Return to Me (26 page)

“Maybe it has,” Mom said, scribbling in her journal. I peeked. She was brainstorming names for our sanctuary.

“What’s going on here?” asked Grandpa, strolling to us with Reid next to him. “Because whatever it is, it looks like some serious subterfuge.”

“We’re envisioning,” I said, repeating my grandmother’s word. Then I added the concept my grandfather had introduced to me, “our own Place of Refuge.” Gazing at my family now—every last one a dreamer who turned romantic windmill-tilting into a life’s work—I knew what to do. I flipped to a fresh page in my journal, smoothed it with the back of my hand, and invoked my mother’s favorite magical words: “Let’s make a plan.”

O
n the day of our departure, I finally made time to enjoy the swing beside Grandpa’s house. I left Mom and Reid on the porch, where they were reviewing the novel growing in the leaves of his leather journal. The seat was so high, I had to hoist myself up with the ropes stringing it to the construction crane. I swayed gently to the chorus of birds and thought about how much I wished Jackson were right here with me. He would have loved how this crane had been repurposed into playground equipment.

I sailed forward as though he had pushed me hard enough that I could fly into the limitless sky. Mom’s phone rang. I recognized the high-tech ringtone: Dad.

My heels dug into the macadamia shells beneath the swing, halting my flight. I hadn’t spoken to my father or answered any of his texts since we arrived on the Big Island. It wasn’t like I
was going to ignore Dad forever, I knew that. But as Grandma said, I was incubating my feelings, allowing myself to get stronger before I spoke to him. Reid, on the other hand, must have prepared for this call, because he went straight for Dad’s jugular: “I’m not playing football this fall.”

Stunned, I swiveled toward the porch to find Reid standing, facing the volcano. When had my little brother gotten so tall? Gone was the little-boy petulance. Now he sounded as sure as a man, looking straight ahead to his future instead of backward at Mom and me for approval.

“No,” Reid said firmly, shaking his head as though Dad could see him. “I’m not doing this to get back at you. It’s just that football is your sport, not mine.”

Whatever Dad said, Reid simply grunted, leaped off the deck, and thrust the phone at me. He muttered, “He wants to talk to you.”

Reluctantly, I took the phone, eyeing it as if it was a snake invading Eden. I knew I couldn’t put off talking to Dad any longer. But as soon as I heard his boisterous “Rebecca!” as though he believed everything was perfectly wonderful, I wished I hadn’t answered.

“So your mom e-mailed that you guys are going to Seattle today,” Dad said now. “When are you coming home?”

Home?

That word disrupted the peaceful nirvana I thought I’d attained at the Place of Refuge and triggered all my feelings of revulsion and resentment in one wild rush that left me shaking. Afraid that I was going to fall from the swing, I scooted off and rested against the metal backbone of the heavy crane. What
would Dad define as home, now that he had uprooted us? Suddenly, I wanted to punish Dad by telling him that life didn’t just go on without him, but life was pretty damn good, thank you. Without him we’d watched dolphins, hiked the volcano, stood on the edge of earth, hung out with my grandparents—

My grandparents.

Our guardians, they strode onto the deck now, hand in hand, a united front of hard-fought love and hard-earned wisdom. I breathed in deeply, remembering what Grandpa had taught me: The path to forgiveness was fraught with hidden crevasses. I remembered what Grandma had shown me: Count all the blessings that have showered upon us because of Dad’s affair.

My future was unfettered by anyone’s expectations but mine.

Blunt as the truth was, I spoke it the way my brother had: “Lewis is our home, Dad.”

“Lewis?”

“Dad, do you really think we’re going back to New Jersey?”

“Well, doesn’t Columbia start soon?”

I hesitated. Standing up for myself was harder than I had imagined it would be. I wiped one of my sweaty palms on my shorts. Even now I found myself circumnavigating the one subject I needed to discuss forthrightly with him: my gap year.

Dad’s vehemence about college was only one reason why I hadn’t told him about my plans. More than that, I worried that he’d discard me just as he had discarded Grandma Stesha because she knew his character, and Mom for reasons only he knew. Love me all he wanted, but the truth was, Dad had left us to create the life he desired. It was my turn to architect my own.

I cleared my throat and remembered Jackson’s motto: Ask for forgiveness, not permission. At one time, I thought that was the mantra of cheaters to excuse their actions, but now I wondered if it was the rallying cry of explorers who defied conventional lives. So I told my father clearly: “I’m not going to Columbia this year, Dad.”

“Oh, you got in touch with UW. Great!”

“No, Dad. I’m taking a gap year.”

“Gap year. In my day, that would be called dropping out.”

“I’m not dropping out,” I said, digging a hole with my foot in the bedding of macadamia shells. “I’m going to be working in my gap year.”

Dad’s disapproval was distilled down to a single question: “Why would you do this?”

I couldn’t believe Dad had the gall to ask me why when he was so obviously the reason. “We don’t have the money—”

“I’ve already paid for your freshman year.”

“What about the other three?”

“No problem,” he said dismissively, as if what we were discussing was as easily solved as a run to the ATM. At stake today was a quarter million dollars of college tuition, room and board, and books. “We’ll figure it out.”

We.

But I now knew what “we” meant in my dad’s lexicon. “We” meant Mom and me contorting ourselves to do his bidding. But “we” hadn’t just done the research. “We” had created a plan.

“I’ve talked to Financial Aid,” I told him. “You make too
much money for me to qualify for aid, even if you and Mom are divorced.” There, for the first time, I voiced the very real possibility of a divorce. Dad may have lulled himself into a fantasyland where our family was perfectly fine, but here was the spreadsheet-backed, insomnia-inducing truth: “There’s Reid’s college tuition, too, and two households now….”

“You’re right. That’s why your mom’s going to have to go back to work,” Dad said.

“What happened to giving Mom half your salary into perpetuity?” I asked quietly.

He didn’t answer. Dad’s reneging on his promise hung over me like toxic volcanic air, corrosive even in its silence. Grandpa had been right; Dad had never intended to honor that blurted generosity.

“She’s planning to work,” I told him hotly, without thinking. “In fact, we’ve been talking about creating a treehouse sanctuary together.”

Before I finished, I knew I had made a strategic blunder.

“Really?” Dad said, and I could hear him shift into the naysaying business-manager mode with me, since Mom had relinquished that role. “What about the capital outlay? A venture like that will cost millions of dollars. And what does either of you know about managing a project that size? Or running a hotel, for that matter? And what about insurance?”

I grimaced, feeling stupid and interrogated. All I wanted to do was hang up and run away. Mom held out her hand for the phone. Glad to relieve myself of it, I still intended to eavesdrop
unabashedly on my parents’ conversation. But Reid was spread out on his stomach on the lanai, catatonic. My brother looked dead on the wood slats. I sat beside him and stroked his back.

“Reidster, you okay?” I asked.

He didn’t move.

“Reid,” I said, rubbing my brother’s shoulder. He remained motionless. I looked up at Mom for help, but she was pressing her temples with her index fingers, trembling. Grandma held my mother, murmuring, “You’re going to be fine, better than fine.”

From deep within, I knew Mom was being nurtured. I turned back to Reid. What did he need to hear? My vision was so clear, so true: Reid shoving open a rusting gate, tall, broad-shouldered, grown up. I bit my lip because I hated seeing his childhood end, but reassurance poured out of me, the truth uncorked: “I am so proud of you.”

While I didn’t see any movement, I swear I could feel Reid paying keen attention to my words. And where this came from, I don’t know—whether from my grandparents or wisdom from all the women before me—but I simply said, “One of the hardest things to do is to speak up. And you spoke up to Dad. You protected yourself, and you were protecting Mom. You are growing up to be such a good man, Reid.”

Even as I gifted him with the words he needed, I felt better myself. And behind me, his chorus of support agreed: “You are,” and from the steps, as Grandpa sidled over to us, “That’s right.” Strongest of all was my mother’s voice: “So proud.”

F
or a full ten minutes, none of us spoke on the lanai, all of us busy with our own thoughts. If I ever needed a sign that I was on the right path with my treehouse sanctuary, now was the time. A sign, give me a sign.

Nothing.

I tightened my arms around my knees where I sat, leaning against one of the sleek wood columns. Dad was right. Given my family’s ever-dwindling finances, that sanctuary idea? Utterly dumb as dirt. If we didn’t have money for college or Mom’s graduate degree, how the hell were we going to fund an entire sanctuary? And what if Dad was right about a gap year being tantamount to dropping out? What if graduate programs for architecture frowned on my decision and this came back to haunt me when I applied in four years?

Interrupting my lengthy list of anxieties, a FedEx
deliveryman lumbered up the driveway toward the lanai, toting a package under his beefy arm. He called, “Hey, I have a package for Rebel Muir….”

With a start, I answered to my nickname for the first time in public. “That’s me,” I said, self-consciously holding my hands out for the box. My cheeks flushed at the way Mom and Grandma stared at me, dumbfounded. “What?” I asked them, shrugging. “It’s what Jackson calls me.”

“Rebel?” Mom repeated with a frown.

An enigmatic smile that would have made Mona Lisa proud graced Grandma Stesha’s face. She nudged my mother. “Isn’t that the name you wanted to give to Reb when she was born?” She cleared her throat. “Ahem, the name I thought she should have?”

“Really?” I asked, stunned, looking from one to the other.

“Your father thought Rebecca sounded more normal,” Mom explained. Unconsciously, she ran her fingers through the wild disarray of her hair. Had I unwittingly suppressed my inner Rebel to become a whatever-you-say Rebecca, just as Mom had ironed herself into a trailing spouse who would follow, no matter the personal cost?

With one sentence, Mom showed me how well she knew my truest self, the one who felt called home by a single Rebel, the one who drew villages of fairy dwellings: “We have an hour before we need to leave for the airport.”

My leave of absence granted, I sped off for the treehouse where, alone, I ran my finger across the name on the mailing label that I should have been given:
Rebel
. That strange
synchronicity was the sign I had been yearning to receive: Welcome home to your life.

Heartened, I pried the package open. Inside was a small box, wrapped in comic paper. This was so classically reduce-reuse-recycle Jackson that I had to smile.

With my breath held, I lifted the box lid and found a round stone, translucent brown quartz, mounted on a leather bracelet, tough yet feminine.

An index card fell from the box, fluttered into my lap. On it, a single quote:

Reading that card, those words, I held my breath, as though listening hard for the Truth. It didn’t ring but was silent. Because. What more sign did I need that I had been wrong about Jackson? What more sign did I need that he understood me?

And then I saw his parting wishes, because that was what his words were:
Call me when and if you want. I’ve never wanted to be anything but good in your life. Be well. Jackson

Here was a boy who texted me every evening to wish me good night, and first thing in the morning to let me know he was thinking of me. Who messaged me throughout the day with wry postings of all the inane things his dad’s clients had said, the ridiculous forms he had to fill out at work—because he wanted
to share his life with me. Who only went incommunicado when I asked for space.

Jackson’s words, his actions, his gifts: They added up to one succinct message. His was a love beating with life because he knew me. He truly knew me.

I started crying then—for me, for Reid, for Mom. For what we had lost. For what I had given up so easily.

I thought about my list of angels on earth, people who would stand at my side, whether in crisis or in celebration: Ginny and Shana. And Jackson. I could ask any of them: Lend me your strength and wisdom and power. It was what I would do for them, as each of us forged our way in the world, Ginny and Shana unabashedly pursuing baking and photography, and Jackson, who knew the contours of the life he wanted, but not the details. Jackson who was letting me go, but with a last parting gift.

The sobbing intensified, increasing in pitch and volume. Panicked breaths gasped out of me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. And then—

I was wrong, so wrong. It wasn’t my mom I had heard in my visions. I wept, curled on my side on the slats of old-growth fir I had seen before. It was me, panting, a deer caught in the jagged teeth of a hunter’s trap called Truth.

My father ran from Mom instead of facing whatever problems they had, whatever ugliness their perfect veneer of corporate coupledom hid.

I had been no different with Jackson.

The stairs creaked as footsteps thudded up to me. I couldn’t lift my head off the hardwood floor that had been worn smooth.
When had I balled up on the ground? Even with my eyes screwed closed, I knew who it was. Who had always come whenever I cried, whether I woke sweat-sodden from a nightmare or was lake-soaked from a near drowning? Who was always at my side, divining when I needed support—when I contemplated sleeping with Jackson because I thought that was what I needed to do to keep him? I knew who was wrapping me in her arms, clicking her tongue sympathetically, breathing out a long “ohhhh” of shared sorrow.