First Pages Friday: AFTER YOU by Julie Buxbaum
First Pages Fridays offers a taste of an author's book—from ones long on the shelves to those newly launched, because while you can't judge a book by the cover, you can tell plenty from the first pages.
Today's book, AFTER YOU by Julie Buxbaum:
On a cobblestone street in Notting Hill, Ellie Lerner's life-long best friend, Lucy, is stabbed to death in front of her eight-year-old daughter. Ellie, of course, drops everything – her job, her marriage, her life in the Boston suburbs – and travels to London to pick up the pieces of the life Lucy has left behind. While Lucy's husband, Greg copes with his grief by retreating to the pub, eight-year-old Sophie has simply stopped speaking.
"Buxbaum skillfully handles this tale of grief and growing, resonant with realistic emotional stakes and hard-won wisdom."—Publishers Weekly
AFTER YOU
by Julie Buxbaum
Let's pretend that things are different. That in the last couple of days, I haven't 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 haven't 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. Let's 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 it's not necessary to resort to memories—to a time before—when I think of Lucy.
How about this: Let's just pretend that Lucy is not dead.
That she will not continue to be dead now, even though that's what that means—dead.
"Want some more?" I ask Sophie, Lucy's eight-year-old daughter, but she seems uninterested in the elaborate bowl of ice cream I've 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 legs—pink, blue, yellow stripes—and 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 haven't 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. That's what we've been calling it—Greg, Lucy's husband, and I—"the 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; that's 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 Lucy's 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 can't 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? It's 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 she'd eat more. I want to feed her cookies and sugar cereal too. Tomorrow, first thing, I'll 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.
It's been only twenty-nine hours since Lucy's 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 she'd actually answered me. "It's all right if you don't want to talk for now. But not forever, right? I love that voice of yours. Cheerio. Let's 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 Queen's, Lucy's Boston accent had barely softened. She always paa'ked her caa' in Haa'va'd Yaa'd.
Today, Sophie ignores me and looks around like she's 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 parents—always two cheerful parents—rushing 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.
"We're going to be okay, you know," I say, and run my fingers through Sophie's 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 exposé 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.
Julie's Bio
I was born in 1977, and spent my childhood in Rockland County, New York, where there were some happy years, more awkward ones, and multiple forays into the regrettable world of perms and spray up bangs. After high school, I attended the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied Political Science, Philosophy, and Economics. To this day, I am not sure why I picked PPE, other than the fact that I have always been a sucker for a good deal, and it sounded a lot like three for the price of one. As a result, I know very little about a lot, which tends to come in handy only at cocktail parties, and even then, maybe once every two years.
During college, I worked as a technician for a sleep deprivation study, which until becoming a writer, was the best gig I ever had. Basically, I got paid to attach electrodes to people's heads and then to keep them awake for an absurd number of hours with the well-practiced art of inane babbling. My time was well spent though: the study ultimately proved that when people don't sleep for long periods of time they get—wait for it—very, very tired.
Directly after college, I attended Harvard Law School. After my first Boston winter, though, in a quest for warmer weather, I spent the summer interning at the US Attorney's Office in Honolulu. There, I did research to help bust a fake I.D. ring, an assignment that let's just say still makes me feel a little hypocritical and guilty.
After graduation, I moved to New York to work as a litigator at a large law firm, where I spent two long winters, and many, many hours working in the MetLife building. When I realized I had not seen sunlight in almost seven hundred and thirty days, I asked to be transferred to their Los Angeles office, which upon seeing my pale and desperate face, they kindly obliged. I eventually moved to a much smaller firm, but shortly thereafter realized that maybe I wasn't cut out for the whole lawyer thing. As part of a New Year's resolution, I quit my job, downsized my life, and went to work immediately on The Opposite of Love.
I have not looked back since. Well, except to write this bio.
