Return to Me (33 page)

“This is what you’re doing instead of going to college? Skipping off to fairy circles?” His eyes darted to Mom, who was sitting in the car, sending her a silent, urgent look I had seen a thousand times before but had never translated correctly. This was Mom’s cue to turn his unspoken wishes into family law. To be the iron fist who doled out decrees and punishment.

Mom didn’t budge, nor did I.

Instead, I straightened to my full height and told him, “I’m taking some time to figure out which college will help me build what I want. One day I’m going to create a retreat where people can heal.”

Again, Dad’s eyes flew to Mom:
Handle this.

“I thought this through carefully, Dad. While I’m figuring out which college is best for me now that I know what I want to do with my life, I’m going to do a bunch of internships to learn as much as I can. I’d love to talk with Uncle Adam to see if we can work something out that makes sense with what I’ve already arranged.” Then, with the authority of a woman who owned
boardroom negotiations and a septuagenarian woman who could still rock motorcycle boots, I declared, “I know one hundred percent that this is what I’m supposed to do.”

Silence, and then Dad said, “You sound like your mother.”

There was nothing damning about Dad’s tone; the words were spoken with his usual mildness, no inflection of accusation. But now I heard the insidious suggestion. Once, the faintest comparison to Mom made me cringe and align myself with rational, logical Dad. I closed my eyes to regain my balance, and the voice I heard was my mother’s, strong and true. Her voice that promised Reid and me that she would never abandon us. That we were the foundation and walls that shaped her life. That she still believed in capital
L
Love.

I heard my grandmother: knowing. And my grandfather: believing. And my brother: becoming.

What were those voices if not the sound of unwavering optimism and loyalty, strong and evergreen? And who was I, if not the daughter of my mother, who could envision the future, and my father, who was the visionary CEO?

“Thanks, but actually, Dad…” I said, looking with admiration at my mother and grandmother, who were smiling proudly at me from the car. My voice rang with passion and power when I introduced myself to my father: “I sound like me.”

W
ith an expert roll, a wide swath of sunshine streamed across the last wall in the entry until there were no seams separating my brushstrokes from Jackson’s. My arms, despite being toned from painting and hauling around heavy cans for a subcontractor over the last month, still ached from reaching overhead for so long. I took a step back to inspect our paint job and nodded, satisfied.

Within the span of two days, our bland white walls, marred with fingerprints and nail holes from our old life, had undergone a colorless-cocoon-to-colorful-butterfly transformation. Mom had chosen well: sunflower yellow to greet us in the entry, Tuscany orange to warm our living room, fern green to encourage new growth in what had been Dad’s man cave and was recast as her crafting room. Our home didn’t just look different; it had never felt more like us: wild and creative and lush with life.

“What do you think?” Jackson asked as he placed his paintbrush next to mine in the aluminum tray. He stood at my side, arm draped easily around my shoulders.

“I wouldn’t want to be anyplace else,” I said, and leaned back into him. “Or with anyone else.”

He tickled me under my rib cage, and I squealed, laughing as I reared back. Even with paint splotched on my hands and spotting my hair, Jackson looked at me with a warmth that made me snuggle at his side.

“Who would have thought that Dad’s leaving us would open all these things of mucho amazingness?” I asked.

“It’s syzygy,” said Jackson.

“What?”

“When the sun, moon, and earth align. It’s happening in your life now.”

I loved that image—the celestial bodies of my grandmother returning, my mother healing, my opportunities blooming.

“You know what?” I slipped my hand into Jackson’s as easily as we had slipped into each other’s lives, ourselves aligning heart, body, soul since the moment we met. The twenty-some years of silent reproach separating Grandpa George and Grandma Stesha could have been healed with words. What was the point of hoarding our appreciation, as if those words were secrets worth keeping? I bumped his hip with mine. “You know what I love about you?”

“You mean, aside from my brawny muscles? And astonishing good looks?”

“Your humility.”

Jackson threw back his head then and laughed. Trust me, I appreciated the way his brawny arms pulled me close and his astonishingly good-looking eyes gleamed at me.

“But seriously,” I said, “I love how you speak geek. Like, how you can pull bits of random info out of nowhere, and it’s… perfect.”

Jackson tucked me even closer into his side, the way he had that first time in Tuscany, like there was no such thing as too close for comfort, only comfort in closeness. He kissed the top of my head. “Baby, I’ll speak geek whenever you want.”

“Sweet syzygy, I think he’s got it.”

“But you…” His voice lowered, softened the way it does when he’s about to be serious. “What’s great about you is how you haven’t let all this crap take you down.”

Raucous laughter rang from upstairs, where the Bookster moms were repainting Mom’s bedroom, accompanied by an intermittent “Stop! Now
I’m
going to pee in my pants!” I peered up at Jackson with a rueful shrug. “Dude, I’m afraid eternal optimism is genetic.”

“What do you want to do?” Jackson asked.

“Head for the beach.”

Both of us shivered from the cold as we made our way to the water. On the bulkhead of piled boulders, we sat with our shoulders pressed together while we listened to the lapping of seawater.

“My dad still wants me to go to the Naval Academy next year,” Jackson said. He fixed me with a piercing gaze. “What do you think I should do?”

I stared out at the vast horizon, pondering the question. Figuring out our calling was something only each of us could do, which might explain why oracles spoke in riddles. It forces those who question their lives to think and imagine and answer for themselves. So instead of telling Jackson what to do, I asked, “What do you want to do? You, not your parents? You, if you could do anything you wanted?”

That, really, was the only series of questions that mattered. And the only answer that counted was knowing our power and following our passion, no matter how crazy and quixotic and impractical it might seem to others, even parents.

Like Grandma Stesha, who could wait all night, all month, even twenty-two years for the right answer, I stayed silent. While I gave Jackson time to reflect, I spiraled back to the Place of Refuge on the Big Island where even the worst traitors were washed clean of their crimes. Whether we hurt the people we loved or careened off course in our lives, there was always the possibility of redemption and forgiveness.

That’s what I held on to with my father. That one day I would reach a point of equanimity, achieve true peace with his breaking our family, and forgive him fully. But for now I accepted the détente my father and I had struck: respect. He had stopped questioning my gap year, even though I could still feel his skepticism about my expanding plans for a treehouse sanctuary. (Why stop at one sanctuary? Why not build a series of them, located throughout the world, each with a different cultural bent but with the common thread of healing?)

Jackson said finally, “I don’t want to explore what’s underwater.
I want to know what’s up there. I want to study astronomy.”

“Of course you do.”

“Even if space exploration budgets are being cut.”

“For now.”

He grinned at me. “You’re right. For now.”

As the sun dipped beyond the horizon, I brought Jackson’s hand to my lips and kissed the middle of his palm. My crimson lipstick left an imprint. Folding his fingers over that kiss, I held his fist tight in my hands, that Ohia bud of love, and reminded him, “Ask for forgiveness, not permission.”

We grinned at each other. Then, together, we walked up the stone-paved path that Mom had dug into the dirt one summer and lined with tufts of baby plants that had matured into lush, beautiful ground cover.

Seven years later…

Even after its grand opening, Toda Vida is a sacred space-in-progress, no different from the clients who’ve been flocking from around the world to our alpine sanctuary of treehouses for the last three years. Beaten down by breast cancer or broken marriages or a myriad of other woes when they arrive, most have remembered their best selves by the time they leave. Despite the positive reviews Toda Vida has been garnering—which Mom insists on reading verbatim to me over the phone, even if I’m in a studio class or trying to capture some much-needed sleep after my final exams—we’d never claim to heal anyone. Just awaken them to live everything.

“Reb! You up yet?” Mom calls through the closed door of my private treehouse at Toda Vida.

“Hurry!” chimes Grandma Stesha, knocking hard. “It’s already ten!”

“Some of us need our beauty sleep,” I groan, rolling onto my back to stare out the skylight at the bright morning, flocked with a few clouds. I had insisted that every treehouse in the sanctuary have a skylight for stargazing in bed, one of the most healing and soothing activities, if I say so myself.

Healing is a long, circuitous process. But if my experience over these last seven years means anything at all, what I know is this: Reaching joy is worth slogging through the volcanic terrain of hate, and the badlands of blame, and the deserted island of self-inspection.

“You’ve got two minutes before we use the master key and pull you out of bed,” threatens Mom, but I hear the chuckle in her tone. “So make it easy on everyone and meet us at the Jeep fast.”

“You won’t need any makeup,” Grandma says slyly. “Just your bikini.”

As I get out of bed, I hear their footsteps racing down the spiral stairs. What do they have up their sleeves? I make time for one quick yoga sun salutation before I pull on a bathing suit and top it with a T-shirt and a short skirt that flares when I turn. I open the door and behold what we created together, from our imaginations into reality.

Who would have known that Sam Stone, Scary Architect, would like my thank-you-slash-apology letter so much that he would e-mail me throughout my gap year to keep tabs on me? Or that he’d be the one to write a glowing letter of recommendation
to Cooper Union, a school in New York that provided me with a full scholarship to its architecture program? Would any of that have happened if life hadn’t unfolded the way it did?

So while many of my classmates are celebrating graduation day by traveling the world, I am in the sunlit mountains of New Mexico. In this untamed land of the purest light I have ever seen, I am Home. I hurried to the Jeep, where the women in my tribe are waiting. They smile their secret oracles’ smile at me, mysterious and knowing, and Mom drives us toward the Rio Grande. The wild river rages so fiercely, I can hear its operatic rapids from the opened roof of our Jeep.

“What are we doing?” I ask suspiciously as I pull my long hair into a ponytail.

“Something I believe you asked us to do the first time you came out to Ohia,” says Grandma Stesha. “I think you insisted.”

“But I wanted to stay in Vida for a day, at least…”

“Oh, you just want to revel in—what did the
New York Times
say?” Mom gestures like she’s waving the memory back into being. “Oh, right. ‘Each treehouse, as exquisitely conceived by Rebel Architects, is a unique treasure box, perfect in its simplicity.’ ”

“My favorite line,” adds Grandma, turning from the front passenger seat to wink at me. “ ‘Here, you will reconnect with your inner playfulness, remember what it was like when childhood was simple, and life was only about joy.’ ”

“They said a lot about the gardens and programs, too,” I say because, of course, the article went on to rave about Mom’s healing garden filled with medicinal herbs (organic, naturally)
and soothing scents. And Grandma’s eclectic roster of teachers, from energy readers to nutritionists to soothsayers, curated from years of travels around the world. But our secret, unsung heroes for opening the sanctuary on time and under budget? Grandpa George, who project-managed its creation; Reid, who buffed himself up with manual labor; my father’s family business, which built the structures; and my mentor, Peter, who always tells me we’re equal partners.

“Let’s face it. You just want to get started on phase three of the construction,” guesses Mom playfully as she meets my eyes in the rearview mirror. The years since her divorce have been kind to Mom, which isn’t to say she hasn’t aged. Though her hair may be graying now, and laugh lines may bracket her mouth, I have never seen her look so fit or so free. And a great part of Mom’s radiance is thanks to Peter, who’s managed to wrangle an engagement ring onto her hand.

“Workaholic.” Grandma Stesha sighs. “Obviously, she hasn’t taken enough of our life-balance yoga classes.”

“Workaholism runs in our family,” I tell them.

Which is a good thing, because we still have a ton of work to do—new structures to build, since demand for our facility has outpaced the room space. New gardens to dream up. New programs to offer. New ideas to implement from my backpacking trip through Costa Rica, where architects are testing cutting-edge eco-designs for entire villages. And doesn’t a Costa Rican rain forest sound like the perfect location for the next treehouse sanctuary?
Toda Vida: Costa Rica
has a nice ring to it.

As we pull into a graveled driveway, I’m reminded of my grandparents’ property on the Big Island, Ohia, sold to fund our desert sanctuary. Saying good-bye to that magical spot nearly broke my heart but, as Grandpa said, “Some things in our lives need to be pruned back, and some things must die.”