Return to Me (14 page)

Ginny added relentlessly, “I wish I could do this for you. Or my mom could. But your mom is so private….”

Had I not known how dead-on accurate Ginny was about Mom and her intense need for privacy, I would have protested. But I knew Mom hated it when Grandma Stesha divined what she was thinking, what she was feeling. “It’s like I have no safe spot from you,” Mom had burst out once during a phone call with my grandmother before she realized that I was listening. On this point, I totally agreed with my mom. I hated the invasiveness of Mom’s knowing what I was thinking even before I knew it myself.

“I have no idea how to do any of this.” Panic made my voice squeak as I approached the phone again, wanting so much for Ginny to appear beside me. “I have no idea what our bank account numbers are or their balances.”

“Um, hello, I remember your math score on the SAT. You’re scary good with numbers.”

I shrugged, but what Ginny had said was true. Numbers and formulas never intimidated me. It was another reason why architecture had seemed like such a natural fit.

“We’ll help you,” she said firmly. “This is no different from cooking: step-by-step.”

“Really?” I layered the sandwiches with the wedges of Brie.

“Oh, remember to salt and pepper them before putting on the top piece of bread. Just one or two shakes should do.”

I did as Ginny suggested. “I wish I could cook like you.”

“You can. Remember? My only hope of eating well after Dad died was to cook. Otherwise, it would have been Top Ramen every meal, every day, since Mom had to work. But I’m lucky. That’s how I found out that my Zen spot is the kitchen.” Ginny’s voice changed back to instructor mode as she reminded me, “So when you’re about to serve the sandwiches, turn on the oven light and make sure the bread doesn’t burn.”

“Got it.”

“Maybe you should make a test sandwich. Cut a sliver off one of them and stick it under the broiler while I’m on the phone.”

As I did, I mulled over what Ginny had said. Petrified that I’d scorch the sandwich, I stationed myself in front of the oven. Finally, I admitted, “My Zen spot has always been my treehouse.”

“I know.”

From the moment Peter took me on a field trip to the recycled-materials store in Seattle’s industrial neighborhood of warehouses and manufacturing plants, I knew I had come home. There, we had spent a blissful afternoon, choosing planks from a demolished barn to use as my flooring.

“Is it burning?” Ginny asked.

“Ack, I forgot to check,” I said, chagrined, since I had been standing right in front of the oven. I grabbed two mitts and opened the oven. “It’s black! I guess it’s a good thing I did a test case.”

“Yeah, and thank goodness you’ll have dorm food.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said as I fanned the smoke.

“What do you mean?”

Hurriedly, I opened the windows and the back door, worried that the smoke alarm would blare at any second. “I’m not sure Columbia’s the right place for me.”

“You’re not just saying that to spite your dad, are you? Because it’s in New York, near…
them
?”

“Well, maybe it’s got a little to do with him being there, but designing big, huge buildings? That was my dad’s dream.” What surprised me was my choice of words and the truth of them. I hadn’t blamed Mom, but Dad. I took a deep breath of fresh air on the back porch. Then I swung the door back and forth, ventilating the kitchen.

When we were reviewing my college essay, Mom nitpicked the grammar, but Dad honed in on the topics. He never came right out and told me what to write, but his hints that “The admissions committee wants world-changers” and “Treehouses are a great hobby” and “Your heritage is in building some of the most important civic buildings in Seattle” had refocused not only my essay but my life itself.

“That, I can believe,” Ginny said. Her voice changed back into teacher mode. “If you scrape off the black parts, you could still do a taste test.”

Holding the hot sandwich carefully, I ran a knife quickly over the top piece of bread while Ginny asked, “So what are you going to do if you don’t go to Columbia?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll figure it out,” she said, so confidently that I felt reassured. “How does it taste?”

Just as I had seen Ginny do a thousand times, I cocked my head appraisingly as I sampled a bite. “Hey, this is good… in a blackened Cajun sort of way.”

Ginny laughed. “So we can thank your dad.”

“Like, for what exactly?”

“Well, look at you. You’re cooking!”

“More like creating carbon!”

We both chortled at that, laughing so freely we could have been at a Bed & Bookfest celebration. “Thank you!” I told Ginny as I placed all the sandwiches on the baking sheet.

“Well, now you know what to do. Just start over and make it even better for real,” Ginny said before hanging up with an easy “Love you!”

Perhaps Grandpa George had it right when he told me to grab joy wherever I found it, especially in the midst of an ordeal. Perhaps it was time to reach out to Jackson. I glanced at the clock: six here, three o’clock Jackson time there. He’d still be at his dad’s office. I brushed my hands off on my denim shorts, which probably would have made Ginny gag, and picked up my cell phone.

The moment Jackson answered, I could tell something was wrong. His voice was strained, reserved. I first thought he was going to announce it was over, that he was tired of the long distance, that more than the stars had exploded overnight when he was “watching” the meteor shower with his “good friend.” I lowered myself to the top step and held the phone tight to my ear.

“I have to tell you something,” he said, fueling every last dire scenario plaguing my imagination. Even as I tried to figure out a way to bypass this conversation that I so did not want to have, Jackson continued: “So last night, we were out for dinner, me and my parents, right?”

My grip loosened. “And?”

“And we saw your dad.”

“Really? He’s in Seattle? He didn’t tell us that.” But then again, why was I shocked, when my father had so masterfully camouflaged his affair from us?

“He was with his girlfriend.”

I didn’t think it was possible to feel the razor slice of betrayal any more keenly than I already had or witness any more clearly how Dad was forging ahead with his family-free Life 2.0. I was wrong. No longer could I deny that I had visions, so clear was the restaurant: Lola, the perfect place to bring his Lolita of a girlfriend, just ten years older than me. I’d been on Dad’s side for years, us against Mom, us against her rules, us against her plans.

That image of Dad out in public—in our hometown—with Giselle short-circuited my brain. I could have been sitting in the restaurant with them, could overhear their conversation, could smell their richly sauced gnocchi. My stomach roiled from their poison meal. Who else had seen them? My school friends? My dad’s family? And here I’d been Dad’s biggest publicist, too, telling everyone how he loved us so much, he’d be coming back.

How could I have been so stupid?

“This is crappy,” Jackson said.

“It is.” My words were lethal bullets, as if he was my intended target, not Dad.

Despite my snippy tone, Jackson said, “I wish I were there with you now.”

But he wasn’t.

Ridiculous and unfair, I know, but I was suddenly, inexplicably furious with Jackson. The guy who had deemed his own dad’s affair healthy—
healthy!
The guy who’d been out with his “good friend”!

I told Jackson abruptly, “I have to go,” ending our conversation in a record ten minutes, our shortest phone call since we met. As much as I wanted to crawl into bed and yank the covers over my head, instead I sprinted down the street, dimly lit by intermittent streetlamps, only to trip on my flimsy flip-flops. My outstretched hands broke my fall. Sitting on the asphalt in the middle of the street, hands pressed on my stinging knee, I stared up at clouds masking the sky, so opaque it was hard to hope that the night might glow with starshine.

Slowly, I hobbled home, where Mom must have been waiting for me, because she opened the door before I rang the bell. She scanned my legs, which were scraped but not bleeding.

“Reb, what’s wrong? Where did you go?” Mom asked, her eyes searching mine.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth about Dad’s latest deception. Instead, I confessed my own omission of truth: “Mom, I didn’t get the internship with Stone Architects.”

“I know.” Rather than berating me on the doorstep or even at all, Mom widened the door, letting me in.

“I didn’t listen to your advice,” I admitted, too embarrassed to look her in the eye, so I studied the marble floor that needed a good mopping. Without noticing, we all had tracked in unseen dirt.

“But now you know for the next time” was her frank reply as she led me to the dining room table, where Reid was seated, sure I would come home, the only question was when.

“Know what?” Reid asked. Hungrily, he eyed the platter of sandwiches that Mom must have broiled while I was gone, and removed just a few moments ago. The cheese was still melted.

“Know how important it is to prepare yourself.” I sat heavily. “I should have written down all my interview questions! I should have practiced.”

“Well, we can’t go back in time, so it’s no use beating yourself up now,” Mom said, and served the sandwiches onto our plates. “This smells delicious.”

And just like that, I was at the restaurant table in Seattle, watching my dad feed his girlfriend from his proffered fork. My throat burned with that betrayal. I swallowed. As if she knew what I had seen, Mom eyed me with concern.

“Eat,” she urged. “You’ll feel better.”

I nibbled the sandwich, and Ginny could have been right here, nourishing me with a restorative meal made with love. When I told Dad about my lost internship, his advice was for me to regurgitate what the hiring manager wanted. Mom instead told me to rehearse so that I’d be prepared. Wasn’t that what Ginny had meant, too, when she all but ordered me to broil a test sandwich so that the next batch would be perfect?

I recalled Ginny’s admonishment, fresh in my head, that my mom needed my help. So I practiced. “Hey, Mom, can I borrow the car tomorrow? I’ll go grocery shopping.”

“Really?” Her face brightened but then turned into a frown. “I have to go to the doctor’s tomorrow.”

“I can drop you off, then hit the store and pick you up after. It’s no problem.” I was gifted with my mother’s smile.

E
xactly one day after my eighteenth birthday back in February, Mom chauffeured me to her ob-gyn in downtown Seattle in what I supposed was some happy-birthday/welcome-to-your-womanhood/coming-of-age ritual. Trust me: mortifying. First, their reminiscing about my birth was embarrassing enough—
Yeah, babies don’t come much hairier than Reb!
And
She wasn’t a baby; she was a Chia Pet!
But I have to believe that Mom’s secret agenda was for my first gynecological exam to double as birth control. Can you say “cold metal calipers”?

So you can guess I wasn’t entirely, shall we say,
comfortable
when I realized it wasn’t just any doctor’s appointment Mom had this morning, but one with a
gynecologist
. The parking lot was packed, so Mom pulled into the handicapped spot, where we could exchange seats and I could drive to the grocery store as planned. The only problem was that my mother didn’t budge.
She just stared straight ahead, hands clenched around the steering wheel as if it were a life preserver.

“Mom?” I asked, worried. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, eyes misting. “It feels like yesterday when your dad and I were in the doctor’s office, pregnant with you.” Then with a firm, no-nonsense nod, she said, “Okay. I’ll text you if the doctor’s running late.”

Worried, I started to ask Mom if she wanted me to go in with her when it occurred to me—duh!—why she was here. My face flooded with color. Of course, Mom had to make sure she hadn’t contracted anything from Dad. The dirty aftermath of his affair hadn’t sunk in, not really. Not until that moment. Because of Dad, Mom had basically kissed and touched and slept with every single person Giselle had. I bent over, sickened.

“I’ll be fine,” Mom assured me, her cheeks pink with shame as she hastily left the car.

No one—and I mean not even long-practicing gynecologists—should ever have to imagine their father and condoms, and their mother and STDs. Ever. Now I remembered how Mom would occasionally disappear with the phone, and wondered if those furtive exchanges were with Dad to discuss uncomfortable details like this.

I couldn’t stand the sight of my mother vanishing alone through the office doors.

Don’t do it; don’t do it.
But I found myself parking the car. I found myself crossing the interminable distance from parking lot to office door. Found myself hurrying down the antiseptic hall to slip through the office door, closing after Mom. Found
myself in a waiting room full of visibly pregnant women and their even more visibly nervous partners. Found myself ignoring my mother’s protests that I leave.

Instead, while Mom filled out a half dozen medical forms, I caught a puffy-fingered woman staring at my stomach, trying to gauge if I was the patient. Uncomfortable, I pounced on the magazines on the coffee table to hide my embarrassment. Underneath the crumpled copies of
Parenting
and
Car + Driver
magazines featuring radiant mothers and race cars, I unearthed a pristine issue of
Dwell
, my favorite home-design magazine. From the cover shot, I recognized the architect’s distinctive style—organic and vital, brimming with creativity. Who else would construct a modern cabin out of rusty brown corrugated steel and rehabbed pulleys from abandoned shipyards? Excited, I flipped through the pages until I found the article. Just as I had thought: It was Peter’s work, our architect. I lifted my gaze to tell Mom, but her face was averted toward the bland beige wall.

“You’ve got to look at this,” I told Mom now, desperate to take her mind off the driftwood of her thoughts. I placed the magazine on her lap and tapped the article. “Look.”