The World Without You by Joshua Henkin Page A

But he pretended he did, or simply chose not to ask, which is what he always does when he doesn’t wish to discuss something. Noelle would like to talk to the children about Leo, but what is there to say? So many senseless deaths. Why compound them with another one? It’s Akiva she’s most tempted to talk to, because he’s older and might understand, and because he has memories of Leo, though it’s hard to know what he remembers and what he has gleaned from the stories she has told him and from the photograph of Leo, which stands on the shelf in their living room, her brother’s face looking down at them like some imperious god. But then she reminds herself that Akiva’s only eight, which was why when he said, “Well, I wish he’d died during the NBA season,” she let it pass.
    “Is there a basketball hoop at Grandma and Grandpa’s?” he asks now.
    She shakes her head.
    “Why not?”
    “Probably because Grandma and Grandpa don’t play basketball.” There was once a hoop in the driveway, but Leo and his friends used to stand on each other’s shoulders and grab onto the rim, and eventually they brought it down. The summer before he died, there was talk of putting up a new hoop, but it never happened, and now the court remains as it was, the downward slope of concrete going to the garage, the bare wooden backboard with the holes where the rim hung, the discoloration from the wind and rain, from the years of balls shot against it. “The next-door neighbors have a hoop.”
    “Will they let me use it?”
    “Maybe,” she says. “If you ask nicely.”
    Ari starts to cry. To distract him, Noelle devises a game that involves figuring out what portion of the trip has elapsed, but because Akiva is getting all the answers right, his brothers lose interest.
    Then they’re on to the next game, this one led by Amram, which involves guessing which of the passengers are undercover; there are rumored to be soldiers on every El Al flight. But the boys go about this too loudly (“That guy in the brown pants!” Yoni calls out), and Noelle is forced to make them stop.
    The children order Sprites, their fourth of the trip, and Noelle says, “That’s enough, kids, you’ve had too much soda already,” but the flight attendant has already poured the drinks, and Amram says, “It’s an airplane flight, a special occasion,” and the boys all cheer and gulp down their sodas before their father can change his mind.
    A couple of people wearing yarmulkes walk down the aisle looking for men to help make a minyan, and Amram gets up and joins them. Noelle doesn’t count for a minyan, but she decides to pray, too, doing so quietly from her seat.
    Judaism, Lily likes to say: just another installment in the random life of Noelle Glucksman. (Lily was the one who wasn’t surprised when they learned after months of not hearing from her that Noelle, at twenty-six, had become an Orthodox Jew, living in Jerusalem, engaged to Amram.) Hey, Noelle, what are you, deaf? This when Noelle was a mere six and Lily seven, and sometimes Lily would shout and Noelle seemed not to hear her. Noelle ten and Lily eleven, Lily singing The Who to her, changing the words to teenage spaceman . In the morning when the alarm went off, Noelle slept right through it. And there Lily was again, coming out of the shower, screaming, “Would you turn off the fucking alarm, Noelle!”
    It turned out Noelle did have a hearing problem, discovered when she was a freshman in high school, and maybe that was why she was doing so badly in school: she couldn’t hear what the teacher was saying. There had been hints of this earlier, Noelle at seven saying to her mother, “Why if people have two ears do they only hear out of one?”
    “What are you talking about?” her mother said, but Noelle insisted she was only joking.
    At fourteen, when she went to the audiologist and discovered she had moderate hearing loss in her right ear and a little in her left ear too, Noelle