The Story of Us (32 page)

“Well, I can understand….”

“He’s probably just got someone else. Does he have someone else? Every girl he knows is probably after him,” she cried.

I kept my mouth shut.

“
You
have someone else,” Amy said. “What about Brad?”

She had a point. “Right,” I said. I nodded to Amy. This second of agreement between us opened a possible door, a secret entrance to the icy land, and I opened my mouth to apologize to Amy, to make some outreach, but just as I did, her stupid phone rang again. She answered, plugged one ear, and turned her back to us so that she could hear over the pounding music.

“Do you want me to call Gavin?” I asked Hailey. “They were supposed to come to this thing tonight. He should be here soon. You guys could talk….”

Amy turned back around. She handed her phone to her sister. “Mom,” Amy said.

“For God’s sake!” Hailey shrieked into the phone. Her tears were gone. She’d gone from a sad, drippy rainfall to a raging hurricane in less than a second. “I’m not taking your calls for a reason! We’re away from you for five minutes, and you think we’re in danger of completely fucking up our lives!”

Amy gasped.

“No,” Hailey said. “I will not take Amy to the airport. I don’t care if Amy wants to go home.
I
want to stay! No, I
am not on some kind of drugs!” Hailey held the phone over her head. I could hear a voice way up there, a shrill, panicked Mom-God voice, a tiny but all-powerful phone trill coming out of that speaker. “Blah, blah, blah,” Hailey said.

“Give me that,” Amy said. She grabbed for it.
Here we go again,
I thought. It was bound to go flying just like that hearing aid, but I was wrong.

Hailey brought the phone back down to her ear. “I’m running off and getting married, Mother,” she said. Then she flipped the phone closed and chuckled. “
That
’ll get her riled up.”

“Oh, Hailey,” I said. I was shaking my head,
No, no, no
. “I think you better call her back. You need to tell her—”

There was a crash then. A small yelp and a cry. Ted’s butt had joined Mrs. Jax’s under the table, and as he backed out, he lifted the table up ever so slightly with his weight, tipping it enough so that the chicken plate started to slide, caught by Grandpa, but not before a few pieces had dropped to the ground. The other dishes slid and banged and gathered together like a sudden food traffic jam.

“Ow, shit!” Ted rubbed his back, but he held the hearing aid up like a winning lottery ticket.

“Whew!” Rebecca said. “Near miss.” She rubbed her temples. We were stressing the poor woman out.

“You!” Hailey said suddenly. I followed the direction of her finger. Gavin and Oscar had arrived. They had both dressed up too. They were wearing their button-up shirts and good jeans.
Oscar’s blond hair was combed down and shiny. They were heading our way.

“You,” Gavin said as they approached us. “Father or no father.” He took Hailey in his arms and kissed her then, right there in front of everyone, and it was a bold move, but kind of revolting, too. I’d never seen Gavin kiss anyone before, and maybe it was like watching a relative making out. I averted my eyes, and they landed on Oscar, and before I could take in what was happening, he followed Gavin’s lead as he had always followed Gavin’s lead as long as I’d known them.

“You,” he said to me, and suddenly his mouth was on mine,
Oscar’s
mouth, a mouth I didn’t want at all, and it was the same feeling you get when you are at some buffet and you eat some slightly unidentifiable food you think is one thing but is another. Mayonnaise, but it’s horseradish. Potatoes that are actually parsnips. There’s the shock, and then the urge to spit it out. It doesn’t necessarily taste bad, but you hadn’t expected it, and to your stunned mouth it’s just
wrong
.

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.

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 from 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.