Likes

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Her voice had a hitch in it, and that made Mari start to cry.

  “I thought so too. I mean, that’s what she told us. But maybe she was just using him as a cover? I don’t know if there was anything really there.”

  Imogen was silent for a moment.

  “Maybe she wanted to talk about what she was feeling without having to say who the person was.”

  Mari nodded tearfully. “Right. Like a decoy.”

  Imogen continued to stare out the window.

  Another possible explanation suddenly reared up in Mari’s mind, and she felt her stomach lurch. Maybe Alex had been not decoy but practice. Like a warm-up. Low stakes, no pressure. Vaguely brown, formerly chubby Alex. Like shooting baskets in the backyard before the game. She shuddered. She could never say that aloud.

  “You know what,” Imogen said, “I really wish they hadn’t taken down the zip line.”

  Mari joined her in gazing at the yard. Below them spread a low layer of broad, glossy foliage. It looked like a shimmering green carpet that floated just a few inches above the ground, lush but uncomfortable to lie down in. In, not on, because of course the carpet wasn’t solid but made out of large, stiff-leaved plants that would crowd in on you or get crushed under you if you were to try to have sex in their midst. This was part of the strangeness of Mari’s fantasy—there really was no welcoming spot in this woodland garden for two people looking to have sex. Or at least sex according to how she imagined it. To her mind it required a reasonably comfortable surface, one that was by necessity horizontal. Never in a million years would she consider the following possible: on the hood of a Volvo; folded over a table; standing on one foot, pushed up soundlessly against a bathroom door.

  * * *

  How did they begin the conversation with Bree?

  We need to talk to you. About something serious.

  Or: Melanie told us.

  Or: Will you close the door?

  Or: I don’t even know what to say right now.

  All plausible, but none certain. None sounding even faintly familiar. However hard she tried, Mari couldn’t remember. Not what was said, or where. The total blankness made her wonder if a conversation had ever happened. Did Imogen speak alone with Bree? Was Mari not a party to it? Did parents step in and make arrangements among themselves, with the thought of sparing them the pain of talking? Or was Mari’s mere presence during this conversation ignoble enough that her memory now refused to summon it? All plausible, too.

  What Mari did know was that whatever happened in such a conversation, however the information was conveyed, Bree would remember. She would be able to recall every detail of it clearly.

  Just as Mari could recall where she and Melanie had been standing in the record store that August afternoon; what Melanie was wearing (a saggy blue cardigan over her Buzzcocks shirt); what they had just eaten (roll-up sandwiches with tahini dressing); what was playing on the store’s speakers (Nick Cave doing a cover of “Hey Joe”).

  * * *

  Another detail, impossible to forget: the phrase that Nicholas had pressed into her, hotly and permanently, a phrase describing her mother. During one of the phone calls between her mother and Imogen’s, Nicholas had picked up the receiver in another part of the house—an interruption that wouldn’t even be possible now—and spoken at her mother furiously, in the relentless, punishing style of a seasoned debater. Afterward she’d walked into Mari’s room looking dazed. “He called me, among many other unpleasant things,” her mother had said, sinking onto the bed, “a busybody. A pathetic busybody who wants to make everyone else as miserable as I am.”

  * * *

  A cooling of relations ensued, but despite what Bree later claimed, it couldn’t be rightly called a banishment. The interlude resembled more of a breather, a period of recovery, than an actual estrangement. After their talk in the tree house, Mari had pictured Imogen and herself moving side by side down the school hallways, heads bowed like novitiates, with Bree maintaining a respectful distance, back turned to them as she spun and spun the combination dial on her locker. And for the first weeks of high school they did give her some space. But not unkindly. They continued to exchange smiles with her; they offered to loan her a pen when she needed one; they waved and said hello, liked her new jacket, laughed when she said something funny in class, held the door open for her.

  Being a duo again brought with it the ease of traveling light. Maybe Mari’s mother hadn’t been completely wrong about two being less complicated. On some days it felt good, the way depriving yourself during Lent felt good, the invigoration of being disciplined and lean. But on some days it was terrible not having Bree at her side, and Mari walked through the school building feeling wobbly and exposed, buffeted by air, as if riding along bumpily in a jeep without a door. In the lunchroom she watched from the corner of her eye as Bree made forays into other groups—for a while she joined the musically gifted girls, the ones who spent their Saturdays at the conservatory, and then she seemed to hit it off with a new girl named Pam who lived in a town even farther away than Revere. There were also the two Allisons, whom she’d always liked and been chatty with. She never sat by herself, in other words; she wasn’t friendless.

  One day Mari saw her leave the lunchroom holding the palm tree–covered cosmetics bag in which she carried her tampons, and briefly felt sick with missing her.

  But in only a few months, they were back to being friends. The three of them had been placed in the same advanced French class, with sublimely silly M. Bernard, and it was hard not to sit together when there was so much goofiness and group work and all the ridiculous skits going on. Then, separately, Imogen and Bree became possessed by the crazy idea of rowing crew, Bree as a coxswain and Imogen as a bow, and before long they were all at Imogen’s house on a Friday night, eating Dino’s. Lifting a slice of Hawaiian pizza from the box, Bree asked, “Am I off probation now?” and even though she asked it sincerely, without any sarcasm or humor, Mari and Imogen both laughed gently, as if she’d made a sweet but impenetrable joke. And so they picked up again, the three of them. The various parents supported it, some more cautiously than others, on the understanding that certain ground rules would be observed.

  If Mari was being honest, however, she would admit that even as their friendship continued—and it did continue, ever-shifting in closeness and distance, through high school and college and deep into adulthood—she carried with her an unwanted residue, a sort of fine, nearly invisible grit she’d tracked in without noticing. Hard little traces of something that refused to be swept or smoothed away. When Mari eventually brought a boy around—it took a while—she had to brace herself. She was watchful. Noting the moments Bree turned her smile on him, or touched his arm, or looked up at him from under her tumble of hennaed hair. And all her tireless self-grooming—it was no longer a curiosity but a threat. The absurd amount of time Bree needed to prepare herself before leaving the house—enraging, resentment-stirring. Mari knew it was unfair to feel this way. Unfair to perceive what would have been merely annoyances in another friend as evidence in Bree of a failing that had already revealed itself, treacherously. But this was how she felt. She couldn’t help it.

  Are your parents still living at same address? That question was original impetus for now epic length text! So saddened by news of Imogen’s parents selling theirs. Hard to think of them in a condo. I hope yours have stayed put for now—can’t imagine all those paintings and plants belonging anywhere else. My first time at your house I thought I was inside museum! But seriously I loved stillness and calm and smell of soil from all the pots. I can’t walk past a bromeliad without thinking of your mom.

  I’m ashamed it’s taken me this long to send proper thank you note. Also the kids tanks. Hahaha tanka. Sent email of gratitude immediately via website but want to do something better for her. Every time I pull food from fridge or turn on stove or put clothes in washer I thank her. All our tiny appliances. As lifesaving as the brakes! Please send her my love and
confirm address. Also update from you please! No need to write 19 c. Novel like this one but miss you and want to hear how you are. xoxoxoxo

  * * *

  Mari felt unsteady. She had to put down her phone. She felt a shrinking all over her body, and then a wave of prickling, an intolerable heat.

  How had she not told Bree about her mother?

  She didn’t need to calculate how long it had been. She knew it already; she knew it down to the day. On Saturday it would be four months. Four months, plus the preceding six months of treatment, and in all that time she hadn’t managed to tell her.

  There had been long spells of silence before, on both sides—growing longer as they themselves grew older. Mari hadn’t known, for instance, about the beetle study, or the bus. She couldn’t remember if she’d mentioned to Bree anything about their moving. She sent holiday cards every year; they texted each other on their birthdays with strings of fond, exuberant emojis. There was no sense of neglect, no recriminations, between the two of them, or none as far as she knew. But this omission on Mari’s part was different—not in degree but in kind. It was a disgrace.

  Her mother had made a donation, clearly, and by the sound of it not a small one. This was Mari’s first time hearing of it. Which was surprising, considering that throughout her treatment her mother had been nearly obsessed by the task of getting her accounts in order and taking care of what she called housekeeping. She had enlisted Mari in cataloging the paintings, for instance. She’d said that Mari’s father wouldn’t remember where they had come from, which ones were valuable and which not. She was also preoccupied by the kind of food he was feeding the cats. Mari kept bringing her back to more important matters—financial paperwork, friends she wanted to see. Yet her mother hadn’t said anything about Mari’s friend, or the fundraising page, or the money she’d given her.

  Mari wondered if her gift might have had something to do with the news—her mother used to refer to herself somewhat indulgently as a cable news junkie, someone who canceled plans in order to stay home and watch Senate hearings or follow fast-breaking stories—and so much of the recent news had made that particular summer feel close again. The past looked different now, and especially the sex. It was likely they had seen it all wrong back then. Why was Bree the bad apple? The one needing to be banished? How could a girl of fourteen be the one held responsible? This wasn’t the first time such questions had occurred to Mari: she was a feminist, for heaven’s sake; she did go to college. But maybe all the zeitgeisty talk had led Mari’s mother to reconsider what had happened decades earlier, and if it wasn’t too strong a word, to repent of her part in it.

  The thought was desolating. Her mother—her practical, refined, brisk, unsentimental, highly opinionated and discerning mother—was capable of experiencing a change of heart, when Mari was not. For all the years she had spent fancying herself a sensitive person, cultivating her feelings and perceptions, her heart had remained tough. Unyielding. No matter how hard she tried to view the past from an enlightened perspective, no matter how much she wanted to see it with clearer eyes, her heart kept stubbornly placing Bree as the subject of the sentence. As agent and initiator. The active, desiring, incautious subject. That was her friend, the girl she remembered. But her mother, evidently, had come to see things differently.

  * * *

  Bree was the one who invented the names. They evolved over time, as nicknames tend to do. First came Imogen’s—it wasn’t so far to get from Pickett to Pickle. This was probably in the seventh grade. The name suited her precisely because it was so perfectly wrong. Nothing salty or squat about Imogen, the very last person you’d expect to find inside a dark, briny barrel—which was why it must have been so satisfying to call her that. After months of being addressed almost exclusively as Pickle—your turn, Pickle; can you pass me that, Pickle; merci beaucoup, Pickle—Imogen answered one day with, “You’re welcome, Brickle”—for obvious reasons. And so Bree became Brickle, a name that eventually got shortened to Brick. Upon the introduction of Brickle, Bree made the regal decision that Mari had to have a name, too. During lunch she led them into the school library and heaved open the giant dictionary resting on its stand. She flipped through chunks, then leafed through single pages, then stopped and peered down at an entry.

  “Good news!” Bree said. “Guess what it means.” Her finger inched across the page. “Mickle means ‘much, or a large amount’ as in the phrase ‘Many a little makes a mickle.’ And guess where it means that?”

  Behind her glasses, her face was lit up.

  “Guess.”

  Imogen and Mari couldn’t guess.

  “In Northern England.” She smiled at them exultantly. “Where Manchester is!” she crowed, as if Mari’s happiness was her own.

  THE BURGLAR

  He watches the second car back out of the driveway and then he makes a slow lap around the block, careful not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. From other houses come the sounds of dogs barking, and from other yards the noise of lawn mowers and leaf blowers. Construction is happening somewhere down the street. After completing the lap he looks up at the clock on top of the Catholic church the next block over: 9:40. He walks up the driveway purposefully and pushes through the white wooden gate, a high gate that, he noticed yesterday, doesn’t have a lock.

  * * *

  Ecola? Orkin? Idling at the intersection she can’t remember for a moment the name of the company she is on her way home to meet. In the past week three men came through the house, one after the other, wearing jumpsuits and slipping disposable booties over their shoes, three men on their hands and knees in the attic, creaking overhead, tapping inquisitively at the beams. After collecting all the estimates, she consulted with her husband, who had only this to say: “Trust your gut.” Oh—Greenleaf! That’s the name. They cost the most, but she liked the man and, according to the literature, they use 100-percent-organic materials.

  * * *

  The husband is late to work. As the elevator carries him up to the offices, he is thinking about Emmett Byron Diggs, Attica inmate #17864. Diggs will be the first innocent man to appear on the show. When the showrunner put him on the episode, he said, “I don’t want you to think that I’m asking you to write this one just because the character is black,” and he replied, “I don’t think that.” But now he is beginning to worry about what to do with Emmett Diggs.

  * * *

  Two thousand one hundred seventy-five dollars: This she remembers exactly. After the job is done, she will write out the entire amount and the feel of the check tearing crisply along the perforated line will be a small, silly thing that pleases her. Thank you so much! For the first time since moving into the house, she is not worrying every minute about money. She is going to the gym again. She is washing her car on a regular basis. In her clean car, in her damp gym clothes, she drives through the bright blue morning, feeling calm. She’s going to be right on time.

  * * *

  He tips back in his chair and looks at the whiteboard, where the story beats for Act One have been written in streaky black marker. They’re only two days in to breaking the Emmett Diggs episode. So far the formula has been consistent: 1960s bad guy commits heinous crimes, winds up in solitary at Attica, travels through a rift in the space-time continuum, and pops up in present-day upstate New York, where he continues his crime spree until he is tracked down and apprehended by a top-secret team of special agents. Which the network says they like; which has worked just fine until now; so why, on the first episode he’s been assigned to write, are they trying something different?

  * * *

  The backyard is a mess. Weeds up to his waist, cracked concrete. A tarp slung over a pile of stuff pushed up against the garage door. From the front, the house looked nice. Neat. Green lawn. Front door painted a glossy bright red. But back here it’s different. Flattened cardboard boxes, dusty grill. Plastic playhouse bleaching in the sun. Shrunken lumps of shit all over the dead grass. He hesitates, then thinks of the cars
that pulled out of the driveway: a Prius, a Mini Cooper. There will definitely be Apple gear inside.

  * * *

  Episode 103, “Frankie Sutton”: a deadly bank robber returns from the past to take a half dozen hostages at gunpoint during a holdup of the First Niagara Bank. Episode 104, “Walter Buckley”: the notorious “Loose Cannon” bomber plants a pipe bomb in the Buffalo Field Office of the FBI. Episode 107, “Mark David Dixon”: a serial child murderer kidnaps Special Agent O’Hare’s nephew from a local playground and leaves the team a trail of taunting clues. And now Episode 110, “Emmett Diggs”: an innocent black man convicted for the grisly murder of his white fiancée emerges out of the ether and does what, exactly?

  * * *

  At the stop sign, she counts to five. She doesn’t want to get another ticket. And then waits a little more, because there’s Jessica, her neighbor, out walking Buster. She gives a tap on her horn and waves: Go ahead, cross the street. She isn’t in any hurry, and she’s preoccupied with a relaxing and anticipatory sort of arithmetic. How many more weeks before they can talk about getting some bids on the roof? Also, the kid needs a proper bookcase; the shelves in her room are starting to bow. The Voder-Smith family is ready to graduate from Swedish-designed particleboard! They’ll have to plan ahead for property taxes, due at the beginning of December, but if all goes as it should they won’t have to ask her mother for help this year. And if—is even to think it to jinx it? Her husband is superstitious about these things—if the show gets an order for nine more episodes, maybe they can finally tackle the backyard.