Return to Me (12 page)

“Yeah! When did you make this?” I asked.

“Before,” she answered vaguely, as though she knew all her efforts to create a wholesome family had been futile.

Grandpa led the way out to his rental car. “Kids, what we need is a sense of adventure. And we’ve got plenty of that. Did your mom ever tell you about the time she thought she could fly?”

“What?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Your mom had just watched
E.T.
and got it in her head that if she hopped on her bike and launched off a big enough boulder, she could fly. She did… for half a second before she crashed and knocked out her front tooth.”

I stared at my mother, who had followed us to the car, opening the passenger-side doors for us.

“Dad, sheesh!” she said with a smile, and only then did I
notice the slight discoloration in one of her front teeth. Despite her words, Mom flushed, a daughter beloved. “How did you remember that?”

Grandpa George added in a voice meant to carry to Mom before he shut his door, “My one and only job when your mother was growing up was to make sure she stayed alive. She’s a daredevil but a terrible planner.”

“Mom? She’s the most detail-oriented person on earth,” I said as I buckled myself into the passenger seat. “I mean, did you see that binder?”

“No, being organized is a foreign language she forces herself to speak to keep your lives in order. Your mom is a zero with details. So is your grandmother. Who do you think taught them to make daily to-do lists so they wouldn’t forget anything?” He tapped his chest. “Did you know your mom broke her nose skateboarding down our steps?”

“Mom did?” Reid said. Both of us peered at her as Grandpa reversed out of the driveway. I didn’t recognize the brazen girl Grandpa was telling us about any more than the broken woman behind us.
Carefree
and
adventurous
—those weren’t the words I’d ever apply to my detail-obsessed, khaki-wearing mom. I rethought the binder: It wasn’t to control how we spent our time but to direct it. She knew what we loved doing, which was why she knew to give Reid the journal to encourage him to write his own stories.

Mom followed us up to the edge of the driveway. There she stood, hugging the binder close to her, a shield that was supposed to protect our family in our cross-country move. I waved
vigorously at Mom, and she grinned back at me, both of us touched by these simple gestures of affection.

Instead of eating in a restaurant, we brought our gyros, stuffed with cucumbers and dripping with garlicky tahini sauce, to the High Line, an urban oasis three stories above the city. Grandpa told us that this public park had been reclaimed from a defunct elevated railroad in the Meatpacking District originally built in the 1930s. Now birch trees and meadow grasses sprouted among the abandoned trestles. And we were stretched out, three peas in a pod of lounge chairs set on casters atop the rail lines.

One bite, and I was disturbingly full. Who knew that my heart and stomach had a symbiotic relationship: Both felt shrunken.

“Your mom would love this place,” Grandpa said.

Humbled, I tilted my face to the sun. Even though Grandpa hadn’t lived with Mom since she left for college, he knew the core of her: what she loved. What made her happy, filled her with joy. Years from now, would Dad know the same about me, considering he had dismissed my fairy houses, steered me to large-scale architecture, ignored my love for treehouses?

Grandpa crossed his arms behind his head while he stared up at the cloud-pocked sky. “You’ll have to bring your mom here.”

“But then she’d want to make a mini version of this back home,” Reid said with his mouth full.

“Probably,” Grandpa and I said at the same time.

We all laughed. I laughed again; I couldn’t help myself. Nor could I explain my spontaneous burst of tears until Reid asked, “What?”

“Mom’s home alone,” I said, sniffling.

Grandpa reached over to rest his hand atop mine. “It’s okay to feel happy even during this ordeal. In fact, you should grab as much happiness as you can, especially during this time. People are resilient. Your mom is. You are. You always have been.”

We never talked about my near drowning off Grandpa’s houseboat; none of us did. Grandpa tightened up whenever I mentioned missing his houseboat, sold shortly after the accident.

“Isn’t it weird to think that you can find something this soulful… even here in a big city?” I asked as I watched a blonde girl with a birthmark like a cloudburst on her face sketch a robin bathing in a water fountain. The boy at her side wasn’t studying the bird or her artwork or the GPS device he held, but her, as though she was the most beautiful being he’d ever seen.

Grandpa smiled, a Cheshire cat smug with a delicious secret. “When you come to the Big Island, you’ll see…. There are sanctuaries everywhere.”

I loved the idea of a sanctuary where people could find peace. That’s what Mom had tried to create for us in the family binder she had assembled, a place for each of us to regroup in our new lives. This was no different from our personal spaces on Lewis Island, custom-designed without any of us appreciating her effort: my treehouse, Dad’s man cave, Reid’s library of a bedroom. When had Dad decided that he wanted to be a refugee
in someone else’s arms? I shut down the image of Dad with another woman. The thought, the idea, was way too disturbing. Way too revolting.

On the street below us, the rumble of traffic mingled with slammed brakes and yelling, so different from the lulling surf edging our island home. When had I decided that New York was my refuge? It was inconceivable that I would ever feel at home in nonstop traffic and thick congestion and crowds of strangers. Automatically, I pulled out my phone to text Jackson with that thought, only to notice he hadn’t written to me. Trepidation shot through me, and I pushed my uneasiness down as I wedged my phone back into my messenger bag.

“Ready?” Grandpa asked, wadding up his soggy aluminum-foil wrapper. “We’ll just hop on a subway, and you’ll see how easy it’ll be to get here. Plus, up closer to where you’ll be at Columbia are the Cloisters. You’ll love it there, too.”

We retraced our way down the stairs and into the streets of this quaint neighborhood of boutiques and wine bars Mom had wanted to call her own.

Later, I would ask Dad and get a mumbled confirmation I didn’t need. I knew as positively as I knew that Jackson would be mine, that my treehouse had been sited in the absolute right spot on our property, that I wanted to be an architect—I knew that this very street corner was where Dad lived with his mistress. An old brownstone home with a door freshly painted bright as a new beginning. An old brownstone home I had seen in a fever dream.

I could feel Dad and Giselle around me, laughing as they
strolled hand in hand along this charming street, not caring that we were home alone with our broken hearts. I could picture them, heads bowed together as they snuggled at one of the cozy outdoor cafés, their only concern their next trip together. All the while, Dad had been lying to us in his sporadic texts and infrequent phone calls about how his “business trip” was going.

People always say life is stranger than fiction. My personal experiences confirm that is true. What I tell you next is no lie, not even the slightest bit of exaggeration. Reid, Grandpa, and I were about to head to the subway when I spotted them far down the same street: Dad and Giselle.

You might say,
What are the chances of that?

You might say,
Yeah, right.

You might say,
Get your eyes checked.

But I know what I saw.

It was as if my feeling Dad and Giselle had conjured them here near the High Line park.

What the hell was
she
doing here? I wanted to run to them and tear them apart; I wanted to run away. But then Dad threw his head back and chortled. It was the liquid laugh of a man without responsibilities. Suddenly, superimposed on the father I knew, I saw Dad at twenty-four, the hotshot MBA who had picked Mom out on the lawn in front of her freshman dorm. Dad before sacrifices in his career, in his travel plans, in his bachelor life had to be made because of unanticipated, unexpected me.

In that vision, I saw Dad as he wanted to be once again.

Reid’s eyes grew fierce. He strode toward them.

“No, Reid,” I said, holding him back even as I watched Dad pull Giselle into his embrace. She tucked her head on his shoulder so naturally, she must have done that a million times before.
That’s my spot
, I wanted to yell at her, at him. My father’s hands slipped down Giselle’s tiny waist, then lower. I yanked Reid around, despite his protests.

“Let’s go,” I gritted out, tugging Reid along with me.

Even though it would cost us far more than taking a subway, Grandpa flagged down a cab. Gratefully, I slid onto the torn leather seat, ripped from overuse.

That unexpected encounter with Dad and Giselle left us too worn to visit Columbia. To lighten the shell-shocked atmosphere on the way home from the train station, I told Reid, “If Mom had been there, she would have marched right up to that woman and said, ‘Move this.’ ” At that, Reid laughed. We all did as we imagined the mama-bear scene, but the Mom we found was slumped on the front steps, worrying her loose engagement ring around and around her finger as though our future was right there in her hands. But was our future here or back on Lewis Island? Give up or fight back? Broken family or simply bruised?

She raised her eyes, haunted, to meet mine in the car. She knew what we had seen. I had no doubt of that.

“Oh, Mom,” I sighed.

No sooner had Reid and I left the car than Mom stood. She
was so achingly thin, her clothes billowed in the wind. She straightened, proud and rooted firmly in the ground as she waited for us. And what she told me with her hands heavy on my shoulders, as if she wanted me to feel the weight of her words, was this: “New York is just as much your place as it is theirs.”

T
he first thing the next morning, I checked my cell phone. For once, there was no extra-late-night message from Jackson. No early-morning greeting. The reason was in his status update:
Heading to the boondocks with a good friend to watch the Pleiades meteor shower!

A good friend? Sharp-edged unease prickled me. Since when did Jackson ever use the words
a good friend
? Buddy, yes. Friend, yes. But
good friend
, left unnamed? Never.

Unsettled, I sought girlfriend support, but knew better than to call Ginny at this early hour. She valued sleep as much as she did her flaming-orange KitchenAid mixer. So I phoned Shana, who was normally up and running by five to log her summer mileage.

“So… do you know who he went with?” I asked her as I laid out my harvest of found objects from the backyard: slender
twigs and boat-shaped leaves, earth-toned pebbles and baby pinecones. This was my insurance policy. I needed to keep my hands busy to distract myself in case I heard something worrisome.

“No,” Shana said without panting, since she was in such good shape, “but why don’t you just ask him?”

Though I fell silent, the answer blared in my head: because I was afraid of what I’d find. Look at what full disclosure had done to my family. Nothing could soften the raw pain I felt after I spied Dad with his girlfriend in Manhattan. Nothing could muffle the sound of Mom’s crying late at night when she thought everyone was safe asleep.

My voice rose a strained octave, then two, high-pitched with forced cheeriness. “Okay! I’ve got to go hang out with my grandfather.”

When I hung up, I felt worse than before the call. I scooped all the materials for my fairy house into an untidy mound and went outside to scavenge more.