Return to Me (4 page)

The next morning when I awoke a few minutes before six, for one lazy second I considered rolling over, burrowing into my
sleeping bag. But I wanted to say good-bye to my home in private. So I crept around my friends, grabbed my denim jacket off the door hook, and slid into my sneakers on the welcome mat outside.

As I set off for the beach, I cast a backward glance at my treehouse and swallowed hard. As frivolous as treehouses were, I loved this treasure box, barely visible in the forest unless you knew where to look. There was something whimsical and secretive about small spaces, however impractical they were. And this treehouse was my heart realized into four walls: snug, safe, and hidden.

Back when I was ten, my parents sold the very last of Mom’s stock options from her job at Synergy to remodel the cottage. The architectural drawings enthralled me—long scrolls of paper detailing the front and back elevations of the house. Our architect, Peter Nakamura, wore a never-changing uniform of formfitting black T-shirt and relaxed black jeans. His one accessory, the black Moleskine notebook he always carried. One morning after meeting with my parents, he had strolled to the coffee table where I was sketching my own architectural drawing of a treehouse. No sweet Snow White cottage, mine was a modern shack whose inspiration came from the eco-friendly houses in the book Peter had just published.

Peter folded his long body next to me on the floor and studied my drawings. “What do you like about this?”

“It’s outside and magical.”

My answer must have satisfied Peter, because he spoke to me like I was a colleague, his callused finger tracing the roofline.
“You know, if we changed the pitch of the roof, we could put in a bigger picture window so you’d really feel like you’re outside.” A few days later, Peter gave me my own Moleskine notebook and a paper scroll: my treehouse rendered as real architectural plans.

Drops of morning dew dampened my sneakers as I followed the grassy path toward the healing garden that Mom had been testing to surprise Ginny’s dad for his convalescence, but never had the chance to plant in his yard. The closer I got to the beach, the more I could breathe. Weird, I know, since I’d almost drowned and swimming made me nervous.

At five foot one and typically dressed in jewel-toned polo shirts, Mom was a human hummingbird, flitting among her beloved plants and her myriad projects. So I was astonished to spot her lounging on the rickety, weather-faded bench facing the Puget Sound, a mug of tea in her hand, her knees tucked up under her chin.

“I’m going to miss this place,” Mom said softly without looking up, almost as if she had been expecting me.

“Then why are you moving? I don’t get it,” I said, as annoyance swept away the calming effect of the water along with my intention to thank her for inviting the Bookster Babes over last night.

Only then did Mom wrench around toward me to respond hotly, “Because, Reb, family is made up of all the hundreds of daily moments. Not the big ta-da family trips to Italy. It’s this.” She gestured between us before widening her arms to encompass the beach, the property, my treehouse. “That’s why we’re
moving, okay? Not just to be with you, but to be with your father. To support him.”

Fine
. I was going to leave her to her grouching, but instead I shot back, “Then how about you all move, and I stay here and go to UW?”

Mom guessed the role Jackson played in derailing me from wanting to attend one of the best undergraduate architectural programs in the country. She shook her head with so much vehemence that her naturally curly brown hair, flat-ironed into submission, whipped like a moon-shaped mezzaluna knife around her shoulders. “First of all,” she lectured me yet again, “this is the time in your life to be totally selfish and focus on yourself. You’ve got this amazing opportunity where you get to invent yourself. And second, I didn’t raise you to be that kind of girl who’d give up your dream to stay with a boy you just met.”

Even though I’d never admit it to Mom, I hated the image of being That Kind of Girl, too, who would shunt aside her goals and shutter her ambitions for a guy. But I had to admit: The temptation shimmered enticingly. Columbia was an inconvenient eternity away from Jackson.

“I’m not putting away my dream. I can still study architecture here,” I said, staring grimly at the receding tide.

“The graduate classes you could take at Columbia are way better than at UW,” Mom countered, and set her mug between us. “Besides, your dad asked me to set up an informational interview for you with Sam Stone, and I already made the call. He wants to see you in a few days.”

Even though the internship had been Dad’s idea, now I
burned with irritation at Mom. Here she was again, intervening as always the moment she sensed me teetering off my preordained path dictated by her from my birth. That path included Columbia, where I’d crash as many graduate courses in architecture as I could to fast-track a master’s degree. Then on to Muir & Sons Development, where I’d be the first and only girl in Dad’s family ever to be employed.

“Dad told me it’d be okay to stay together with Jackson,” I said over the shriek of a seagull out in the bay. As anger at my mom coalesced, so did my conviction that this might actually make sense. “He said some long-distance relationships are worth the work.”

Mom stood so abruptly that the blanket fell from her lap. Instead of picking the mocha-brown cashmere blanket off the damp grass, she sidestepped it and headed for the gate to the beach. Beyond that rusting gate, a misshapen barrier of a log, gnarled and sea-soaked, lay across the slick boat ramp. That didn’t deter Mom. She leaped over it to the rock-laden beach.

“Mom, what’re you doing?” I asked, following her down to the exposed shore. The tide was lower than I had ever seen—so shallow, the receding water nearly beached the moored sailboats.

With unerring precision, Mom plucked a stone from the wet sand: a perfect circle, free of barnacles. When dry, the shocking fern green would dull to a mottled brown. Mom handed that Cinderella stone to me.

“Make a wish,” she said.

“But it’s yours.”

“I found it for you.”

What I wanted to wish for wasn’t reprieve from my family’s move; we were too far gone for that, with the house packed and our belongings journeying to New Jersey. What I wanted, needed, was reassurance that Jackson and I would work out. My heart contracted painfully, already missing him even though I knew he was driving me to the airport for our red-eye tonight. But just this once, I wished Mom would tap into the sixth sense Grandma Stesha insisted we both had and assure me I was doing the right thing with Jackson. Just once, I wanted her to tell me with absolute confidence,
Sweetheart, everything is going to work out fine
.

Who was I kidding? If I dismissed the notion of my having a sixth sense, Mom denied its existence in anyone altogether, most especially the family legend that we were descended from psychics and mystics. She practically derided Grandma Stesha’s tours to sacred sites whenever anyone asked. In their dismissiveness of the unknown, my parents were united.

Ignoring me, crouched low to the sand, Mom sifted through the wet stones, rejecting one after another. Usually she was so mindful of the water, especially since my near drowning. But now, her back to the waves, she used both hands to shove aside a large, bulbous rock.

“Mom, geez, you’re going to cut yourself,” I said, alarmed at her frenetic searching, and held out the stone she had given me. “Here, take this one.”

“No,” she said almost angrily, “that’s yours.”

“Okay…” I said, shoving my wishing stone into the pocket of my denim jacket.

I wanted to leave but couldn’t.
Stay.
Mom shoved aside another enormous rock. Both of us screamed when a sea snake, no longer than a foot, with a dangerous yellow stripe down its back, slithered out. Mom recoiled so abruptly, she lost her balance and fell atop the sharp rocks as a wave swept the snake away.

“Mom, you okay?”

The water crept to the shore, lapping at our feet, mine safe in my sneakers, Mom’s exposed in her flip-flops. As the water drew back, I spotted the perfect wishing rock for her, egg-shaped and striated gray-green. Most importantly, a thin white line ran around the top third. That rare circlet, according to Grandma Stesha, was a good luck sign: a halo. I plunged my hand into the icy water to snag it for my mother.

Suddenly, against the soothing backdrop of the surf, I could hear the sobs again. The sound of inconsolable heartbreak. My heart raced in frantic beats. The premonition that something would go horribly wrong if we left here was almost unbearable. For the first time, I felt compelled to tell Mom about one of my feelings. Confess about the weeping I kept hearing. Ask for her interpretation because surely I was wrong.

Fiercely, Mom shook her head, a sharp, cutting movement, the same as the one at the hospital so many years ago:
Don’t dream.
I could have been seven again, swamped with panic from my vision, needing to confide in someone. Only this time it was Mom who was leaving because of what I had seen, not Dad.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said sharply, turning her back on me, my premonition, and the beach.

“Mom, wait,” I said, holding the wishing rock out to her.

“We’ve got a ton to do,” she said, not seeing the stone offering, “and regardless of what your dad thinks, I can’t do it all on my own.”

I retracted my hand. “He would have stayed if you had just said something!”

Mom’s lips pursed as if she were swallowing a mouthful of sour doubt. She marched to the bench, grabbed the blanket off the lawn, and swept up a clipboard I hadn’t noticed. A paper lined with a long list of things yet to be done fluttered in the breeze, a white flag of defeat. “The movers are coming in fifteen minutes to pack your treehouse and bedroom. You need to make sure everything’s ready for them. Pronto.”

As Mom charged up the path with a last bark—“Come on, Reb! I mean it. You’ve got to pack!”—I drew back my arm and threw the egg stone I had found for her and wished her life would be as upended as mine was now.

With an unsettling feeling, I watched the wishing rock arc in the sky and trace an invisible rainbow. As it landed with an impotent thud back on the beach, guilt and worry engulfed me. Now I wanted to stay down where it was safe at the beach. Now I wanted to retract my wish. Now I wanted to insist that Mom backtrack, too, but she was lunging toward the endless tasks that would usher us to the future. It was too late to do anything but follow.

Hours of sweeping and mopping to prepare our house for rental did nothing to stop me from berating myself for that
mean-spirited wish. Distracted, I ran the vacuum cleaner into the wall and smudged the meticulous beige with a dark mark. With an impatient sigh, I switched off the vacuum and was about to inspect the damage when, in the abrupt silence, I heard Jackson outside. When had he arrived?

I rushed to my bedroom window and leaned out, ready to call to him. Instead, transfixed, I watched him play with Reid. At ten, my brother was as burly as a middle schooler—precisely why all the coaches of peewee football were chasing him with the fervor of lovelorn NFL scouts.

“Okay, Reidster,” said Jackson, drawing back his arm, “watch and weep as my fireball incinerates your temple.”

“Not a chance, peon, because my arrow of destruction is going to obliterate your wimpy fireball,” shot back Reid as his hands lifted to catch the football.

Just like that, I remembered my once-in-a-lifetime family biking trip in Italy, where I met and fell for Jackson. After a particularly long ride, Dad hibernated in the air-conditioned hotel room to catch up on work, but he wanted Reid to practice before football season started. That left Mom and me, which was a frightening prospect, since neither of us had ever touched pigskin. After watching our bumbling for a few moments, Jackson banished Mom and me from the hotel’s clipped lawn. Watching him toss the ball with Reid back then, I knew with absolute certainty it would be a hop, skip, and a jump from merely liking to being smitten and falling in love with Jackson.

I flew down the carpeted stairs now, intending to spend as much time as I had left with him. Screw cleaning the cottage;
Mom could be her own Cinderella. I burst out the back door and onto the porch, where I stopped short.

The crying that haunted me yesterday restarted, building in pitch and intensity. I lowered myself onto the porch steps, fighting the compulsion to rock myself. At that moment, I would have done anything, said anything, to make that wailing in my head disappear.

“Hey, you,” Jackson said, loping to my side.

I forced a placid smile even as my stomach roiled from my effort to ignore the crying that was growing increasingly sorrowful. Between Mom’s order to stop dreaming, Dad’s scornful denial of anything that hinted of premonitions, and Ginny’s painful three-month silent treatment after I predicted that her father would die, I’d learned to stopper my sixth sense. I ignored the few visions I still had on rare occasions, afraid people would fire me from their lives. How different was that from Dad’s terminating employees who didn’t agree with his business vision?