Return to Me (2 page)

“Dad, I was going to break up with Jackson today.”

“Think about what’ll make you happy. That’s all that really matters.”

Dad and I smiled at each other, back in sync as coconspirators. Right as I was about to thank Dad for his offer, I heard a hard, racking, shuddering wail. A wheezing intake of breath so pained, it sounded as if a woman was suffocating. I recognized this prickling down my neck, this deep-gut knowing, even if I had refused to acknowledge it in years.

“What’s up?” Dad asked, concerned.

As always, I gritted my teeth against the gathering vision—now I saw a wood door, gnarled and knotted; now I felt the old-growth fir, worn smooth like resignation. I forced a placid smile. “Nothing,” I lied brightly, even as I commanded myself to stop dreaming the way I have at these first telltale signs of a premonition, squelching them the way I’d learned to these last eleven years. But before I could spit out hasty sentences, spoken fast and loud to drown that whispered voice, there it was:
Do not move to New Jersey
.

I swallowed hard, nauseated from battling this overwhelming sense of foreboding.

As though Dad guessed I was having a vision, he said, “See you in two days,” then reversed out of the driveway, all haste and hurry now. Visions, miracles, predictions—none of these Dad believed. Not against-the-odds company turnarounds and certainly not near-death experiences, not even when the paramedics told him after my close call in the lake, “It’s a miracle that your daughter’s still alive.”

Even though my stomach was roiling and a cold sweat
beaded my forehead, I sprinted after my father. Gravel kicked up on my calves, pinpricks of pain. Urgency I couldn’t explain propelled me forward. “Dad, wait!”

But Dad’s car roared away. All that remained was a tuft of putrid smoke from his exhaust, then silence. The same silence in my hospital room that followed Grandma Stesha’s accusation aimed at my father: “How could you let Reb swim after I warned you that she would drown?” The same silence after I admitted to my parents, “I dreamed it, too.” The same silence after Dad abruptly left that antiseptic room with a disgusted snort. As the door clicked shut behind him, my mother glared at my grandmother, blaming her.

“Reb!” I could practically feel Mom’s frustration mount from inside our soon-to-be-emptied house. “Where are you?”

Dad had the right idea. If Mom wanted this move, she could orchestrate the entire project down to how boxes were packed, the way they were labeled, the treehouse she was about to strip, the lives she disrupted. I pressed my hand hard to my chest to imprison every wail, every doubt, and every premonition deep inside me.

Unexpectedly, as though in answer to my
SOS-save-me-from-my-mother
plea, I heard a familiar rumble down the road.

Jackson.

S
ometimes I felt like I was dating two guys: Jackson and his car. I’m serious. The 1965 Mustang, a gift from Jackson’s parents for his seventeenth birthday, doubled as a nice bribe to sweeten the move to Seattle in the beginning of his junior year. When he drove, we went one speed: sexy. If I closed my eyes when I was riding shotgun, I could smell the prairie grass of Jackson’s Iowa even though we never ventured much farther than Vancouver to the north and Portland to the south. Three hours either way was our bubbled universe, and that bubble was about to burst the next day.

I looked away from the window and back at Jackson, who was staring at me intensely. That smoldering instant reminded me of my first good look at him four months ago, in March. There we were, on our separate spring breaks, sharing the same air space in a hotel lobby. There he was, barrel-chested and
wide-shouldered, more sturdy than stocky, and his legs… The words
highly defined
barely described his muscle-man quads and calves. And here we were, together ever since.

“You’re quiet,” Jackson said, placing one hand atop mine as we idled at the stop sign at my neighborhood crossroad.

The conversation I’d been dodging for weeks stirred between us like a caged animal slamming against the metal slats for its freedom. I heard Mom now, chiming with annoying clockwork that it was time to break up. But Dad’s voice—the voice of inspirational business speeches that could rally game developers who’d been coding around the clock for weeks—lured me with the tantalizing thought that long-distance love could be worth the work and worth the wait. So why not try?

Before Jackson shifted the car back into gear, he looked at me hard, as though searching for something that had already gone missing. I still wasn’t used to his attention. Boys rarely spared me a flyby glance. After all, at five foot nothing with mousy brown hair, I wasn’t anything special—unlike my best friends Shana, with criminally long legs, and Ginny, whose exotic looks had caught the fleeting attention of a casting agent when she was nine.

“So… I have something I want you to see, Rebel.”

Rebel.

I swallowed and looked away from him so I wouldn’t break into tears. Only Jackson used that nickname, as though it were his personal password to me. How he had known that I had never felt like my father’s Rebecca or everyone else’s Reb, I could never quite understand. Even if that nickname belonged
to a wild girl who did whatever she pleased, I secretly reveled every time Jackson used it.

Damn it, why had I chosen Columbia when UW was right here, a stone’s throw to Viewridge Prep, where Jackson was enrolled for another year?

“Trust me?” asked Jackson, his warm hand settling on my thigh as I curled on my side in the passenger seat, leaning toward him.

All I could do was nod. Yes, I trusted him. Yes, let’s hurtle straight past these next endless months, straight past Manhattan. Yes, aim for the future, and never, never, never stop.

Finally, after driving through the dense, green heart of Lewis Island, navigating down winding streets I’d never seen before and, frankly, never needed to see, Jackson parked on the side of the potholed road. He killed the engine, then pushed his door open. Cold air surged inside, a tangible reminder that while the rest of the country sweltered, summer had yet to come to Seattle.

“It’s freezing out there,” I said. “Polar bears would protest.”

He leaned toward me, eyebrows cocked up:
For real?
Then he said, “You’re going to have to toughen up if you want to survive the East Coast winters with me, Rebel.”

Forget the “Rebel.” It was the “with me” that warmed me now and made me seriously consider what Dad had offered: his tacit approval if I chose to stay with Jackson over Mom’s wishes.
That “with me” convinced me to open the door and follow him outside. The wind rushed me, furious, and I staggered back.

“Okay, cold,” I gasped.

Jackson was rounding the hood of the car, already sliding out of his leather jacket. “You aren’t going to last five minutes in winter.”

“No,” I said when he handed me his coat. “I don’t want you to be cold, too.”

“I’m a guy. I never get cold.”

“Tell that to Shackleton.”

“You’re a nut,” he said, and tugged me to his chest, wrapping his jacket around me like wings. I burrowed in, inhaled deeply, and smelled sweet saltiness. Call me odd, but deodorant is overrated on Jackson. After a long bike ride, he smells like a guy who can take on the world. I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his neck and felt his question beneath my lips: “Did I tell you that I like my women smart?”

“Women?” I said, pulling back and stabbing my finger in his chest. “As in plural?”
Stab.
“As in a stable of women?”
Stab, stab.
“As in a plethora of women?”

“You must be warmer now,” he said, rubbing his chest.

After days of rain, the air smelled clean and moist. The clouds parted, revealing the sun. The warmth felt good on my face.

“This,” I said, stretching my arms sunward, “is almost better than being kissed.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said, challenged the way I knew he’d be. He kissed me the way I wanted: long and lingering and very, very
thorough. The sweet urgency of his lips, the slow stroke of his tongue along mine, made me wobble, unbalanced. That kiss-induced tippiness only made Jackson grin wickedly at me, confident that nothing bettered his kiss. He grabbed my hand and led me down a paved path, fringed on either side with purple-flowered vinca and feathery ferns.

“Close your eyes,” Jackson said.

It was too much work to stay crabby after a kiss like that—even after a drive that had lasted an eternity during what I might add, yet again, was One of Our Last Hours Together.

Finally, he let me open my eyes at the edge of a small pond I never knew existed, lined with tall, striated reeds and nestled within a ring of trees. In the middle of the pond floated a tiny dock, sized for two people, complete with crank and steering wheel. Two ropes connected the dock to the shoreline, and Jackson began winching the dock toward us.

“What is this place?” I asked, my voice quiet, as though I knew this was a special space.

“A bird-watcher’s sanctuary.” He opened the gate and waved me aboard. “Your dock awaits.”

“Are we allowed here?”

“Remember? It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway, my dad’s listing it on Monday. So think of it as us providing some quality control to maintain my dad’s carefully cultivated reputation as the leading waterfront real estate agent in the Pacific Northwest.” Jackson lifted his eyebrows. “So, my badass girlfriend, what do you say?”

“You had me at
badass
,” I said before I sashayed onto the
dock, glancing over my shoulder with the sultriest look I could muster.

Mission accomplished. Jackson cleared his throat. I gave silent thanks to Shana for making Ginny and me practice a billion expressions and struts for her photo shoots.

Jackson navigated us to the center of the pond, and once there, I gasped because I finally understood why he had brought me here—not to see this dock or admire the birds. Hidden among the trees was a tiny house, all wood and windows and built upon stilts.

“This is so you,” he said, standing behind me with his arms wrapped around me.

“It’s what a treehouse wants to be when it grows up,” I said, leaning against him.

“I still don’t see why you want to build corporate offices.”

I sighed. We’d had this conversation countless times before. No matter how often I tried to explain that commercial work was a lot more financially prudent than residential work and that Dad’s family was expecting me to be the resident architect in their real estate development business, I knew Jackson wouldn’t understand. He was forever pointing out that Dad hadn’t worked at the family firm since he was in business school.

So now I gestured to the pint-size house and said, “I’ve got to see it.”

“First, we should talk,” Jackson countered.

Just like that, I forgot about the house; such was the power of those three dreaded words:
We should talk
. If you have good news, do you preface it with “We should talk”? No. You say,
“Guess what?” Or, “You won’t believe this!”
We should talk
is what doctors say when they’re about to break it to you that you have a few months to live. It’s what a boyfriend says when he’s about to tell you that your romance had a shelf life that expired yesterday. But now I wasn’t so sure anymore that I needed, or wanted, to break up.

“How can I talk? My teeth are chattering,” I answered with a cheeky smile to buy time while I thought.

Jackson looked at me long and hard, as though he could hear me weigh the sure risks of staying together versus the unsure rewards of attempting and failing. Then he said, “Everybody says long-distance relationships are impossible. That it’s totally stupid to try.”

Wasn’t that what Ginny and Shana—who both had a lot more experience in the Guy Department than I did, with their endless buffet of boys—had been telling me for the last month?

“But is it so stupid?” Jackson asked gruffly.

Here I was, alone at an unfamiliar crossroads in an unfamiliar neighborhood of a serious relationship. To the west was here, now, Seattle, the impossibilities of long distance. To the east was the future, New York, and being prudent and practical about my future plans, which had never included going off to college with a high school boyfriend. And through it all, like an aria of abandonment, I heard the crying again, the high-pitched heartbreak. On the verge of throwing up, I only managed to keep my arms at my sides instead of clenched over my stomach.

“What?” Jackson asked, watching me carefully, as if he sensed my crazy, conflicted emotions.

Part of me wanted to tell Jackson now about the inconsolable weeping, the inkling that something horrible would happen with this move. But tell him now and he would think I was an official nutcase. I’d be yet one more casualty of my family curse: Every woman on my mother’s side has ended life alone, all spinsters. That is, except Mom. Case in point: Consider Grandpa George, the portrait of loyalty, who was there for every one of my performances and play-offs. Even he bolted when Grandma Stesha heeded her “calling” to lead tours of woo-woo weirdness to inexplicable rock formations and purported fairy circles around the world. Not even Mom faulted Grandpa for the divorce when she was about to set off for college.