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. “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 co-parent. That hasn’t changed a bit. We are completely in sync when it comes to Coco. Completely on the same page in terms of making this transition feel okay for her. We have dinner as a family now three nights a week, which is actually more often than when we were still living together.” 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 was already accustomed to hearing it discussed in her vicinity.
“And she and Robert,” we asked, “they’re hitting it off? That’s going well?” 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.
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 back seat was Henry, sound asleep: head cocked and mouth gaping, arms spread in surrender, a lightsaber 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 both furious and sort of sympathetic 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.
Didn’t 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.
Doesn’t 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
