by Julie Barton
“Exactly,” she said, laughing and opening the car door. I pulled her suitcase out from the back of the truck and put it on the sidewalk. “Let me say good-bye to Bunk first,” she said. She opened the backseat door and hugged him like he was her own son. She whispered something into his ear, held his head with both her hands, and kissed the bridge of his nose.
“I’m gonna miss that dog,” she said.
“Mom,” I said, taking her hands. “I think I’m going to be okay here. I really do. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I love you. So much.”
“You are going to be so happy,” she said. “I just know it.”
“Thank you, Mama,” I said, through the massive lump in my throat. “I love you.”
She hugged me and gave me a quick kiss. “Listen,” she said, holding both my hands. “Let’s do the same thing we did when you were away at college. Let’s look at the moon. Remember? When you see the moon, know that I’m looking at the same moon you are, no matter where we are. It’s the same moon shining on us. Okay?” she said. We’d done this when I spent a semester abroad in Australia while I was in college, and we’d done it when I went to Italy on a high school exchange program. It was my mom’s way of connecting us despite any distance. “I’ll call you when I get home. Have fun, Julie. You’re going to do wonderful things.”
With that, she blew me a kiss, turned around, and rushed through the airport’s sliding doors. I took a deep breath and walked around my car. I buckled my seat belt as tears came. Big tears. I wiped my eyes, wondering if I was making a huge mistake. I missed my mom terribly already. Then Bunker jumped from the backseat into the passenger seat, opened his mouth and let his long pink tongue dangle carelessly, so I laughed through my tears.
“Okay, buddy,” I said. “I get it. No lingering all sad at the departures curb. Let’s get on with it. Here we go.” I put the car in drive, pressed the gas and rested my right hand on Bunker’s back as I drove past the city back to Aunt Aurora’s house.
FOSTER CHILD
AUGUST 1996
Aurora loved Bunker. She sat down on the ground with him and let his puppy paws climb all over her. She got orange dog hair all over her clothes, let him lick her cheek and sniff her ears with intensity. Animals loved her. They spoke to her in a way I knew well. All my life my mom had suggested that Aurora was a little odd for how much she loved animals, her endless parade of guinea pigs and cats and dogs as a kid. Animals were her childhood solace in a world that made her feel alone and not good enough. Just like me. She was the youngest of three, with two over-achieving sisters. She had a wandering eye as a child and struggled through surgeries and glasses while her older sister, my mother, was the homecoming queen, and her middle sister was the blonde athlete of the family. I remember hearing jokes about how she was supposed to be a boy. Part of her always felt she’d failed before she was even born, her father’s last failed attempt at a son.
I think Bunker sensed Aurora’s deep connection to animals and the natural world. He listened intently to her, loved her with a heart-crackling clarity that I understood was from the depths, from far, far below what we understand to be visible in this world. The three of us seemed to congregate there.
Those nights at Aurora’s, we’d sit on the couch flanked by cats and dogs, her rabbit Radar sleeping soundly on her chest. We’d just be together. I got to feel a different kind of mothering. It wasn’t better than my mom’s—just more my frequency. Like Seattle. A better-fitting longitude. We spent time together with no small talk. Only real talk. Emotions were not a taboo subject in this house. In fact, they were almost always the topic of conversation. Aurora told me, for the first time, that depression and alcoholism ran in my family. I learned that everyone knew my immediate family’s problems, despite no one’s ever mentioning them to me. I felt a reckoning, a peace. Maybe I wasn’t so weak and crazy after all.
Melissa and I connected on the phone and made plans to have dinner with the guys, the other two soon-to-be roommates who also were friends from high school in California. We all went to different colleges and graduated in 1995. One guy was in graduate school and the other was working downtown at a film company.
I talked to the grad-school guy on the phone to plan our first meeting. I told him I’d pick him up outside his building on the University of Washington’s campus. He said his name was Greg and that he’d be the guy in the plaid shirt waiting on Fifteenth Avenue. “What color plaid?” I asked.
“Well, let me see.” I could hear by his voice that he was looking down at his chest. “Red, yellow, blue, green, a little bit of, I don’t know, purple?” he said.
“Any more colors?” I said. “Because that’ll make it much more specific.”
He laughed. I bit my nails sitting on Aurora’s carpeted living room stairs. She stood in the kitchen, cooking pasta for her daughters. The bunny scratched his ear just outside the sliding glass door. Bunker slept at my feet. And I had just made a boy laugh.
Not long after my mom left, the infamous Seattle clouds crept in. Days and days of gray-white skies, cool temperatures, and intermittent drizzle. But the gray came as a surprising comfort to me. Seattle felt like a gentle friend, taking me in her arms, holding me with her dim light, making my re-entry into the world a quiet, slow, easy one. I loved the clouds. They made me feel as if a blanket were wrapped around me. It wasn’t always sunny all the time, and that was okay. A place can still be beautiful, breathtaking even, when it’s gray and damp. The flourishing plants, the animals thriving there, they all spoke so much more than the sun could. Like the roots of a tree, hidden underground and more elaborate and astounding than we would ever know.
BLIND ROOMMATES
AUGUST 1996
On a Friday afternoon, I kissed Bunker good-bye, left Aunt Aurora’s house, and drove to the University of Washington to pick up Greg. The housemates were meeting for the first time, gathering at a pub for beer and burgers. I pulled up to the sidewalk at the university and spotted him. The plaid shirt was indeed just about every color but pink and I chuckled as he circled my car and opened the passenger door.
“Sounds like you need new brakes,” he said. “I’m Greg.” He was right. The brakes on my truck had been squeaking since Missouri.
“I know,” I said. “Good thing I made it cross-country. I’m Julie.” We shook hands. I laughed a little; he was cute. Melissa was not exaggerating when she said he had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. He had dark hair, beautiful full lips, and black lashes that made his eyes stand out like lit-from-behind gemstones. I wanted to keep looking at him, but I forced myself to watch the road. “This is weird,” I said, pushing my hair behind my ear and flicking the turn signal. “It’s like we’re all on a blind roommates date.” He laughed and adjusted his backpack between his legs.
“That’s because we kind of are,” he said, smiling, confident. We chatted for the rest of the drive about what he was studying (molecular biology, whatever that is), and where he grew up (Northern California). I told him about my year in New York and about how I was looking forward to living in a real house with a real yard because I had a dog. A great dog. A dog he would love. “Can’t wait to meet him,” he said. “I really wanted to get a dog, but I’m at the lab too much, so this works out perfectly.”
Driving down from Aurora’s house, I had contemplated my last few months: the depression, the medication and therapy, Bunker’s companionship giving me enough courage to try something new. I vacillated between hope and dread; sure one minute that the housemates would love me, sure the next that we’d hate each other and I’d be forced to crawl back to Ohio defeated again. But when I met Greg, there was a simple calm, like a leaf floating to the ground, or maybe rather an enormous 767 landing with a barely perceptible touch. There was a peace about him, a surefootedness that I found comforting. I knew we would be friends.
We parked and met Melissa outside the pub. I hadn’t seen her
in a few years and she looked fantastic; slim with her normally bobbed hair lopped into a pixie cut. She introduced me to our other roommate, Chris, a tall Nordic-looking guy who hugged me tight upon our meeting. The four of us slid into a booth made of dark wood, sour with the smell of old beer. Everyone seemed a little nervous and I wondered how Bunker was doing without me. My mind wandered to various scenarios: my cousins accidentally letting him out the front door, him getting hit by a car, a horrific scene looping through my mind’s eye. I tried to fight the thoughts away and listen to my new housemates. Melissa ordered four glasses and a pitcher, then poured us each a golden-brown beer. She held up her glass. “Here’s to our new place,” Melissa said. “It’s going to be awesome.”
We drank and talked about our first years out of college. Melissa had lived in an apartment by herself. Greg too. Greg had gone to Princeton and was in his first year of grad school. Chris had gone to Davidson, graduated, and spent a year traveling in Africa. He gestured wildly with his hands when he spoke and laughed from deep in his belly. I told them I had spent the year in Manhattan but realized East Coast big-city life wasn’t for me. Greg said he’d decided that living alone wasn’t for him, that he was excited to have roommates. Chris said living in Kenya had changed his life forever.
They asked about my road trip, and as I spoke, I felt that we were like four pegs in a board, all sliding into place. Gathered around that dented, sticky table, I don’t think I was the only one who felt a surge of hope, as if somehow the four of us would create our own makeshift family, a family of friends. They asked about Bunker and I told them what a mellow puppy he was, how he would love all of them. They all responded with such eager enthusiasm about meeting him that tears crept to my eyes. It was both their openness and kindness, but also their seeming immediate acceptance of me that moved me so deeply. That, and this was my first real afternoon being away from Bunker. I missed him terribly. Not having him next to me left me feeling untethered. I tried not to think about how much time we’d spend apart once I found my first job, which had to happen soon. My bank account was running low.
We said good-bye on the sidewalk outside of the pub and planned our move-in for one week later. Melissa gave me the address of the house they’d found so that I could swing by and check it out. She said it was in Queen Anne, and that it was beautiful. It had a huge yard we could landscape however we wanted, four separate bedrooms, two big bathrooms, and a deck off the kitchen and dining room that had incredible views of downtown Seattle and Mount Rainier. The rent was only $400 per person per month. We’d gotten approved for the property after Chris’s mom wrote a letter to the landlord saying what wonderful, upstanding, and responsible young people we were. I asked if it mattered that I didn’t have a job yet and Melissa said the landlord had never asked. “Sucker!” she said. “Who cares anyway? We got the place!” I hugged her good-bye and walked to my car, realizing as I drove back to Aunt Aurora’s that I was smiling.
Bunker greeted me at the door with his happy dance, his body bending and wiggling wildly. I held his head in my hands, inhaled his beautiful puppy breath, kissed his fur, and whispered, “We’re going to be okay, buddy.”
429 MAGNOLIA STREET
SEPTEMBER 1996
The next day my cousin Lindsay and I drove to the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle to check out the rental house. Bunker was in the backseat as we drove up a steep hill and pulled up to the place. The house was big, partially hidden behind an enormous pine tree. It was gray with white trim, and the large flowerpots out front held long-dead plants.
We knocked and one of the current tenants let us in, clearly waking up from his midday nap, rubbing his eyes, and going back to bed after telling us to feel free to look around. Lindsay and I laughed quietly, then started snooping. The house was big, drafty, and old, with huge windows and tons of light pouring in. On the first floor was a living room with a large fireplace flanked by built-in bookshelves. The kitchen was small but functional, and the dining room had a huge plate-glass window that looked out over the city. A door from the kitchen led to a deck that wrapped around two sides of the house and offered jaw-dropping views of the Seattle skyline and Mount Rainier.
Left of the living room were two small rooms and a staircase leading to three bedrooms and a second bathroom upstairs. From the kitchen, steps led down to an unfinished basement that held a mustard-yellow pool table and a refrigerator painted with “BEER” in block letters.
Bunker and I wandered out the basement door to what Melissa had assured me would be a great yard for a dog. It was a big, slanted expanse of overgrowth. From the basement door, down a flight of creaky stairs, the yard sloped to a fence buried in vines. Bunker and I made our way down, walked all the way to the edge of the large lot, pushing weeds and branches out of our way.
I stood at the base of the hill and peered up at the house feeling as if I’d been sent to rescue this little patch of land, to reclaim it, care for it, show how resilient the earth can be, even in the most neglected and misused spaces. As I walked, I picked up crushed beer cans and fast-food wrappers. A long snake-like shape that I’m pretty sure was the tail of an enormous rat scurried through the brush. And I thought, This has potential.
“We can make this work, buddy. Don’t you think?” I said to Bunker, scratching his rump. He looked up at me, his mouth open in a smile before he scurried, deeply focused on the mysterious movement in the grass. I imagined pulling all the weeds, making a real lawn, a vegetable garden even, building a beautiful doghouse out of scrap wood, finding an old patio set and making a little area for outdoor lounging, hanging twinkling lights, and planting flowers.
I wanted to dig my hands into the dirt right there, mark my presence. My cousin called down from the deck off of the living room, “Come check out this view!” Bunker and I began to climb the stairs to join her. On the third step up, Bunker stumbled. His back legs gave out in a flattened splay. He yelped. I gasped and lifted his rear end up and watched concerned as he swayed up the rest of the stairs. I reached the top step and looked back down expecting to find a hole in one of the planks, but saw nothing, so tried not to worry. He must have missed a step or slipped. But in the back of my mind, fear grew. Mom and I had never taken Bunker to the vet after the Sun Valley hike. What if something really was wrong?
Soon we joined Lindsay at the deck’s railing and took in the view: Mount Rainier to the left, downtown Seattle to the right, big open sky as far as we could see. The sun pouring over the city made us ignore that when we walked, the deck swayed with the stress of our weight. We smiled, locked eyes, a wordless celebration. I felt welcomed by the energy of this big house, its openness, its light and air, its need. As we thanked the soon-to-vacate tenant and left, I stood on the sidewalk with Bunker and thought about what a contrast this new life would be compared to my dark bedroom in Manhattan. I could plant grass and flowers, sit outside, and feel the sun and rain on my face.
Lindsay was fourteen and I could tell that she thought that my soon-to-be new life was the coolest thing ever. We drove home with the windows down, Pearl Jam blaring, singing at the top of our lungs, the wind whipping our hair into our faces. It was a celebration of new beginnings. As we crossed the bridge over Lake Washington, Bunker stood up in the backseat, looked out at the water and howled, as if to announce our arrival in this beautiful city. I felt like the summer sun would never set on that day.
I thought for a moment about the pot on the stove in my dingy New York apartment, the crawling to the phone, and though it was less than six months earlier, it felt like a lifetime away. Everything before Bunker felt as if it happened in another lifetime. I wasn’t awake until I found him, and he found me. Our bond felt that strong, my essence renewed in his presence. He healed me, and to thank him, I planned to give him the best life possible. He was barely six months old, still a puppy. But I looked in the rearview mirror and saw in his sparkling brown eyes an ancient soul, one who came to me with a
distinct purpose. I nodded in gratitude to whatever forces brought us together. I reached back with the hand that wasn’t on the steering wheel and petted his head. He closed his eyes and leaned into my touch. We were together in this new adventure. I couldn’t wait to get started.
We moved into the house a week later, helping each other with our things. Before unpacking, we ordered a celebratory pizza and clinked Red Hook beer bottles on the back deck. The planks wobbled when we walked, and we joked that were it to fall, Chris, who was closest to the house, would grab onto the doorjamb and we’d all grab onto him. It was August in Seattle and the weather was divine: warm sun, cool breeze, and a feeling of contentment and satisfaction that I chalked up to this city. Our conversation felt like one long belly laugh. I knew it already—Seattle and these friends just worked for me. I lay in bed at night those first few weeks thinking that I must have been a Northwestern girl accidentally switched at birth with a bunch of Midwesterners.
My roommates gave me the biggest bedroom in the house, the one on the first floor closest to the front door, and Melissa got the room with the view of Mount Rainier. Greg’s room was directly above mine. Somehow Chris landed the bedroom not much wider than a twin bed, but he said he didn’t care, that he planned to only sleep there, that’s all. His generosity endeared him to us all.
We unpacked, walked the dog, grocery shopped, watched television together, and I gave up on the lingering fear that moving to Seattle could go the way of my horrible year in New York. My housemates already felt like family. Melissa laughed with abandon and confided in me like she already trusted that I would be a good, loyal friend. She’d call me and say only, “Hey, it’s me.” The way she assumed intimacy between us was an unexpected gift that I wasn’t sure I knew how to accept or reciprocate. I wanted desperately to honor her trust in me, so I found myself showing up for her as a friend in ways I never had. I’d always understood that female friendships were special, but I realized in Seattle that I’d never really had a best friend. Soon we were inseparable. We sat hip-to-hip on the couch, laughing about how we didn’t care that our asses were expanding as we watched Sixteen Candles for the third time on a Sunday at noon in our pajamas. Pass the Ben & Jerry’s.