The Story of Us (15 page)

“Dan?” Ben said. Dan stopped on the stairs. Ben contorted his face into a grimace. Dan took this in, and they had some kind of guy conversation that didn’t require words.

“Absolutely. Go,” Dan said. It was kind of beautiful, actually, the brief, knowing exchange. If it had been Mom and me, we might have talked for twenty minutes about what we needed and how we felt about it. Someone might have cried. There might have been hugging involved. I didn’t necessarily
work the way these guys did, but I could see the benefits.

Ben snagged his car keys from his pocket, dangled them at me like we were prisoners about to break. I felt a surge of glee. “Let’s spring Jupiter, too,” I said. “Who knows what that kid’ll do to her.”

“Good thinking,” Ben said.

Gram came down the stairs next. “Ghosts! I’m so excited. Oooh-eeeh!” She lifted her arms above her head in a spooky fashion.

“Get a move on, Casper,” Aunt Bailey said behind her.

Mom has always been insistent and sentimental about Ben and me staying connected “later.” Whenever she discussed it, you heard the shadowy backdrop behind that word, the
Someday when I’m dead
that hovered there. It was more important to keep your ties with your sibling than nearly anyone else in your family, she would say, grasping our hands so we knew she meant it. She called her own sister once a week, and Aunt Hannah would be the person who stood up for her at this wedding, as she had also done at the wedding to our father.
Your sibling is your only witness to the train wreck of your childhood,
she’d say.
And that is valuable beyond what you can imagine right now.

Train wreck—it sounded so cynical, a far cry from tender growing-up images of cookies and milk, birthday parties and paste eating. But from what I could tell, every childhood
was
a train wreck, or at least some sort of collision, small or
large, every one. Natalie’s mother takes medicine for depression, and Oscar thinks his father drinks too much, and Gavin’s dad expects him to be someone he’ll never be. Our father had an “anger problem,” and our mother left men at airports. But how can it
not
be so? We get only imperfect people for parents, and then we get a dose of life thrown in—their bad marriage, a lost job, plain old sadness. Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That “Builds Character.”

I guess Mom was right about Ben. My brother was the only one who had our same parents and our same great-grandma, and those exact houses and that town and those particular school lunches. Only the two of us in Bluff House had our last name, McNeal. Dad’s name. And I could feel all of that shared stuff as we got into Ben’s truck and rolled the windows down and got the hell out of there. He was my witness, all right. Those were his frightened eyes next to me when we saw our father strike our mother in the kitchen once. Those were his joy-filled eyes too, beside mine when Mom and him and me snuck down to Marcy Lake and sat on the dock at midnight that one New Year’s when we were kids. Yeah—sparkling cider in Styrofoam cups, fireworks exploding on the lawns around the water, his and Mom’s faces glowing orange and red and gold.

So, my witness and my rival and my partner in crime. Also, my friend.

“Maybe Gram’s gay too,” I said to him. “I saw her and Rebecca hugging out on the deck.”

“Shut up, moron,” he said. But he didn’t really seem to care. He popped in a CD of a band we both liked, and we shouted over it. It was the thrill of a narrow miss, a snow day, a test put off until the next week. Jupiter sat between us, her nose up in the wind, ears flapping. I swear she was smiling.

“We could drive home. Hang out for the day and drive back,” I said. “Oh, wait. We don’t have a home.”

“We could drive south to Mexico,” he said. “Eat burritos until our colons explode.” See? Giddy.

“I saw some place that rented boats in town. You could take us sailing.”

“Awesome,” he said.

“Jupiter?”

She looked over at me at the sound of her name. She waited to see what was required of her. “We can put her below so she’s safe,” Ben suggested.

We parked in town and walked to the waterfront. As I said, Jupiter had never been very good on her leash (actually she was terrible on her leash), and she was yanking and pulling us forward, cruising around in a zigzag, sniffing and stopping to pee everywhere. We found the shack that rented the boats, and Ben paid, even though I offered to help. The guy handed us three life jackets: our two, and a yellow dog one. With it wrapped tight around her, she looked like a bright yellow pig in a blanket. We told her how pretty she was, and she wore it around proudly. She liked compliments as much as anyone.

Ben was one of those natural athletes—got it from our dad,
obviously, because Mom could walk into a tree on the street while trying to find her phone in her purse. (This happened once.) Any sport he tried, you’d think he’d done it a hundred times already. But Ben lacked the asshole quality that often came with putting balls into various nets, holes, and goalposts. He was just easy with himself, and the boat glided out and picked up the wind, and he seemed to remember the lessons he took once, even though that was several summers ago.

We didn’t have to put Jupiter below after all, because there was a nice, deep, indented portion of the boat where we could ride. She wasn’t so sure about the whole idea at first, and refused to sit on the smooth bench. She didn’t like the feel of certain things under her butt (the seat of Mom’s car, for one), and instead chose to balance precariously with her back end in the air if the surface wasn’t right. I understood. I felt the same way about padded toilet seats and certain public bathrooms. I set her down on my lap and rubbed the tips of her ears and whispered that she was a brave sailing girl. She was a fat package in that life jacket.

“Guess who I talked to last night?” Ben said. He held the rudder in one hand, and the rope to the mainsail in the other.

“Oh, this is a challenging one. Go ahead. Tell me how much she misses you. She’s cried every minute since you’ve been gone. No, wait. You are a god to her, I know. A sex god. Her life will never be the same now that you are in it.”

“Janssen, idiot.”

How many times in my life had I heard that name or
spoken that name or thought that name? Hundreds of thousands. Millions, even. More than my own name, I’m sure. So why did the sound of it send my stomach falling? A hurtling body off the tallest building?

“Go ahead. Tell me how much he misses me. He’s cried every minute since I’ve been gone.”

“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.