The World Without You Read Online Free PDF

to stay on high alert. Watching the police officers search the van, she thinks of Leo, of course, though Leo was in Baghdad when he was killed, not on the Brooklyn Bridge. And heightened security was the last thing on his mind. For as long as she can remember, he preferred heightened insecurity.
    “When does Noelle get in?”
    “Four?” she says. “Maybe four-thirty?” She rifles through her bag to find her date book.
    “I haven’t seen her in …”
    “A year.” Noelle flew in for Leo’s funeral, but when it was over she returned to Jerusalem, and she hasn’t been back since. Money is tight for her and Amram. Still, Clarissa thinks, how can she have absented herself for so long? When they spoke in February, Clarissa told Noelle she’d pay for a flight, but Noelle refused; she said she’d fly in for the memorial.
    “And Amram,” Nathaniel says.
    “Mister Asparagus Pee.” It’s what Clarissa and Lily still call Amram. Amram and Noelle went to high school together, though back then he was known as Arthur. Arthur was the class prankster, overweight and disheveled, well liked in the way that overweight boys can be well liked, whereas a girl as heavy as Arthur would have been ostracized. Arthur was always turning scatology into philosophy. He wove elaborate theories as to why people liked the smell of their own farts; he considered suitable for scientific inquiry the question of why some people’s pee smelled after they ate asparagus while other people’s didn’t. Apparently, it was a matter of having a particular enzyme, but Arthur hypothesized that it wasn’t the pee itself but the ability to smell it that distinguished the two groups. One day, when asparagus was being served at lunch, a bunch of ninth-grade boys could be seen shuttling in and out of the bathroom under Arthur’s supervision to smell each other’s pee.
    Now, as they head up the West Side Highway, Nathaniel gives a desultory wave in the direction of his office. Above the branches, Clarissa can make out the tops of the buildings on Riverside Drive. It’s the neighborhood where she spent much of her childhood. Evenings, from her family’s balcony, she used to stare across the Hudson at the Palisades, the amusement park flickering, the Ferris wheel lit up like an enormous necklace.
    “Are you ready for the next few days?”
    She looks at him forlornly: how could she possibly be?
    An airplane streaks across the horizon, drawing something in chalk, but the writing disappears as soon as it’s been printed, lost in the cloud cover and the darkening sky, the hints of impending rain.
    “Did you write out your speech?”
    She shakes her head.
    “You’ll have time when you get there.”
    “It might be better just to speak it. Sometimes when you prepare it’s even worse.”
    A car backfires. Or maybe it’s fireworks already going off. Even as a girl she was indifferent to fireworks, the boom like a rifle’s recoil, the smear of color across the sky; you’ve seen one firework, she thought then, you’ve seen them all. Now, though, it feels like taunting: all that enforced good cheer. She thinks, the nerve of Leo to die on the Fourth. As Nathaniel drives on, she falls asleep to the hum of the movement, the ticking of the grates beneath their tires. She dreams of Leo. He’s not doing anything—he’s just hovering on the edges—but she has an image of him as a baby, and of her changing him on the table beside his crib. Another image comes to her, a Saturday and it’s raining out, and she’s watching Leo, who’s only ten months old, thinking he’s going to talk someday, that he’s going to have opinions. It seemed inconceivable at the time, and in that inability to conceive lay a sorrow too, that her brother would grow up and eventually leave her. Often now, when she reflects on her newfound maternal impulses, she thinks back to how she felt about Leo, and she realizes these impulses have always been there and they’ve simply been