Return to Me (17 page)

The twisting drive along the volcano’s flank now stopped me from obsessing over what I should have said and berating myself for what I did say. One accidental jerk of the steering wheel would plow us through the sorry excuse of a guardrail, and we’d plummet into the ocean far below. While I was nervous, I trusted Grandpa to keep us safe. Mom must have, too, because she didn’t nag him once to slow his mad-dash pace.

Reid had fallen asleep next to me, his head knocking against the window with every little bump. So I pulled him toward me, where he could rest on my shoulder. Who cared if he smelled like boy, sweaty and slightly sour? The comforting weight of his body slumped against mine made me feel less alone.

I wondered then about Jackson, wondered how he was doing, what he was doing. And who he was doing it with. As though my fretting had conjured Jackson, I received a text from him:
Heard from Ginny you went to Hawaii. Doing okay? Aloha.

I found myself unconsciously holding my phone to my heart, as though I could feel the reliable clockwork ticking of his ongoing care. There were probably a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t answer him—and Shana no doubt could list, footnote, and fact-check each one of them. Regardless, I was tempted to text Jackson back for the first time since we broke up:
Grandpa flew us to the Big Island. Aloha.
But we were never only friends. Instead, we had fallen immediately into a relationship. Flirting was our first language. I didn’t know how to talk to Jackson without leading him on. Or worse, leading me down a yellow brick road that led to a fantasy called happily ever after. So I shut off my phone without responding and buried it deep, deep, deep within my messenger bag.

The sound of Grandpa’s truck entering the gravel driveway woke me before his gruff “Welcome home.” A pair of tiki torches glowed at the top of the driveway, highlighting the lush
foliage edging the road. A wood sign nailed into a palm tree read
OHIA
.

“I’ll show you to your rooms,” Grandpa said as he parked the truck under a thatched garage, “and then I’ll drop off your luggage.”

Not even Mom protested with her usual polite “No, no, we can handle it”—we were all that tired. The narrow footpath from the garage forked off the driveway to a Japanese-style house but, surprisingly, Grandpa headed in the opposite direction. I could tell from the way Reid drew a deep, operatic breath that he was about to break into an aria of discontent, but the tiny building before us, not much bigger than my treehouse, silenced him. The hut exuded the same serenity that our architect had created for us back on Lewis Island. So organic, this hut could have sprung from the earth, but what were the chances that Peter had designed this property?

Two chairs flanked the front porch, a charming touch I wouldn’t have expected from my gnarl-bearded grandfather. After Grandpa George opened the front door, labeled with a sign that read
NOOKERY
, he handed Mom the dragonfly key chain.

“Dad… what is this place?” Mom asked, peering inside curiously.

“Where you’ll be staying.”

At the far end of the room was a reading nook, deep enough to double as a twin bed. Fern-green curtains hung off to the side, ready to be drawn for privacy. Mom entered the space
slowly, lingering at the built-in bookshelves on one of the walls. She ran her fingers along the spines of the faded old editions of classic children’s books:
The Phantom Tollbooth. Half Magic. The Little Prince. The Witch of Blackbird Pond
. The Betsy-Tacy series. All the books I remembered Grandma Stesha reading aloud to me when she used to babysit on alternate days with Grandpa George while Mom was at work.

“Dad?” Mom asked haltingly. She pulled out
Betsy and Joe
, my favorite in the turn-of-the-century series, the one where Betsy falls in love with another writer, a boy who truly understands and appreciates her. “Are these my old books?”

Grandpa grinned at her uncertainly. “Do you like it?”

“Dad…”

“Just make yourself at home. I’ll bring up your bag once I get the kids settled.”

“Dad?”

But Grandpa had already backed out of the hut—Mom’s Nookery. Who else could it have belonged to but Mom? If I were to design a room specifically for her, this was what it would look like: cozy and light-filled, stocked with books and the window seat she had always coveted. Only then did it occur to me that Mom had given me my treehouse sanctuary at our island home. A man cave where Dad could retreat and recharge. A bedroom that changed with Reid’s ever-morphing interests: first a fire station complete with a replica of a 1934 fire truck as a bed, then a robotics laboratory. Even her gardens were intended for other people’s pleasure: the healing garden for Ginny’s dad, the
vegetable patch for us. Other than her small container gardens, Mom never claimed a space of her own, never staked out a private spot to recharge, even after telling Dad how much she had always dreamed of a reading nook.

But Peter had heard her. I remembered their one argument during the remodel. Mom’s reading nook was on the chopping block due to budget overruns, but Peter had insisted on retaining the window seat, overriding her protests. And he was the one who had the window seat upholstered in robin’s-egg blue, Mom’s favorite color, as a housewarming gift. I remembered her glow of pleasure when she first saw the seat, the way she had run to it and plopped herself down, precisely as she did now.

My last image of Mom before Reid and I followed Grandpa into the night was of her snuggling into her Nookery. Mom had arrived home, an entire ocean away. Despite my very best efforts otherwise, I wished I could snuggle into Jackson, but much more than an ocean separated us.

I fell asleep to the light drumbeat of rain on the upturned palm fronds outside the bunkhouse I shared with Reid. Hours later, I awoke to an exuberant birdsong that drowned out my latest nightmare of a vision: Dad slashing our spreadsheet with a red marker and smirking at Mom.
You may own the house, but the property is mine, not yours.

So disturbing was the dream that I woke fully alert, without
a trace of jet-lagged grogginess. What good was our cottage if Dad owned the land on Lewis Island? That was a question and this was a vision I refused to ignore. So I made a mental note to research property rights, then e-mail the Bookster moms afterward to double-check my understanding.

Across the room, Reid was sleeping so soundly, he didn’t budge at the raucous gabbling of chickens in the garden, not even the loud cawing from beneath our window. Unable to rest a minute longer, I threw off the white quilt, appliquéd with fiery birds-of-paradise. The air was chilly, not the perennially hot, humid Maui I knew from my family’s one previous trip to Hawaii. Though that vacation had been only a few spring breaks ago, it felt unfathomable that we were ever an intact family of four.

Shivering, I lifted my black sweatshirt from the foot of my bed, where I had cast it last night, and pulled my phone from my messenger bag. It was already ten, decadently late. Compulsive, I know, but I wanted to see if Jackson had texted. He had:
Surf up, Aloha Girl?

Buoyed by his words in spite of myself, I practically bounced across the room to the front door. Closing the bunkhouse door gently behind me, I stepped into a jeweled paradise of variegated greens, bright against the clouds, and felt… happy. I remembered what Grandpa had advised in Manhattan: Seize joy. So now in the daylight, I reveled in this primordial jungle where wild spirals and alien antennae sprang rapturously from the mulchy ground.

Again, I was tempted to text Jackson back:
Volcanoes and jungles
and sun, oh my!
What harm would one little text be? But I knew. Any word from me would be an opening that I wasn’t sure I wanted to create. Once again, I ignored the text, even if I could hear Jackson call me by my new moniker:
Aloha Girl.

To reach the main house, I retraced our steps from last night, following the gentle bend of the trail. Like the Nookery and the bunkhouse, Grandpa’s house was Japanese in style, Zen in spirit. If space itself could exude mystical healing energy, this one did. My muscles relaxed even before I reached the charming swing that dangled from a decommissioned crane next to the house. As enticing as that swing was, I followed the trail of river rocks winding a sinewy, black stream up the three steps to the front door. Two had words chiseled into them:
Live. Everything.
My eyes filled with tears at the familiarity of those words, etched on my pendant, unspoken in years. I could almost hear Grandma Stesha’s butterscotch voice, sweet and husky, as she tucked me into bed: “The point is to live everything.”

But it was Grandpa’s voice that I heard this morning: “You’re up.” He had been sitting with such meditative stillness, I hadn’t noticed him on the porch. The beginning of a smile softened his austere expression. “Sleep well?”

“Grandpa, this,” I said, gesturing widely to encompass everything he had created, “is a masterpiece.”

At that, he gifted me with his gathering smile, slow and wide and welcoming. “Would you like a tour?”

“What do you think?”

With an answering nod, Grandpa loped down the stairs,
gripping a metal water bottle, and jogged through the knee-tall grass behind the house. There, a muddy trail led into the forest, mired with thick roots and uneven with sharp rocks. I followed, laughing, as though we were playing chase the way we had whenever Grandpa babysat me.

The path opened to a vignette of art: a glass orb, vibrant cobalt blue. I thought back on the conversations I’d overheard between Mom and Dad, circling around how little ambition Grandpa had. Mom saying that was the reason why Grandma Stesha had given up on him, Dad saying my grandfather needed to grow up and get a real job. But if Grandpa had sacrificed the traipsing of his vagabond life for the trappings of a corporate one, would he have wrought this: beauty and sanctuary, security and love?

As I hustled to keep up with Grandpa, my gaze landed on a metal sculpture of an open hand, its palm a basin of water that cupped a pink water lily. Again, I thought of Jackson and how much he would love this place. I cleared my throat, trying to rid myself of my pining for a boy I could not allow myself to want. “Did you build your house yourself? Houses, I mean?”

“I had some help.” He glanced back at me as if expecting me to grasp his meaning.

To our left, a hut with a whimsical roofline seemed vaguely familiar. But where had I seen it? Again, Grandpa’s expectant look. I asked, “Are those solar panels?”

He frowned slightly, as though his star student had made a careless error. “Yeah, that’s how I heat the water.”

“And the cisterns?” Quickening my pace, I closed the gap between Grandpa and me so I didn’t miss a single word. “Do you collect rainwater?”

“Most of us do up here.”

“You’re so… green. I had no idea.”

Over his shoulder, Grandpa said, “I can show you the plans later.”

“Cool!”

“But I’m just a builder.” As proof, he held up his callused hands, scarred tools of his many trades. Then he looked at me proudly. “And you are going to be an architect.”

“There’s no ‘just’ to what you’ve created, Grandpa.” Again, I was struck by his soulful vision for this property, the hours he’d spent crafting it. This work was no less important, no less impactful than Dad’s in the office, shepherding a game to market. Who better than Grandpa to ask about my future now that I was questioning my college decision?

As Grandpa lifted another branch out of my way, I told him, “I’m not sure about going to Columbia.”

“What do you mean?” He turned his attention fully upon me, letting the branch fall safely behind me.

“I’m thinking about taking a year off.”

“Why?”

“Mom needs me. And I might have to pay for college myself….”

Only then did Grandpa look concerned. His forehead furrowed. “Your parents have it covered… right?”

“The first year, but we don’t have as much money as we thought….”

Grandpa looked grim, his lips parting as though he wanted to probe further but thought better of it. He started down the path, this time slower. “How do you feel about a year off?”