Return to Me (11 page)

Now I remembered how Dad had smirked in that Tuscan lobby, dismissing Mom publicly.
Bits will be telling you that this was fate
. Now I remembered how Mom had blushed, ashamed. The same way blood rushed to her cheeks now, as though she remembered Dad’s derision, too. She retracted her hand and scrutinized her fingernails. Their unpolished state had become critically important. Mom mumbled, “So why didn’t she come herself?”

“She’s in India.”

“India?” I asked, and brought over the fourth cup of green tea I’d been using as my excuse to stay in the kitchen. I pulled up a barstool next to Grandpa George. “What’s she doing there?”

“Leading another healing tour,” he said, taking a sip of his tea. “Mystics this time. Anyway, there’s been a strike at the airport. Not a single flight is leaving out of Delhi. Didn’t you hear about it in the news?”

Both Mom and I shook our heads. Neither of us had been keeping up with the affairs of the world, outside of the one that had rocked our home.

As though the burden of her thoughts was weighing her down, Mom lowered her head and rubbed the back of her neck with both hands. I understood. My own mind spiraled to Dad, who had escaped to Manhattan… back to her… while we stayed in this cold igloo of a home. Suddenly I hated this house, selected by Dad, who never understood the magic of fairy houses, so I stopped building those fanciful structures. Dad, who told me that treehouses would be the first item cut from any
budget in a down economy, so I set aside my dream of creating treescapes. Dad, who told me that the big-league architecture programs only wanted people who were going to change the world, not a household, so I became the analytical Thom Girl he wanted.

I demanded to know what I already suspected deep, deep down: “But how did Grandma Stesha know what happened, when I didn’t even leave her a message?”

“Didn’t you know, too?” Grandpa asked me directly.

Guiltily, I averted my gaze and bit my lip even as my mind replayed all the times I’d heard the wailing. If I were honest with myself, I’d admit that I had known with certainty that something horrible would happen because of this move. But knowing was one thing; warning was an entirely different, entirely dangerous matter. I should have spoken up about the misgivings I had. I should have told Mom and prevented—

Interrupting my self-flagellation, Grandpa asked gently, “And what could she have done? Any of you? Even if you had said something?”

I clenched my mug so tightly, I was shocked it didn’t crumble in my hands. True, while I might not have been able to stop Dad from cheating and leaving us, at the very least I could have prevented us from living in this isolation chamber of a house. I could have prepared us for the pain of Dad’s betrayal.

Grandpa George placed a calming hand on Mom’s arm. Whether to steady her or to prop her up for his next revelation,
I couldn’t tell. He said, “Warn you? As I recall, your mother did that once, and look at what just happened.”

Startled, Mom met my grandfather’s gaze but remained silent.

“She predicted that Dad was going to leave us?” I asked, incredulous.

“She told all of us,” Grandpa said flatly.

“Dad knew, too?”

“Your grandma accused him of it after your hospital stay.”

No wonder Dad had wanted Grandma Stesha gone, banished from our lives. No wonder he dismissed her purported intuition so vehemently that his attitude verged on mockery. And no wonder Grandma Stesha had kept such vigilant tabs on him that he’d grouse to Mom: “She’s always watching me. That evil-eye act is a little creepy.” Then he had mimicked my grandmother, squinting his eyes so they looked beady, delighting me so that I laughed hard.

Grandpa asked quietly now, “So when she says you should come home with me—”

“Good,” Mom interrupted. “Then she’ll have nothing to complain about, since we’re already planning to go home.”

Grandpa George shifted in his chair and scratched the back of his neck. “Well, I didn’t exactly mean Seattle.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to take you home to the Big Island.”

“Hawaii?” I couldn’t help interjecting then—not that Mom noticed, because her mouth had gaped open.

The power of speech revived in Mom with astonishing rapidity. She demanded, “When on earth did you get a place on the Big Island? How did you afford it?”

Reid chimed in. “Hawaii? I want to go.”

“So how come you didn’t tell me about the Big Island?” Mom asked.

“Spend a week there, then come back here if you want.” Grandpa’s broad gesture communicated what he didn’t say in words: How could anyone want to be here? Here? That one gesture encapsulated everything about this house made of faux stone and fake plaster, starting with its lack of solidity, integrity, authenticity.
Just like Dad
, my inner voice whispered. I gulped down my hot tea, not caring that it scalded my tongue. Anything to stop that treacherous thought.

Mom confessed, “I don’t know about the cost, Dad.”

“Don’t worry about that. Between your mom and me, we’ll cover the trip.”

There was a long pause before Mom asked, her voice soft, as though afraid to voice the question: “I didn’t think you talked to each other?”

“Sweetheart,” my grandfather answered tenderly, “I speak to her every single day….” And then more faintly, as though echoing a confession he rarely admitted to himself, “Even if it’s only in my head.”

That sweet admission made me feel guilty because the flurry of Jackson’s texts lighting up my phone had felt like harassing mosquitoes, annoying and unwanted:
Rebel, I’m here for you
. And
Rebel, call me whenever, wherever.

I didn’t want to talk to Jackson, not by text, not over the phone, not in my head. I didn’t know what to say or what more I could possibly want to hear. Until our last conversation, I had been a thousand percent confident that Jackson wouldn’t cheat on me. Now, after his blasé endorsement of his dad’s affair, I could no longer be so sure.

P
erhaps Grandpa George’s visit knocked me straight back to my childhood. Or perhaps I simply needed to escape the heaviness shrouding our home. Whatever the cause, I found myself in the backyard, foraging for materials to build my first fairy house in years. Kneeling on the grass edging the flower beds, I collected a few blue-gray pebbles and tiny fern fronds that would dry into a rich brown roof.

“Reb! Hey, Reb!” Reid stood at the edge of the deck, clutching his journal in one hand, my cell phone in the other. Even though Mom had instructed him to get ready for the day, Reid was still in his pajamas. No doubt he’d been lost in yet another one of his fantasy novels. “Your phone’s driving me crazy.”

Straightening, I approached Reid, knowing who had called yet again. I set my brown bag of building materials on the deck
before taking the phone from Reid. Text message number three from Jackson was noticeably salty:
Silence is not golden.

I sighed. Even though I knew it wasn’t fair, I shut off my phone altogether.

“What’re you doing?” Reid asked, disturbed as though his world had been rocked a second time by my setting my phone down instead of responding.

“I’m making a fairy house,” I answered.

“Really? Like Tolkien’s Lórien?”

“His what?”

If Reid raised his eyebrows any higher, his hair would be wearing a toupee. “The treehouses where elves lived…”

Startled, I realized that Reid had never seen me construct a fairy house. After all, I had stopped building them when he was four. So ignoring his pained disbelief that anyone could be so ignorant of
The Lord of the Rings
, I plucked a few rocks from my bag and placed them on his open palm.

“Here,” I said, beckoning for his journal. “I’ll design a hobbit house for you. Unless you want an elven treehouse.”

I hadn’t even finished my sentence before he entrusted me with his birthday gift.

“This is so cool,” Reid breathed when we finished the sketch: tiny stones for walls and a thatched roof woven from strips of bark. For the first time, I experienced what it must be like to be an architect collaborating with a client, and I loved it. As Reid scrutinized our plan, completely absorbed, I felt at once how much I was going to miss my quirky brother when I was away at
college… and worried that I was leaving him to navigate this torn home life by himself.

“Reb…” Reid began hesitantly.

I erased an errant line, blew away the rubber droppings. “Yeah?”

“Do you think we’re going to be okay?”

I jolted, and the eraser skidded across the drawing but, luckily, didn’t mar the sketch. I knew what Reid was requesting: ping the future, report back in the present. But that was an invitation to a secret society I wasn’t sure I wanted to belong to, a faith in my visions I wasn’t sure I deserved. Look at Mom, who was joining the women in our family as yet one more oracle cursed to stand alone in life without a partner, soul mate, helpmate.

“Do you?” Reid asked persistently.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Don’t know or don’t want to know?”

I narrowed my eyes at Reid for having the audacity to ask me the question I was too afraid to ask of myself. It was one thing to have visions, but to court them deliberately? To look unflinchingly at all the other ugliness that might linger in the Pandora’s box of our father’s deception?

No, thanks. Maybe Ginny had it right all along. Maybe my wish was a curse, a self-fulfilling prophecy. With a start, I recalled my last wish on Lewis Island, that Mom’s life would be as upended as mine. My God, what had I done? Had I changed her fate somehow, some way?

Reid stared intently at the drawing as though he wanted to vanish within the lines on that page. I would have gone willingly
with him if I could. His question stretched invisibly between us, a taut tightrope. He deserved an answer, no matter how precarious it made me feel.

But what could I say that could possibly comfort him? A prophecy was no promise of solace. Just look at how mine about Ginny’s dad had unraveled her. I grasped for anything and found inspiration in the unlucky source of our drawing, the treehouse from Tolkien’s fantasy world. So I asked, “How would you get us out of this ick if we were a fantasy novel?”

“Us?”

“Mmm hmm. Us.”

That one simple question filled Reid with ideas so rapidly, so abundantly, I could practically hear them collect like raindrops in a cistern during a storm. It was as though he had been waiting his entire eleven years of life to be a fantasy novelist. All he needed was the right trigger. Without another word, Reid leaned forward in his chair, plucked the pencil out of my hand, and began to write furiously. Whatever story he had begun to concoct in this wild, gasping rush of hope, I was confident he would write his way to safety. That was far better than I could manage. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t even string together a simple one-hundred-sixty-character response to Jackson’s latest text:
Talk to me.

“I’m not sure what you’re doing,” Grandpa George told Mom later that morning as he set a bag of Kona coffee beans and a box
of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts on the counter, “but I’m hanging out with my grandkids.”

“I thought you might like to go to the nature reserve. It’s supposed to be just ten minutes away,” Mom said, plucking a hot-pink binder from the bookshelf where the cookbooks were haphazardly stacked, some even upside down. “I’ve got the information right here.”

“I’ve got this covered, Betsy. Relax today. Take a nap. Eat a chocolate.” His brows drew together as he glanced down her scrawny frame. “Or the entire box. Do whatever you want.”

Mom nodded quickly as her eyes filled with tears, and with chagrin, I realized how rarely I offered to help her.

“So, what sounds good to you?” Grandpa asked me.

“I’d love to check out Columbia,” I said.

“Oh, honey, that’s all the way in Manhattan,” Mom started to protest.

“No problem,” Grandpa said.

“You’d take her there? The city? You hate cities.”

“Yeah, but I’d love to see where my granddaughter is going to learn to be an architect. And then she can show you around later.”

Mom flipped to another section of the binder. “Oh, I have some info about Manhattan.”

“Elizabeth, put that away,” ordered Grandpa George.

Since Mom didn’t look like she was going to obey anytime soon, I took the binder from her. Each section was neatly labeled with colorful tabs: gardens and nurseries, farmers’ markets,
architecture, antique dealers, bookstores and libraries, sports, and pubs. Every single one of these activities mapped to our interests, each meticulously researched from websites and blogs, articles neatly clipped from the
New York Times
, brochures Mom must have curated.

I flipped another page over and found listings for paint stores that Mom and I loved to troll for their colors. After that, a page with contact information for all the local treehouses featured in the three coffee-table books she had given me for Christmas.

“Mom, this is amazing!”

Pleased, Mom smiled, her first real smile in a day. “Really?”