The World Without You Read Online Free PDF Page A

know whether Clarissa would consider having children with him. If she wouldn’t, he wasn’t sure he could marry her.
    To hear it put so baldly startled Clarissa. If Nathaniel wanted a mother for his children, he should have chosen someone else; there were plenty of women who’d have been happy to bear his child. It felt crude and utilitarian, not to mention unromantic, as if their relationship had been driven by an ulterior motive she’d only now unearthed. It made her wonder whether she and Nathaniel should be getting married in the first place; for a time it seemed they would have to break up.
    But they loved each other, and when Clarissa, despite holding no stock in biological clocks, began to see her friends have children; when she held a friend’s baby and, to her surprise, was overcome by an almost visceral pull; when she turned thirty-one, and thirty-two, and she started to realize that although she wasn’t a kids person, exactly, she wasn’t exactly not a kids person either; when she began to think that if she never had a child she might someday regret it—when she felt all this, and saw how important it was to Nathaniel, she agreed to try.
    But a year passed, and another, and they hadn’t begun yet. She was thirty-five, she was thirty-six, she was thirty-seven, and it seemed they were in a holding pattern from which they couldn’t emerge. Then Leo was killed, and she decided they couldn’t wait any longer. Because she’d been planning her life and her brother went off and died, and there was no point, she realized, in planning things.
    Something happened when it didn’t work those first few months, and she panicked, realizing she’d waited so long to get pregnant that now she might not be able to. It wasn’t supposed to happen, this savage, seemingly chemical urge to reproduce. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, living in Brooklyn, home to the world’s greatest population explosion. Whatever the reason, this wish to have a baby has blindsided her, has blindsided Nathaniel too, who has found in the last year that he doesn’t recognize the person he married.
    She’s dressed now, folding laundry in the alcove outside their bedroom, while Nathaniel is in the bathroom taking a shower. She removes her cello from its case and seats herself on the ottoman.
    “Something to sing by?” Nathaniel calls out.
    “I guess.” Though it’s hard to sing to Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B Minor: there are no words. “You can hum to it,” she says, but Nathaniel can’t hear her from beneath the shower water.
    When he steps out of the bathroom, she’s still moving the bow across the strings. He taps her lightly with his towel. “I thought you were in a rush to get going.”
    “Careful,” she says, poking him. “You don’t want to get water on the strings.”
    It’s only in the last year that she has started to play again. For years—for decades, in fact—her cello remained in storage. It fell into desuetude, she likes to say, though really it fell into disrepute. She didn’t so much as want to look at it. It pains her to play—she’s such a pale version of what she once was—but she’s driven to do it nonetheless. Music calms her in a way nothing else does, in a way it never used to when she was playing seriously.
    They’ve been hoping to beat the holiday traffic, but now, as they drive through downtown Brooklyn, it seems the traffic has beaten them. On Flatbush Avenue, they’re stalled across the street from an Italian restaurant. “We could stop for a whole meal,” Nathaniel says, “in the time it would take us to get down this block.”
    The Brooklyn Bridge is backed up, too. A couple of police officers flank the entrance ramp, one of them checking the trunk of a van.
    “It’s only July second,” Clarissa says. “Imagine what it will be like tomorrow and the Fourth.” Green threats, yellow threats, orange threats, red threats: it’s hard for her to remember what means what. Hard, too,