OUR FRIENDS, our very good friends, are getting a divorce. Julia and Sunny, lovable and loving, whom we’ve adored from the beginning, when we were all in medical school. The past few years have been difficult, we know that; we’ve known that for a while. It’s not news to us that there’ve been problems, some counseling. A furnished short-term apartment. But still: it is a shock. Julia and Sunny, both in our wedding. And the same with us, for them. All those ski trips, the late-night card games, the time we hiked the Inca Trail and threw up repeatedly in the high altitude. There are kids now, and if any of us went in for that sort of thing, we’d be godparents; that’s the kind of close we are. Or were? There are moments when we feel as if we don’t know them anymore.
Julia’s family owns property in New Hampshire, right on a lake, a place the four of us have been going to for so long that we can’t help but think of it as ours. When we were in school it was close enough that we could go up any time we wanted, but now, with Julia and Sunny living in Missouri and us in South Pasadena, it’s no small feat to get there every summer, as we have. The last week of July, without fail.
It was at the lake house, two summers ago, that Julia began talking about letting some air into the relationship. Those were her words. She sat on the splintery bottom step, gnawing on a coffee stirrer and swatting at the blackflies, frowning, saying that she’d been depressed over the winter and started taking Lexapro. Lexapro? We tried not to let our eyes meet. Julia had always been so sparkly. And with all that energy! Loping off into the dawn, her orange nylon jacket bright in the mist. There was nothing she loved more than to run and swim, to travel impossible distances by bicycle, to sign up for half marathons on holiday weekends. She always wanted us to join her but never shamed us when we didn’t. She never noticed when her running shoes tracked stuff all over the rug. But for an athletic person she was mystical too, full of superstitions and intuitive feelings. During our second-year exams, she brought each of us a little carved soapstone animal she’d found in a global exchange gift shop behind the pizza parlor and insisted that we give them names. Hers, named Thug, looked as if it could have been a tapir. With the help of our animals we managed to pass our exams, to do well on them, in fact, and we celebrated by having a dance party and eating too much Ethiopian food and then, years and years later, felt unspeakably touched to discover Thug sitting on the windowsill of their guest bathroom, looking fine. That was Julia—sentimental and fond, likely to invest inanimate objects with meaning, always sneaking off to exercise—the Julia we knew, and it was hard to imagine that person in the grip of a dark Midwestern winter, writing herself a script for antianxiety meds. She tossed her chewed coffee stirrer into the grass and said listlessly, “It’ll biodegrade, right?” When asked what she meant by some air, she sighed. “I don’t know. I’m still figuring that out.”
Where was Sunny when she told us this? He must have been off somewhere with the kids. It’s easy to allow that to happen: he’s good with them, naturally, one of those rare people who manages to still act like himself when he’s around them. Our son, Henry, has formed a strong attachment to him, somewhat less so to their daughter, Coco, who is eighteen months older and a little high-strung. They don’t always play well, so having Sunny there to facilitate was helpful, maybe necessary. He kept them occupied with owl droppings and games of Uno; he coated them in deet-free bug spray and took them into the woods hunting for edible plants that we then choked down as a bitter salad with our dinner. Wherever he might have been with them that afternoon, he wasn’t there to add his thoughts on letting the air in. Julia was the one who started us wondering, and for a long time afterward, hers would be the only version we knew.
In a way, it was almost like being back at the beginning, back before there was a Julia and Sunny, back when there was just Julia, knocking tentatively at our apartment door, bearing bagels and cream cheese, rustling in her workout clothes, desperate to talk. She wanted to learn all she could about Sunny, who had kissed her briefly on a back porch at a party, and as the people who usually sat next to him in immunology, we were interesting to her. Among the topics we covered were his note-taking, which was haphazard; his penmanship, loopy yet upright; the scuffed leather satchel in which he carried his books; the silver ring he wore on his right hand; the involuntary tapping of his foot. All three of us liked the dapper way he dressed, as if ready at a moment’s notice to spend a day at the races. We liked, too, the things he’d say to us beneath his breath during the lecture, comments that were off-kilter and often very funny. He was easily the handsomest person in our class.
This was the point at which Julia would kick off her sneakers and we would really dig in. That woman Sheri—now, what was that all about? Sunny had dated her at the very beginning of the year. She was a type that schools were eager to get their hands on back then: definitely not premed, but the kind who does something interdisciplinary, like East Asian studies, and then takes some time off and has life experiences. In Sheri’s case, she had doubled in classics and dance theater at Reed. She didn’t have any piercings, at least as far as we could tell, but she did have a large tattoo on her right shoulder of a woman who looked suspiciously like her. Same flaming red hair, same wide red mouth. But how could we be sure? Asking would be rude. And she was difficult to have a conversation with, precise and cold in her way of speaking but nervous in her body, a little twitchy, her eyes darting about. Yet Sunny had wooed her, had undoubtedly slept with her! That haughty kook. At Halloween, they dressed up as a garbage collector and a bag of garbage. She was the hottest bag of garbage we’d ever seen, all silver duct tape and clinging black plastic, wobbling slightly in a pair of bondage boots. Soon after Halloween she and Sunny split up. “And a good thing too,” we pointed out, given the accidental comedy of their names. Julia had never noticed this before, and now she laughed and laughed, with genuine delight. “Sunny and Sher-i,” she repeated, eyes shining, and stretched her long limbs in the morning warmth of our apartment, already perfectly at home.
We liked it when Julia dropped in on us unannounced. She made us feel romantic. She’d peer at the photographs lined up along the mantel of the bricked-in fireplace; she’d compliment the ceramic salt and pepper shakers, shaped like French roosters, and open the flimsy kitchen cabinets to admire the plates and cups within. Settling back into the recently acquired club chair, our secret pride and joy, she propped her feet up on the matching ottoman and cried out, “I never want to sit in a papasan again!” It pleased us to no end. We were new to this, and sometimes just the sight of our clothes hanging companionably in the closet, or our large and small shoes jumbled in a heap by the door, would be enough to send us falling onto the nearest sofa in a sort of diabetic swoon. With Julia around, we wanted more than anything to while the day away discussing Sunny, and never have to send ourselves to the library, or class.
Julia alone, whose soft knock on the door used to make us so happy, now fills us with a feeling similar to—we hate to say it—dread. Sometimes when she calls, we do not have the wherewithal to answer. We’re afraid that the conversation will go too long, or that she’ll bring up Robert again and want to be affirmed. Sometimes we let her phone calls go straight to voicemail, and then allow a few days to pass before we even listen to the message.
“Aren’t you going to call her back?”
“I think it’s your turn. I’m pretty sure I did it last time.”
“Are you keeping score?”
“Keeping track is not the same as keeping score.”
“Seriously?”
“I just don’t want this to become exclusively my job. Like what happened with the pool.”
We can’t help wishing that maybe one of these days Sunny would give us a call. Before we even really knew him we liked him, from afar we liked him, and sitting next to him in class we were charmed by his sudden way of smiling and his jaunty haircuts, which he received weekly from his octogenarian landlord, who in a former life had been not only a barber but a classical music deejay. This was the sort of information he’d occasionally divulge, each casually offered aside accreting into an ever more subtle, complex, and absorbing picture. He enjoyed reading fiction, especially Nordic detective novels. He’d once played lacrosse at a very high level, and done massive amounts of hallucinogens. He’d gone to a good boarding school but a mediocre small college, spent much of his twenties trying to save his family’s electronics business, and now here he was, making his comeback in medical school, where by all accounts but his own he was doing very well, with seemingly little effort.
We liked him, too, for not continuing to kiss Julia at parties. We appreciated the clarity of his intentions, and the way in which it flatteringly reflected our own: because what sane person wants to keep messing around at this age? That was what the undergraduate experience had been for, those four short and sweaty years. Now it was time to relax into something real. “He asked me on a date,” Julia said in wonder. “That’s actually the term he used.” We suggested she wear her hair down.
She had brought over some different outfits to model for us. It was like watching a parade of past Julias: a kittenish little number she’d worn during her year singing a cappella; a pleated skirt and sweater set that had been her daily uniform as a temp. She retreated modestly into our bathroom between each costume change. “None of this is working, is it,” she called from behind the door. We had a glass of wine waiting for her when she emerged again, plucking at the neckline of something cheap and brightly patterned, the kind of pretty dress found for half price on a sidewalk rack. She looked with longing at the wine but didn’t take it.
“Will you drink it for me?” she asked. “I’m already nervous that I’m going to have too much at dinner. And wine turns my teeth purple, so I’ve decided that I’m just going to stick with gin and tonics for the night. The lime always brings me to my senses.” She hiked up the skirt of her dress and climbed unceremoniously into the club chair. “Oh no. Do you think this place is going to have a full bar, or just beer and wine?”
As we searched the bookshelf for our restaurant guide, Julia recounted tales of other boyfriends she had had. She didn’t want to make any of the same mistakes again. One ex had followed her down to Ecuador during her semester abroad and camped out for two weeks at a nearby youth hostel, watching her morosely from an Internet café as she walked in the mornings to the local clinic. And then, the year after graduation, she had become embroiled with a Ph.D. student who was supposed to be supervising her at the lab where they worked, doing gene sequencing in a mild stupor. He was already engaged to someone else, which had made things extra heated and complicated between the two of them. She’d trained for her first marathon with him, and it was really more the running than the lab that had gotten them into trouble, and even though the relationship had ended in disaster and she was relieved, glad, that it was all over and done with, sometimes even now she found herself crying a little as she ran.
At least there was a full bar, according to our guide. “The crispy cod cakes come recommended. Also the short-rib ravioli.”
“I’m not saying that going out to dinner automatically makes him my boyfriend. I’m getting ahead of myself. Way ahead of myself, as I have the tendency to do.”
“Did the fiancée ever find out?”
“Oh, sure. It was kind of inevitable. I think he was just looking for a way to avoid getting married and there I was. Literally sitting right next to him, day after day. I had the whole convenience factor going for me, which can be a powerful source of attraction,” she said plainly. Sitting cross-legged in the chair, she planted her elbow on her knee, and then her chin on her palm. She gazed out the window at our air shaft, where the daylight was already starting to disappear. “Do you realize that Sunny is the first guy I’ve liked before he liked me?”
We stopped listening for a moment to wonder which of us had liked the other first, and how, when things happened so naturally and fast, was it possible to tell?
“Which seems significant somehow,” she was saying. “Even if nothing comes of tonight, even if he never asks me on a date ever again. I’ll still feel hopeful. In a general sense. About me and love.” She inhaled. “Please forget I said that word.” And then, recalling her audience, she smiled at us trustingly. “But you probably use it all the time.”
We did, of course, and contrary to what we thought, it didn’t necessarily make us authorities. We believed strongly and without any particular evidence that Sunny had liked her all along, even back in the days of Sheri and the garbage bags, and we told her so. From where our confidence came we couldn’t have exactly said, but it struck us as indisputable, the rightness of Julia and Sunny, and on this feeling alone we were willing to stake our new friendship with her, and to not say a word when she leapt out of the chair and put on her coat while still wearing the cheap dress, which wasn’t nearly nice enough for the restaurant where he was taking her. We experienced not the slightest protective urge as we sent her out the door.
In fact, the wrongness of the dress only served to further endear her to him, as did, we were to learn soon enough, her half-drunk insistence upon paying her share of the bill and her less drunk attempt at getting him to sleep over. Julia had predicted correctly that he would never ask her on a date again. It seems miraculous to us now, the quantity of mistakes we made, mistakes that should have sunk our romances straight off from the start: the hasty tumbling into bed, the disproportionate demands, the declaration of feelings. How did we manage to stay together despite all of those offenses? Today young people are so cagey. Always keeping their options open, hedging their bets. Sure they have a lot of sex with near strangers, but that’s not the same as being heedless in love. Not like us! Before we knew it, Sunny was making dinner for Julia most nights and cleaning up afterward. He was, he is, a terrific cook: cassoulets, curries, the most remarkably ungreasy fried chicken. We had never liked lentils before trying his. The card table set for four, the yellowish glow from Julia’s thrift store lamp, our textbooks, open to the same page, spread like stepping stones across the floor, the steam rising from whatever rich, soupy thing Sunny had just placed in front of us…It was a very sweet time.
Incredibly, he liked us back. That was the great, unhoped-for gift of it all, that Sunny—whom we had admired from both near and far, from our plastic seats in the lecture hall and over bagels at our apartment, who had so enchanted us with his distracting good looks and breezy style and eccentric remarks—appeared to find pleasure in not only her company but ours. It now seems negligible, his being six years older, but then the difference in age felt meaningful to us, as if we were being paid a serious compliment. Often, he would send us into spasms of private delight by doing that thing that comedians do, a callback, he was so good at doing that, plucking out of thin air some throwaway line we’d mentioned days earlier and then making it sound hilarious and intimate by referring to it again. He was listening, he was remembering! Even his impatience made us happy. Once, we were driving home from a camping trip in the mountains, and after sliding up and down the radio dial a few times, he finally landed on something he liked, turned up the volume, and then swiveled around to grin at us from the passenger seat. It was a song we hadn’t heard before. Neither had Julia, clearly. She was driving with her eyes fastened on the road and a small, polite smile on her face. “Guys. Really?” Sunny looked at us in despair. “It’s their best record. With the kudzu on the cover?” He let out a low groan. “You probably weren’t eating solid foods yet.”
So much of that is irretrievable now. The papers haven’t been signed and filed yet, but Julia and Sunny, as a couple, are over. We’ve needed to keep reminding ourselves of this fact, only because it is so easy to slip into the habit of hoping otherwise. Our hope has remained quite stubborn for the most part.
“I met him at that physician wellness conference,” Julia told us, and started to cry. This announcement occurred in Utah, about six months after our last time at the lake house. We were chopping things atop the kitchen’s glittery granite counters while the children, stripped down to their long johns, watched television upstairs, and Sunny drove back to the grocery store because he was making turkey chili and the rental didn’t have any cumin. His name was Robert, and he was in radiology. He lived in San Diego. His first email had just been friendly, Julia said. A regular old great meeting you hope our paths cross again kind of email. No more than two sentences, and a signature featuring a long list of his various titles and affiliations. They had exchanged business cards after eating a complimentary buffet breakfast together at the hotel, at one of those big, round banquet tables where solitary conference-goers are herded into each other’s company. She had had a yogurt and watched him polish off a plate of warmed-over scrambled eggs. After the perfunctory exchange of cards, and after being slightly sickened by the spongy look of the eggs, she was then surprised to experience a little surge of erotic feeling when he stood from the table and she registered how tall he was. Not just tall, but big. Visibly strong through the chest and shoulders, and with thighs that looked like they could belong to an Olympic speed skater. Briefly he had loomed over her.
He was not her type at all, not by any stretch of the imagination—and yet she had been moved to reply. “Take care” was what he’d written in closing, and though every rational part of her knew that this farewell was, if not electronically generated, then at least his go-to phrase when signing off in casual correspondence, Julia couldn’t help but feel that there was a hidden message for her in the words he had chosen, as if he had perceived, and was tactfully acknowledging, that she might be in need of some care. So it seemed reasonable to answer, “Thank you for your kind message,” and somehow just the typing of that one word, kind, released the series of sentences that followed, which began lightly enough, with a humorous account of the delays she had faced when flying home from the conference, but then made a sort of unexpected but lyrical turn toward the prospect of another long winter, the ineffectiveness of Lexapro, and the pain of watching one’s only child struggle socially at school. Off it went, off into the ether, and a several-day silence had followed, long enough that she thought for certain she would never hear from him again, an idea that didn’t really bother her once she realized that simply the act of writing those sentences down had helped her, and that maybe she should just start keeping a journal like everybody suggests, or at least consider combining some talk therapy with the medication, when bam! There in her in-box one overcast morning: the most wonderful, wonderful reply.
The sound of the garage door churning open caused us to drop our knives and circle helplessly around the kitchen, but Julia, pausing, promised us that Sunny already knew about the radiologist. “I’m committed to being transparent,” she said. “And nothing has actually happened. I haven’t even seen him since the conference, which is strange to realize. But I feel like something might happen. Soonish.” She said it ominously, and all of a sudden looked as if she might cry again. “I just wanted to keep you updated. The thought of telling you guys was almost worse than telling Sunny.” She tore a paper towel from the roll and swabbed her eyes while we tried to keep our faces still. We wished that the children would appear, demanding snacks and a different show. What were we to do with this information, except pretend that we hadn’t received it? Sunny, smiling, came inside with the cumin, cheerfully unaware that we’d had this talk, and what a relief it was when Henry pulled his groin on the slopes the next day and we had to head home early.
Back in South Pasadena, under the safety of our own duvet, the conversation turned inevitably to Julia and Sunny. And now this new person, this Robert. A radiologist, of all things. It was impossible to conceive of the attraction, despite his size and his flair with email. The simple fact was that no one could compare to Sunny, who was sensitive without being spineless, capable but not controlling, funny, affectionate, generous, a highly respected doctor, a hands-on parent, and still so staggeringly handsome. He was aging better than the rest of us. True, they had landed in a city that was a bit off the beaten path, it was hard to get direct flights, the school options weren’t terrific, he had persuaded her, for Coco’s sake, to adopt a small hypoallergenic dog that she hadn’t wanted, her father was showing signs of dementia—but still, on balance, in fact by all imaginable measures, her life was good. Wasn’t it? We sank into bemused silence for a moment, and then got sidetracked by a disagreement over who had made the greater professional sacrifices for the other, Sunny or Julia, and in a fit of sulkiness stopped talking, only to wake up in the middle of the night to have intense, heartbroken sex that resulted in our sleeping through the alarm the next morning and Henry’s being late to Chinese school.
A phone call from Julia soon followed. “My mom wants Coco to stay with her over the summer. And though my initial response was to say no, now I’m thinking it could be good for both of them.” She was calling from the car, on her way home from the hospital. “Coco can be an uplifting presence when she wants to be. Even if she’s not, just her being there will keep Mom from dwelling and, you know, fixating. She was always a worrier but it’s gotten so much worse with my dad.” The ticking of a turn signal punctuated the roar in the background. “The great thing is it’ll be a chance for Coco to train with my old swim coach. And she’s never ready to come home when we visit. She always wants to stay longer. I think she’s kind of starved for an environment that isn’t dominated by freeways and Chipotles. A place where you can walk to the corner drugstore.” Julia’s parents live for most of the year in Rhode Island, in one of those flat-faced colonial houses that stand a little too close to the road. “Does it sound like I’m rationalizing? I’m really not. I really think this will be beneficial for everyone. It’s an adventure for Coco, and it gives us a little space. A little room to breathe. Do you realize that Sunny and I have not taken a single vacation without her since the day she was born? I know—you’re the same as us. I don’t need to tell you. And I know it seems easier with just the one to bring them everywhere, especially when they’re this age and they’re good travelers, but it’s actually not easier in the end, it takes its toll, and we have to remember how important it is, to have time alone as adults—” A getaway! Just the two of them and their swimsuits. It was exactly what they needed. The Azores, or Cambodia…“Well, what I meant was time alone alone, not together alone,” she said gently. “Sunny has signed up for a cruise, believe it or not, because he’s short on his CME credits. Then he’ll stay on in Alaska for a few weeks to see the fjords and do some camping. You know how he gets about Grizzly Man. It’s still his favorite.” And what would she do? All by herself? With that long, luxurious stretch of unencumbered time? It felt dangerous to ask. “Oh, I’m staying put. Cranking up the air as high as I want and working some extra weekends. Someone has to be here with Peaches.”
There was no mention of Robert. And no mention, conspicuously, of the lake house. Months later, in a semiapologetic text, it was confirmed that we wouldn’t be gathering there in July. But we have managed to get together with Julia twice this year: first at a Houston’s off the 405 in Irvine, roughly equidistant between San Diego and our house, and the second time, also in Orange County oddly enough, for a long, hot, glazed-over day at Disneyland with the kids.
We should acknowledge that Robert ended up not being as bad as we were prepared to think he would be. The meeting up at Houston’s had been his idea, according to Julia, and as we drove south we couldn’t decide whether this choice was considerate on his part, our drive being ten minutes shorter than theirs, or whether it implied a sort of finicky exactness, an insistence on making everything “fair” instead of just sucking it up and driving to South Pasadena as Julia had most likely wanted. Then again, maybe Robert’s plan suggested depths of sensitivity that we hadn’t expected, allowing him to intuit that we weren’t yet ready to have him hanging out at our house, his very presence polluting the home in which Sunny had cooked countless pots of dal and relinquished so many hands of Hearts. And the fact is, we were not ready, not at all. Which was nice of Robert to anticipate.
Once we all got settled in the leather booth, however, it quickly became clear that none of these factors had played a role; Robert just really liked eating at Houston’s, and before we had looked at our menus, he’d already ordered the spinach dip and grilled artichokes for the table. When we asked for margaritas, we learned that he was sober. “Three years and eight months,” he said with simple happiness. It was hard to reconcile this large, ruddy person with the radiologist we’d imagined, the bloodless Lothario who had destroyed our friends’ marriage. As much effort as we had put into hating him over the past many months, regularly enraged by the thought of him, our insides roiling at the sound of his name, Robert was, we had to admit, probably beside the point. We protested a little when he reached for the check, but eventually gave in and said thank you. He and Julia had been careful to leave a few inches of space between them throughout dinner, and as we watched them cross the parking lot, we saw her take his hand and kiss it.
The more recent trip to Disneyland was, on the whole, less successful. Julia had persuaded Coco to try a weeklong marine biology camp on Catalina Island, and apparently her reward for surviving it was a weekend at the Happiest Place on Earth; the proximity of all this to San Diego was not lost on us. But it had been such a long time since the kids had seen each other. We didn’t want to take the high road at the expense of Henry, who’d been lobbying to do the Jedi Training Academy for a while now, and despite our discomfort with Julia’s self-interested itinerary, and some deep-seated misgivings about supporting the Disney empire, there was no graceful way to avoid going. And we should say up front that the bulk of the blame for what happened at the end of the day falls squarely on us.
The real problem was the lack of Sunny, of course. We hadn’t sufficiently prepared Henry for the shock of this—we’d mentioned it plenty of times on the drive to Anaheim, but the reality of Sunny’s not being with us was a different thing altogether. Without Sunny around, the full extent of our children’s incompatibility was free to reveal itself: Coco wanting to do nothing but get her autograph book signed and have her photo taken with princess reenactors, Henry gloomy and lagging behind, unable to recover from the brief high of being a Jedi trainee, which had required us to register as soon as the park opened and then lasted all of twenty minutes. Their only shared inclination was to ask wistfully for “mementos” while stopping to examine the merchandise at gift shops. Neither of them seemed particularly interested in the rides; both of them were unsatisfied with the food options. All of us felt somewhat stunned by the heat and the long waits in line. None of this was helped by the fact that Coco had shot up in the past year and now towered incongruously over Henry.
While shuffling slowly forward we tried to ask Coco questions about her time on Catalina, but she offered only vague, incomplete answers, made more difficult to understand by a metal appliance that had been installed inside the roof of her mouth. “It’s called a palatal crib,” Julia murmured. “I know it looks like a medieval torture device, but there was no other way to stop her.” Coco was a hardened thumb sucker, grown furtive and resourceful over the years. “The orthodontist said that we couldn’t even think about braces until we achieved ‘total extinction of the habit.’ ” She widened her eyes at the terminology. “And normally I wouldn’t have taken such drastic measures, especially given what’s going on right now, but did you see? She’s already chipped her left front tooth. Her teeth are sticking so far out of her mouth that the dentist says they’re ‘constantly vulnerable.’ We had to do something—Sunny felt the same way.”
We must have perked up at the reference because Julia stopped talking about the crib and instead continued warmly on the subject of Sunny. “I mean I knew this before, obviously, but he is an incredible coparent. That hasn’t changed a bit. We are completely in sync when it comes to Coco, really clear at communicating about her needs. And completely on the same page in terms of making this transition feel OK for her. We have dinner as a family now three nights a week, all of us sitting at the table, focused, and we never miss it or let anything get in the way. It’s actually more than what we did when we were still living together.” It was odd to hear Julia talk this way, using phrases that sounded borrowed from a parenting book. She wasn’t bothering to speak in a lowered voice anymore, and Coco seemed undisturbed by the topic, staring agreeably into space, as if she were already accustomed to hearing it discussed in her vicinity.
“That’s great,” we said to Julia, meaning it. “That’s wonderful.” We told her we were glad but not surprised. How like the two of them to approach divorce not as a dissolution, but a kind of renovation, a rebuilding into something new. “Yes!” she said. “Something new. And better. With more room for all of us.” She smiled at us radiantly.
“And she and Robert”—we nodded at Coco—“they’re hitting it off? That’s going well?” We were smiling too—at Julia, at the kids, at the other people waiting in line—feeling that maybe we’d been wrong, and that maybe, in defiance of our fretful predictions, everything would turn out all right in the end. But then Julia’s lovely face froze into an expression of pure alarm just as Coco, without missing a beat, asked—in a perfectly distinct, piping voice—“Who’s Robert?”
“He’s a colleague, baby,” she said, “you haven’t met him yet,” and from her backpack she handed out sticks of mint gum to all except Coco, with her mouth crib, who received an energy bar instead. We chewed in silence. No subtle means of changing the subject came immediately to mind. “Watch where you’re stepping,” Julia warned as she steered the children around a pat of bright pink bubblegum glistening on the ground. “That is definitely not sugarless,” Coco noted, and then craned her neck to see if she could guess which person in front of us had spit it out, Robert apparently forgotten.
But as awful as that moment had been, it wasn’t as bad as what we felt later that night, after we had dropped off Coco and Julia at their Disneyland-adjacent hotel, and after we had made the trek back to South Pasadena and pulled into our driveway. We turned around and there in the backseat was Henry, sound asleep: head cocked and mouth gaping, arms spread in surrender, a light saber in one hand and a small square of silky, pale blue material in the other. Oh God. We knew immediately what it was. We would know that silky scrap anywhere. It was Coco’s. It had started out years earlier as the satin trim on a fancy chenille baby blanket, a blanket she had loved, her favorite thing to do with this blanket being to pile it up on one side of her and then take the very tip of its corner and press it against her nose, where she would stroke it voluptuously with an index finger as she sucked on her then-permissible thumb. Without the blanket she refused to go to sleep; also, she refused to read or be read to, watch a movie, take a time-out, ride in the car—and each summer at the lake house, when Coco emerged from the back of the Subaru, the blanket would appear a little further diminished, until at last it had disintegrated into this one remaining relic-like bit of trim, no more than three inches square. For a few long minutes we sat there in the driveway staring at Henry, feeling sympathetic and sort of furious that he was acting out in this weird way.
When questioned the next morning, he was not very forthcoming.
How did he end up with Coco’s wubby?
She was playing with it when we drove them back to the hotel.
But how did it come to be in his possession?
She put it in the cup holder when Julia told her to pull her sweater from her backpack.
And after she put it in the cup holder?
They got out of the car.
Did he tell Coco that she’d forgotten her lanyard, and hand it to her?
Yes.
So why didn’t he tell her that she’d left her wubby in the cup holder?
He’d forgotten to mention it.
Did he know how much it means to her?
At this, Henry merely shrugged. He was glowing with resentment and by now crying hard. We discussed the logistics of driving to Anaheim and catching Julia before she left the hotel for the airport, but soon enough came to our senses and made Henry draw a card, first in pencil and then more carefully in pen, which we enclosed in a self-sealing business envelope, unable to find anything cuter, along with the little blue remnant. While it wouldn’t quite beat them back to Missouri, Coco would be reunited with her transitional object in just a matter of days. So what an unwelcome surprise it was when the business envelope and its contents appeared in our mailbox several weeks later, looking battered. How stupid—the wrong address! But to us it was the right address, and would always be the right address: the house to which, for years, we had sent holiday popcorn tins and joke gifts and small belated offerings to mark Coco’s birthdays. There were now two new addresses, though still in the same zip code, and we hadn’t had the chance to update our contacts list with either.
It goes without saying that we did repackage the whole thing, making sure to write down Julia’s new house number and street and also including a set of flavored lip balms designed to look like macaroons, which was meant as a mea culpa to Coco but which also necessitated a larger, padded envelope and a trip to the post office in order for it to be weighed and affixed with the correct postage. Little did we know that due to operating budget shortfalls, the post office now closes early on Saturdays—so the padded envelope went into the backseat of the car, and then it migrated to the trunk when Henry and his friends Noah and Griffin had to be driven to basketball practice, and there it stayed for quite a while until a long-overdue Costco haul, when it was discovered again and placed inside the capacious French shoulder bag that’s intended to collapse into chic origami but, as the repository for seemingly all of the family’s cough drop wrappers, parking tickets, reusable water bottles, school newsletters, store receipts, etc., is never empty enough to do so.
An absurdly long delay—but we did keep Julia posted on our efforts and having looked hard at ourselves can say that it truly was a case of two parents working full-time, a kitchen remodel going sideways, their kid trying out for the travel team and actually making it, and life just being the breathless, nonstop circus that it tends to be these days. After a month of being toted about in the bag, the envelope became part of the furniture, as they say, and encountering its puffy presence while fishing around for a permission slip or the car keys came to feel sort of reassuring. In fact, the envelope was still inside the French shoulder bag when a last-minute trip to New York proved unavoidable, a parent’s knee finally needing to be replaced, and who of all people should materialize at the Muji store near the food court in JFK’s Terminal 5—full head of hair appearing above the rows of tiny Japanese containers, lean frame moving down the aisle—but Sunny. Our Sunny. Wearing a slate-gray coat and a bright, beautifully striped scarf, looking as marvelous as ever.
It felt unbelievably good to hug him. He smelled of coffee and fig shampoo. Both the scarf and the coat were cashmere, and though it’s possible that he had an extra layer on underneath the coat, he didn’t feel as thin as we’d been worried he might be. Inexplicably, he seemed an inch or so taller. Never before had my head fit so neatly under his chin. I must have held on for a second too long because he gave me a little pat on the back, letting go.
He was coming from Glasgow, of all places, where he’d been invited to give a talk. He said it went well, and that he’d been traveling more in general. Gracious as always, he asked after us, after Henry in particular, inquiring about school, the basketball season, whether he was still interested in Houdini. He laughed when he learned about Henry’s ongoing efforts to raise enough money to buy a straitjacket. As we talked, we browsed through the selection of soothing organizational items, unable to stop touching things and weighing them in our hands, and I chattered about the knee replacement and holiday plans and staffing changes at the hospital, trying to resist the urge to hug him again. It was just so good to see him. It had been such a long time, and he looked so exactly himself, which was a relief to me, a great comfort and a relief. Finally, I admitted this aloud and pressed my face against his shoulder, adding how glad I was to hear that they were all doing so well. Sunny turned to look at me. “We are?” His surprise seemed real. He picked up a pocket notebook and began thumbing through its pages. “Julia told you that?” He shook his head. Then he smiled crookedly at the notebook. “I think it’s safe to say that she’s speaking for herself.”
The notebook ended up going back on the shelf but he did hold on to a clever stapler and hovered over the rainbow array of gel pens, asking if I thought Coco would like them. His question reminded me, for obvious reasons, of the package I had been carrying around with me all this time, the package addressed to Coco; I dug it out of my shoulder bag and held it up for him to see. As soon as I did so, I felt ashamed that we had used Julia’s address and not his. Yet it somehow seemed not only an apt correction but an act of fate that he should be the one to deliver it. I imagined the look of amazement on her face when her father walked through the door, bearing his prize: I could picture the appliance glinting in her slightly opened mouth. What serendipity that I hadn’t had the chance to make a second trip to the post office! For once I felt good about being harried. I gave the padded envelope to Sunny and explained what was inside.
“Disneyland,” he echoed, and then realized: “Which was in August.”
I didn’t want to bore him with the convoluted story. He had a flight to catch, and still another one after that before he reached home. I knew from experience that he didn’t like to rush. He seemed to have changed his mind about the stapler and the pens, maybe because a short line had formed at the register or maybe because—this was my pleased, ridiculous thought in the moment—he already had something special to bring back to her. Outside the store we hugged once more, and this time Sunny was the one to give an extra-long squeeze, and the last thing he said was “Be sure to tell Henry I said hey,” before he adjusted the beautiful scarf and headed for his gate.
In other words, we ended on a very warm note, and I turned dreamily in the direction of my own gate, still glowing from the encounter with Sunny but already starting to feel a familiar melancholy at the thought of their divorce. The truth is that my sense of loss has not abated, as I originally believed it might, with the passing of time. Tincture of time—a phrase I had first heard while sitting beside Sunny in immunology, his foot tapping away. I think it was my sadness that made me glance over my shoulder to steal one more look at his gray coat, growing smaller as he retreated down the bright, polished corridor, and this is how I happened to see what he did then, which was to take the padded envelope from under his arm and drop it into a large putty-colored trash receptacle. He did it without stopping, in one swift motion, a gesture so fluid that I almost missed it. But this was unmistakably what he did.
Of course I was surprised, actually quite shaken, and I spent the flight home flipping from one free movie to another and trying to analyze the act that I’d not been meant to see. My first hopeful thought was that Sunny didn’t want to reintroduce a crutch after Coco had learned to live without it. Entirely possible. Less probable but also consoling was the idea that he objected to the artificial additives in flavored lip balm—I had mentioned the little gift we’d included—or the marketing of beauty products to preadolescent girls. Maybe he’d never liked the blanket and was just as glad to have it gone. Gradually, though, my theories grew darker, and on the drive home from LAX to South Pasadena, I find myself wondering if his treatment of the envelope is a reflection of how he feels about us.
It’s well after eleven when I pull up to the house. They’ve left the lights on for me, but my first impulse upon stepping inside is to turn them off. Upstairs they are in their rooms, asleep, which makes the house feel very still but also full. In the darkened living room, I pick my way to the club chair, now twice reupholstered, and as I sit down, it occurs to me that though I will certainly describe running into Sunny, I’ll keep the other part of what I saw to myself. Now that I’m home it’s clear that there is no need, really, to bring this abrasive bit of mystery in through the door with me.
Our months of conjecture, our lengthy, circular conversations with Julia: they have left us exhausted, not to mention irritable with each other, and with no deeper understanding of why she doesn’t love Sunny in the same way she used to. We ask ourselves, Is there something she isn’t telling us? Is she protecting us, out of kindness, from disturbing truths—about Sunny? or herself? As much as we try, we can’t bring ourselves to believe what she keeps insisting on, which is simply that she wasn’t happy. Simply that her feelings changed. Because this is inconceivable to us, when ours have remained so constant. We love them, Sunny and Julia, as much as we did in the beginning.
Sometimes it happens that in the early morning, we shuffle out onto the landing at the same time—my snoring has gotten worse, so lately I’ve been sleeping in the guest room—and without speaking we keep shuffling forward until we’re touching, resting on the other’s upright body, and almost magically, Henry opens up the door to his bedroom, and out he shuffles too. The three of us lean into each other, and it’s not exactly a group hug but more like the kind of huddling that animals do in the cold, our flanks rising and falling with our breaths. We stand there sleepily for a minute or two, and once in a while, I’ll think I smell something faint and intoxicating, similar to the fancy shampoo that Sunny must have used at his Glasgow hotel; I’ll sniff Henry’s hair, sink my nose into my husband’s T-shirt, trying without success to find it again. Then, as easily as we came together, we break apart and go about our business, knowing that soon enough we’ll be bumping up against the same bodies, whether on the landing or in the kitchen or somewhere else. Just knowing that, it seems to me, is plenty as it is.