought the van.” Most of the time the van sits in the parking lot at Malcolm’s restaurant. He uses it to go on runs to the farmer’s market and the liquor wholesaler. But he won’t need it over the holiday, so Lily has commandeered it; she figures if she can’t bring Malcolm himself, she might as well bring his van. Still, she says, they’ll need to rent a car, too.

Dov, meanwhile, has spotted someone eating an Auntie Anne’s Pretzel. He wants one, he announces. He wants a bagel as well and, while he’s at it, a slice of pizza, all of which requests his younger brother reminds him can’t be fulfilled because the food isn’t kosher.

“Nothing in this country is kosher,” Dov says forlornly.

“There are kosher restaurants in America,” Akiva says.

“Not as many as in Israel,” says Yoni.

“Let’s get going,” Noelle says. “It’s two and a half hours to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.”

Amram has a suitcase in each hand and a duffel slung over his shoulder. The two older boys are wheeling suitcases themselves, which leaves the last suitcase and the car seats to Lily and Noelle, sister beside sister moving through the airport toward the rental car counter where they’ll divide forces, as Lily has suggested. Lily will take Noelle, the two older boys, and most of the luggage, and the two younger boys and the rest of the bags will go with Amram.

Noelle puts down the car seats.

“Is something wrong?”

“I got lipstick on you,” Noelle says. “It must have been when I kissed you.” She licks her forefinger, and now she’s putting the finger to Lily’s cheek, and when that doesn’t work she takes out a tissue and places it against her sister’s skin. And there Lily is, standing in the airport, and she feels as if she’s going to cry, the touch of Noelle’s hand to her face. Where is this feeling coming from? Always she finds herself caught unawares. And now Noelle is licking her finger again, telling her to hold still, and Lily does as she’s told, feeling her pulse flutter within her. She’s back to years ago, their parents taking them to the beach, the Pavlovian sound of the ice-cream truck, the four of them beside each other in the sand with their rainbow ice pops and chocolate malteds, the handing out of Wet Ones. Lily’s mother is wiping one of their mouths, and then it’s Noelle wiping Lily’s mouth, and Lily is wiping Clarissa, who’s wiping Leo, the four of them in a row the way Lily’s nephews are now, marching determinedly through the airport. Lily hears her mother’s voice,
They’re like monkeys, David, pulling nits out of each other’s fur.
They had been that, Lily thinks, hadn’t they—four little monkey?. And Noelle is saying, “There, I got it off,” and she’s telling Lily a story about synagogue, how you always know which prayer books have been in the women’s section because they’re the ones with the lipstick smudges across the page. But Lily hears only the outlines of this. She has her hand to her cheek, is saying “It’s off, right, the lipstick?” and now she realizes Malcolm’s van is still over in domestic, and so she tells Noelle she’ll go get it and drive over to rental car to retrieve them.

Now, in the van, a quiet settles on them; Lily can sense they’re going to fight, or if not fight, then remain silent, which feels to her like its own sort of fighting. She and Malcolm don’t argue much, but when they do, there’s no place she’d like to be less than in the car, the endless hum of the tires, the rubber clicking over grate after grate. Noelle sits beside her in the passenger seat; the two older boys are in back. Noelle is wearing a yellow blouse and a denim skirt down to her ankles, and her hair is hidden beneath a kerchief.

They pass Cambridge and Newton and are headed toward Worcester; it’s a straight shot west on the Massachusetts Pike. It’s four-thirty, and they’re supposed to be in Lenox for a seven o’clock dinner. They should get there on time if the traffic isn’t bad, but now the cars in front of them have stalled and a pickup truck is pulled over at the side of the road, an orange pylon flattened beneath it.

It goes on like this for fifteen, twenty miles, the cars proceeding at their own haphazard pace, the vehicles moving slowly around a bend, swaying like beads on a necklace. They pass Framingham State College and they’re in Fayville now. To the sides of the road, the grass is lined with realtor signs and little American flags pitched into the ground. In the distance is a Red Rooster drive-through, with a giant-sized soft-serve vanilla ice-cream cone perched on top. A billboard reads,
WHEN
WORDS
FAIL
,
MUSIC
SPEAKS
. The van in front of them says Kennedy Livestock. They pass telephone pole after telephone pole, all that wire running west. Lily glances over at Noelle, who wears a mystical, faraway look, as if wherever she’s been since Lily last saw her, she has left a part of herself. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“You could say, ‘How are you, Lily?’”

“How are you, Lily?”

“I’m fine.”

Noelle is silent.

“And how are
you
, Noelle?”

“I’m fine, too.”

Behind them, the boys have fallen asleep, each with his head pressed to the window, thumping against the glass as Lily accelerates, as she winds around the occasional bend. She turns on the radio and music comes through the speakers, bad music, she thinks, but at least there are other voices in the car.

A Saab brakes in front of them with a bumper sticker that reads
JESUS
LOVES
YOU
BUT
I
’
M
HIS
FAVORITE
. A deer stands at the side of the turnpike, still as a signpost, looking at them so intently it’s as if he’s trying to make out their words.

Presently the news comes on, and it’s bad news, of course. Lily lives in D.C., an entire city dedicated to making bad news and watching it spread like a disease. Right now, that disease is Iraq, where, the broadcaster announces, another car bomb has gone off. Two Americans were killed, and dozens of Iraqis. “Occupation, occupation,” Lily says glumly.

“You better get used to it,” Noelle says.

“I am used to it. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

The car in front of them seems not to like it either: on its bumper is a sticker that says
NO
BLOOD
FOR
OIL
.

But when Noelle looks up at the sticker, she says, “That’s a stupid slogan.”

Lily doesn’t respond.

“You disagree?”

“It’s stupid in the sense that all slogans are stupid. As far as slogans go, it’s less stupid than most.”

On the radio, the newscaster goes on about the war casualties. Lily hears the words
Baghdad, Mosul, Basrah
, and dejected, disgusted, she turns the radio off.

“Taste of your own medicine?” Noelle says.

“What medicine?”

“All those years the U.S. criticized Israel, and now look at the world’s greatest superpower. A couple thousand people die in Manhattan and the heavens have fallen in. Your country lectured everyone for decades, and now that it’s happening here, no force is too excessive.”

Lily certainly isn’t going to disagree about that. Though she can’t help adding, “
My
country, Noelle? Have you renounced your U.S. citizenship?”

“Not technically.”

“I didn’t think so. A lot of people would kill for your passport.” She looks over at her sister. “Just don’t fight with Mom, okay?”

The sides of the turnpike are thick with brush, the rock formation jutting out above it. Clouds block the sun, it’s getting harder to see, and soon it starts to rain, so Lily turns on the windshield wipers. “Does Mom send you her op-eds?”

“She doesn’t need to,” Noelle says. “The one that ran in the
Times
a couple of months back? It was reprinted in the
Jerusalem Post.
”

But Lily doesn’t want to talk any more about this, doesn’t want to argue with Noelle about the war, about anything having to do with Leo. But it’s all she can do to stop herself. Noelle voted for Bush—and not just once, but twice! She voted for him even after Leo died! Lily holds all fifty million people who voted for him responsible for Leo’s death. With Noelle, though, it’s worse; she was Leo’s sister.
You killed your own brother!
she wants to shout.

They’re past Worcester, where an enormous pumpkin sits at the side of the road, as if waiting, derelict, for Halloween. In the distance is a sign for Wachusett Lumber. Election Day is months off, but already campaigning has begun; little flags are staked at the side of the road with candidates’ names printed on them. County legislator. County court. Town supervisor. Someone named French is running for something. Lily turns the radio back on, but all she gets is static. “Surprise, surprise. They still don’t have radio towers in the Berkshires.”

“We’re not even close to the Berkshires,” Noelle says. “We’re more than an hour away.”

“Well, it’s anticipating us.” A gob of bird shit splats against their windshield; Lily turns the wipers on. “The last time I was in Lenox, no one could get cell phone coverage. It’s like the fucking Stone Age up there.”

“Lily!” Noelle thrusts her thumb over her shoulder to where Akiva and Yoni are sitting. “Watch your language.”

Ah, yes, Lily thinks. The fucking Stone Age. Noelle who when she was eight had her mouth washed out with soap by her third-grade teacher. Noelle who as a teenager used to say about some guy or another, “That’s the one I’m balling,” and Lily would look at her in benign amusement and say, “You’re balling him, Noelle? My understanding is he’s the one balling you.” Now religious Noelle with her long skirts and head coverings has become the language police. “I’m sorry, Noelle. The dang Stone Age. The gosh-darn Stone Age. The dickens of a Stone Age.”

“How about just the Stone Age?”

“All I’m saying is I’d like to get cell phone coverage up there.”