“See?” Reid said to Mom and me, glowing with triumph as Dad vanished into the master bedroom. “See, I told you he was coming back.”
“Reid…” Mom cautioned softly. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
“He’s going to stay,” Reid said, his jaw a stubborn line of boy bravado.
Despite her warnings, Mom rose and stared expectantly at the closed bedroom door, hoping in spite of what we all knew. It wasn’t long before Dad trotted downstairs, carrying a small overnight bag.
“Wanna watch MythBusters with us?” asked Reid, rubbing the tip of his sneaker on the marble floor.
Dad dumped the overnight bag in the entry before tugging his cell phone from his jeans, his head bobbing—such a familiar gesture, my heart ached—while he calculated the time. I softened. How many times had he done that for me, opening his schedule when I needed a lift to the ferry? Or help on a problem set?
I didn’t want to think beyond this minute, when we were still four, to the impending minutes that would whisk him to his weekend plans for two, whatever they were. Finally, Dad agreed, “For a little bit.”
Without a word to Mom, he snagged her spot on the couch, with Reid leaning on one side of him. I sat on his other side but kept a gap between us where none had been before. That left no place for Mom, who stood near the entry, the odd woman out. Slowly, she walked over to us, perched on the arm beside Reid. From the window, I could see an old man strolling along the sidewalk, slowing down to peer in our windows to behold our cozy tableau: the enviably perfect all-American family. If he only knew.
One lone piece of pizza remained in the cardboard box. Cold as it was, Dad grabbed it before settling back, one foot propped on the coffee table. As I listened to him chew the pizza—our pizza—I suddenly grew angry. Now, heart, body, and soul overheated, I was sweating. I wanted to storm into the kitchen, snatch the spreadsheet Mom and I had created, shake all the zeros under his nose, and demand, What the hell did you do?
Mom may have been too proud to ask for help, but I had to. “Dad, our savings account is running low.”
“I’ll deposit half of my paycheck into it,” he said easily.
“For how long… do you think?” Mom asked uncertainly, as though she didn’t want to offend Dad and chance him retracting his offer.
Dad leaned back, arms behind his head, a man in command of the boardroom. “Into perpetuity, Bits.”
I breathed out, relieved. This was the generous father I knew. The one who would take care of us forever, who would never claim it was “his” money. I grinned at him and snuggled into his side now. Right as the MythBusters debated the best way to transport their LEGO creation to the test site, Dad fidgeted. It wasn’t long before he patted Reid on the knee and said, “Okay, got to go.”
Reid demanded, “Why?”
“Where are you going, Thom?” Mom asked.
“Out,” Dad said, belligerent as a boy defying his mother, disrespectful with curt, one-word answers. Shocked, I recalled hearing this very tone every time Dad spoke with his own mother… and mine.
“Well,” Mom said now, standing slowly with her hands clenched so tight behind her back that her knuckles were white, “if there’s an emergency, how are we going to reach you?”
“I’ve got my cell phone.” Dad strode toward the front door.
How many times had I witnessed this conversation, too? Mom asking Dad for basic information, and Dad doling out responses in miserly monosyllables. Now I could appreciate Mom’s position: How the heck could she have planned our week if she didn’t know whether Dad could pick us up from the ferry station? Drive Reid to a football practice? With his scanty answer, I couldn’t stay quiet, even if speaking meant incurring Dad’s disapproval.
“Dad, you didn’t answer our calls when we first moved here,” I pointed out.
Just as I thought, he shot me a hurt look before grudgingly admitting, “We’ll be at the Four Seasons. In Boston.”
I couldn’t help glancing at the empty pizza box that had felt like a reckless splurge of twenty bucks.
“That’s where the party is,” Dad said.
“Party?” I asked. Instinctively, I moved to stand at Mom’s side.
“Giselle’s parents are celebrating their thirtieth anniversary.”
It wasn’t me who spoke up against this new insensitivity. And it wasn’t Mom who choked on Dad’s tone-deaf intentions. But Reid. Reid who recoiled but refused to look away. Reid who maneuvered in front of me and Mom now, as though his one hundred ten pounds could protect us, and stated firmly, clearly, as if he were the man, not our father, “Dad, you’re still married. Don’t you think that’s just… mean?”
Dad didn’t respond but stared at his cell phone, wishing someone else would answer for him. There was no one else. The truth in Reid’s assessment stretched taffy-thin before Dad answered in clipped words: “I didn’t think about that.”
Mom reared back as if struck in the face by the magnitude of Dad’s disregard.
I can’t take any more. I can’t. Mom’s voice was as clear in my head as if she had spoken, but she was silent, ashen-faced. Her bottom lip was caught painfully between her teeth. Fury gathered inside me as I studied this imposter of a father. Couldn’t he hear himself?
I had ignored my inklings about this move. I had told myself that I was crazy when I predicted things. I had convinced myself that a sixth sense couldn’t possibly exist. My scoffs echoed my dad’s derision of everything and anything that couldn’t be calculated and calibrated, explained and documented.
Whatever happened to us now—Mom, Reid, and me—was going to occur under my steadfast watch. Maybe it was time to admit to myself that I had visions.
Tired of nibbling after my father’s trail of crumbs, stale and insubstantial, that led us in maddening circles, I asked myself: What should I do?
Then I listened.
There was no nausea, no listing ground, no pounding headache.
Get them to safety.
The voice was so adamant—my inner knowing unquestionably strong, a perfect-pitch ringing that ran from head to heart. I told him now, “Dad, you can keep doing whatever you want, but we’re going to Hawaii.”
Part Three
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
—Frank Lloyd Wright, architect
Chapter Twenty
One call to Grandpa and we were bound for the Big Island two days later. I paused outside the open door of the airplane. There, I lifted my face toward the star-clad night sky, breathed in the balmy air of Hawaii, and felt, surprisingly, like I had arrived home. That unexpected sensation of homecoming only heightened at the sight of Grandpa George, in his vivid red aloha shirt, waiting for me and Reid and especially Mom.
As soon as Mom cleared security, Grandpa grabbed her heavy carry-on bag and threw his arms around her. A divot of concern creased his forehead, and he asked, “You hanging in there, darling? You look like you’re going to faint.”
“Doing fine, Dad.”
He nodded. “We’ll just get the truck, then, and head home.”
“How far is it?” I asked.
“Two hours. You can sleep on the way to Volcano.”
“Is that really what your town’s called?” asked Reid.
“It really is,” Grandpa said, mussing Reid’s already bedraggled hair. As easygoing as my grandfather sounded, I caught his worried expression. Not that I blamed him. Three long flights had taken a toll on us: Reid smelled musty, I felt greasy, and Mom looked vampire-pale. She hadn’t slept on any of the plane rides; I knew because every time I woke from my catnaps, Mom was either journaling or reading one of her books with dire titles like He’s History, You’re Not: Surviving Divorce After 40 and When Love Dies. I never thought I’d miss her books on effective time management until now; this new batch of self-help was a heartbreak.
Six hours on the plane should have been plenty of time for me to compos
e a letter to Sam Stone, belatedly thanking him for meeting me… even if that meeting had been mortifying. Under any other circumstances, Mom would have been incensed that my handwritten thank-you note hadn’t been signed, sealed, and delivered within twenty-four hours of my walking out of Sam’s office. But my procrastination continued because I kept replaying our last good-bye with Dad and my final conversation with Jackson instead.
The twisting drive along the volcano’s flank now stopped me from obsessing over what I should have said and berating myself for what I did say. One accidental jerk of the steering wheel would plow us through the sorry excuse of a guardrail, and we’d plummet into the ocean far below. While I was nervous, I trusted Grandpa to keep us safe. Mom must have, too, because she didn’t nag him once to slow his mad-dash pace.
Reid had fallen asleep next to me, his head knocking against the window with every little bump. So I pulled him toward me, where he could rest on my shoulder. Who cared if he smelled like boy, sweaty and slightly sour? The comforting weight of his body slumped against mine made me feel less alone.
I wondered then about Jackson, wondered how he was doing, what he was doing. And who he was doing it with. As though my fretting had conjured Jackson, I received a text from him: Heard from Ginny you went to Hawaii. Doing okay? Aloha.
I found myself unconsciously holding my phone to my heart, as though I could feel the reliable clockwork ticking of his ongoing care. There were probably a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t answer him—and Shana no doubt could list, footnote, and fact-check each one of them. Regardless, I was tempted to text Jackson back for the first time since we broke up: Grandpa flew us to the Big Island. Aloha. But we were never only friends. Instead, we had fallen immediately into a relationship. Flirting was our first language. I didn’t know how to talk to Jackson without leading him on. Or worse, leading me down a yellow brick road that led to a fantasy called happily ever after. So I shut off my phone without responding and buried it deep, deep, deep within my messenger bag.
The sound of Grandpa’s truck entering the gravel driveway woke me before his gruff “Welcome home.” A pair of tiki torches glowed at the top of the driveway, highlighting the lush foliage edging the road. A wood sign nailed into a palm tree read OHIA.
“I’ll show you to your rooms,” Grandpa said as he parked the truck under a thatched garage, “and then I’ll drop off your luggage.”
Not even Mom protested with her usual polite “No, no, we can handle it”—we were all that tired. The narrow footpath from the garage forked off the driveway to a Japanese-style house but, surprisingly, Grandpa headed in the opposite direction. I could tell from the way Reid drew a deep, operatic breath that he was about to break into an aria of discontent, but the tiny building before us, not much bigger than my treehouse, silenced him. The hut exuded the same serenity that our architect had created for us back on Lewis Island. So organic, this hut could have sprung from the earth, but what were the chances that Peter had designed this property?
Two chairs flanked the front porch, a charming touch I wouldn’t have expected from my gnarl-bearded grandfather. After Grandpa George opened the front door, labeled with a sign that read NOOKERY, he handed Mom the dragonfly key chain.
“Dad… what is this place?” Mom asked, peering inside curiously.
“Where you’ll be staying.”
At the far end of the room was a reading nook, deep enough to double as a twin bed. Fern-green curtains hung off to the side, ready to be drawn for privacy. Mom entered the space slowly, lingering at the built-in bookshelves on one of the walls. She ran her fingers along the spines of the faded old editions of classic children’s books: The Phantom Tollbooth. Half Magic. The Little Prince. The Witch of Blackbird Pond. The Betsy-Tacy series. All the books I remembered Grandma Stesha reading aloud to me when she used to babysit on alternate days with Grandpa George while Mom was at work.
“Dad?” Mom asked haltingly. She pulled out Betsy and Joe, my favorite in the turn-of-the-century series, the one where Betsy falls in love with another writer, a boy who truly understands and appreciates her. “Are these my old books?”
Grandpa grinned at her uncertainly. “Do you like it?”
“Dad…”
“Just make yourself at home. I’ll bring up your bag once I get the kids settled.”
“Dad?”
But Grandpa had already backed out of the hut—Mom’s Nookery. Who else could it have belonged to but Mom? If I were to design a room specifically for her, this was what it would look like: cozy and light-filled, stocked with books and the window seat she had always coveted. Only then did it occur to me that Mom had given me my treehouse sanctuary at our island home. A man cave where Dad could retreat and recharge. A bedroom that changed with Reid’s ever-morphing interests: first a fire station complete with a replica of a 1934 fire truck as a bed, then a robotics laboratory. Even her gardens were intended for other people’s pleasure: the healing garden for Ginny’s dad, the vegetable patch for us. Other than her small container gardens, Mom never claimed a space of her own, never staked out a private spot to recharge, even after telling Dad how much she had always dreamed of a reading nook.
But Peter had heard her. I remembered their one argument during the remodel. Mom’s reading nook was on the chopping block due to budget overruns, but Peter had insisted on retaining the window seat, overriding her protests. And he was the one who had the window seat upholstered in robin’s-egg blue, Mom’s favorite color, as a housewarming gift. I remembered her glow of pleasure when she first saw the seat, the way she had run to it and plopped herself down, precisely as she did now.
My last image of Mom before Reid and I followed Grandpa into the night was of her snuggling into her Nookery. Mom had arrived home, an entire ocean away. Despite my very best efforts otherwise, I wished I could snuggle into Jackson, but much more than an ocean separated us.
I fell asleep to the light drumbeat of rain on the upturned palm fronds outside the bunkhouse I shared with Reid. Hours later, I awoke to an exuberant birdsong that drowned out my latest nightmare of a vision: Dad slashing our spreadsheet with a red marker and smirking at Mom. You may own the house, but the property is mine, not yours.
So disturbing was the dream that I woke fully alert, without a trace of jet-lagged grogginess. What good was our cottage if Dad owned the land on Lewis Island? That was a question and this was a vision I refused to ignore. So I made a mental note to research property rights, then e-mail the Bookster moms afterward to double-check my understanding.
Across the room, Reid was sleeping so soundly, he didn’t budge at the raucous gabbling of chickens in the garden, not even the loud cawing from beneath our window. Unable to rest a minute longer, I threw off the white quilt, appliquéd with fiery birds-of-paradise. The air was chilly, not the perennially hot, humid Maui I knew from my family’s one previous trip to Hawaii. Though that vacation had been only a few spring breaks ago, it felt unfathomable that we were ever an intact family of four.
Shivering, I lifted my black sweatshirt from the foot of my bed, where I had cast it last night, and pulled my phone from my messenger bag. It was already ten, decadently late. Compulsive, I know, but I wanted to see if Jackson had texted. He had: Surf up, Aloha Girl?
Buoyed by his words in spite of myself, I practically bounced across the room to the front door. Closing the bunkhouse door gently behind me, I stepped into a jeweled paradise of variegated greens, bright against the clouds, and felt… happy. I remembered what Grandpa had advised in Manhattan: Seize joy. So now in the daylight, I reveled in this primordial jungle where wild spirals and alien antennae sprang rapturously from the mulchy ground.
Again, I was tempted to text Jackson back: Volcanoes and jungles and sun, oh my! What harm would one little text be? But I knew. Any word from me would be an opening that I wasn’t sure I wanted to create. Once again, I ignored the text, even if I could hear Jackson call me by my new moniker: Aloha Girl.
To reach the main hou
se, I retraced our steps from last night, following the gentle bend of the trail. Like the Nookery and the bunkhouse, Grandpa’s house was Japanese in style, Zen in spirit. If space itself could exude mystical healing energy, this one did. My muscles relaxed even before I reached the charming swing that dangled from a decommissioned crane next to the house. As enticing as that swing was, I followed the trail of river rocks winding a sinewy, black stream up the three steps to the front door. Two had words chiseled into them: Live. Everything. My eyes filled with tears at the familiarity of those words, etched on my pendant, unspoken in years. I could almost hear Grandma Stesha’s butterscotch voice, sweet and husky, as she tucked me into bed: “The point is to live everything.”
But it was Grandpa’s voice that I heard this morning: “You’re up.” He had been sitting with such meditative stillness, I hadn’t noticed him on the porch. The beginning of a smile softened his austere expression. “Sleep well?”
“Grandpa, this,” I said, gesturing widely to encompass everything he had created, “is a masterpiece.”
At that, he gifted me with his gathering smile, slow and wide and welcoming. “Would you like a tour?”
“What do you think?”
With an answering nod, Grandpa loped down the stairs, gripping a metal water bottle, and jogged through the knee-tall grass behind the house. There, a muddy trail led into the forest, mired with thick roots and uneven with sharp rocks. I followed, laughing, as though we were playing chase the way we had whenever Grandpa babysat me.
The path opened to a vignette of art: a glass orb, vibrant cobalt blue. I thought back on the conversations I’d overheard between Mom and Dad, circling around how little ambition Grandpa had. Mom saying that was the reason why Grandma Stesha had given up on him, Dad saying my grandfather needed to grow up and get a real job. But if Grandpa had sacrificed the traipsing of his vagabond life for the trappings of a corporate one, would he have wrought this: beauty and sanctuary, security and love?