The Story of Us (2 page)

Obviously I have my own troubles with forever, and what I did to Janssen proved that.

I heard my mother breathing hard, her suitcase bashing and banging into the walls as she brought it down the stairs. I could just see it—my mother, tripping and tumbling, broken leg, broken arm, no wedding. I listened for the crash. Janssen once said I was
always
listening for the crash.

“Be careful!” I called, but she was already safe. The bag thudded to the floor, and she sighed. She must not have heard me because a second later she was yelling up the stairwell.

“Cricket! Ready?”

Ready? I guess that was the question. Were
either
of us ready? For the last few weeks our house was a maze of cardboard cartons and mixed emotions. You could barely walk in there, and every stupid thing was a memory. Boxes were stacked up wherever you looked; stacked up and labeled in fat, black pen (or crayon or eyeliner or whatever was closest).
KITCHEN. ATTIC. BEN’S STUFF. FRAGILE!
Clumps of newspaper were strewn around, and so were the odd piles of things no one knew what to do with. A CD that belonged to one of Mom’s friends and needed returning, manuals to varied appliances, mystery keys.

What do you keep hold of? What is meant to go? One thing was clear—I’d had a childhood marked by Disney movies.
Cricket, you want to keep your and Ben’s old Lion King game? How about these Princess Jasmine slippers? Cricket, look what I found in the garage. Remember this? Beauty and the Beast magic-mirror-slash-squirt-gun Happy Meal toy. You loved this.

When you were moving, every little object was a decision.
That seventh-grade report on the Industrial Revolution—keep or toss? Christmas sweater knit by Great-Grandma Shine? On one hand—obviously I’d never wear it. On the other—she was dead, and putting it in the Goodwill bag made me feel like she’d be looking down, getting her feelings hurt. I couldn’t break hearts in heaven, I just couldn’t. Here on earth was bad enough.

My mother was worse than I was about all that stuff. Of course, she was happy, too. Really happy. Whenever Dan Jax would call or come over with a homemade something (Dan Jax was a great cook), she was
giddy
. I’d never seen her like that. But then came the sorting and the packing of our old baby clothes, tiny shirts yellowed with spit-up, miniature sweatshirts with trains and bears that she was supposed to be getting rid of, but that she only solemnly folded back up and returned to the box. She did better with our baby toys, but she was still weepy and sullen with each teething ring and stack of plastic doughnuts (largest to smallest, in rainbow colors) that she decided to part with.

“You can be happy and sad, too,” I had told her, which was a joke between all of us, because that was a line in
Monkey M. Monkey Goes on Vacation
, one of her most popular kiddie books.
“Monkey M. Monkey was happy to go, but sad, too. He knew he would miss Otto and Willa and the others.”

“Do you want this for college?” she had answered, holding up a plastic yellow toy telephone. When I was four, I’d swung that at Ben once and gave him a bloody nose.

“Ha,” I’d said. “If I ever need to call home …”

Finally she found a solution—she kept a few of the toys and then spread the rest out on the floor and took photos of them. She even crouched for close-ups. My crib-side Busy Box got more poses than I did for my senior pictures. Hopefully she’d order wallet sizes so it could pass some to its friends, the shape sorter and the Fisher-Price garage.

Was that what I should have done with everything that was mine and Janssen’s too? Taken pictures, so that I could leave it all behind, if leaving it behind was what I was going to do? Hundreds of pictures, it would be. Dried flowers and stacks of sweet notes and the scarf he tried to knit me once but which ended up about two inches long. Pictures of pictures, too, I’d have to take. That one of him on Moon Point, where his hair is catching the sun and it’s a curly mess, and he’s grinning like mad, his arms out, as if he’s trying to hug the moment. He’s the cutest, he is. God. That’s a great picture of him.

Mom was down there with her bag, and in the driveway outside Ben leaned on the horn. He was ready a long time ago. He had this enviable ability not to linger over feelings. Get a move on, let’s go. I loved that. Maybe it was a guy thing. I wished I had it.

“Bus is leaving!” Mom yelled.

“Coming!” I yelled back.

“Jupiter!” Mom called.

From the doorway of my room, I could see Jupiter get up from her pillow. She stretched one thin beagle leg out behind
her and then the other—oh, the old girl had to get the kinks out lately, before she could get the whole body moving. She clomped down the stairs, front paws and then back end, in a little hop. She’d already had a big day. A bath that morning, where she’d sat, miserable, in the tub with flat, drenched hair, until she was finally out and free to roll around on the carpet, smelling like strawberry shampoo and wet dog. Now she was fluffy as she made her way down. Some dogs—they’re just sweet; you can feel their kindness in their soulful eyes, and that was Jupiter. I snagged her bed and her favorite ragged blankie, too, and Rabbit, that flat stuffed-animal roadkill she loved.

“Don’t forget these,” I said to Mom.

“Thanks. Stinky dog bed … check. Deflated old Easter bunny.”

“This was one of ours?” We used to get a stuffed rabbit every year in our baskets.

“Yours, I think. Didn’t you give it to her?”

I felt a pang of something sad and bittersweet as I looked at that dreary, matted used-to-be fur. Even a stupid smelly dog toy had its stories. Stuffed toy glory days, long gone, but still, Jupiter kept on loving that flat old rabbit. It kind of choked me up. God! That, right there—
that
was evidence of the mess, the knotted, impossible, stuck mess I was in. Sentimental feelings about something that disgusting … I don’t know. That thing
stank
.

We hauled the gathered luggage to the porch. Ben hopped
out of his truck, headed over to help with the bags. Jupiter had already tangled herself on her leash around the front hedge. Mom shut the front door and then locked it. The door seemed huge all of a sudden. Years and years huge. We’d moved to that house when I was ten years old and Ben was twelve, after our parents got divorced.

“Well,” my mom said. Her voice was wavery.

“I know,” I said.

“It’s not the last time. We’ll be back. We’ll have to check to see if the movers left anything behind …,” Ben said.

“Still,” I said. “Let’s hurry.”

“Good idea,” Mom said. “I hate good-byes.”

But we didn’t exactly hurry. Even Ben didn’t. He set down the bags he held. We all stood on that wide, wide lawn in front of our old Victorian house in Nine Mile Falls, my mother’s arm around our waists, mine and Ben’s. Behind that door—no, wait, on that lawn and up that drive
and
behind that door and everywhere else on that property—there was what felt like a lifetime full of memories. Middle school angst and Christmases, the huge blanket of maple leaves every fall, our creek out back, the sound of it—soft and trickling, or rushing with too much rain as the boulders tumbled underneath. My father with his car idling out front, picking us up for the weekend; Jon Jakes and his rotten kids who lived under our roof for two years; Ben and me—fighting and laughing and more laughing. Ben and me and Mom and Jupiter.

Home.

And Janssen, of course. My very own Janssen Tucker. Who right then did not belong either to my past or my future, which was all my stupid doing. I’d put him in some waiting place of in-between, and he’d just made it clear he wasn’t going to stay there much longer. Could you blame him? Me and my Janssen, our clock was ticking.
You gotta figure this one out on your own,
he told me.
You gotta decide.
I loved,
love
, that boy. That’s the first part of this story that you need to know.

“Smell,” Mom said.

“What?” Ben said.

“Blackberries ripening. Along the creek. Smells like summer.”

“It does,” I said.

“Summer was great here,” Ben said. “Except for cutting this goddamn lawn.”

“How many lawn mowers did this lawn kill?” I asked. The lawn was huge. The first cut of the spring—the grass was ankle high and so thick and hard to mow that it took a couple of days to do the job.
I fought the lawn, and the … lawn won,
Mom would sing, after taking a long drink of water out of the hose.

“Three,” Mom said.

“Two Weedwackers,” Ben said.

“And what about winter,” Mom said.

“Yeah,” I said. The wind would blow so hard that tree branches would crack loose, and the power would go out for days.

“Here …,” she said. Her voice was soft.

“What?” I asked.

“So much of our story is here.”

I didn’t want to cry. I hated to cry. All three of us were the same that way. She kissed the tops of our heads. Ben cleared his throat.

“Look at that crazy dog,” Mom said.

We did. She had about four inches of leash left and was now bound tight to the lilac bush. She had given up. Lain down right there and set her chin on her paws. She sighed through her nose.

It was great comic timing. That’s part of what made them so great, right? The mess, the barking, the trouble—one reason you put up with it all was for the relief of ridiculous dogs during big moments. Ben laughed. “Oh, poor you,” Mom said to her. “Poor defeated baby.”

I went to untangle her leash. Ben picked the bags back up, and Mom put her house key in the pocket of her jeans. All this past and all this future and all this unknowing, and there was only one thing we could do about it. One choice, and so we did it. We got into Ben’s truck to see what would happen next.

Dear Janssen—

That sounds so formal. I was trying to think how many letters we’ve written to each other over the years. Not many, really. Notes, yeah. But we’ve never actually been apart that long to write regular e-mails, have we? Well, when you went to Spain with your parents after graduation. That was only two weeks, and I remember it seemed like
forever
.

Anyway, I got your letter. When you said that it might be a good idea for me to write things down to help me sort out my feelings … Maybe you
didn’t mean I should write to
you
. But how can I
not
write to you? You’ve been in my life for
eight years
. Eight of eighteen. Let’s subtract that first year of being a preverbal baby vegetable and say you’ve been there for almost half my life. You’re like my
arm
, or something.

I can hear your voice now. Don’t even say it.
I don’t want to be your arm
. I know, I know.
Decide, Cricket,
you say.
Stay, or leave
. I hate when you say that. I hate when you say “leave.” It hurts. You don’t leave an arm, Janssen. You just don’t. I love that arm.

The house is packed up. Of course you know that. You’ll be driving by and seeing it empty except for all those boxes until we’re out for good and strangers move in. I don’t like the thought of other people in our house. That’ll be really weird for you too, I guess. But worse, Janssen—the new place in Seattle feels so
new
. My room, the kitchen … Even though it’s an old, old house, we’re all new there. No memories in it yet to make it feel lived in.

If I go away … Janssen, where will I go to find home then? This is my really big worry.
I’ll look around some stupid dorm room in an unknown city, and there won’t be the usual things we do and there won’t be my familiar people, and that’s like living without your favorite stuff around. Like your favorite stuff was wiped out in a tornado. I have no idea where home will be.

I’ve decided to write down our story, okay? That way we won’t lose it. All this newness—I worry it might barge in and shove our stories away until they disappear. I’d hate that. What does my mother always say? Each story, good and bad, short or long—from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness—they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won’t necessarily make sense, but at the end there’ll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits. I like that idea, but who knows. Some books are lousy or boring or pointless, even if there are those rare ones that leave you feeling forever changed.

Anyway. I don’t want to forget.

All right, then. Day one of us.