Julie Buxbaum - After You (Random House Readers Circle)

J ULIE B UXBAUM is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School. Her first novel, The Opposite of Love, has been translated into eighteen languages, and optioned to film by Twentieth Century Fox. She currently lives in London.

L ets pretend that things are different. That in the last couple of days, I havent become the kind of person who resorts to wishing on eyelashes, first stars of the night, and the ridiculous 11:11, both a.m. and p.m., in earnest and with my eyes closed. That Lucy and her family havent transformed into tabloid stars with a full picture on the cover of the Daily Mail with the headline Notting Hill Murdergate!, and the lead story on the BBC evening news. Lets pretend that I am home, on the right side of the Atlantic, the one where I understand the English language, and that tomorrow will be just like early last week, or the week before that one, when the days were indistinguishable. That its not necessary to resort to memoriesto a time beforewhen I think of Lucy.

How about this: Lets just pretend that Lucy is not dead.

That she will not continue to be dead now, even though thats what that meansdead.

Want some more? I ask Sophie, Lucys eight-year-old daughter, but she seems uninterested in the elaborate bowl of ice cream Ive doused with concentric circles of whipped cream. She sits with her knees drawn to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. An upright fetal position, a pose that has been as reflexive for her as irrational wishing and pretending has been for me. Striped pastel pajamas ring her legspink, blue, yellow stripesand on top, she wears a long-sleeved T-shirt with a decal of a purple horse with a silver mane. Her socks have abrasive soles that scratch and swish along the kitchen tiles, a sound I havent heard since my own childhood and that I associate with my younger brother, Mikey, asking for a glass of water before bedtime.

She shakes her head no.

Is it good?

She stays noncommittal. Her tiny glasses slip down her nose and are caught by her finger, pushed back up with an efficient tap. They are tortoiseshell frames, brown on the outside, pink along the inner edges, like an eyelid, and they magnify her already large brown eyes, so that she always looks just a tiny bit moony.

Sophie has not been speaking much since the accident. Thats what weve been calling itGreg, Lucys husband, and Ithe accident, a comforting euphemism despite the fact that there is nothing accidental about what happened. The word homicide is one that no eight-year-old should ever have to hear. Using accident makes us feel better too. As adults, we can handle an accident; thats in our repertoire.

I am not sure when Sophie last spoke out loud. She was interviewed by the police on Thursday, right afterward, and somehow Lucys little girl found the strength to use her words and describe the unspeakable. When I arrived less than twenty-four hours later, blurry from grief and the red-eye, she said, Hi, Auntie Ellie, before putting her arms around my waist and burying her face in my shirt. But since then, since that first greeting, spoken in her crisp British accent, I cant remember the last time I heard her voice. Did she say good night to Greg before he went upstairs and knocked himself out with Xanax?

Soph?

A shrug.

Where did you get that shirt? Its pretty. And that horse has really cool hair.

Another shrug.

Soph, sweetheart, are you not talking?

Sophie just looks at me, her eyes burning in a silent protest.

Shrug number three. She looks impossibly small and thin, the stringiness of her arms and legs exaggerated by the unforgiving cotton of her pajamas. I wish shed eat more. I want to feed her cookies and sugar cereal too. Tomorrow, first thing, Ill replace their two percent milk with full fat.

My mother, a therapist, warned me this might happen to Sophie. That kids often go quiet for a while in the wake of a traumatic loss. Their only way of exerting control in a world in which they clearly have none.

Its been only twenty-nine hours since Lucys funeral, an event so improbable that pretending still works. Surreal, too, like the news vans that are idling out front of her house, waiting for a sound bite. I want to scoop Sophie up into my arms and let her cry into my shoulder, but she is not the sort of kid you just scoop up. She would know that I was doing it more for my comfort than for hers.

Okay, I say, as if shed actually answered me. Its all right if you dont want to talk for now. But not forever, right? I love that voice of yours. Cheerio. Lets take the lift and go to the loo, I say in my best British impression, which used to be a surefire way to make her laugh.

Speak like me, Mummy, Auntie Ellie! Sophie used to demand of Lucy and me when I would come to visit, and the two of us would go back and forth, spitting out all of the British expressions we knew. Even after nearly a decade in London, and despite a husband and child whose inflections were as posh as the Queens, Lucys Boston accent had barely softened. She always paaked her caa in Haavad Yaad.

Today, Sophie ignores me and looks around like shes not sure whose kitchen this is. We are in the breakfast nook, with its Americana diner style, the sort you would see in a cornflakes commercial: two kids, two bowls of cereal, and two glasses of orange juice, with two parentsalways two cheerful parentsrushing everyone out of their red pleather seats and off to school after their nutritionally balanced breakfast. I can picture Lucy deciding to put a booth in the corner, knowing that making your house look like a home is the first step.

Were going to be okay, you know, I say, and run my fingers through Sophies curly dirty-blond hair; they get caught on a knot. I remember the first time I held her, when she was less than a week old, bald and tiny, and how she would sleep with her mouth opening and closing against my arm, her dreams, no doubt, filled with glorious imaginary milk. She had seemed so fragile then, so far from a real person, that looking at her now, a fully formed little girl, beautiful and tough and exerting her power in the only way she can, makes me glow with a vicarious pride for Lucy. My best friend did a lot with her thirty-five years on this planet; her expos on the corruption in the Chilean government should have won her a Pulitzer. But of one thing I am sure. Making this creature, this fierce mini-Lucy, is my favorite of all.