The World Without You (26 page)

“I want to give you some money,” Gretchen said.

“Oh, Gretchen, I can’t let you do that.”

From her pocketbook, Gretchen produced an envelope with her name embossed on it. “You’re alone,” she said. “You have a baby to take care of.”

“Gretchen, please.”

Gretchen reached across the table and handed her the envelope.

“What about the girls?”

“What girls?”

“Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle. Are you giving them money, too?” How, Thisbe wondered, could she accept money from Gretchen when they weren’t related by blood, when, blood aside, their connection felt flimsy. She had been married to Leo for only five years, and during that time they’d rarely seen Gretchen.

“The girls will be fine,” Gretchen said. “You’re the one who needs my help.”

“So the money would be for Calder?”

“It’s not for me to decide.”

She would lose this battle, Thisbe understood, the way everyone lost to Gretchen. No matter what Gretchen said, the money was intended for Calder. If Thisbe hadn’t been the mother of Leo’s son, Gretchen probably wouldn’t have even taken her out to lunch.

She has no memory of what she did next, of anything, really, from the moment she left the restaurant until she got home. She convinced herself she had refused the money, but when she awoke the next morning the envelope was still in her coat pocket, in the envelope with Gretchen’s name embossed on it.

Two hundred thousand dollars! Standing in the kitchen, holding the check with both hands as if the very number made it too heavy to lift, she began to cry. All her life, she had remained ignorant of money. It was a combination of laziness and futility at math, along with the idea, passed on tacitly by her parents, that excessive focus on money was deserving of contempt, that if you knew too much about money you knew too little about everything else. Leo had been in charge of their finances, and when he died she panicked. She bought a book about money management and enrolled in a one-day seminar on financial planning, which taught her just enough to make her realize how little she knew.

Was it even possible to cash a $200,000 check? If she deposited it, she’d be regarded as a fraud. She’d felt fraudulent enough eating at that restaurant with Gretchen, where the bill had come to $150.

A month later, when she got to Berkeley, the check was still in her wallet. If she waited long enough, it would be void. How long? Ninety days? A hundred and eighty days? The only thing that made her deposit it was that Gretchen would realize she hadn’t done so and she couldn’t bear to face her.

There are college savings plans now, and educational IRAs, but she hasn’t invested in those. She could put the money in U.S. Treasury Bonds or C.D.s, tying it up to get a better interest rate, but she hasn’t done that either. She simply deposited the money into the same checking account into which her monthly graduate stipend gets deposited, and then, not wanting to mix the two up, she opened a second account, just for the money Gretchen gave her. “I haven’t told anyone about this,” she says to Lily.

“Not even Wyeth?”

She shakes her head. She certainly hasn’t told Marilyn and David, convinced that they will feel as she does, that the money isn’t rightfully hers. She hasn’t even told her own parents. She has two hundred thousand dollars plus interest collecting at the headquarters of Wells Fargo and her parents are helping pay for Calder’s preschool! They’re sending her additional checks whenever they can find an excuse—her birthday, Calder’s birthday, Christmas, Mother’s Day—trying to make it seem as if it’s not outright charity. She feels terrible about this, and she keeps a careful tally of the money, promising herself she’ll pay them back. “I haven’t benefited from it,” she tells Lily. “Not even a penny.”

“Then you’re crazier than I thought.”

“Why?”

“You’re a starving graduate student, Thisbe. I should have bought you more than a tank of gas. I should have paid for your therapist.”

“Who are you to talk? You don’t take money from Gretchen either.”

“But if I were a graduate student—”

“Oh, stop it with the graduate student, already! It’s insulting!”

“And if I were a widow with a three-year-old to take care of, I wouldn’t have so much pride.”

“Is that what you think this is? Pride?”

“You don’t?”

“You’re her granddaughter, Lily.”

“And you’re—”

“I lived in the same city as her for years and I hardly ever saw her. I’m just some girl who married into the family.”

“You’re the mother of her great-grandson, is what you are.”

“Who, a year later, is shacked up with another guy.”

“Ah,” Lily says. “So that’s the issue. Wyeth.”

“It’s one of them. I don’t want the privilege of receiving Gretchen’s gift. Or the burden of it, either. I’m alone now, and I want to do things on my own. You of all people should understand that.”

“And so you’ll deprive Calder in order to make your point?”

“Calder will manage.”

“How?”

“The same way everyone else manages who doesn’t have two hundred thousand dollars in his name. Which is to say the rest of the world.”

“So what are you going to do with the money? Just let it sit there?”

“It’s what I’ve been doing until now.”

“Fine,” Lily says. “I can see your mind is made up.”

They stop in to O’Brien’s to pick up some beers, and now, as they move silently around the bend, the Community Center comes into view, where Leo’s memorial will be held tomorrow. It’s six in the evening, and two women in their forties emerge from the center holding yoga mats. Above the entrance to the center is an American flag. “God bless America,” Lily says glumly. “Don’t forget to salute.”

In back, beyond the long porch that spans the width of the building, sits a playground. Everything is made of plastic, the jungle gym and the slide curling back on themselves like those rollercoaster straws Thisbe used to drink from as a girl. The ground is lined with wood chips, and she spreads out her jacket and sits down. Lily subsides next to her. Across from them sits a basketball court and five tennis courts. Down the hill is an expanse of green with a volleyball net erected in the middle. An elderly couple has been playing tennis, but now they’ve put their racquets away, and it’s just Thisbe and Lily alone.

It’s a hundred yards across the lawn to the Lenox Children’s Center, where, when they sit down on the concrete steps, they can see the Community Center looming above them, the ballroom on the second floor where the memorial will be held. Behind the Children’s Center Thisbe installs herself on a swing. Now Lily does, too, and soon they’re swinging, climbing high above town, then descending in an arc toward each other.

“Look at me,” Thisbe says, pointing at her open beer bottle. “I’m back in Lenox and I’m going to get myself arrested.”

“You’ll spend Leo’s memorial in jail.” Lily moves past her in the shadows, her legs and torso flashing by. The cables sway from side to side; their legs almost touch. Lily takes her hand, and now they’re swinging together, as if they’re on a trapeze.

Back on the steps, they stare up the hill at the Community Center. “That’s where it’s going to be,” Thisbe says. “My late husband’s memorial.”

“Your late husband,” Lily says, and she forces out a laugh.

“I figure if I talk that way it might be easier.”

They sit quietly for several seconds, dragging their feet through the grass.

“Everyone who knew us says Leo and I were great together. Our tragic love story. There’s no love like the love that’s been erased.”

“What about you?” Lily says.

“Me?”

“Do
you
say you were great together?”

“Sometimes we were great and sometimes we weren’t.” Toward the end, she admits, they were less and less great. In the months leading up to his departure for Iraq, she and Leo were fighting more and more. It was even worse when he got there. She would stay up like a schoolgirl waiting for his call, and when he finally did call, they would fight about the fact that he hadn’t been calling. Calder’s second birthday was coming up, and she wanted to know whether he would be home for the party. But he couldn’t be sure, which was his answer to everything. They’d agreed, he reminded her, that he would go to Iraq. Agreed! As if he’d signed a contract! I agree to work for
Newsday
for a paltry salary! I agree to cover a war I’m opposed to, waged by a president I don’t support, a president who stole the election! And she—she’d agreed to none of it!

Leo didn’t make it home for Calder’s birthday, and a week later, at four in the morning, Thisbe had to take Calder in to the emergency room. He was having an asthma attack; he couldn’t breathe.

“Come home now,” she told Leo.

“What do you mean come home now? What would I tell my editor? That my kid is sick?”

“I don’t care what you tell your editor. Just come home.”

Where, she wondered, was the boy she’d met, affable, winsome Leo who had once convinced his mother to grow pot for him; that way, she could be sure it wasn’t tainted. Years ago, in that vast swath of his life before she came along, he used to argue with his friends about which was the better trick, putting the porn movie inside the Disney movie box or the Disney movie inside the porn movie box, both of which pranks they used to perform on torpid summer nights as they trolled the local video store. It was sophomoric, it was ridiculous, Thisbe didn’t even know him then, but she’d have chosen that teenager over the man he had become.

Yet even early on she’d seen glints of his resolve. When he was editor of the
Argus
, he’d once stayed up for sixty straight hours.

“So the defense rests,” Lily says.

“What defense?”

“Even if your marriage to Leo was perfect, you wouldn’t have to justify what’s happening now.”

Maybe she doesn’t, Thisbe thinks. But what she doesn’t tell Lily, what she can’t bring herself to say, is that late at night in one of their awful phone calls she told Leo she was through; she wanted a trial separation. Afterward, she had a premonition he was going to die. Silly, silly Thisbe, she thought. What did it mean to have a premonition your husband was going to die in Iraq? Someone aimed a gun at you, and you were long past the point of premonition.

“It’s no fun being alone,” she says. “I’m thirty-three and I have a toddler, and when people say ‘How are you?’ to me I wonder if it’s a greeting or a question. Because if it’s a question, the answer is long, and it’s different from moment to moment.” Everyone, she thinks, wants to know about the milestones—Leo’s birthday, their anniversary—and those are hard, of course, but it’s the everyday things that are the toughest. When she used to shop for groceries, she would get this cereal Leo liked, Great Grains Raisins, Dates and Pecans, and she mustn’t have been thinking because a couple of months ago she ended up with a box of it in her shopping cart. There it was when she got home, sitting in her bag from the Strand, which was where she and Leo used to buy their books. She was clear across the country, holding that box of cereal, and she couldn’t even eat it—she’s allergic to nuts—and she was standing in the kitchen and she started to cry.

“Before Leo died,” she tells Lily, “we talked about getting a dog. He had his heart set on a Siberian husky. He’d even picked out a name for her. He was going to call her Demeter. But I wasn’t going to take care of a dog while he was in Iraq. You come back, I told him, you settle into a life in Berkeley, and we’ll get a dog.” But then he died and she was alone, and she thought, stupidly, she’d be less lonely if she had a dog, and Calder wanted a dog, too. But there was no way they could handle a Siberian husky. She had just started graduate school and she was taking care of Calder, who was as much work as a whole pack of Siberian huskies. “So we settled on a turtle,” she tells Lily, “and sometimes when I’m home and Calder is at day care I’ll go over to the tank and pick that turtle up. I’ll take my highlighter and poke it in the back because I’m just the kind of compulsive grad student who always carries her highlighter with her, and the turtle will just lie there—dead, for all I know. There I am, in my T-shirt and underwear at eleven in the morning, thinking, This is the solution to my loneliness? A fucking reptile? A turtle I’ve named Demeter, which is a retarded name for a turtle, especially since it turns out he’s male? And all I can think is, I’m never, ever going to get over Leo.”

“You
are
getting over him,” Lily says.

“Which is even worse.”

Lily stares straight ahead of her. “If it’s as serious with Wyeth as you say it is, you’re going to have to tell my parents.”

Thisbe nods. She also needs to talk to Noelle. Because Noelle was the last person to see Leo alive. Maybe Noelle can answer her questions. Thisbe doesn’t even know what those questions are, but she knows she needs to talk to her.

They drive back to the house with the windows open, the breeze blowing Thisbe’s hair against her face. Lily presses on the gas, and now they’re hurtling up Cliffwood Street into the shadows.

When they reach the house, a single lantern is on next to the bird feeder, casting a ribbon of light across the porch. A lamp flashes on upstairs. Thisbe shuts the car door behind her and, using her jacket as an umbrella, she makes her way up the path.

When they step inside, David is in the foyer removing his rain boots. Amram, though, hasn’t returned. Noelle, as if to make a point, has set the dinner table without a place setting for him.

“Don’t worry,” Marilyn says. “He’ll be back soon.”

“That’s what you told me six hours ago.”

Marilyn stands at the entrance to the kitchen, holding a ladle in one hand and an oven mitt in the other. “You were gone for quite a while.”

“We had a lot to talk about,” Lily says.

“Well, come help make dinner.” Marilyn ushers them through the swinging door and into the pantry, where she hands them each an apron. She removes a bunch of carrots from the fridge, and a bag of arugula. “You can wash and chop these,” she tells Thisbe. “The salad bowl is above the sink. And you,” she says to Lily, “can help me make the fruit soup.”