Return to Me (20 page)

At the moment my prodigal grandmother encircled my mother in her embrace, their foreheads touching, all the years separating them vanished, along with every misunderstanding and every ignored premonition. Homecoming—I saw it clearly and felt it myself when Grandpa wrapped his arm around my shoulder and nestled me close to his chest. I felt it again at noon when Reid finally bolted into the main house, so ravenous he was practically frothing, but he launched himself at Grandma Stesha, crying, “Grandma! You’re home!”

Homecoming—I wanted it badly with Jackson. I felt a sharp pang, an actual physical hurt, from yearning for him. But I wasn’t ready to risk myself, not when I caught the look of longing on Grandpa George’s face in his swift, surreptitious glance at Grandma Stesha before he switched his attention to the cooktop. That palpable heartache so perfectly mirrored mine.

W
hile I could ignore Dad’s voice mails and texts as much as I wanted, Mom had other ideas. She answered his call on the first ring, then handed her phone to me with a dejected expression: “Your dad wants to talk to you.” I shook my head, backing away from the phone, but Mom glowered at me and whispered, “He’s still your father.”

It was all I could do to respond to Dad’s chipper “Having a good time?” as though we were vacationing while he was stuck at work. But I was done with his innocence-clad denials, his words that were lies in sheep’s clothing. My distant and disinterested “Um… yeah, I guess so” reaction was nothing compared with Reid’s.

“Are you still seeing her?” he asked Dad point-blank.

Dad squirmed from the truth: “Of course, we have some paperwork from the move to finish up.”

Reid simply grunted and handed the phone to Mom, who looked at the device as if she had never seen one before.

After that call, Grandpa declared that a visit to the volcano would do us all some good, which rejuvenated Reid, making him whoop. That’s how, for the second time in the day, I found myself at the Volcanoes National Park, a place I had already grown to consider my personal backyard playground. Ten minutes down the main road, the Chain of Craters, Grandpa blew past the disconcerting warning sign that had stopped me in my path earlier.

“Um, Grandpa, should we be worried?” I asked as I checked every window to make sure they were rolled all the way up, sealing us inside safe, recirculated air. Around us, plumes of steam escaped the black rock, and I could imagine poison fumes pooling in our lungs.

“Nah,” said Grandpa, all blasé unconcern about the possibility of losing a few critical organs. “If the air was really bad, I wouldn’t have brought us here.”

Even though no one said another word—maybe because none of us other than Grandpa wanted to chance inhaling more toxic air than necessary—I caught the look of surprise that Grandma Stesha shot my grandfather, as if she had never witnessed this responsibility, this protectiveness. The road twisted past a forest of mushroom-shaped trees embalmed in lava and ended in thick, pitch-black lava that had coursed across the street before spilling into the ocean.

“It’s so strange,” Mom mused as Grandpa edged toward the side of the road. “Miles of moonscape, and then paradise down here. Who would have known?”

“That’s why we fell in love with the Big Island on our first visit,” said Grandma Stesha, turning around in the passenger seat to smile at the three of us in the backseat. “There’s a primal wildness in this land that we both fell in love with. Remember, George?”

“How could I forget?” he answered, gazing steadily at her.

Grandma Stesha’s face colored slightly. Maybe she, too, heard her easy reference to “we,” so easy you could forget that they had been divorced for more than two decades. Adroitly, she changed the subject. “Every place can be an adventure. Even your own backyard.”

Grandma launched into a story about a woman from Taos whose abusive husband died of a sudden heart attack in his home office fifteen years ago, and since then everyone, including her cat, refused to enter the space. The man from North Dakota who swore his farmhouse was haunted by his wife, because every morning, he’d find his bedroom door cracked open… even when he double-checked to make sure it was locked when he went to bed. The old lady in New Jersey—not far from our house… yikes!—who heard jazz from her locked attic late one night, only to find her son’s long-lost sheet music when she investigated the next morning.

“Why don’t they just move if they think their houses are haunted?” Reid asked, so frustrated that he flung his head onto his headrest. “I mean, wouldn’t you just move?”

“Inertia. Sometimes moving is the hardest thing to do,” Mom said softly.

“Not inertia. Incubation,” Grandma Stesha corrected her.
“Sometimes staying in one place is the healthiest thing to do while you regroup. And then, watch out. There’s a whole lot of pent-up forward momentum to make some changes. That’s why people want to go on my tours. They want resolution from the past so they can live in the present and plan for the future.”

The tours Grandma led weren’t about gallivanting around the world, having a grand old time, leaving us behind. They were about healing people of pain. How far would I have to travel to stop longing for Jackson?

A car sped up behind our truck, trying to overtake us as though we were racing. Rather than speeding, Grandpa edged to the side of the road to give the other car maximum passing room.

“Everyone, breathe in,” Grandpa said.

Instead, I breathed out and squeezed my mother’s hand.

Our surroundings could have been a movie set for an apocalyptic movie, human civilization on the brink of destruction after a devastating volcano. But shimmering like a promise before me was the powerful, undulating ocean. Leaning over the stone wall, I snapped a picture of the waves crashing against the cliffs of lava, knowing how much Jackson would love this, when he texted me:
Found paradise yet?

The synchronicity of the moment, the two of us dwelling on each other at the exact same second, warmed me. That had to be a sign of something…. Whatever it was, I could no longer resist the siren call of texting Jackson back.

I promised myself, just one text a day.

I promised myself, no signing off with an
XOX
.

I promised myself, keep it friendly, not flirty.

So after agonizing about the right words while the seagulls cried and the waves pounded, I broke my long days of silence and sent him the photo with the message:
Paradise found. Aloha.

But as soon as I hit Send, a million questions fired in my head: How would he interpret my texting him? Did I strike the right tone—friendly-warm, not girlfriend-flirty? Were my words so cryptic and innocuous that he wouldn’t understand that I meant we were doing well? Interrupting my second-guessing, I received his answering text with a photo of his work desk piled with official-looking real estate forms:
Purgatory found. Hello.

I laughed and, without thinking, shot off an answering text:
Who knew paradise serves Kona coffee?
Right as Jackson responded—
Now, that just hurts
—Reid jogged over to me, tugging Grandpa along. No doubt this was my brother’s thirtieth question in five minutes: “Is the volcano still erupting?”

“More like leaking.” Though Grandpa answered Reid’s question, his eyes were trained on Grandma, ever the tour guide, who was educating herself by reading the sign explaining the science behind the lava flow. “Maybe tomorrow night we can drive to where the lava’s still flowing. You’ve never seen anything like molten lava at night.”

Mom marched ahead, bearing down on the hardened shelf of lava that overhung the sea. I understood: I yearned for the wide expanse of horizon, too. At my side, Grandpa continued to watch Grandma. It was easy to envision her leading groups to sacred
spaces, pointing out details that tourists would have missed without her sharp eyes. But those sharp eyes completely missed the tender way Grandpa was looking at her like a long-lost treasure he had misplaced. A long-lost treasure he had spent a lifetime regretting.

What had I done? I looked with horror at my phone, this mobile Cupid I thought I had exiled.

Five minutes. I hadn’t even respected my own set of rules for engagement with Jackson for five minutes before I broke two of them: flirting over multiple texts. His newest message—
Wish I were there with you
—only reinforced how easy it was for each of us to draw the other back in. I didn’t want to be Grandpa, still pining for a woman rooted deep in his past. I didn’t want to be in Mom’s shoes, aching when Jackson moved on to someone else.

“Isn’t living here like playing chicken with Mother Nature?” Reid asked Grandpa.

I almost choked. What was I doing but playing chicken with Love?

To keep myself from any further temptation, I powered off my phone. Attempting to take my mind off yet one more mistake I’d made, I gestured at the acres of death-black lava sprawled before us. “Isn’t this one of the most dangerous spots on earth?”

Grandpa thought for a moment as he nudged an errant lava chunk away to clear my path. “Actually, you could argue this is the safest place on earth.”

“How can you say that?” I demanded.

“Well, Seattle is basically right smack on top of a fault line. They’ve been predicting the Big One to hit in the next hundred years, right?”

Both Reid and I nodded.

“There are no early warning signs for an earthquake, unless you count watching animals.”

That was something Grandma Stesha would have said. As if we had called her, Grandma glanced in our direction. I waved at her to join us as I asked Grandpa: “Do you really believe that?”

“Sure. There’ve been reports that cows get antsy before an earthquake. And snakes get more active, slithering all over the place.”

I knelt, picked up the lava rock he had brushed out of my way, porous and pitch-black and surprisingly light. In my head, I could hear Dad mocking Grandpa, snickering about animal sense, which he believed no more than he did women’s intuition.

“So living on a volcano, is that any more dangerous than any other place on earth?” Grandpa asked as he placed his hands on an enormous boulder. Reid and I copied him, the hardened lava rough against our palms. “At least here, the volcano is literally letting off steam. And you get enough warning to evacuate.”

“But aren’t you worried that the lava is going to wipe out your home? All your hard work?” I asked.

“It’s a risk, but historically, the lava flows down the other side. When you think about it, life is a risk. Every day is a risk.” His eyes may have been on me, but I knew he was totally aware of Grandma standing behind him. He continued. “Getting in a
car is a risk. Loving is a risk. But, darling, losing it all means that you have a chance to rebuild, better than before.”

Wanting to give my grandparents some much-needed alone time, I knocked my shoulder against Reid’s. “Hey, let’s go find Mom.” When we reached her where she was staring out at the sea, she said, “Well, kids, I always said I would go to the ends of the earth for you. And here we are.”

Together, we stood on the black shell of destruction, where the flow had indiscriminately scorched and suffocated everything in its path—road, trees, shrubs, sand. Enormous, rippled piles of lava resembling fossilized elephant dung (Reid’s observation) converged with table-flat chunks of lava that could have been upended by some burrowing monster (Mom’s). There was no trail across the lava floor, only trail markers made of stacked totem poles of rock.

“Let’s go up there,” I said to Reid, pointing at a hill of lava.

We darted from trail marker to trail marker, and at the third, I recalled rock piles like these on postcards Grandma Stesha had sent us, first from Scotland, then from Tibet: cairns that marked memorials. It was mystifying that certain rituals and beliefs could cut across countries and transcend cultures. This universal emblem of death didn’t sit well with me, and I glanced uneasily at the steam wavering at my feet. Perhaps my imagination was overactive, but I swear, the rubber treads of my sneakers were melting, sticking to stone.

I had expected Reid to follow me to the lava mound, but not Mom. Yet there she was, scrambling hands and feet up the hill with us. A veil of mist engulfed the three of us, not thick enough
to cloud our vision but enough to be living proof that the earth was breathing.

So warm, I unzipped the sweatshirt that Dad had bought for me to celebrate my acceptance to Columbia. As I peeled it off, a sleeve snagged on the uneven lava. I tugged, but Mom freed me before it ripped.

Had Dad vented—literally vented, instead of stuffing his misery deep, deep inside himself—would things have been different? If he had spoken the way Reid had earlier, firmly and decisively, would his needs have been met? Instead, Dad erupted, not in words but in actions. Actions no less violent than this volcanic eruption.

I shut my eyes on this destruction and concentrated on the power of the earth beneath my sneakers. No matter how impractical and financially unstable designing small spaces was as a profession, I loved tiny places that enlarged a person, no different from this minor hill within an acreage of lava. I loved spaces that lifted people’s spirits and allowed them to recuperate after a miserable day.