The Story of Us

by Deb Caletti

  “Want up?” I said. That always felt like a treat for both of us.

  I patted the bed, and she hopped up.

  “I don’t know,” I said to her. I held her in my lap. I could only see the back of her, her silky head and her ears and her long back with the white spot. I took off her collar for a minute. I would have liked to have had that thing off, if it were me. I scratched her neck. I kissed her head.

  She shifted around. She got into a nice ball beside me, and set her chin on my leg. “I don’t even want to open that fucking computer,” I told her. “He’s probably run off with Alyssa because I’m too stupid to make up my mind.”

  She kept her opinions to herself, which was especially smart under the circumstances. It was good to be by myself but not alone. She was good and respectful company. We stayed that way until my foot started to fall asleep. I shifted her, and she leaped off the bed, sniffed the clothes spilling from my bag. “Where’s your jingle, huh?” I asked. It was funny when she walked around without her collar and her tags, her very own sound. She looked out the window for a while, which she loved to do. I stretched out on my bed, and then she came over, and I patted the spot beside me, and she jumped up again. I put her collar back on so she could go back to being herself. She sniffed around the pillows and licked some spot on my bedspread where I’d spilled some Diet Coke, and then she finally got settled. It took some doing, but she stretched out too, her chin on her paws, her deep brown eyes watching me.

  “I wish you could talk,” I said. I waited. Sometimes I forgot that I wouldn’t get a response from her. She held my eyes. “Do you think I’m with Janssen for the wrong reasons? Or the right ones?” I asked. “I hate to even say that. Because I do love him.” We kept on looking at each other. Maybe it was stupid, but I felt she heard me and understood me and was responding in the way she could.

  “What do you think, huh, Woof?”

  Of course she couldn’t answer me. But her eyes said, Everything is all right. Her eyes kept on saying, I am here for you.

  “Cricket!” Mom pounded on my door.

  “What? God, what’s the matter?”

  I opened the door. My mother’s eyes were frantic, and her purse was over one shoulder as if she was heading out, wearing only socks. “We’ve gotta … Cruiser knocked over Mr. Jax while we were gone. He’s been lying out in the garden for who knows how long. We just found him! He’s crying in pain. God. Do you know where Ben is? Dan doesn’t want to drive his car around with that windshield. We need Ben’s car to take him to the emergency room.”

  “He’s probably out with the guys in the tent,” I said. “I can run and get him.”

  “That’s okay.” Mom raced to the top of the stairs, yelled, “Dan? He’s at the beach. In the tent!” I saw it all, as if it had already happened. Ben, not in the tent after all. Dan, pulling back the tent flap. Hailey with her blouse unbuttoned, sitting in Gavin’s lap. “No wait!” I said. “No, no—”

  I shoved past Mom. “Cricket?” she said.

  I heard the back door close, and I knew Dan was already on the way down the boardwalk. By the time I got down the stairs, Ted was walking in the front door with another bag of groceries. It seemed like all he ever did was go to the grocery store, but there was no time to wonder about that. Ted. Car. “They need you,” I said to him. “They need you to drive. Just a sec,” I said.

  Cruiser was pacing downstairs, whining and barking; we were anxious, so he was anxious. I raced to the back door. Dan was running down the boardwalk, heading toward the tent. I swear that tent off in the distance was vibrating. I could see its shiny fabric whipping a little in the sea breeze, and from whatever was happening inside.

  “Dan!” I shouted. “Ted’s here with his truck!”

  Dan turned and waved at me, a rushed not now wave. He couldn’t hear me. It was one of the tricks of the ocean. It could be beautiful and endless and full of hope, but it could also pull you under and steal your voice and drag it far away.

  I tried to reach him, but he was too far ahead. He got to the tent just before I did, and he pulled that tent flap back all right, and it was oddly quiet in there. Ben wasn’t there, and neither was Oscar, but Hailey was and so was Gavin. They looked like one big body in that sleeping bag, until Dan yelled something and Gavin’s big bushy head popped up. Hailey appeared too, and her hair was all smushed up, and I didn’t even know you could get a bra in that color.

  “Hailey!” Dan cried. Hailey was eighteen and had had lots of boyfriends by the sound of it, and Dan wasn’t exactly Jon Jakes, with his prim, obsessive eye on womanly virtue. Still, by the look on Dan’s face, it never quite occurred to him that his little baby had grown up. Or else, seeing evidence of that right in front of him was more than anyone really wanted.

  “I’m just changing!” Hailey said. Well, I guess this was true in more ways than one.

  She held up her shirt as some sort of evidence and then struggled to put it back on. Dan covered his eyes. His other hand was on his chest. Oh, God. I imagined him keeling over, a heart attack. No wedding, Dan’s blue face and lifeless body. But it was a heart attack of a different kind.

  Dan turned and fled, and I followed, like the idiot sidekick in the cartoon, always a few paces back, waving her arms.

  “Ted is here. A car,” I said. And I watched Dan’s back once more. Defeated again, and carrying too much, again. That poor, sad ponytail. You wondered how love could thrive in this kind of mess, or at all. Love was such a delicate thing, requiring tissue-paper touch and the safest place, yet there it was out in the real world, where it got battered by storms of ill will and bad circumstance and demons of your own or of other people. Love didn’t stand a chance.

  Dan and Mom and Ted came back hours later with Mr. Jax, who now had his left wrist bandaged in a white cast. Hailey and Amy were in their room, in self-imposed exile. I heard them arguing. Ben had gone into town with Oscar and Gavin, but I was too pissed at Gavin to go. I never took him for the kind of guy that liked girls who played dumb, first of all. But, worse, he should have known we didn’t need any more complications right now. Maybe he should have just driven Mom right to the Sea-Tac Airport himself! Besides, if I went I’d probably end up in the backseat next to Oscar, with him grabbing my butt or something. Obviously high school had been some version of a safe, snug prison, with the inmates mostly in their cells, and now we’d been let out. Freedom had led to wildness and rioting, and if you asked me, some of us should be locked back up.

  That night Rebecca made heaping piles of Japanese dishes as a surprise for George, and she set out bowls and platters for everyone to come by and dish up their plates when it suited them. I thought I’d probably be seeing Ash—I was looking forward to it—but for some reason he wasn’t around. Fine. Good. No problem. Where was he?

  Rebecca brought all the food back out when Mom and Dan came home, but no one except Ted was very hungry. Jane fussed around Mr. Jax, and Mrs. Jax fixed the collar of his shirt coolly. His chin was still dirty from his face-plant in the garden. Cruiser had been closed into the kitchen. I saw him in there, checking inside his food bowl to see if anything new had appeared. I caught Dan on his way upstairs.

  “Hey, Dan? I’m sorry,” I said.

  We’d had a good relationship before. Before now, anyway. When he came over to our house, he’d cook dinner and I’d help him. He taught Janssen how to replace the brakes in his car. He was easy to talk to. He told stories about how he changed his major three or four times in college before deciding, because he knew I didn’t know what I wanted to study yet. He went out and mowed that great big lawn of Mom’s, and I helped him bag the grass clippings.

  I realized right then that an apology was a pretty shabby thing. The same word was used for both small crimes and big ones—you said you were sorry for bumping into another person, and for destroying their life. It seemed wrong. I was sorry for what I had said to Amy earlier, and sorry about Hailey, and sorry about Mr. Jax, and sorry mostly that things had gone so
wrong. But an apology too—you think you’re giving something, but you’re not. You’re really asking for something. You’re asking for forgiveness, you’re asking for the other injured person to make it okay for you. Apologies were harder work for the person getting one than the person giving one.

  “It’s all right,” Dan said. “It’s not your fault.” But his voice was husky from fatigue. He rubbed under his eye with the tip of his finger, that place where the skin is so thin that emotions show through, rising up in dark rings of fatigue or despair. “Everything will be fine.”

  I heard them arguing through my wall. It was the first real argument that I’d ever heard, two days before their wedding.

  I couldn’t make out Dan’s exact words, but my mother’s were clear. My ears had been trained to her voice, probably, from a long time ago, when she used to sing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” to Ben and me, dancing with us. “Wheels on the Bus,” sure, that too. All the songs from Raffi, and from Mr. Rogers. “Baby Beluga” and “You Are Special.” I remember her singing Springsteen’s “Pony Boy” to Ben, when he was seven and going through that cowboy phase.

  She wants to go home ? Mom’s voice cut.

  Then the low rumble of Dan’s voice.

  Did you tell her that going home isn’t possible? That everything is not about her ?

  A slam. The walls shuddered. Slamming meant she was really mad. Mad enough to go public with her anger, mad enough to forget that other people might hear. Another slam, downstairs.

  Jupiter got up from her bed, stretched out her back leg, oooh so far behind her, and then the other one. She sat beside my door and looked at me. Who says dogs can’t talk.

  “You need to go out?” I asked. “Now?”

  She would sit this way by the back door at home, too. Sometimes near the jar where we kept her treats. She stared insistently. “Your timing sucks,” I said.

  I searched around for her leash, and found it under yesterday’s clothes. My phone buzzed with a text message. I looked.

  Oscar. We really need to talk. Where ARE you?

  What had happened between us that night? Nothing, I was sure. I ignored it. Jupiter wagged. I clipped on her leash, and opened the door like a robber would. I looked both ways. When there was a fight in the house, you were as careful and quiet as a thief trying not to trip the alarm.

  At the top of the stairs, Jupiter sat willfully. “Oh, come on,” I said. “Really?” She wouldn’t budge. “Fine,” I said. I picked her up. She seemed so much lighter than she had been. There’d been times in her life when carrying her around took some doing.

  Her butt was sticking out under my arm, which made me think of Hailey that afternoon. And that made me think of Hailey and Gavin, and that bra color, and the fact that Gavin was one of my best friends. I saw the bubble of the tent, glowing in some otherworldly way. I felt guilty about it being there at all; it had gone from the greatest-fun sort of tent to a tent that made you feel like you were looking at a bed people had just gotten out of. Guilt wasn’t exactly a logical thing. It was more like a virus, spreading wildly and looking for places to land. I wondered if love, mine or anyone else’s, wasn’t safe anywhere near me. I felt like bad luck.

  I set Jupiter down on the grass. My phone buzzed again. I knew it was Oscar, and so I reached to shut that stupid phone off, but it wasn’t Oscar after all. Any chance we can talk? Something I want to tell you. Ash.

  Something he needed to tell me? I didn’t know what to say right then, I really didn’t, so I shoved my phone back into my pocket without answering. I saw my mother sitting on the beach not far from that tent. She had snagged one of Rebecca’s beach towels that had been hanging over the deck railing, and she sat on it, her arms around her knees, her long hair down her back, and her white sundress glowing in the moonlight. Her chin was set down on her arms, and she was rocking slightly. She stopped and looked over her shoulder when she heard our steps on the boardwalk.

  Jupiter saw her there and began to pull on the leash. “Okay, okay,” I said. She made a quick stop to sniff and pee when we reached a clump of some apparently delicious-smelling beach grass, and then she pull, pull, pulled again toward Mom.

  “Let her come,” my mother said, so I let go of the leash, and Jupiter ran full speed toward her.

  “Oh, look who’s here,” Mom said to her. “You little one. Funny girl.” She scruffed Jupiter under her chin and around her soft ears.

  “You must be freezing,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m too mad to be cold,” she said. “You can leave her. I’ll bring her back later.”

  I took this to mean that Mom wanted to be alone. So I left them there. I walked back toward the house, which suddenly looked huge, those glass windows an enormous display case for every feeling inside there. Above me I could hear a chair being dragged against the upper deck, the squeak of a body settling in. I smelled the grassy tang of burning pot.

  I climbed the steps to my room. I did not turn on the lights. I stood at my own window, looking out. I could see Mom’s figure down on the beach, with Jupiter sitting beside her. Mom had one arm around her, her fingers stroking Jupiter’s head.

  Jupiter had always been there for me. She’d sit patiently when I would cry. She would trot around when I was excited. She gave herself to your grief and to your joy. But I remembered too the times when we had gone for our weekends with my father. Ben and I would leave, and it would be the two of them at home, my mother and our dog. “What are we going to do this weekend, huh, girl?” Mom would ask her as we packed our bags. “Slumber party, you and me?” Other times I would hear Mom talking to Jupiter down in the kitchen. “Do you think that chicken’s done, huh? What do you think? You like chicken.” When we were at school, I knew that Jupiter would lie by my mother’s feet while she worked. And when we had that earthquake, when I was watching the lights swing in Mr. Jacobi’s earth science class, my mother said that she and Jupiter had huddled together in our doorway.

  And Jupiter—she would go into Ben’s room too, when he was doing homework. She’d go through his garbage can, sure, looking for candy bar wrappers or Kleenex, or she’d hunt around in his backpack for the remains of his lunch. But she’d also just lie quietly under his desk while he did his math. She would lick the salt from his sweaty baseball-playing legs. She would tease him by stealing something of his and taking off.

  I watched her and my mother out there. And I realized what a big job our dog had, looking out for all of us.

  I stared at the wedges of light on the ceiling. My mind was playing a slide show, and I couldn’t seem to interrupt it to get up and get ready for bed. After a while my mother tapped at the door softly and brought Jupiter back. Jupiter’s nose was cold from being outside. Her fur smelled like night. She had a long, slurpy drink of water and looked out the window for a while into the darkness, and then she sighed through her nose and went to her bed, turning three circles before settling into her croissant-shaped circle.

  My phone buzzed again. Oscar. Damn it! This time I remembered to shut off the phone. There were murmurs on the other side of my wall, and then it was quiet. I heard a toilet flushing upstairs. I had not opened my laptop all day. So I did. And what I read made my stomach feel sick. I held my pillow on my bed and rocked.

  The slide show kept playing. My mother’s sharp words to Dan, my sharp words to Amy, an old man sprawled helpless in a garden, a windshield destroyed.

  A mess.

  A new house, an old one gone, maybe a plane lifting off, changing things forever.

  Janssen.

  It was too big, too much. But mess and chaos love mess and chaos. Mess always gathers more, like dust gathers dust, like friends gather friends for support when they want to do something bad.

  So of course I let him in when he tapped on my door and said my name softly. Of course I let Ash in.

  chapter

  nineteen

  Janssen—

  Wow—your list was full of amazing dog fe
ats, just like you promised. I loved that one especially about the people who watched as their car went into that lake with their dog in it, how he managed to get out and swim ashore. I was so happy he made it. But Jupiter has her own astonishing talents, don’t forget. She can open Gram’s refrigerator door. She carries her red ball with the treats in it to the top of the stairs and lets it drop, so that the biscuits break up and fall out. And, of course, there’s that thing she used to do with her food. Picking out the reds first and then the yellows and oranges and leaving behind the tans. I wonder what was in those tans.

  All right. My turn.

  What Us Humans Could Learn from Dogs:

  1. How to notice the small things: The smallest speck of cracker. Some tiny piece of kibble that’s rolled under the stove. They see.

  2. How to keep it simple: A meal. A treat. A walk. A friend. No need for big TVs and fancy cars and expensive clothes. Grass itself is joy.

  3. How to make the most of what you’ve got: If all you have is the hard floor, find the spot of sun.

  4. How to be a good friend: Play together. Have patience. Forgive. Be there. Listen carefully.

  5. How to be hopeful: Keep checking your food bowl, just in case. Sit and stare, but if that piece of cheese doesn’t come your way, move on.

  6. How to be loyal: Stay near, never forget, and fight for what’s most important.

  I was thinking about this last night—how Jupiter is faithful to all of us. She drives Mom crazy sometimes, going everywhere she does. Mom gets up, she gets up. Mom goes to the kitchen, she goes to the kitchen. But she keeps her eye on her. And when Ben leaves for college too, Jupiter is always so thrilled to see him again, weeks later. She waits. You have the feeling that he could be gone for years, and Jupiter would keep on waiting. She keeps track of me also, of course. She watches, and she listens to me carefully, even if occasionally she yawns while I talk. (Yeah, don’t even say what you’re thinking.) She tries to protect us all from coyotes and deer and strangers and squirrels, even though she is small and old.