Return to Me (24 page)

Mr. Aloha nodded over to the rocky cove. “Going in?”

“Ohhhh…” Mom shook her head, suddenly self-conscious. She waved to the dolphins. “They’re so far out. I’m not that good of a swimmer.”

“You’re not supposed to swim to the dolphins anyway,” said Reid as he gestured to a sign requesting that people maintain a fifteen-foot distance from the spinner dolphins.

Mr. Aloha shrugged and explained, “They usually come to us. It’s like they want to interact. And if they’re asleep, we stay away.” Instead of cajoling us to join him, Mr. Aloha crouched to grab his banged-up flippers. “You girls can be like fisher wives and wait for your men to sail back.”

That comment rankled almost as much as the truth of his observation: Mom, Grandma, and I were watching from the safety of the shore while Mr. Aloha, Grandpa, and Reid prepared to swim in the cove. Dad would have been the first to frolic with the dolphins had he been here, pressuring Reid and me to join him, rolling his eyes if we didn’t.

While Dad didn’t believe that people could change, Grandpa did. And I chose to side with my grandfather’s philosophy. Ever
since my near drowning off Grandpa’s houseboat, I’ve been leery of any body of water—oceans, rivers, ponds, pools. My friends lost count of the number of times I “felt sick” or “had my period” at pool parties and lakeside picnics. The one and only stroke I had mastered was a modified breaststroke where I could keep my face above water.

Reid’s and Grandpa’s laughter washed over the waves. My lucky brother: He floated free of our history of water-phobia. A dolphin dove near Reid, but my brother didn’t shy away, nor did he swim to the safety of the shore. He didn’t just stay; he played. In the echo of his laughter, I could almost hear Jackson now—not pushy but confident, the way he had been about my nonexistent mountain-biking skills the first time we went:
You can at least try.
Even if Mom, Grandma, and I were scared of the water, we could at least stand at the shoreline and feel the waves on our toes.

“Come on,” I said as I headed down the treacherous black rocks for the shore. When Grandma Stesha balked, I said, “Grandma, just because one of our ancestors may or may not have been dunked in water—”

“She was drowned, not dunked. She may or may not have been a witch. That’s the only
may or may not
,” Grandma Stesha replied, arms crossed. But I noticed that she followed carefully.

“Fine,” I said, slowing so Grandma wouldn’t rush on the uneven lava. “But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to drown if we get too near to water.”

“You almost did.”

I continued to make my deliberate way down, not too proud
to crouch and use my hands for balance. Never again did I want to be a helpless girl who needed to be scooped out of the murky lake because I was too afraid to dunk my head underwater, too afraid to see all the scaries that lurked below the surface, too afraid to learn to swim. I swiveled around to my mother and grandmother, who were following me at a distance, and told them hotly, “History doesn’t have to repeat itself.”

Support came from an unlikely ally: Mom. She agreed so adamantly—“Reb is right”—that I knew she was talking not only about swimming but our family curse, too. There was a long line of women with sixth senses in our family, and an equally long line of men who had left them. Men who couldn’t handle our divining the future and reading their moods and knowing their thoughts. The dissolution of relationships wasn’t entirely our fault, nor the men’s. Could it be a confluence of everyone’s fear of being completely vulnerable and easily hurt?

Mom stood on a bulbous rock with her hand shading her eyes from the sun. She finally said, “We need to know how to swim.” Had I been mistaken about Mom yet again—that she was our crossing guard, safety patrol, fun police, not because she was cautious by nature but because protector had become her role in our family?

“Girls, remember who we are!” Grandma Stesha planted her hands on her hips, each foot on a different lava rock.

That was just it. I did remember who I was, finally, after all my denials. I studied my hands, pebbled with volcanic grit, square hands that came from Mom and Grandma. I may have been a Thom Girl, but I was also my mother’s daughter. I knew my limits, and I knew when to test them.

I bent down to the cool seawater to wash my hands of rock dust. Without warning, I spun around and flicked first my mother with water, then my grandmother. I grinned as they both squealed. “When we get back home, Mom, we’re signing up for swim lessons. That’s the first thing I’m going to do in my gap year.”

“I’m still not so sure about that,” Mom said.

“But I am. I know this is what I’m supposed to do: take a year off, figure out my next step.” I straightened, wiped my hands dry on my T-shirt. With Mom’s hand clasped in mine, we watched dolphin fins flash above the surf, then vanish, the ocean’s answer to a shooting star. “We can take lessons together. It’ll be fun.”

“You know,” Mom said as her eyes sparkled in the healing sun, “your gap year just might be growing on me.”

T
elling me that we were leaving for home in two days was easy compared with telling Reid, whose eyes reddened, a hidden volcano of anger. He kicked one of his sneakers so hard, it bounced off the door of our room at the inn, where Mom had taken us for a private talk after dinner.

“I don’t want to go to Seattle,” Reid said, slumped on his twin bed. His lower lip jutted out like a petulant toddler’s.

“I know you don’t,” Mom soothed. She reached out to stroke Reid’s arm, but he flinched away. “But Lewis is our home.”

“Dad’s in New York,” Reid argued.

“But we’d be in New Jersey, not New York.”

I didn’t want to move back to Seattle any more than Reid did. With my head lowered onto my hands, I slumped on the queen bed I shared with Mom. If anything, heading home felt like a concession of defeat, as though somehow we couldn’t hack
it in our new lives. Plus, with all my classmates off to college, I was going to feel like a loser, left behind. And worst of all, we would be the gossip du jour among our neighbors and everyone at school, our lives flayed open for dissection. It made me so sick, I crossed my arms over my stomach, thinking about people feasting on every last salacious detail of Dad’s affair.

“You move, then!” Reid’s eyes flashed hot and he flung his pillow away.

Those could have been my eyes, my frustration, my anger, but after our nights at the kitchen table and our trek through the volcano, I knew how to translate Mom’s soft sigh. It was a sigh not of exasperation but of resignation. I could practically hear Mom doing the accounting: her need for home versus our need for Dad. If she thought it’d be best for us, she’d move back to New Jersey, to a house she despised, to a city where she had few friends, to Dad’s affair that would be rubbed in her face. That wasn’t a sacrifice I wanted Mom to make, nor was it one that Reid should request.

“Reid,” I said firmly, crossed the space separating our beds, and placed my foot atop the other sneaker he was preparing to kick. “We’re moving back to Seattle because it makes more sense.” He started quibbling, but I held his hand. “Mom needs a job, and all her connections are there. And I’ll be going home with you.”

“You’re only saying that because Jackson’s in Seattle,” Reid said, scowling at me.

“Maybe a little bit,” I admitted, “but our home is in Seattle.” Only then did I lift my foot off the missile of his sneaker.

Mom chimed in, “It’ll all work out.” Her laser-beam eyes that never missed anything settled on me. It was disconcerting. No wonder she had needed distance from Grandma Stesha if her every thought could be plumbed so easily. “Even going to the college you really want. If it’s Columbia where you want to go, you’ll go there. I promise you.”

“How can you say that? That it’s all going to work out? Huh?” Reid demanded.

“Because it always works out” was my answer, spoken with finality because I knew at a soul-deep level that we had survived the worst ripping apart of our family. Our lives were knitting back together into a different but stunning design of our choosing.

Before Mom or Reid awoke the next morning, I grabbed my journal and ambled outside the inn to the row of whitewashed Adirondack chairs. Under the protective shade of the mango tree, Grandma Stesha was cycling through her morning yoga routine. A strand of gray hair curled in the shape of a heart on her sweaty cheek. I poured two glasses of cucumber-infused water from the pitcher on the table and doodled while Grandma finished. She brought her hands together in a prayer position and lowered them to her heart. Only then did she open her eyes, step off the thick yoga mat, and greet me.

I held out the glass of ice water to her. “Mom said we’re going back to Grandpa’s today, then back to Seattle the day after.”

“It’s hard to leave,” Grandma said, taking a grateful sip. “But we can always come back.”

“You’re right,” I said, nodding. “We can always come back.”

Just as I wanted to get to know my grandfather beyond a make-breakfast-together way, I wanted my understanding of Grandma to be more than a label: tour guide to the weird and the woo-woo. So, like my mother, I asked a question that would invite a deep conversation rather than an exchange of surface niceties: “Grandma, why do you do your tours?”

Without any hesitation, Grandma Stesha plunked herself down in the adjacent chair and replied, “It’s my calling. Traveling to some of the most special places in the world while giving people closure on old hurts? Or helping them find meaning in their terrible, horrible lives? Or when terrible things happen to them—tragedies—showing them that there is hope on the other side? This is what I’m meant to do.” Grandma Stesha finished her water in three gulps. “Do you know how many people I meet who just float through their days without any real passion? Who are stuck in jobs they hate? I’m lucky to do what I love.”

A light breeze blew my hair into my eyes. I brushed the strands back impatiently so I wouldn’t miss a single expression on her face. “But how do you know it’s your calling?”

“You know. In here.” Grandma tapped her heart and then pointed at mine, as though she knew I was asking about myself. “Trust your instinct, Reb. No amount of planning is going to confirm what your gut can, especially when life changes our best, most detailed plans. When your passion and your power collide, that’s when you know you’re on the right path.”

“Passion and power?” I asked, not understanding.

“When what you love intersects with what you’re good at. And when that happens, you have to lean into your calling, even if people think you’re absolutely crazy.”

Matchbox cars raced on the road that ran alongside the meandering coastline. From yesterday’s dolphin-watching expedition, I knew the beach was closer than it appeared, a scant ten minutes’ drive. Maybe in the same way, what I wanted wasn’t impossibly far out of my reach. My passion kept circling me back to my treehouse and the sense of magic and peace I found high in the boughs. If Grandma’s calling was to heal people through travel, then I wanted to do the same, but with their homes. I sat up, bolt straight. My calling wasn’t to build treehouses but to create special spaces for people to experience the same joy and healing I found in my sacred spot.

Grandma Stesha remained silent even as I felt her watching me carefully, lovingly. She waited, giving me time to find my own way, allowing me to stumble from insight to idea.

“And people find closure on your tours? The meaning of their lives?” I asked, my hands clutching my knees as though my epiphany had knocked me off balance. “Just by traveling?”

“Just by confronting the truth, no matter how hard or uncomfortable it is… whether it’s hurting someone you love or accepting that a relationship is over or coming to terms with a terrible childhood.”

Or having a sixth sense that could predict one version of the future.

I lowered my gaze to my bare feet. Ever since Dad walked
out of my hospital room after my near drowning, I had tried to deny my sixth sense just as much as I had denied that I loved designing intimate treehouses—because I was afraid he would turn from me the way I had seen him dismiss employees, Grandma Stesha, and my own mother. A wind blew a ripe mango off the tree, landing hard at my feet. Startled, I cringed, then bent to pick up the sun-warmed fruit, cupping the egg shape in my hands.

The truth had to be faced: Call it sixth sense, gut instinct, visions, or intuition. Since I started heeding my inner voice, look at all the riches I’d been given. A recuperation on the Big Island with the healing presence of my reunited grandparents. And time to explore a future I wanted to call my own.

“I think you’re right,” I said as I set the mango on the table between the two of us. My mind swept to Ginny, who hated learning about her future. “But, Grandma, what’s the purpose of our intuition? I mean, are we supposed to change fate?”

“I’m not sure about that. What I do know is that we’re supposed to listen hard. Be alert when our inner voice tells us we’re off course. Our job is to be deliberate about how we live our lives and what we invite into them—the people we choose to spend our time with, the opportunities we choose to take and the ones we choose to let go. For me, I think of intuitions as early warning signals when we need to correct our course.”