Free The World Without You by Joshua Henkin Page A

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.