The Story of Us

by Deb Caletti

  3. In another case, a family’s dog went missing just before they moved twelve hundred miles away. Nearly a year later the dog appeared at the family’s new home.

  They never forget, see? I’ve heard it too—that howl, howl, howl of joy Jupiter gives when we’ve returned after a long while. Did she know how long we’d been gone? Is a week forever? Did she worry we wouldn’t ever return? But we weren’t gone forever. No, we weren’t.

  I know you’re right. That night on the dock was not about graduation and college choices and needing a solution. I was sad about time passing, and there is no solution for that.

  And you are right about something else. My mother ran from forever because she was afraid, and I wanted to stay forever because I was afraid.

  I know. It’s time for her to stay, and for me to go.

  When there is a connection so deep, reunion is inevitable, isn’t it, Janssen? Tell me that it’s true. I hope we will find our way back to each other one day, Janssen. Even if it takes years. Even if we have to travel a hundred thousand miles to get back home.

  Love always,

  Cricket

  chapter

  twenty-seven

  We all said good-bye. Jane and John and Baby Boo had left early that morning, and so had Aunt Hannah and Mr. and Mrs. Jax. Gavin and Hailey drove off too, waving madly after being properly fueled with coffee and chocolate doughnuts, and then Natalie left with Oscar. Ben would drive me and Jupiter back in his truck, leaving our mother and Dan to head home on their own with Cruiser. I gave him a good scratch good-bye, in that spot that made his hind leg go like a crazy fiddle player. We’d all arrived believing some things and left knowing others.

  We hugged out in front of Bluff House.

  “Keep it under a hundred, Gram,” Ben said, and kissed her cheek.

  “We’re stopping again at the outlet mall on the way out of town. You need anything?” Aunt Bailey asked me. “They’ve got some cute parkas.”

  I had visions of fur-lined hats, or snowflake patterns. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m set for parkas, but thanks.”

  “We’ll follow you,” Grandpa said. “That golf store—”

  “We just can’t get rid of you, can we?” Gram said. Grandpa gave her a hug.

  George shook my mother’s hand. “You have a beautiful family,” he said.

  “Oh, George, give me a hug. We’ve been through enough together.”

  Ted was slapping everyone on the back happily, and Rebecca was kissing cheeks. I think they were just giddy with relief that we were finally leaving. I looked up at the house, toward the third-story windows. We had said our good-byes, but I said another silent one to Ash. I reminded myself: Bishop Rock was not very far away, if I wanted that. A quick trip by helicopter, ha.

  “People. It’s not like we don’t live a few miles away from each other. We’re going to be together in two weeks for my birthday,” Ben said. “Let’s get a move on. Crick, you ready?”

  We got into Ben’s truck. I lifted Jupiter up and set her between us. Ben reversed out of the drive, honking his horn. The house got smaller and smaller in the distance. Ben turned the radio on, to his regular station.

  I kissed Jupiter’s black velvet head and put my arm around her so she wouldn’t slide around up there. “You’re an idiot,” I said to Ben, for no other reason than that change kept coming, like it or not, but, too, there were always the things you could count on.

  “I’d rather be an idiot than have a face like an ape,” he said.

  We settled into my mother and Dan’s three-story Craftsman in Seattle. The movers had taken everything from our old place and brought it to the new one. Even though there was nothing left for me to do there now, I went out to our old house. I drove down Cummings Road, past the llama farm and the paragliders. Past that secret shortcut road we’d take on the way to school, where we’d see Bob, Betty, and Louise. Past the Country Store and Johnson’s Nursery and the church and the little shed that was mine and Janssen’s.

  I drove down our own dirt road, careful of the potholes. I turned the corner, and there sat our house, with its peaked Victorian roof and its big porch. I half expected to see Jupiter peering out between the deck railings, barking at the sound of my car. I half expected to see Ben’s light on, or Mom out there with the hedge clippers, her Jeep in the driveway. The electronic gate, the Mighty Mule, was shut, so I parked in front. I rolled my window down so I could hear the creek. I just listened to the sounds of home.

  I walked up the long drive, past the fruit trees. Tiny apples were beginning to appear. The rooms of the house were empty. They were Christmas rooms and birthday rooms and heartache rooms and joy rooms and plain old everyday rooms. I turned away, and took a last look over that large stretch of grass. I looked toward the road leading to Janssen’s house. I wished for it: to see him riding down right then on one of his mother’s horses. If that had happened, I would have thrown away everything I knew right then and gone to him. To hell with growing up. To hell with moving on. But that didn’t happen. He did not come down the road then, and I did not drive up. It would have been too hard to see his house or to run into his mother or father.

  I pulled a blade of grass from our lawn, no longer our lawn. It was stupid, but I put it into my pocket. I wished I could take it all and keep it forever—the blueberries, the lilac tree we had given Mom for Mother’s Day, those old rosebushes. All the animals: John Deer and Gauca-mole, and Dan and Marilyn Quail, and those salmon we would hear splashing in the winding water come mid-October. The sound of the creek.

  But I would always have one thing no matter what, one thing that time or circumstances would never take from me—the story that happened here. The story of us.

  I spent the summer with my mother and Dan and Cruiser and Jupiter, and I decided I did not want to go to school in Los Angeles. I enrolled at the University of Washington. Natalie and I were talking about getting our own place the following year, after we could save up some money. Maybe some people who felt safer than I did could release ropes and suddenly fly up, up, up. But I needed to untie them more slowly. The right time—not yet.

  I started classes that fall.

  Are you going to cry on the first day of school like you always do? I asked my mother.

  I don’t cry, she said.

  We know you do. Ben and I both know. Every year.

  I can’t help it. It’s always a big day, she said.

  I found my way around the large campus lined with cherry trees. The leaves turned orange and then fell. I got a part-time job at the university’s bookstore. We had the first snowfall of the year, which made the city go crazy with skidding cars and abandoned ones, and my English 101 class gathered to sled on one of the steep nearby hills. We had Christmas in the new house, a big, high-ceilinged place that was a hundred years old, and which sat on a street not far from the university. Dan’s business was nearby, and my mother now had a studio in one of the gabled rooms upstairs. Monkey M. Monkey Moves to the City.

  Dan called Hailey and Amy a lot, and while Amy still refused to visit, Hailey and Gavin came over once together and we went Christmas shopping with Natalie and Oscar. I went to see my own father, back over the bridge where he lived, him and his new girlfriend. We watched movies together, tried to make the past disappear into the future. Mom got lost over and over again in the city, trying to find the street where we lived. Ben stayed with us during winter break, and Gram and Aunt Bailey came by and drank eggnog until their cheeks reddened. We all went to a ground-breaking ceremony for Grandpa’s golf course.

  And Jupiter and Cruiser. They didn’t get to choose if they wanted to be together or not, but they made the best of it. Maybe they would have picked different relatives for themselves, but they worked it out. Jupiter, our old girl, she still kept Cruiser in line, but they’d gang up on their humans, sitting together by the treat jar. They’d both go crazy when anyone came to the door, barking and trotting around like teammates defending the same goalpost. The mailm
an made them nuts. We’ve been over this a hundred times, I’d say, but they had a job to do.

  I’d bundle up and walk Jupiter by herself too, on the hilly streets of Seattle, her new home. I could see her funny little breath in the cold. But her gait was slow, and her nose seemed always dry. You can fool yourself into thinking it will never happen, even though you know it has to happen. I knew it was happening for a while, really. Her muzzle had gotten gray. She’d been looking old. Dog years—you could forget what that meant. But then the strange, worrisome things came—how thin she got. The shaky legs. Shivering. No one could say what was wrong with her. She began to yelp in pain even when resting quietly. She couldn’t walk down any stairs, and sometimes one leg would give out on her and she would stumble. We tried to give her her dignity, even when she peed in the house, which began to happen a lot. She felt so bad about it. Her stomach was always sick too, and none of the medicines we hid in bits of cheese or bread seemed to help.

  She started panting hard. She had nights where she would wander the house, climbing the stairs, pacing. I saw my mother holding her in the middle of the night. She stayed with her and held her on her lap. I laid my head beside Jupiter as she slept on her bed. After years of locating every microscopic bread crumb, stealing candy from purses, and trying to fake us out by stepping back over the door ledge for a second you-came-when-we-called treat, she lost interest in food.

  But the worst thing was, her tail stopped wagging. She held it low and still.

  I could feel the seasons changing. I knew it was an important time, that time, same as you know all big things. Same as you know a person will be important in your life, or know when you’ve made a choice that will change you. I could feel heartbreak and loss just like that, waiting, getting ready. I wanted it gone. I didn’t, don’t, understand why this had to be. I didn’t, don’t, understand that kind of forever.

  I went with Mom again to see Dr. Mary, Jupiter’s vet. We were there a lot. They shaved the side of her for another test, an ultrasound, and they sent her through X-ray machines again too, more tests, and still no one knew what was the matter. We brought her home. But one night—we heard her. We all did. Suffering, throwing up, so sick. We piled into the car, and Dan Jax drove us to the animal hospital emergency room. We sat in plastic chairs and my mother held Jupiter on her lap in a blanket. The doctor said it was time to think about doing the kindest thing.

  It didn’t feel like the kindest thing. It felt wrong. You must choose their death because you love them, but loving them makes the choice an impossible one. It was mercy, an act of compassion, a mercy that rips your heart out. Still, we had brought her from her beginning to her end.

  A dog—a dog teaches us so much about love. Wordless, imperfect love; love that is constant, love that is simple goodness, love that forgives not only bad singing and embarrassments, but misunderstandings and harsh words. Love that sits and stays and stays and stays, until it finally becomes its own forever. Love, stronger than death. A dog is a four-legged reminder that love comes and time passes and then your heart breaks.

  At that hospital, late that night, they taped a plastic vial of morphine to her leg. We brought her home so that we could spend a few hours together. Suddenly it’s the last day, and then the last few hours, and then moments, and then moment. You wish for so many things. To do it all over again, but so much better. To have even a little more time. You hope and hope she can understand that you are doing everything you can. You hope and hope she isn’t afraid. This time it’s terrible not to share language. You try to say it all anyway.

  That afternoon Ben came over. Mom and me and Ben—we sat in a circle on the floor, and we set our Jupiter in the middle. Could she have known? Because she came to each of us one by one. We stroked her and told her how much we loved her, and we said thank you to her, and then we snipped a piece of her hair, the white spot on her back, and that’s when I knew she would really be gone.

  Dan drove us to Dr. Mary’s office. He stood respectfully aside, because this was our good-bye. My mother held Jupiter on her lap and told her what a good dog she had been. My mother was crying and so was I, and Ben, too. See, she was one of us. Three and a half. Our little beloved. We had her favorite blankie, and Rabbit. My mother held her and stroked her and spoke softly to her, and Ben looked into her eyes, and we were there by her side as she had always been at ours when Dr. Mary slipped in the needle and when Jupiter left us.

  chapter

  twenty-eight

  Dear Janssen—

  The Worst Things About Dogs:

  1. They die.

  2. They die.

  3. They die.

  Love always,

  Cricket

  chapter

  twenty-nine

  We were heartsick, of course. Some people think sorrow and pain over dogs is silly. But they don’t understand what it means to love them deeply, they don’t know all the corners of your life that a dog gets in. There’s no rightful place for the sadness. Somehow the grief is supposed to be wrong or embarrassing.

  But why wouldn’t the loss be as true as it feels? Why wouldn’t we grieve her? A dog is there, always. Ours was. She was there, for us and with us, when we suffered and when we celebrated. She was there, part of us, when we were just making breakfast or cracking jokes or falling asleep. She joined us just as we were starting a new life together, and she left us just when that particular life was ending. We were family.

  “I keep hearing her everywhere,” my mother said.

  I knew what she meant. We took Jupiter’s collar off after she died. Her jingle. It sat on the mantel next to a picture of her, and if you gave it a shake, it would sound like she was still here, trotting around and checking things out. But you didn’t have to shake that collar to hear her. I heard her in my head constantly. I kept seeing her too, trotting around the corner or barging through the bathroom door. I wondered if her sound, and the sight of her, would get further and further away.

  “I keep finding her hair. How can her hair be here but not her?” I said. I didn’t get dead. I didn’t understand dead one bit.

  “I regret so many things,” my mother said. She was sitting at our old kitchen table in our new house, her hands around a mug I had made in the second grade.

  “Like what?”

  “Back when she was younger, I kept her in the garage at night for a while, remember? Jon Jakes didn’t want her getting into trouble. She wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. Why did I let that happen? I put a rug out there, her pillow, but still. God, I wish she knew that I was sorry about that.”

  I put my arms around her shoulders.

  “So many things you’d do different, if you really knew it was going to end,” she said.

  The doorbell rang. Cruiser ran to the door, barking madly as always, skidding on the polished floor. I made him sit. He was a mostly good boy, but, oh, it was hard to see only one crazy dog scrambling toward the door. I asked Cruiser once where Jupiter was. I whispered it into his soft, folded-over ear. Maybe it was another secret super-intelligence they had, some kind of knowing. Maybe he knew those answers but was keeping his little black lips shut on that one. Cruiser lay down, then rolled over on his side to show his butterscotch belly and his willingness to do what I asked.

  “Stay,” I said, and I answered the door.

  And there he was. Right there. My very own Janssen Tucker.

  He took me into his arms, and I cried.

  “Why, Janssen?” I sobbed.

  He tucked my hair behind my ear and kissed my tears. He had something in his hand. A stupid old chewed-up rawhide that had been left on our lawn. One of those long ones, rolled up like a newspaper. She loved those. The ends were gnawed and her teeth marks were embedded in it.

  I invited him in. But he only shook his head. Too hard, he whispered. Too much love and missing. We stood on the porch of the new house and hugged. Janssen was familiar but new. He smelled the same, but had a shirt on I’d never seen before. After a while he
said he’d better go, and I agreed. Cruiser was spying on us out the window.

  Janssen was down the sidewalk before I called out to him.

  Wait, I said.

  He turned to look at me.

  A dog traveled three thousand miles to return home again, I said.

  Janssen Tucker, he nodded. That’s how the story goes, he said. You travel safely, Cricket. And come back soon.

  He left then. His same old car backed out of our new street, and his old, familiar arm waved to me in that new and unfamiliar shirt. He had my stories and I had his, and we both had our story together. Each story, good and bad, short or long, yes—they are each a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. At the end, a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter

  fits. I believe my mother is right about that.

  I watched Janssen’s car drive off. The sun was shining down, and the day smelled grassy and warm, like summer. I waved good-bye to my very own Janssen Tucker, and then I put my arms around myself and watched the empty street where he once was. Then I went back inside to my family.

  Why, Janssen? I had asked. But I think I knew.

  The story, our real story is this: doomed, precious, imperfect love. Love, deep and endless and brave in the face of certain loss—through death and leavings and growing up and letting go. Love, given over. It’s the tender pulse of every word and every line and every chapter. It’s our story, and it’s the place where our heart, no matter what, always finds home.