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. Maybe he was mad at Julia for allowing it to get lost. Gradually, though, my thinking grew darker, and on the drive home from LAX to South Pasadena, I find myself wondering if his treatment of the envelope might be 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 one another, 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 we’ll be bumping up against the same bodies, whether on the landing or in the kitchen or somewhere else. Knowing that, it seems to me, is enough. And not just enough, but plenty.
LIKES
The dad scrolled through his daughter’s Instagram account, looking for clues. The most recent post was a photograph of an ice cream cone, extravagantly large, held up against a white wall by a disembodied hand. Peppermint stick, or strawberry. The mound was starting to melt, a trickle of it inching down the cone and drawing dangerously close to the thumb. His daughter’s.
The next photo was a close-up of a shop window. Inside the window glowed a pink neon sign spelling out the word warm in lowercase letters. The glowing word took up most of the frame: it was impossible to tell what sort of store it was.
Another close-up: an eraser-colored rose, its petals halfway unfurled.
A panorama: the sky at sunset.
A shot of her dog, Bob, curled up like a cinnamon bun on the pleated, peachy expanse of her bed.
And then an earlobe—was that what it was? Soft, rounded, partly in shadow.
He closed his eyes and put down the phone.
His daughter was nearly twelve, and difficult to talk to.
Normally she rode the bus home from school, but now that she had to do physical therapy twice a week, he had been picking her up and taking her to the appointments. He felt responsible. These problems with her joints—runner’s knee, Achilles tendinitis—were undoubtedly a handicap she’d inherited from his gouty side of the family. In ballet class, she could no longer do grand pliés or go up to relevé. In the middle of the night, she would wake up in pain. He kept a tin of
