After You by Julie Buxbaum

From the Publisher

When tragedy strikes across the ocean, Ellie Lerner drops everything—her marriage, her job, her life in the Boston suburbs—to travel to London and pick up the pieces of her best friend Lucy’s life. While Lucy’s husband, Greg, retreats into himself, his and Lucy’s eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, has simply stopped speaking. Desperate to help Sophie, Ellie turns to a book that gave her comfort as a child, The Secret Garden. As its story of hurt, magic, and healing blooms around them, so, too, do Lucy’s secrets—some big, some small. Peeling back the layers of her friend’s life, Ellie is forced to confront her own as well: the marriage she left behind, the loss she’d hoped to escape. And suddenly Ellie’s carefully constructed existence is spinning out of control in a chain of events that will transform her life—and the lives of those around her—forever.

Publishers Weekly

Like her debut, The Opposite of Love, Buxbaum's second novel concerns a woman struggling with devastating loss. When American ex-pat Lucy Stafford is killed by a mugger, her lifelong best friend Ellie Lerner drops everything to fly to London. Ellie stays on after Lucy's funeral to care for her friend's eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, who witnessed her mom's violent death and has since retreated into silence. Ellie also worries about Lucy's husband, Greg, who confesses that he "can barely even look at" his daughter; her own divorced parents' on-again, off-again relationship; and her long-suffering husband, waiting for her in the Boston suburbs. Ellie finds London as much a refuge as a place of mourning; she's been unable to move past the birth of a stillborn child and feels the need to "borrow" Sophie. As she uncovers more of Lucy's life, Ellie finds her own spinning out of control, and soon she's forced to reassess even her deeply held certainties. Buxbaum skillfully handles this tale of grief and growing, resonant with realistic emotional stakes and hard-won wisdom. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

New tragedy jars a rudderless woman out of her grief and into the life of a charming, troubled eight-year-old. Ellie Lerner has been coasting for years since the death of her baby. Her marriage on hold, her teaching career lifeless, Ellie's only real connection seemed to be to her lifelong friend Lucy, who had moved to England, married and produced an adorable, precocious girl, Ellie's goddaughter Sophie. When Lucy is murdered, that tie seems severed also. But the connection to Sophie quickly takes its place, as Ellie drops her life in Boston to take up residence in Lucy's Notting Hill home. Sophie's father, Greg, has buried himself in work and drink; Ellie's husband, Phillip, doesn't understand. Only the troubled little girl really seems to need Ellie. Caring for her, Ellie comes to terms with her grief, and discovers some hard truths about her dear friend and about herself that help her move on. Buxbaum (The Opposite of Love, 2008) has a light touch with characterization, letting us judge the friends through Ellie's admittedly unreliable rose-colored nostalgia. But although the plotline could easily dip into formula, Buxbaum keeps the story as smart as the writing. "If our lives were a movie, this would be the scene where the music changes," Ellie observes. "We'd make eye contact-tentatively at first, then a pact-before we'd rip off each other's clothes and declare our undying love . . . But this is not a movie, and things are never simple." Instead, the author keeps it real and works out optimistic rather than happy endings for her sharply focused and honestly sympathetic characters. Fresh, lightly done take on the classic tearjerker.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Reading Group Guide

1. Toward the beginning of the novel, Ellie says, “Last Thursday, when Lucy stopped breathing, there is not doubt a part of me died too. The history of who I am–the accumulation of a million memories from a thirty-one-year friendship, the knowledge that at least one person in the world could see me, that at least one person in the world would always know me–has been washed empty.” Do you think we lose parts of ourselves when we lose those closest to us? Ellie seems to believe that Lucy truly knew and understood her, but do you think that Ellie ever really knew Lucy? Can we ever know the people we love the most?

2. Ellie talks about having two vows in direct conflict: her wedding vows and her commitment to being Sophie’s godmother. Her relationships with both Phillip and Sophie change dramatically through the course of novel. Do you think in the end she keeps or betrays those vows?

3. Why is Ellie so willing to leave her own life in Boston to pick up the pieces Lucy has left behind? Would you do the same thing for your best friend? Ellie claims she is only “doing the right thing,” but Phillip thinks that even Lucy wasn’t selfish enough to expect Ellie to drop everything and move to London. Who do you sympathize with more?

4. Ellie talks a lot about the various drafts of Lucy and describes her recollections of her best friend as “still and constant, memories an unfolded map, like the timeline in Sophie’s history textbook.” What does she mean here? Will her memories stay like that? What about Sophie’s memories of her mother?

5. Why does Greg have so much trouble looking at Sophie? And do youthink the fact that Lucy was going to leave him anyway makes her death easier or harder on him?

6. Sophie and Ellie turn to the children’s classic The Secret Garden for comfort throughout the novel. Why do you think they are soothed by this particular book? Why do both want to play Mary when they playact the novel?

7. In the end, it seems as if Ellie’s decision to go back to Boston mirrors Lucy’s decision to move to Paris. Is this a fair assessment? Do you judge one more harshly than the other? Why?

8. Do you empathize with Lucy’s desire for a fresh start or a do-over? If not, do you think you would feel differently about her choices if she were a man?

9. Why is the book titled After You? Who does the “You” refer to?

10. The reader’s view of Lucy is necessarily limited to Ellie’s perspective because the story is told in Ellie’s first-person voice. Do you think the reader gets a full sense of who Lucy was as a person or are we only allotted a snapshot? And if it’s the latter, do you think this is intentional? Effective?

11. Ellie often uses words to suggest that they are all “acting” or “pretending” that things are normal to get through the days. Is this a common coping mechanism in the wake of loss?

12. Ellie, Lucy, and Jane all seem to be, at various times, women on the run. What are they each running from? What are they each most afraid of?

13. At one point, Ellie says: “If our lives were a movie, this would be the scene where the music changes….We’d get to live happily ever after, in this pastel-colored house in Notting Hill, to swelling crescendo. A simple, natural, and best of all, neat resolution. Sophie gets a mother, I get a child, Greg gets a wife. All solved in five minutes or less. But this is not a movie, and things are never simple.” Would an ending where Greg and Ellie fall in love have been satisfying or believable? As readers, are we programmed to yearn for those tidy endings? And do you agree with Ellie that “things are never simple”?

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One


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.

***



When did I start speaking a language I don’t recognize as my own? I dismiss the stalking reporters with copied phrases I’ve learned from watching TV, please respect our privacy during this very difficult time; reassure Sophie with silly platitudes, we are going to be okay; lie to all the well-wishers at the funeral Greg and I hastily planned, Lucy spoke so highly of you. I guess when your world blows up, when you lose the person you were closest to for thirty-one years—almost my entire life—language skills are the first to go.

Here is what happened: Lucy woke up a few days ago, happy and healthy, trapped in a tent of all the clichés of a perfect modern adult life, with the international glamour of an American ex-pat thrown in to boot, and one hour and forty-five minutes later, while walking Sophie to school, she died. Just like that. No, she didn’t die, just like that. She was murdered. Apparently, there was a knife and a meth-head overly interested in her two-carat diamond ring, some idiotic resistance on Lucy’s part, and then it was over.

And, yes, there is a worst part of all: Sophie saw the whole thing.

I am not surprised Lucy fought back—she’s always had an inhuman amount of courage—but I am surprised she fought back for that ring. She hated that ring.

“Who buys a diamond-shaped diamond?” Lucy would say. It was one of her favorite bits when Greg wasn’t around. “I mean, seriously, a diamond-shaped diamond? It’s so redundant. I swear, all men think about is size.”

And now I am here, in her kitchen, sitting next to her daughter—my goddaughter—trying to adjust to this new world we have entered. After Lucy. I am sipping tea because, from my experience over the last few days, that seems to be what the British do in situations like these. As if consuming mass quantities of flavored hot water with a spot of milk and sugar will make everything better. But it’s too late for stopgap measures. The grief has started to burrow into my skin like a parasite, slow and steady, in inverse proportion to my disbelief.

“Soph, what do you want to do? You want me to be quiet, too, for a bit? We can just sit here.” I get a nod, slow, as if she wants to say, Yes, please. I can tell simply by looking at her that we both want exactly the same thing. For it all to stop for a little while.

And so the two of us do the closest thing I can think of. We sit in the booth and stare straight ahead at nothing in particular. I pull her in closer, and her head rests against my shoulder.

We pass the next hour this way. Silent and watchful. Like we are waiting for a bus that may never come.

Read a Sample Chapter

After You

The Dial Press

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Excerpted from After You by Julie Buxbaum Copyright © 2009 by Julie Buxbaum. Excerpted by permission.
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