The Story of Us

by Deb Caletti

  “Oh,” I said.

  “San Juan. Not the San Juan with the pools and hotels, right? The other one. The one tourists don’t see. My mother is still there.”

  “Do you get to see her much?”

  “I’m going down there next month. See all the crazy relatives,” he said, but smiled.

  “That must be hard. To be away. You must miss her.”

  “Yep. I do. But she’s happy I’m going to school here. And Rebecca’s cool. Smokes way too much. I’ve been high on secondhand smoke since I was six, I swear. Still, she’s all right. And my dad does the usual ‘You got to think about your future, son,’ but he’s calmed down now that I’m going to college. I took a year off, you know. All that ‘What do I want to do with my life’ bullshit.”

  “I know.” I did. You could be so sure about what you wanted. All senior year, it was all about getting out. But then, out … Out was a huge place. “Where you going?” I managed to make it sound casual. But I noticed the quick skip of worry I felt. I was thinking, Far away.

  “Seattle U. But don’t ask what I’m studying, because I have no idea. You’re supposed to plan your whole life right now? I don’t know what I want for breakfast tomorrow.”

  “Same. Up until now I wanted to be an astronaut, a cowgirl, or an explorer.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Up until now you thought those things were possible.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Reality’s a bitch. Wait, now you. I hate people like, ‘Tell me more about myself.’ You in school?”

  “Just graduated. Trying to decide. I’m holding a spot at two places. USC. U-Dub,” I said.

  “Whoa. LA.”

  “Yeah. Not sure, though.” I didn’t want to tell him or anyone else that LA, in my secret heart of hearts, sounded a million miles from home. You weren’t supposed to admit that. You were supposed to want the best school, no matter what. You were supposed to be ready. And you were supposed to want to leave. “And don’t ask me what I’m studying, because I don’t even know what I had for breakfast today.”

  Ash laughed. “Pancakes.”

  “Riiiiight,” I said.

  “See? I can help you.”

  I smiled at him, and he smiled back.

  “You cold?”

  “No, I’m great,” I said. I didn’t feel cold. I didn’t feel anything close to it.

  “You shivered.” He unzipped his sweatshirt. Holy crap, the sudden view—just a tank top stretched across that chest, and the round, hard muscles of his arms. I mean, wow.

  “Oh no, that’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine.” But he’d already tossed it around my shoulders. It was warm from his body heat, and it smelled like he must smell—good, some musky soap. Really good.

  We watched a solitary seagull taking a long walk down the beach. He looked like he had things on his mind. I stared at that leaping fire, looked into the deep, enchanting red, way down by the coals. I hated to admit it, but maybe Hailey was right about a guy’s sweatshirt, the way it could make you feel.

  Behind us, from far up on the hill, you could hear a door slam. An angry shudder, maybe, or just the force of the wind.

  “Ouch,” Ash said at the sound.

  I looked at the house behind me, white in the moonlight, with the yellow glowing windows. I saw a light shut off. Nearly all my people were in one place.

  “Hey, I’d better go,” I said.

  “Yeah? Too bad.”

  I tossed his sweatshirt across his lap. He stood when I did. He looked at me with those dark, intense eyes. “Hey, you can share my log anytime,” he said.

  “Great,” I said. I don’t know. The way he looked—he seemed as dangerous to me as that ocean then, with its tides and undercurrents. With its wide possibilities, stretching to other unknown continents.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said back.

  I turned to head home. But Ash called out.

  “Hey, Cricket Girl,” he said.

  “Hey, Ash Boy.”

  “You seeing anyone?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Janssen and I were and weren’t. We were in some relationship waiting room, with bad magazines and a clock ticking too loudly.

  “I’m seeing you, right this minute,” I said.

  He laughed. “All right. Gotcha. Playing it cool.”

  The moon was above me on the boardwalk. Half full, but you could see its shadow half there, too dim and waiting to be revealed. I breathed in the smells of wet sand and fire cinders and sea. A deep breath. The truth was, I was mad at myself for how I was feeling. Those shoulders—those eyes … That kind of desire was disloyal. True, you wanted more from people sometimes. And sometimes, you wanted more from yourself.

  The screen door of the house banged shut, and my mother came out. She wore a long, white sundress down to her ankles, a mismatched dress shirt, probably one of Dan’s, hastily thrown over the top. No shoes again. My mother and her bare feet … She was walking fast, and her hair was riding out behind her, a wave of yellow. She saw me, and held up her hand to indicate she didn’t want to talk. It was a gesture of upset I remembered from her encounters with my father. I knew the feeling—when too much had suddenly gathered before you and you needed to catch up.

  I let her pass. Something was sinking in my chest. We’ve got a special size of worry for the people we love, somewhere between a mountain range and a small planet. You could wish sometimes that you were the kind of person who didn’t care. Who could see someone hurt and turn on the television or order some new shoes online, thinking only about tan or black, seven or seven and a half. But I wasn’t a person like that. I guess we’d had a lot of troubles. We saw the damage one person could do to another. You got to thinking that a person could be harmed, broken, swept out to sea.

  I brushed the sand off my legs, clapped my shoes together to clean them off. Inside my room Jupiter was already asleep on her pillow. But at the sound of the door, she rose and headed for the far corner in shame. Dogs remembered their guilt, even for something they’d done hours before. I’d felt the same thing, wearing that sweatshirt. I wondered what it was. Had she chewed up something she couldn’t resist? Eaten the gum from my purse? I looked around. I saw the small puddle near the front door.

  “Oh, honey, are you okay? Did that stupid Ben forget to take you out?”

  I cleaned up as fast as I could so she wouldn’t feel so bad. She stayed over there in her corner in spite of my reassurances. She didn’t think she deserved forgiveness, I guess.

  There was deep apology in her eyes. And although I’d seen her regret many times before, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this time it seemed different. It seemed to be an apology for something bigger, even, than any simple accident on a wood floor.

  chapter

  ten

  Dear Janssen—

  Your list made me laugh. There was that other time Jupiter was furious with us too, remember? When we tried to make her go swimming? We thought dogs loved that. We yanked and pulled her toward that water. We carried her in. She was up to her knees, frowning at us. She refused to move. I think she was mad the rest of the day.

  Okay.

  Things Dogs Do That Make You Think You’ve Glimpsed Their Top Secret, Hush-Hush Intelligence:

  1. When you catch them watching TV

  2. When they “accidentally” wink at you when you’re talking

  3. When they know the sound of your car engine and door slam versus every other car engine and door slam

  4. When all the dogs bark to each other at night like in 101 Dalmatians and you know they really are passing emergency messages

  5. When they rush to sit in the driver’s seat when you go inside somewhere to run an errand, as if they used to drive in a past life

  6. The way they purposefully use the Power of Looking Sad to their advantage

  How do we know they don’t have great abilities we’re unaware of? They can detect cancer in a human by scent, for God’s sake. But, we say, they
’re “just” dogs, and other animals are “just” too, and for that matter, we can look at other people as “just” an awful lot of the time. It bugs me, our human displays of superiority, our single-minded, self-centered blindness. Our lack of generosity. We go about our Important People business, not even noticing their important animal business going on beside us. Dogs are trying to do the job they know to do, to demonstrate their devotion to us by doing it well, and we’re so in our own heads, we don’t even notice. They scratch up the kitchen cupboard trying to hunt that mouse they’re supposed to find for you, or run around like crazy trying to herd two people in an apartment, and we yell at them. Some poor Chihuahua is on a leash, running like hell to keep up with her owner, a hundred steps to one, and the owner doesn’t even see. They’re trying to do their best keeping one foot in our world and one foot in their own dog world, craning their necks whenever they see one of their own, and we yank them hard to get a move on. We’re inconsiderate.

  Too often we don’t even notice how hard good people and good dogs are working.

  Maybe I’m just pissed at Dan’s daughters. Obviously I’m pissed, because I feel like using a lot of capital letters. OBVIOUSLY I’M PISSED. Mom ran out of the house upset tonight, and I’m sure they’re the reason. And—they could really mess this up, you know? They could. But, yeah, to answer your question, I am sure there are no airports on Bishop Rock! Ha. You should have seen them at dinner tonight, though. It was like middle school, when Gina Halverson and Whitney Fricks decided not to like me. Whispering behind their hands.

  Most of the time you have mostly good people mostly doing their best, so how about a little generosity, huh? How about it?

  And, yeah, your e-mail. Okay. Maybe it got me a bit worked up too. You know how I hate to fight with you. I don’t want to fight. But, God. That was hard to read. If it’s not what you want to do, “not at all,” then why are you pressing me to decide? I’ve forced you to that position, I know. You’re right. You need a commitment. It’s unfair. Especially after what happened. But—it’s all just a lot right now. Trying to figure out about school, moving, graduating … Please, I’ll hurry. I don’t want to lose you.

  Please … wait.

  Our story. You say it’s painful and good to hear? That probably says something twisted about your psychology, and mine, too, since we’ve always been just the same. But, stories … Remember Anne Shields, English teacher extraordinaire? When I worked for her after school over those two years, she’d say the same thing Mom did about them. I wonder if she ever finished that book she was writing. Stories help you understand your life, she’d say. Stories can heal. And I think she’s right, because why do old guys back from the war tell their experiences again and again? Why did people of long ago make up elaborate tales of mythical beings? Why do people sit in a room and reveal the pieces of their life to doctors trained to listen, and why are they cured by doing that? Why libraries? Come on, all those stories, pieces of life told again and again. We need them. Stories are a ritual that put all the crazy shit about life into a form that makes sense. We’re all like the little kids that need to be read the same story over and over again.

  Plus, I like our story. I love it, actually.

  After that day on the church grass came the thing with my dad … Wait. I just remembered something from before all that. Way before. When we were still all riding our bikes around together and making those elaborate forts in our family room out of sheets, with different rooms to sleep in. This was just before Jon Jakes moved in, when Mom was taking care of those two neighbor kids, Bella and Harrison. Remember those little monsters? God. She needed the money, though. She hadn’t sold Monkey M. Monkey yet. Bella and Harrison. Wonder how they are? I can’t think of them being whatever age they must be now. That was awful, though. Mom had been friends with their mother before that, but afterward she treated Mom like the hired help, which I guess she was. The woman’s name was Janet, right? Why can’t I remember? Probably blocked it out. One time we went with Mom to drop off the monsters at Janet’s work. Janet showed off Bella and Harrison to some coworker but totally ignored us. Mom just hung back and pretended to fix the strap of her purse, and it felt humiliating.

  The little guy threw the worst tantrums and the little girl was kind of a priss, and we’d all have to shove into the Bermuda Honda with their car seats and bags and toys whenever we went anywhere. Mom took Ben and me to counseling after the divorce, and they’d be sitting out there in the waiting room hanging off Mom’s lap, reading our old Elmo books. Harrison would scream every time the sun got in his eyes, and whenever Mom would put on Bella’s red shoes instead of her pink ones or give her a cereal snack instead of fish crackers, she’d use her Janet mother voice on Mom. “It’s okay to make a steak, Daisy,” Bella would say, which should have been cute but somehow showed how she’d treat every waiter or salesperson for the rest of her life.

  But we’d sometimes have fun with them. Okay, rarely, but we did. We’d play store, invite them into our rooms to pick through our old Happy Meal toys and crap we didn’t want anymore. We’d let them bring the stuff home. Sometimes they’d cuddle up to us when we played them our old favorite video, The Land Before Time (otherwise known as the Screaming Dinosaur Movie), and it was actually kind of nice.

  That day, we were out back with them while Mom was making grilled cheese. They had our old kitchen toys with the dishes and the plastic food spread out all over the lawn. I let Bella use the child-size apron Gram had made me, and Harrison was wearing Ben’s cowboy vest from our former dress-up box, and you and Ben were the restaurant customers. You guys were maybe thirteen, and you wouldn’t have been there except you were waiting for Mom to feed you. You two were always together then, cracking each other up over something stupid. I remember you bent in half a lot, laughing. Holding your stomach.

  You were sitting at our old kiddie picnic table. You looked hilarious stuffed into it, your knees up high. Bella made me pour the “coffee” from the toy coffeepot, and Harrison was fixing you up a plate of rubber bacon and pizza. The monsters sat down next to you with their plastic plates and plastic glasses that looked like fancy goblets, and you asked for more coffee, please. Ben thought that was hilarious, and Bella and Harrison also lifted their goblets in the air for me to fill.

  “Dank you,” Harrison said, and I suddenly looked at his golden head and smiled. I kissed the top of it, and it was warm from the sun and it smelled like fruit shampoo. Mom called us in for lunch, and Harrison untangled himself from the bench and took my hand. It felt like a sweet hand.

  You looked over at me. Do you even remember this? You said, “I’d take that good of care of you.”

  It surprised me. Probably surprised you. Definitely surprised Ben, who said something like, “You can’t take care of a fucking fish.” He never said “fucking.” Doesn’t even say it now.

  We went inside and had lunch; everyday life piled on top of the words, burying them. But maybe they were like those sunflower seeds we planted with the monsters—forgotten in their Dixie cups on the windowsill and then overwatered, but still there underground. And then, finally, a real plant pushing through.

  I think it’s cool your Mom’s getting a new horse. Did she name him yet? I can see how you’re going crazy there, though, after being away at school. You came back to see me, and I’m not even there, and I can see why you’d feel you should have stayed where your friends were. Your dad’s getting on your nerves, but he’s only worried because of his own past, right? Think of the stories he tells! Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll! Grateful Dead Daddy. He’s a good guy, your father. He probably just doesn’t want you doing drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll. Oh, God, wait. I don’t want you doing those things either. Please don’t do those things. Except maybe the rock ’n’ roll.

  Love always,

  Cricket

  P.S. I’m sorry if I sounded mad earlier.

  chapter

  eleven

  Early the next morning I awoke to Reb
ecca shouting. “Guests!” she called upstairs, to whoever might hear.

  I put the pillow over my head. I didn’t know who we were expecting that day, except the cake guy. I stayed there in my bed-womb and wished I could hide out for the next seventy-five years or so. That bed felt so good. A safe mini cave, a secret lair. Too bad everyone knew where I was.

  Wait. Definitely not the cake guy. I could now hear a ton of commotion and a kid screaming. No wanna! No wanna!

  “Someone find Dan!” Mom shouted down our hall. “I think his sister’s here.”

  I tucked myself farther down into the covers. I shut my eyes and saw Ash’s face and strong arms, and so I opened them again. God, those stupid raccoons kept me up all night again. You could hear them tumbling around, thumping and—right, okay—humping, making some weird raccoon mating sounds. Two nights of no sleep, and I was exhausted. The fog was morning-heavy out the windows, but you could tell it was the kind that would clear away, leaving things blue and sunny. I wouldn’t have minded fog all day. Fog was a good weather match with my mood. Why do they call it “feeling blue” when it is actually more like feeling gray?