The Story of Us

by Deb Caletti

  “He didn’t even mention you.” I had thought the hurtling body had reached the ground, but it hadn’t yet. There, now it did. He didn’t even mention me? “He was wondering if he could borrow some of my hiking gear. Is he going up to Rainier?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. How could I not know? Jesus, I had needed a little time to think, that was all. That didn’t mean a person completely went ahead and lived their life without you, did it? Okay, maybe it did, but at least they shouldn’t live a life they didn’t even tell you about.

  “Hey. Don’t get pissed at me.”

  “I’m not pissed!”

  It was quiet for a moment. Maybe I was something worse than pissed. Maybe I was scared.

  Ben put the sail down, and we bobbed around out there, and we poured some water from the water bottles into the plastic margarine container we always brought for Jupiter. She took a good, long wobbly drink and then got her courage up and walked around the deep, safe inset part of the boat. We tilted our heads back into the sun and sat there with the water sloshing against the sides. I made myself feel better with a nasty, selfish thought. It was all my doing with Janssen, so there. My decision. And I could un-decide if I wanted. Just like that, I could un-decide, and Janssen would be here in our next boat ride out and there’d be no hikes to Rainier that I didn’t know about and no more uncertain futures.

  Ben took his shirt off and jumped in. I got a little worried about that. I had a vision: him drifting off, me floating out to sea, unable to reach him and lost forever. But he stayed by the boat and climbed back in neatly. He shook his head like a dog after a bath.

  “I’m getting sunburned,” I said.

  “I’m hungry. Let’s head back.”

  Ben lifted the sail again. Jupiter, confident now, stood near the front with her nose up, like the mermaids on the bows of ships. Noble. Her eyes squinted at the wind, and her black fur shined. She looked very beautiful right then.

  It was a fast trip in. The harbor was busy with whale watching tours and fishing boats; a huge sailboat arrived, and the passengers disembarked. Ben bumped us to the dock and tied us down, and he lifted out Jupiter. Her toenails clicked happily along the dock as we walked back. We headed for the nearest burger place, a shack at one end of the marina, The Cove, with outdoor tables set around that overlooked the sound. We ordered food, including double fries, and then headed toward the tables near the back of the place.

  Wait—I knew that long hair, and those particular shoulders. I knew that hair so well, I had grabbed it with my tiny fists before I could speak. (We had a picture of this, among others, on the living room wall.) Our mother was sitting by herself, eating fries of her own and drinking a Coke, contemplating the wide, wide ocean, and probably the distance from here to the next airport, by the look of it.

  “Hey,” I called. “You related to us?”

  She turned, surprised. “What are you guys doing here? I thought you were hiking out to whatever that place was. Hi, Jupiter! Hi, girl! Where’ve you been?” She trailed her fingers down, and Jupiter wagged, happy to see her. Jupiter gave her salty-fries hand a lick.

  “Dan set us free,” I said.

  “Went sailing,” Ben said.

  “Damn, I wish I knew,” she said.

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be cake-ing or something today?”

  “Cake guy is later this afternoon. Had to get out of there for a while. This is great, though. You guys can give me a ride back.”

  “You walked?” I said.

  “It’s not that far,” Mom said. She gave Jupiter a dog treat from her jacket pocket, where she always kept some. Jupiter crunched away down there. “I just needed to get a little air.”

  “Yeah, get away from all those people,” Ben said. I shot him a look. Kicked his foot. What was he thinking? I remembered Mom, Ben, me, and Jupiter getting into the Bermuda Honda and going on drives to get away from Jon Jakes and Olivia and Scotty. We’d go get Slurpees in the next town and then take the long way back on winding farm roads. We’d pile into the car to get candy bars at the Country Store down the road, and end up at the park at the Cedar River Watershed. We’d sit at the edge of the river with our shoes off for as long as possible, as Jupiter watched the treetops for squirrel action. Those were not the things you did when you wanted to be somewhere and with someone—you didn’t try to escape. You didn’t drive on every back road so it would take as long as possible to return. And, probably, you didn’t walk miles down a beach without any thought to how you were getting back.

  “Is Olivia giving you problems?” Ben said. He was digging into the bag to get his fries. He didn’t even realize what he’d just said, but Mom did. It looked like someone had just struck her—her cheeks got red and she looked shocked.

  “Ben, shit,” I said. “Olivia?”

  “Did I say Olivia? Hailey. Or the other one. Amy.”

  “They’re not as bad as Olivia. No way,” I said. “They’re just shy. We’re pretty overwhelming.”

  “Hard to get along with, yeah. I’d stay away from us too.” Ben bit into his burger. “Grandpa is especially evil.” I could read his damn mind, because he’d forgotten about Grandpa until he said his name. A grin started creeping up the corner of his mouth and he met my eyes, and I narrowed mine with warning.

  “Adjustments,” Mom squeaked.

  “Dan’s a great guy,” I said.

  “Great guy,” Ben said. “Hey, as long as their mother doesn’t show up at the wedding, you’re fine.” He was laughing, and not about Dan’s ex, I knew. He was still thinking about Grandpa and George, and he was chuckling, the kind of chuckling that could turn into all-out hysteria. I knew what that looked like well enough, from a particularly serious moment during Great-Grandma’s funeral, and from every time Mom got mad at him. I was going to kill him the second we were alone.

  “I know he’s a great guy,” Mom said.

  With Vic Dennis she started keeping her car keys in the pocket of her jeans toward the end. You saw the bulge of them there. I caught them having an argument once, and saw her gripping those keys in her hand. There’d been a lot of staring off into the distance then too, and she would run her finger across her mouth in thought, as she was doing now.

  I stared off along with her. Maybe that’s where a person found answers—out there. “Hey, wait,” I said.

  “What?” Ben said.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  It was him, I was sure—down by that fishing boat. Wearing those rubber overalls fishing guys wear. Walking up the dock, talking on a phone. Shutting the phone now. I jogged over. Looking back, it seems overeager. I didn’t have much practice in those things. If it had been Janssen, I would have jogged right over without a second thought. I didn’t know how to play games.

  “Ash!” I actually called out, which was probably another thing not to do. Ordinarily, too, I would have joked about the rubber pants. Janssen and I always made fun of each other. “Is that you?”

  “Cricket,” he said. “Hey! Wait, don’t come near me. I stink.” We stood together on the dock. I felt a little dizzy. Either the dock was moving or the water and sloshing boats only made it seem like it was.

  “You fishing?”

  “Yeah. I work down here. Make some money this summer, you know? Good money, but I got to get up at four a.m.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Got that right.” He grinned. He had a zillion-watt grin. Warmth crept up my body, landed somewhere at its center. “But now I go home and sleep.”

  “Sleep is good.” Oh, idiot. Nice one. It sounded like I was one of those lame people who thought sleep was an actual hobby. I like to watch football and sleep. I like to blink and breathe, too.

  “Glad I saw you, though. I was thinking—we’re having a bonfire down here tonight. Some people from school. Friends. Party, kind of. If you wanna come? Bring whoever. Mostly you.”

  “Okay, sure,” I said. All right. I wasn’t usually the
party type. I didn’t really like parties. Talking to drunk people—it wasn’t my idea of a good time. But who knew? A bonfire, Ash, some beach town where no one knew me …

  “Great. Great. Hey, I gotta get these rubber pants off.” He snapped the suspenders like an old man.

  “Or else get a rubber shirt to go with,” I said.

  He laughed. “You’ve got a beautiful smile, you know that?”

  “You do,” I said.

  “See you tonight? Just come down here, over there—” He pointed. “After dark. You’ll see where we are. Come and find me. Anyone else over at the house can come too.”

  “There’s a toddler you’d love.”

  “Oh no …”

  “I’m thinking up other uses for Cruiser’s kennel.”

  “Got the picture,” he said. “Hey, wait. Cell number?” He handed me his phone, and I typed it in. “All right. Later, Beautiful Smile.”

  I waved. Hurried back to my fries, which were getting cold.

  “Who was that?” Mom said. She sloshed the ice in her cup in circles. She fed Jupiter the last bit of bun from her burger. “Is that Ted’s son?”

  “What are you doing, Cricket? Jesus, you should have seen yourself,” Ben said.

  “Can’t I have a conversation with someone? Yes, Ted’s son. No big deal, people. I’m not having his babies.”

  “Payback for Rainier? You trying to make things worse?” Ben said.

  I stuck my tongue out at the back of his head.

  “What happened at Rainier?” Mom said.

  “He’s wrong for you.” This was not said in some big, overly-protective-brother way. Ben wasn’t like that. He was stating a fact. The same way he’d say, You got something on your shirt, or, It’s getting late.

  “Did you decide to break up with Janssen all the way?” Mom said. “You guys don’t tell me anything.”

  “I was just being friendly,” I said. “He’s wrong for me because he’s not Janssen?”

  “He’s wrong for you because he’s wrong for you,” Ben said. He crumpled up the foil from his burger. “I think I want another one of those.”

  Mom reached for her wallet. “Here. I owe you guys.”

  I didn’t know who or how I’d be without these people right here. If I went away to school, my own self might be left behind. My home, for sure. I knew them, and they knew me, same as a roof knows a house. We were connected like that, and they were my shelter, too. Could you be too known, though? What if, like Gavin said, you could be anyone now that you graduated? You could sit inside the warm, familiar room of someone’s idea of you. Or you could step out the front door and see if they’d been right, or wrong, all along.

  chapter

  twelve

  “I think that’s Gavin’s car,” I said. I couldn’t quite see over the dog.

  “I don’t have my contacts in,” Mom said.

  Ben hit the gas and swerved around the car in front of us.

  “Shit, Ben!” I could see us making the papers. All of us dead in one swoop, and right before a wedding. The worst kind of horrible news story that stops you in your tracks for one second before you head into the kitchen to get yourself a bowl of ice cream. Close-up of the grieving groom, the dress spread out on the bed, the now-tragic yearbook pictures. So, chocolate mint or vanilla caramel? It makes me nervous, the way the biggest things and the smallest live together day in and day out.

  The windows of the Kia rolled down, and arms popped out on both sides, waving madly. That pasty white flesh could only belong to two people.

  Ben honk, honk, honked! the horn. Mom rolled down her window and waved.

  “They’re camping on the beach,” I said.

  “Oh no,” Mom said. “Is that safe? Have they ever slept outside before?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “They know there are no electrical outlets in nature, right?” Ben said.

  “It’s their big postgraduation adventure. Geeks Meet the Great Outdoors. Someone should make a movie.”

  “Reminds me of that time we slept in the tent in the front yard to watch the meteor shower,” Mom said. “Remember that? They’ll probably come running into the house in the middle of the night too.”

  “Freezing their butts off,” Ben said.

  Now that we were all back at Bluff House and my eyeballs had stopped spinning from Ben’s driving, I could see that Gavin’s car was jammed full of stuff. That back window was dangerously blocked, in my opinion. Gavin popped out of the car. He was wearing one of his usual T-shirts, the one with the wizard on it, but I was surprised to see him wearing a pair of shorts. I don’t think I’d ever seen his legs before. Oscar got out too, and slapped Ben on the back, and Ben slapped him on the back while Gavin leaned into the car, shoving everything around in some sort of hunt. Finally his head emerged, his big bush of dark hair its usual mess. He was holding a box wrapped in birthday paper. He handed it to Mom.

  “From both of us,” Gavin said. “Happy wedding.” For some reason Oscar wore a knit cap over his own longish blond hair. Probably to protect against the elements. He was trying to grow a beard or something, since I saw him last. There was an alfalfa sproutlike fluff on his chin.

  “Oh, you guys,” Mom said. “You didn’t have to do that.” She put her arm around Oscar’s thin shoulders.

  “It’s a router,” Oscar said.

  “You fool! Don’t tell!” Gavin said.

  “That is so great!” Mom said. “How thoughtful. Dan is just going to love it.” She had no idea what a router was.

  “It’s got WAP2,” Gavin said.

  “You’re kidding!” Mom said. “Wow. I love it! Thank you.”

  “What’s that on your belt loop?” Ben asked.

  Gavin lifted up the dangling bit of flat plastic. “Cool shit, eh? Compass. They had ’em there right by the REI counter.”

  “Thank God. Now you dweebs won’t get lost on the beach directly in front of the house,” I said.

  Gavin patted his new hiking shorts, struck a pose. “New me. Whattya think? Not bad for a guy voted most likely to have moobs, eh?”

  Mom looked my way for an explanation. “Man boobs,” I said.

  “You’ve still got time, dude,” Oscar said. He was obviously trying on a new persona too. I’d never heard him say “dude” in my life.

  Mom smiled, looked at her wrist where a watch would be, if she wore one. “I’ve gotta get going,” Mom said. “Cake guy is coming. Thank you so much again for the gift. Hope you guys will have dinner with us later?”

  “We’re covered,” Oscar said. “Beef stroganoff. Freeze dried, baby. Ice cream, too. Just add water.”

  “Want to come in and see the house?”

  “Nah.” Gavin brushed his hands on his shorts, like he’d already been getting down and dirty in the outdoors. He had some new look of manly determination, in spite of that same old fright-wig of black hair I’d known since the seventh grade. “We gotta set up here.”

  “So little time, so much to eat,” Oscar said. I hadn’t seen him this excited since War Worlds Six came out; his hands had been shaking so hard then, he could barely tear the cellophane from the box. “Later, y’all.”

  “I wonder how much stuff they bought,” Ben said as we walked to the house together. “I saw an REI shopping bag filled to the top with foil packages.”

  “Look at them,” I said. “Like us when we got our Aladdin tent for Christmas that year. Look how excited they are. I don’t feel good about this.”

  “Good things don’t always lead to bad ones, Crick.”

  “He just unloaded a camp stove! Oh no. I had high school chemistry with those two.”

  “Are they the ones that—”

  “Yeah. And I don’t know if that sub’s hair ever grew back.”

  My mother had her own ideas about religion. A personal patchwork quilt of all the best stuff, the love, the watching over, everything comforting, minus the hell and damnation. Whenever we did a painful good deed, she�
�d say, Well, at least you got some heaven points. Her God was understanding enough to know that some situations required extra incentive to be good.

  So I got heaven points for asking Hailey and Amy to come to Ash’s party with me that night. I asked Ben, too, but he was going with Dan and Ted into town to watch an old James Bond film at the Bishop Grand (not so grand) Theater. Ben never met a gadget he didn’t like.

  I was glad he wasn’t coming, actually. The night was wide open and smelled great, and I tried on three things before deciding what to wear. When you try on lots of outfits, you’re probably going somewhere you don’t want your brother to be. Your sibling is your witness and your rival and your friend, yeah, but also a spy. Even if they’re not a spy, even if they’re cool or don’t even notice what you’re doing, you’re sure they notice what you’re doing. Ben has never been my moral guardian, but I’m still pretty sure he’s got some recording device embedded under his skin, like those tags dogs have in case they get lost.

  I knocked on Hailey and Amy’s door. “Ready?”

  I gasped. Okay, that was a lot of flesh all of a sudden. Not that I was a prude or anything; my school never sent anyone home for dress-code violations, so you see it all. Usually you don’t go out with it all, though. Natalie and Kelly, even Shauna—my girlfriends stayed mostly dressed. But now Hailey wore a white skirt the size of a coffee filter, and a little crocheted doily for a top. We used to make Valentine cards out of those. Her stomach was bare. She was suddenly a good four inches taller, and, oh yeah, that was why. Those shoes. The kind Mom and I made fun of at Ross. Two stories high, gold glitter. Her perfume slammed into me, took me to the ground in some sudden champion wrestling move.

  I hated judgmental bitchiness, but I was feeling it crawling all over me, like sand fleas. I did a mental slap-slap of myself. Sometimes you gotta keep you in line.

  “Amy’s not coming,” she said. I could see Amy on the bed, head on her arms.

  “She okay?”

  “Not feeling well. Dad’ll take care of her.”

  So much for James Bond. Who knew illness could get you such parental one-on-one? Slap again. “Okay. We’ve got to stop by and get a couple people before we go,” I said. “Two of my friends are here, camping on the beach.”