Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

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 anytime 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 third week of June, 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 scrip 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 at the house 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 time off and has life experiences. In Sheri’s case, she had doubled in classics and dance-theatre 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