by Deb Caletti
I shoved him away. His eyes were glazy and oddly triumphant, and then I was aware of someone pushing past us. Natalie. I was aware of Ash, too, who just shook his head as if I was someone he couldn’t believe, as if I were too much, and he set down the barbecue fork.
“Cricket, I don’t get you,” he said softly as he went by me, went inside, and shut the door as the chicken kept smoking and the flames leaped.
And then I heard a scream. And then another. Coming from somewhere near the table. George. And what was that? Something on him. Partly on him, and hanging from the tall potted palm near the table. Something large and gray. George was shrieking and screaming, and so were the ladies, and Grandpa had taken off his hat and was whacking whatever it was, and yelling. Goddamn you!
A raccoon. A raccoon had dropped from the roof and was reaching for a piece of the chicken that had dropped into the large pot of one of the palm trees. It had its little black leather-gloved claws on George’s back, and George was hopping around with his hands covering his head, and Grandpa was whacking the shit out of them both.
The animal released itself from George, ran onto the roof and away, a rolling gallop, and then George had his shirt off and Grandpa was examining the scratches.
George was gesturing and breathing wildly, and that stupid conga song was still going, or another one just like it, and everyone had stopped, and their eyes were on George and Grandpa. Grandpa was examining George’s back. But then he must have felt the sudden stillness in the room, and he turned around. I’m sure he could feel us all staring. He looked back at us all, caught. He held his hands out, a helpless gesture. It was so clear then. There was something between them, all right. Something important. The two of them shared a secret all right, and we all saw that, and they knew we did.
“Well, George and I—” Grandpa said.
“George and you?” Gram gasped.
My mother, suddenly beside me, might have been hyperventilating.
Two truths? Could I have been more wrong?
A hundred truths. A thousand. Truths—they can’t even be counted.
chapter
twenty-two
Janssen—
Really? Did you make that up? Anywhere you find humans in the world, you also find dogs? Wow, those little guys get around. Okay. While we’re on the whole topic of shocking canine truths …
Astonishing Dog-Human Communication Facts:
1. Scientists have discovered that we read our dogs’ emotions and they read ours. (Ha, we knew that all along.) They’ve found that dogs scan our faces for different feelings, and that we can identify different types of barks and what they mean. Researchers played tapes of barking, and people could tell what was actually happening when the bark was recorded. They knew the dog wanted a toy, for example, or was watching a stranger approach, or was trying to say that they hated your new girlfriend. Okay, I made that last one up.
2. In the wild, dogs only have one kind of bark—a warning bark. But domesticated dogs have developed many different kinds of barks, in order to better communicate with us.
3. Dogs may think more like us than even the chimpanzee. (This will be a relief if you watch chimpanzees for more than five minutes at a zoo. Kind of disgusting. Kind of like sitting in our school cafeteria.) Dogs are the only animals that understand a pointing gesture. We take it for granted that they understand our pointing. They even understand us “pointing” with our eyes. But apparently this is really unusual. No other animal knows what we mean when we do it. Dogs don’t use pointing with each other, only with us. It’s like they’ve learned a second language.
4. There is a dog in Germany that can identify three hundred objects by name. If you tell her to go get her rope, she will bring back the rope. The bear, the ball, the pig, etc. Three hundred. But even more amazing? If you show her the picture of the object, she’ll go get it. Some days, I think Ben isn’t even that smart.
5. Dogs tilt their head to listen better for the words they know. (Well, this is just something I noticed.)
If you think I’m over here looking up stuff for hours just in order to fascinate you, you’re wrong. I found that all in one article about a NOVA special they had on dogs. So there. Five minutes, and that was it. The rest of the time I’ve been spending not keeping my life on hold, same as you.
It’s interesting, though. Obviously dogs and humans have some kind of evolutionary determination to make something special work between us. And isn’t it great? We have this mystical, outlandish success—two different species doing what we can to communicate with each other. Jupiter always gets so excited too, when we get it right. Food? Pee? Outside? When we hit the magic word, she does a little dance of glee, like a winning game show contestant.
Of course, there were plenty of times we didn’t get it right with Jupiter. Miscommunications. She’d bark and bark a warning, and we’d look outside and … nothing. We’d even try to tell her there was nothing! We doubted her. What are you barking at? There’s nothing there! Quit it! But if we looked again more carefully, there it would be. Some raccoon. A rabbit. A stunned deer family in the dark, hooves pressing quietly on the lawn as they passed, but never quietly enough for Jupiter. She must have been frustrated with us, as we were with her. They probably sounded like an army troop passing through, or maybe just smelled like one. They were eating our blueberries and fallen apples! But we missed her message. We didn’t see or understand.
It’s both harder and easier without words.
And maybe it’s another miracle that human communication works at all, ever. So many ways to misunderstand. All the wrong directions, the wrong roads of tone and gesture. Or, yeah, an ill-timed laugh.
Of course, you know where I’m going with this. Of course you do.
I’m sorry. So, so sorry.
We were in love, and then … Janssen, I keep telling you, it was an accident. But you call it one of those accidents that reveal the real. You love that phrase, “reveal the real.” I still don’t think (or want to think, that’s what you’ll say) that you’re right. It was a miscommunication. I’ve said I’m sorry every way I know how. I didn’t mean it, Janssen.
I felt even closer to you than ever, after that first time in the shed. I felt so, so close. You felt that too, right? We both did? We went back there a lot, in different seasons. It was like having our own little house. Our own home. Is that corny? I could feel us pretending it whenever we walked through that door. We’d set our things down, sigh. Home, dear. Some future of ours. Of course it wasn’t just about sex after that—we were there for each other, with each other, always. You’d come by our house before school for breakfast. I’d be over at your house for dinner. I knew you so well—someone could say something and I knew it’d piss you off before you even showed it. I knew you had to have your apples peeled because you hated the skin, and I could look at a menu and guess what you’d order. I knew how you’d get grumpy after swim practice because you were hungry, and knew how you could almost choke up with emotion when you saw the Cascades on those days when they were so craggy and snowy and unreal. You believed in God when you saw those mountains. And you didn’t whenever you heard about some natural disaster. Thousands of people being killed.
You knew me. You know me. I can’t imagine life without you, without someone who knows me that well. You know I’m always cold, and you reach for my hands to warm them whenever we’ve been outside. You know I get anxious talking to my dad, and know I get lost when driving and hate water chestnuts and believe in God when the Cascades are so craggy and snowy and unreal. And I don’t whenever I hear about a natural disaster.
I sat through those zombie movies you love, and you brought me books from the used-book store. We could sit on the couch all Saturday together. (Especially during the period when I had that brief fling with the Classic Movie Channel. You were very patient.) But we also went on drives over the mountains and went swimming at Marcy Lake. We’d swing on the swings there, remember? My hands would smell like metal fro
m holding tight to the chains. We’d go on fancy dates, not many of those, but a few. Where we’d dress up and go out to dinner. We valet-parked, even though we weren’t sure how to pay the guy and it ended up being sort of embarrassing. I was embarrassed. You were totally cool about it all.
You and Ben graduated. You moved into your dorm. I was scared it would change things, and it did for a while. I was sure you were going to meet some college girl and leave me. I’d visit you and go to your classes, and I felt like I was wearing a sign that said “YOUNG” around my neck. When Thomas was gone and we had your room all to ourselves, though, it was magic. A bed, a room of our own without the cold and discomfort of our shed … I’d have to leave, and it was so hard. Stupid curfew. My mother, always worrying about me driving back from the city. Two years until we would be free! No more rules, no more of my mother waiting up at night, no more feeling like a kid—God, I couldn’t wait. I COULDN’T WAIT! It couldn’t come fast enough. It seemed forever until I’d graduate.
We had anniversaries. That’s when we’d have our “fancy dates.” Like a married couple. Okay, maybe I liked those more than you did. And, sometimes, let’s be honest, we fought like a married couple too, didn’t we? Having the same arguments over and over again. About me not asking for what I want, about you not listening sometimes. We’d have those days where we just got irritated with each other. You’d pick around in the popcorn bowl, or I’d refuse to cross the street until the walk sign came on. I’d confess that I hated that T-shirt of yours with the guitar on fire. You’d wonder why I always waited until the last minute to get working on something. My mother told me that maybe we needed to spend more time apart, and we both got mad about that. This was what happened after you’d been together with someone a long time. You loved that it was old and worn and comfy, but sometimes it was old and worn and comfy.
Still. No matter what, I could always, always count on you to be there. I loved you. Love you.
Change—sometimes it’s some great big event, right? One major episode that means nothing will ever be the same. Birth, death, meeting you on your horse, a wedding, a hand striking, an announcement. But more often, I think, change is slow and quiet, it sneaks in like the seasons, where you don’t even notice the shift until the trees are all orange or snow is falling, or it’s so hot that you are desperate for a swim.
My senior year, though—I felt every shift of every season. How can I explain this to you? I noticed the first leaf that turned orange. I smelled snow in the air before it fell. I felt spring approaching under my skin, in my body somehow. I felt it all. You go, go, go, but sometimes you stop and it all catches up. You start thinking. You feel what it means to be alive and what it means for time to pass. That’s what happened.
We got rid of the Bermuda Honda. My mother had bought her beloved Jeep long before that, but the old Bermuda Honda was kept around for Ben and me, until one day every piece of it broke down, as if it had cancer or something, an illness that crept around and ravaged it. The cancer had spread to the brakes, then the carburetor, and then to the back windows, which wouldn’t roll down, and the tires were balding and there were those bangs and bashes along its body where people hadn’t been careful with it.
That stupid car, that evil Bermuda Honda—it was still trying to get us, all the way until the end. It started emitting noxious fumes that probably would have killed us. The last ride was spent with the only working windows down, and it was probably a miracle that the car didn’t have the last word somehow, veering off into some telephone pole, or blowing up with us in it.
We took the car to the wrecking yard, the car cemetery, my mother called it, all that over-and-done-with glory and all those stories, buried in unmarked heaps. Every one of those cars once had the thrilling new upholstery smell.
And then we had it put to sleep.
I feel choked up to see it go, my mother said.
I didn’t say what I thought—being sad to see the Bermuda Honda go was like being sad when Jon Jakes and his nasty kids left, but she had been sad then, too. You’d think saying good-bye to crappy cars and bad relationships would be easy. Still, it’s a time in your life that you’re leaving. And you know what? Leaving that blue metal piece of shit gave me a lump in my throat too. I’d learned to drive in that car. That car played the starring role in so many of our stories, even though we hated the thing.
So, the Bermuda Honda was gone, and Jon Jakes and all of them were long gone, and Ben had moved out to go to college. One day Mom decided to paint our bathroom. I realized it was still decorated for little kids, she said. It was true. It had been decked out for years with our framed art: a crayon lizard Ben had drawn, clay masks I had made. Various objects were hanging from the ceiling—a papier-mâché globe I’d done in the fourth grade, and a mobile Ben had done in the sixth. Folded stars and origami dangled from strings. I realized you guys were grown up, she said.
I guess I realized it too.
It hit me, filling out those college applications. The year before, the idea of the future, of moving out—it was hurry, hurry, hurry! Get here! You had shown me how it was done. Ben, too. It was natural, easy, except for what you both left behind. I saw Mom staring out the window of Ben’s room sometimes, and Mom and I would eat dinner standing at the counter every so often, like a couple of bachelors. Jupiter slept on Ben’s bed. I couldn’t just walk up the hill to see you whenever I wanted, but I could drive into the city and be in your dorm room within an hour, a private place, the two of us out in the world together.
You were a shield for me, even then. Even about change. I watched, and you made moving on look possible; it made me think it could be merely practical, a series of steps, forward motion that was only ever a welcome thing. You taught me that the inner shifts could be ignored. Or didn’t matter. Or didn’t exist. I didn’t see your inner shifts. Did you even have them? Was this a guy thing or a you thing? Both you and Ben moved on to the next stage of life without a tear or a hesitation. That you showed, anyway.
I thought that’s what would happen. I didn’t expect the interior noise, the clanging and banging that looming change brought. Or my bravado just wasn’t loud enough to cover it all up, like yours.
The college applications made it real, though. I filled them out, and it felt like I was going through the motions, faking this thing that was supposed to happen—going away to school, being a college student, moving out. Applying to out-of-state schools, places I didn’t know. Cities where there were no coyotes crying out in the night or the Taco Time right there on the corner where I knew it was, or where there was no little kiddie bathroom that had just been painted but still had the tack marks in the ceiling where the globe and the stars had hung. Where there was no you, a car ride away. Where my mother wasn’t in the kitchen, eating cookie dough from the bowl, talking to the dog so it wouldn’t look like she was talking to herself. Where would us go, all of us, where would home be, if we all weren’t here anymore?
The awareness slapped me, Janssen. I was faking it, but I knew it was real, too, a big huge real, sitting out there in a future that was tearing toward me, heels smoking from speed. Too-much-ness was hurtling my way, and the brave thrill of the year before seemed childish and naïve. I was putting stamps on envelopes and not wanting to put stamps on envelopes. I mailed those things with both a sick and excited feeling in my gut.
You … You had always made the future feel safe. As long as you were in it too, beside me, I could be okay. From first days of school, to awkward school dances, to scary, dark nights, to car trips when we were lost …
The future, this big step out of life as I knew it, the whole piece of childhood, I tried to keep it all at this shiny, golden distance. But the symbols of time passing were piling up. The last homecoming, the last holiday concert, the last, last, last. The bittersweet arrival of summer, the air smelling like warm cotton sheets. Prom, and there you were, looking so crazy handsome in your tux. We were there at home just before meeting Natalie and everyone. Mo
m was taking pictures and her voice was wobbly, like she might cry. I suddenly wanted to get rid of the dress and the hair and sit on the couch and watch movies.
These shoes are too high, I said.
Those shoes are perfect, you said. You look like a princess.
Beautiful, Mom said with her wobbly voice. A grown woman.
I can’t walk, I said.
Look, you said. You held your arm out for me to take. No problem.
And of course Mom had met Dan by then, and she was so happy and so in love, and they started talking about moving, getting married…. She was in her own world. Everything felt like an ending. I wished we could fight more, Mom and me. Don’t you think that would have helped? She was too happy to fight, and I was too scared. I want to say that everything was fading into the past, but it was actually fading into the future. I didn’t know whether to hold on tight or to let go. There were too many opposites at once, scenery speeding past, flying past, as if I were in a high-speed train. The desire to go, the desire to stay. My old blankie, my birth control pills. I noticed that my father was going gray.
