The Story of Us (4 page)

“Dan knew them in college or something.” Jupiter was coughing now, like she did when she strained at the leash too hard—an alarming hack/honk that involved a frightening display of lurching. “Jesus,” Mom said.

Rebecca Rose reappeared. She didn’t even seem to notice the noise. I picked Jupiter up, and tried to soothe her. “You’re okay,” I whispered.

“It feels insane, bringing the dogs on top of all this.” Mom
said. “But Jupiter’s never stayed in a kennel … and Dan thought, you know, these two have got to finally
meet
, so let’s just do it. Get the whole family together. I keep thinking,
chaos …
”

“Oh no, no, no.” Rebecca waved away the problem. “The more the merrier.” She had already moved toward the stairs, and we followed her up dutifully, carrying bags and one now quiet dog who was enjoying the ride. I felt like an overloaded duckling, following the stoned and muddled mama duck, who abruptly stopped in the hall. She flung open three doors. “King bed here,” she said to Mom. “Shared bathroom, right? Ted told you? Down the way. You might see our son, Ash, around.”

“Great,” Mom said.

“He’s in and out. I’ll let you …” She swirled her hands around.

“Thank you so much,” Mom said.

“You’ll all be at dinner tonight? We’re totally organic.”

“I bet,” Ben whispered to me. I snickered now.

“Wonderful,” Mom said. She shot us a look. “Dan will be here by then. He’s just picking up his girls at the airport. Everyone else will be straggling in …”

“Beautiful!” Rebecca Rose said. She grasped Mom and kissed her cheek. It was a wet one too. I could see the little bit of shine her lips had left. Rebecca Rose hurried back down the stairwell. Mom wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. We heard Rebecca stumble and then her voice. “Shit!” The cat yowled.

Mom sighed. I set Jupiter down. I could feel it, the familiar
crawl of things going sideways. The sense that the nice little path you’d been walking on was suddenly getting steep and twisty. I hoped Mom wasn’t feeling it too. I looked over at her. Her face seemed frozen. She had her purse and her travel bag draped over her arm, but she wasn’t moving either forward or backward.

“This …,” she said.

“Don’t say it,” I said.

“Is a bad sign.”

Ben had already disappeared into his room. He was walking around in there. “High innkeeper, okay,” he said. “But this room is amazing.”

“See?” I said.

“All right,” Mom said.

“It’ll be fine.” I imagined a forgotten joint catching some couch cushion on fire. Smoke pouring from windows, animals and people running everywhere. No wedding, and only the cat manages to escape unharmed.

“It will.”

And then we both looked down at the same time. Jupiter was squatting on her shaky little back legs right there in the hall. A puddle was spreading out from under her.

“Oh no,” I said.

“We weren’t paying attention,” Mom said to her. “It was our fault.”

Mom was right. You could tell Jupiter couldn’t help it. She looked embarrassed. She never peed inside.

“Shared bathroom, down the hall. I’ll get the paper towels,” I said.

When I returned, Ben was back out again. “It’s okay, Jupe.” He scruffed her little black head. “Cricket used to puke after long car rides.”

“Oh, God, you did,” Mom said. She took the paper towels from me, started cleaning up.

“You guys obviously have memory failure,” I said.

“Crystal clear,” Mom said. “Kinda hard to forget.”

“So?
You
used to suck on rocks,” I said to Ben.

Mom chuckled. “That
was
kind of strange.”

“You called us by the dog’s name,” Ben said to Mom.

“Still do,” I said.

“Old age,” she said.

Ben tossed our bags into our rooms.

“Rock sucking in early childhood leads to success in later life, huh, Beetle?
I
got the best room.”

“Shut up, you idiot,” I said.

He was right, I saw, but I didn’t mind. Things could get off track, but there we still were, the three and a half of us. We’d been through a lot. And we’d always been okay so far.

Rebecca Rose might not have been able to deal directly with life without a protective barrier of marijuana haze, but the rooms of her inn were beautiful. Ben’s was bigger, sure, but mine had a sloped ceiling and a side dormer window that made it feel like a snug attic space. There were white plank floors, soft throw
rugs, linen drapes blowing gently from the ocean breeze coming in. And the view—the windows opened out to the wide, wide sea. I could have stayed in that room for a long while.

Score a point for Dan Jax. Score
another
point for Dan Jax. He’d already made plenty of points with us, because he was a good guy. Maybe even a great guy. Probably Mom’s first one. I love my father, but it’s a complicated love. He can be great,
really
great, and then he’s suddenly a storm slowly building, a storm that finally tosses lawn furniture and garbage cans, knocks trees down onto roofs. Dan was a regular, calm sky. You kept looking up there, and, yeah, it was still blue and still blue. I said a silent prayer to whoever was in charge of these things, love things, that nothing bad would happen and that my mother would actually marry Dan Jax. There was no reason, really, that she wouldn’t, right? I mean, the other guys were assholes. Still, past assholes could make a person feel skittish. You had to be careful. It could all suddenly be different than you thought it was. A big possible mistake could be hidden anywhere, ready to blow up everything, same as stepping on a land mine.

I was the dog-loving girl, so I had Jupiter and her bowls and stuff in my room, which I didn’t mind, even though her bed smelled and she snored like an old man. She was lying on her bed right then, her small chin on Rabbit. I lay on my bed for a while too, and then I got up. Jupiter only lifted her head, I noticed. Used to be, you’d make a move and so would she. If you went downstairs, she went too. If you went outside, she’d
be right behind you. She followed you as dutifully as a Secret Service agent. But lately she didn’t mind just waiting until you got back.

“Anyone want to go to the beach?” I called down the hall. I knocked on the bedroom doors on either side of me.

“Shut up. Jesus,” Ben said. His voice was groggy, muffled by a pillow. Taking a nap already, I guess, and he hated to be woken up.

Mom poked her head out. “Wanna be here when Dan and his daughters arrive.”

“Okay. Jupiter? You and me. Want to go for a walk?” She thumped her tail on her pillow. I grabbed her leash, and she rose, stretched, wagged her tail.

“They should be here soon,” Mom said. “Did I tell you Grandpa was coming tonight? He’s bringing a friend.” I raised my eyebrows. “No, a friend-friend. Golfing guy or something. Gram’s coming too, later, with Aunt Bailey. I told them they’d better behave.”

“Good,” I said.

“When those two get together …”

“Watch out,” I said. Maybe I shouldn’t have opened my stupid mouth, but I couldn’t help it. “Hey, Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“You can’t like them better than us,” I said. She knew who I meant. I was only half joking.

“Impossible,” she said.

Something tomato-saucey was cooking downstairs, but I didn’t see Rebecca Rose or anyone else. Jupiter wasn’t great on her leash, and she was twisting and pulling toward the dining room, smelling that cat, probably. In one of my dog books, I once read that a beagle is something like one hundred million times better at smelling than we are. A
hundred million
times. They can track human feet even when the trail is four days old and the person was wearing
shoes
. They can smell forty feet
below ground
. Jupiter’s whole world was smell. A hundred million smells of information. She didn’t just smell cat. She smelled
CAT
. She could probably smell what that cat was
thinking
.

We headed down the boardwalk to the beach. The boardwalk was steeply sloped and looked like it could be rickety (image: me breaking my neck; no wedding), so I held the railing with one hand until I realized it was pretty sturdy. The sun was out, but it was windy down there, and the beach grass was whipping around. I was really giving Jupiter a treat, because before us was an endless ocean of smell—seaweed and salt air, deep water and dead things on the beach. Her nose was down to the ground. She was pulling to the right. There was probably a decaying beached sea lion two towns over. I took my shoes off, let her lead. We picked our way over the driftwood and the layer of creepy stuff and broken shells to the hard sand where it was easy to walk. Oh, that beach felt great, peaceful, and I hadn’t felt peaceful in months. We walked a long ways—when I looked back, the Bluff House was tiny.

“Look how far we’ve gone,” I said to Jupiter.

I suppose even if you were computer geeks like Gavin and Oscar, who were not prone to dreaming or philosophizing (unless it was about the release date of some video game, Horizon Gate Six, say), a walk on the beach would still get you wondering about the direction of your life, your purpose, the big questions. Beaches, music, and car rides—they could all bring on a sudden bout of deep, dreamy thoughts. See, I was seeing the beach and the houses, and I was thinking about how to describe it all to Janssen. I was talking to him in my head. I realized it, and then my heart clutched up. My chest had this aching pain, thinking what it might mean not to talk to him anymore. Because that’s what breaking up meant.

The realization hit me with all its power and simplicity. You couldn’t break up and still stay together, could you? You couldn’t break up and still call each other every night and tell each other how the day went. He would go on with his own life, and I wouldn’t even know what
happened
. How could you not know the way the story would end up, when it was a story you’d been following for so many years? I wouldn’t know if Janssen was happy, or miserable, or if he needed me. Or if he still loved Taco Time (beef soft taco meal, number three, with a root beer). I wouldn’t know about his friends, or how he managed that economics class he was dreading next quarter. His mom had had breast cancer last year. It could return. She could
die
, and I wouldn’t even know.

What was I doing? Crashing and burning my own life. I
wasn’t leaving Janssen at the Sea-Tac Airport, but what was the difference?

If I left Janssen, I wouldn’t know what was going on with him, but someone else
would
know. That was the other piece, wasn’t it? Maybe he’d do the
Godfather
film fest again with that person. Maybe he’d teach her how to swim the butterfly too. It could be one of those ideas you play with in your head, to see how it feels. You’d imagine his hands on her under the water…. You could pretend that you, too, were alone and free. But you could take it too far, let it scroll out a day or a week past someone’s tolerance and you’d mess it up forever. Especially when your mother was maybe finally getting married, and you were moving, and home as you knew it would be gone. It was an avalanche of change, so much snow barreling down right at you that parts of you were saying,
Screw it. Go ahead and bury me.

Maybe I’d messed it up forever already, after what I’d done. Maybe it was already too late.

Why would you leave someone you love?
Natalie had said to me. Even
she
was getting frustrated.
What is wrong with you? You usually have it so together.
I counted on her to understand me, but she couldn’t understand this. She poked me with the straw from her drink.
You’re going to lose Janssen, and it’s going to be your own stupid fault.

And I would say to her,
How do I know what love really is?
And she would say back,
You’re nuts, you know that? It’s been right there in front of you all these years.

Oscar and Gavin were getting tired of my questions too. I could tell. They’d change the subject.
You’ll figure it out, Crick. Hey, did I tell you about this clock I got? All the numbers are replaced with equivalent equations….
Other people’s confusion could get old. I guess it was a little like the time Janssen broke his leg skiing. You’re caring and giving, but sometimes you just want the person to
walk
already.

Jupiter and I were tromping along, when I guess she just had enough. At least, she plopped right down and decided to go no farther.

“Okay,” I said. “Can we at least sit by those rocks?”

Nothing doing. You could tell when she had her mind made up.

“Well, fine, then.” I picked her up, carried her over, and sat down on the sand with my back against a large flat boulder. Jupiter sat next to me. She liked to sit real close. I put my arm around her.

“Good dog,” I said. “How’d you get to be so sweet, huh?”