Return to Me (19 page)

“She needs to process. This is a shock; it’s all a shock. I pushed her too hard.” He cupped Mom’s empty bowl between his palms as though it were a child’s rounded cheeks, but I wasn’t sure whose concern he was allaying—his, mine, or Mom’s. “But don’t worry. We’ll figure this out.”

By then I had lost my appetite, too, and stirred my soup idly.
“Dad told her he was giving her half of what he made into perpetuity. That’s what he promised. So why is she so worried?”

Grandpa didn’t answer. Instead, he busied himself with refrigerating Mom’s unfinished fruit bowl.

To fill that damning silence, I said loudly, “Dad wouldn’t leave us without anything. Not us. You heard Mom. He’ll pay for my college.” Despite my insistence, despite my own doubts otherwise that had spurred me to call Financial Aid, I begged for him to agree: “Right?”

But Grandpa was a man who did not apologize for his life choices—not to Dad, who questioned his long list of short-lived jobs; not to Mom, who worried about his retirement. Above all, Grandpa was a man who did not lie, opting to say nothing rather than say something he did not believe. And he was pointedly silent while my phone rang. It was Dad. Now was my chance to talk to Dad, ask him point-blank, prove Grandpa wrong.

And yet… I couldn’t. I didn’t want to hear Dad’s voice or his all-veneer-no-substance promises.

I turned off my phone and felt Grandpa observing me closely.

On the verge of bawling, I didn’t want Grandpa to witness my meltdown. So I escaped outside, sprinted toward the driveway with my arms hugged tight around myself, as if that would keep my jagged heart together. Without warning, a peahen darted from the thick foliage. I yelped.

Trying to calm down, I breathed big gulps of dew-infused air. How were we going to make money in case Dad didn’t come through with his promise to share half his income—or any at
all? Whatever skills Mom had were lost a few generations of technology ago. Besides, I had serious doubts that she’d be able to take orders from anyone. Reid, what could an eleven-year-old boy do other than get a paper route? That left me.

Me, the girl who couldn’t even lock in an internship that had been practically handed to her.

What the hell could I do?

Three matching mountain bikes, all shiny silver, leaned against the garage; not one looked used. Biking hard and fast away from my worries, away from Dad’s lies, away from Grandpa’s damning silence, had its appeal.

But the bikes weren’t mine.

But Mom might need me.

But I didn’t know my way around.

My mind raced to Jackson, who would have grabbed one and gone, no plan, no destination. It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission, he’d have chortled with a rebellious grin. What was I waiting for? Another long list of
but, but, but
excuses to stop me from what I yearned to do?

I snatched one of the bikes, snapped on a helmet, and pedaled hard down the driveway. With a sharp bank to the right, I aimed for a path called exploration that I’d never charted solo before.

I don’t remember much about the beginning of my bike ride except that I prayed in earnest for the first time in a long time. Dad wasn’t a churchgoing man but an atheist who categorized
religion in the same cracked bucket as sixth sense, soothsayers, and pretty much all of Mom and her drowned-witch family lore. And Mom was the fair-weather kind of churchgoer, attending only on Easter Sunday and Christmas Eve.

En route to the volcano, my prayers flooded from me with a fervent power that might have scared the most devout:
Please, God, take care of us. Please, God, keep us safe.
I pedaled even faster, crouching low over the handlebars.

The one thing I did not pray for was my father’s return.

I steered hard to my right, so fast I could have taken flight. Unholy anger propelled me into the mist shrouding the two-lane road in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. If Dad were here, I would run him down. How dare he sound all self-righteous when he spoke to Mom—“I never felt loved by you”—which, when you came down to it, was a backhanded way of blaming her for his affair.

Coasting on a hill, I flew into the headwind of truth. Dad prided himself on sticking to the letter of the law, when all along he had been fraying its edges. His lies made me sick; his smirk, even sicker. At that moment, I hated him and never wanted to see his face or hear so much as a word—not one “sorry,” not one “love”—come from his lying mouth again.

Down the park’s main arterial road, I sailed by the scoured landscape—here the 1917 lava flow, there the one from 2003. Not that it mattered exactly when the lava had flowed; the effect was the same: utter obliteration of everything in its path. No different from Dad.

So involved in my private diatribe, I didn’t see the jagged
lava rock on the road. My tire careened off it. I skidded. The bike toppled. I fell. It was a miracle that only my knee was scraped. A trickle of blood slid down my calf. My breathing was hard and labored, more from being scared than from being winded or hurt. Oddly, the shock of the fall combined with the intensity of my uncensored anger at Dad actually calmed me.

To my right, a roadside sign warned about the volcano’s toxic fumes, hazardous to your health. I gasped for air, almost laughing. Grandpa was right: Life itself was a risk. Here I was, atop a volcano, inhaling poison and potentially damaging internal organs. But what was I going to do? Stop breathing? Stop living? Stop loving…?

Go home. Now.

Without any hesitation, I heeded that voice and climbed back onto the bike for the long, uphill ride to Grandpa’s inn and home. The road curved around a large heart-shaped chunk of lava. Instead of appreciating the shape, I only wondered guiltily whether I was any different from Dad, in the abrupt way I had ended my relationship with Jackson. Ended it without giving him a chance.

Even as I made my resolutions to stop dwelling on the past, and the wheels on the bike made their revolutions propelling me forward, my mind circled back to Jackson.

Jackson, whose texts had greeted me this morning and wished me sweet dreams last night. If I were being honest with myself, I missed his voice. I missed being in his arms.

And as vulnerable as it made me feel and as weak as it sounded, I had to face the truth.

I loved him.

Even so, love was no guarantee that any relationship was worth the risk. Countless books, movies, songs were about broken-down love. Eighteen, and I already counted myself too much of an expert on betrayal. At last, sweaty and exhausted, I veered off the main highway and into Grandpa’s jungle of a neighborhood. Everywhere I looked, verdant green bloomed in lavish defiance of the very real, very persistent volcanic threat underneath us.

Skidding to a stop on the graveled driveway, I saw a tiny woman standing alone before Grandpa’s porch. Her voice was as insistent as any rooster crowing in the morning, and so, so beloved to me: “George! You get your butt out here right now. You kidnapped my daughter. And I want to know where the hell she is.”

For the first time in these tundra weeks, I felt a spurt of joy: buoyant, unbidden, true.

Grandma Stesha had returned.

F
rom behind, Grandma Stesha looked no different from the last time I had seen her: still skinny, still bedecked in jewel tones. Her hair was short and salty white. Hands on her hips, feet spread apart, Grandma was an Amazon from the land of Lilliputians, dressed for battle in a purple tunic, black leggings, and her trademark motorcycle boots.

For such a small woman, her bellow was elephantine. “George?
George!
”

How long had it been since I last saw my grandmother? Right before she embarked on her tour of Scotland, scouting out fairy glens and stone circles two years ago? Three? My heart lurched toward Grandma Stesha, but something stopped me from flinging myself at her. A hand could have reached out to hold my arm:
Wait.
A voice might have whispered,
Hold on.
Whatever it was, I listened and didn’t move.

Perhaps it was the same hand that kept Grandma Stesha grounded on the pathway instead of mounting those three steps to pound on my grandfather’s front door. Perhaps it was the same whisper that cautioned her from storming through the door that Grandpa never locked, day or night. She waited.

And then, there was Grandpa, first silhouetted behind the screen door, then standing on the porch. If I thought he had emitted protective vibes when he came for us in New Jersey, that strength was anorexic compared with what I felt today. Gone were all my doubts that people can exude an aura, because Grandpa’s energy swirled from the porch, cascaded down the steps, and roared throughout the sanctuary.

“Don’t you stand up there lording over me, George Price,” Grandma Stesha snapped.

“Then you better come on up here.”

The fight left Grandma’s body at this unexpected challenge. Her hands fell from her hips as if she was so stunned, she had lost traction in the world she had known and defined.

“Fine,” she said, regaining some rigidity in her posture.

The women in my family, as I’ve said, are not known for great height, but neither are we women easily daunted. At least, not according to family history, which I now remembered like a tired echo that had finally reached me after a long, detoured journey. Now I could hear Grandma Stesha shut
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
with finality, and now I could remember her declaring,
Reb, stand tall like Kit, even when everyone else doubts you
. Now Grandma Stesha strode up the stairs to face my grandfather.
Now she stood before him as if she belonged here in the sanctuary.

“I asked you to bring her home, George,” she said.

“I did. This was supposed to be our home, remember?”

“I meant home to me. In Santa Fe. Not here.” Only then did Grandma Stesha take her eyes off Grandpa and gesture at the buildings that he had built with his own hands. The paths that he had carved around native plants, connecting one building to another, connecting her to me.

Perhaps it was that thought that called Grandma Stesha to me. Whatever it was—psychic knowing or energy reading—she spun around, her eyes locking on me. For the first time in years, I saw my grandma’s face. Worry lines creased her forehead, and deep laugh lines bracketed still-lush lips.

She flew down the steps, pulled me into her arms, and held me so tight, the sweet scent of her gardenia perfume churned together dream and memory and reality. Grandma Stesha pressed kisses on my cheeks like I was a little girl recently fished from a lake. And then she kissed the backs of my hands, first the left, then the right, as though blessing the girl I had become. With one last squeeze of both hands, she drew back to study me. This was no cursory glance but a head-to-heart inspection.

Surprisingly, I was Grandma Stesha’s exact height. In my memories, she towered over me, a force of nature whose clear-eyed stare could snap burly paramedics into action.

Satisfied, Grandma Stesha said, “Reb, I thought that was you.”

Dad would have scoffed at those words. Not so long ago, I
would have scoffed right alongside him, renouncing Grandma—and my own sixth sense—simply to win his approval.

But Dad wasn’t here. And I no longer needed to deny that at some deep and immutable level, I had known that Grandma Stesha would come back, here, now, today. That I had felt her barreling down the road toward us even as I biked from the volcano.

Time may have passed, and the world may have separated us, taking Grandma Stesha from Peru to Turkey, India to Bhutan. But she still knew me, always loved me. I had no doubt of that. And I? I knew and loved her, too.

Even before Grandma’s smile of homecoming widened, I knew she sensed Mom. In that moment of recognition, Grandma Stesha transformed back into the grandmother I last saw: powerful and protective. My mother emerged from the forest like some mystical creature who had come when she was called. She clenched her arms around herself.

From the shadows, Mom said, “You were right about Thom.”

“I’m so sorry I was. You don’t know how sorry I am.”

At that, Mom’s face softened, and she stepped from the forest’s shadow, closer to us, though a heart’s beat away. In the dappled light, she admitted, “He hurt me, Mom.”

“I know, Babycakes. I know….”

“I should have listened to you.”

“You were trying to save your marriage,” soothed Grandma Stesha, padding slowly to Mom, a tiny bird, too broken to fly. “You had the kids to worry about. I wasn’t helping. I shouldn’t have said anything, not to you and not to him.”

Perhaps Grandma’s tour business wasn’t so much to pursue her life’s dream as it was to escape the premonitions she had about Mom. A breeze blew the hair from my eyes. I almost lost Ginny’s friendship once with my prediction that her father was going to die. So how much harder would it be for a mother to know about her own daughter’s breaking point and be powerless to stop it?

“Why didn’t I listen to you?” Mom asked now.

Grandma Stesha merely opened her arms wider in answer, creating a space that only a beloved child could fill. “Babycakes, come here.”