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.
Yes, I heard the ringing of rightness. Yes.
When I opened my eyes, Mom was holding out a single flower to me.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
She gestured to the ground below, where a pink-tinged shrub had sprung improbably from black death. Across from the low bush was a spindly tree, taller than me. I spun around, no longer noticing the consuming force of the volcanic eruption but instead seeing the hardscrabble life that had eked its way back. This was no different from the High Line park in Manhattan, which could only have been rebirthed into an urban oasis because the railway had first been abandoned. No different from Mom, whose face was angled toward the sunlight, her natural curls bouncing freely around her shoulders. No different from me, freeing myself from a mantle of expectations I no longer wanted to wear.
All around me, the burned floor was sprinkled here and there with a flowering of glorious red.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Immediately
after dinner, Mom apologized that even though it was only seven, she needed to sleep, blaming her exhaustion on jet lag. Her excuse was only partially right. It wasn’t just our bodies that were jet-lagged. So were our emotions. Coming to terms with Dad’s betrayal and all the aftershocks of new hurts and the reappraised past had sapped me more than I cared to admit. What toll did that take on my mother? I accompanied Mom to the Nookery, our pace slow in the dimming light.
“Dad totally screwed up, Mom. You deserve better than this,” I said softly. Instead of feeling like a traitor for admitting out loud that Dad had messed up and let our entire family down, I felt… unburdened. And relieved.
Unexpectedly, Mom began to cry as if her illusions were shattering all over again, shoulders heaving with sobs I hadn’t heard since her appointment with the gynecologist.
“Mom, Mom!” Panicking, I fluttered around her, not knowing what to say to assuage her sorrow. “I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Even in her distraught state, Mom must have sensed that she was frightening me, because she shook her head. “No,” she said, drawing in a shaky breath, “I’m okay. Better than okay, Babycakes.”
That nickname—the one I heard Grandma use with her, the one I had snapped at Mom never to call me ever again in front of my friends when I was in sixth grade—was healing balm.
As though she had foreseen this moment, Grandma caught up to us, toting a basket loaded with a flask of Kahlúa, a Thermos of coffee, and three tiny cups. She told me, “It’s time for a girl talk.”
Designed for one, the Nookery was snug for two and crowded for three. Even so, we squeezed inside, all three of us on the window seat.
“Girls,” Grandma said without any preamble, “I’ve been wanting to tell you something for a long time. You both have spent practically half your lives—yes, you have—denying your intuition. Let me tell you something. Your sixth sense is a God-given gift.” She held up her hand to stave off Mom’s protest. “Let me finish. It is no different from your gift in creating gardens.” Then she turned to me. “Or yours to design buildings.” Straightening her back and placing her hands on our knees, Grandma said, “Denying your intuition is no different from squandering those gifts. So when people talk about callings, you should know that you’ve been twice blessed. It will be a shame, a darn shame, not just for you but for everybody around you, if you don’t use your gifts, all of your gifts, to their full potential.”
“Thom said—” Mom began.
“I can guess what Thom said!” Grandma smoothed back her hair to calm herself. Her eyes were button-hard as she considered us. “There are plenty of CEOs who talk about trusting their guts. What’s that if not sixth sense? In any case, what matters most is you being authentically yourself. And if you cut a part of yourself off—especially to please someone else—do you think that you’re really being celebrated for who you are? Do you really think you’re being truly and completely loved?”
My mind wandered to Jackson as I pondered what Grandma was telling us. I had never trusted him to accept all the parts of me when I saw firsthand how Dad mocked Mom’s inklings and scorned her forebodings. Had I been wrong about Jackson? After all, not once had he ever asked me to be less than I was. But then I thought of Ginny. Her reaction to my premonition about her dad’s death had all but censored my visions.
“How do you know that our visions aren’t… I don’t know, wrong?” I asked quietly.
“Because we help people,” Grandma answered simply. “How could that impulse come from anything but goodness?”
I thought of Mom and her healing garden for Ginny’s dad and the salad bowl container gardens that she gave as gifts. And I thought of my few visions, even the prophetic one about Ginny’s dad. After my revelation, she had flounced to her mom in hysterics, demanding to leave. Didn’t that give her time with her father that would have been otherwise spent on Lewis, away from him before his unexpected death a few days later? For the first time, I found peace over that event.
“I’ll put it in another way,” Grandma said, as she took my hand and my mother’s and squeezed gently. “When you’re in tune with your inner voice, do you feel completely aligned: head, heart, and soul?”
I nodded. It was true. When I denied my visions, that’s when I felt nauseous. Mom murmured, “Yes.”
“The women in our family have always been helpers. I don’t mean that you have to save the world. But you do have to listen to your intuition. That is our true calling. I believe it,” said Grandma, quiet in her conviction. Silent now, she poured the Kahlúa and coffee in cups for herself and Mom, just coffee in mine. Lifting hers, she said, “Salud.”
Through unspoken understanding, Grandma and I left Mom to rest after we finished those drinks. We found ourselves drawn back to Grandpa’s home, his front door propped open with a coconut. Through the screen door, I saw him puttering in the kitchen, filling the next morning’s breakfast baskets on the countertop. I counted one for each of us.
“Do you think everybody will want macadamia-and-banana pancakes tomorrow morning?” he asked uncertainly when we ventured into his kitchen.
“Who wouldn’t?” I answered.
Before I could offer to help, Grandma did so, grabbing the Ziploc bag crammed with fat macadamia nuts from the refrigerator. Without a word, in perfect synchronicity, they assembled the other ingredients. Feeling left out, I knew I should leave them alone. But where should I go? Even though there was light left in the waning day, I didn’t want to bike any more than I wanted to drive down to admire the lava glow in the dark.
Grandpa blurted, “You know, there’s a treehouse here….”
“A treehouse? Really?” I asked, startled. “That wasn’t part of our tour.”
Grandpa shrugged. “I wanted you to find it on your own….”
“But don’t you need help?”
“No,” said Grandma quickly, too quickly.
When she wasn’t looking, I winked at Grandpa. With a grin, he handed me a flashlight.
“Where is it?” I asked. But then I shook my head because I knew where Peter had sited the treehouse, where I would have hidden a secret sanctuary on these lush grounds. Even without any guidance or direction, my gut knew the way.
There were no twinkle lights, no tiki torches, no wooden signs to announce the existence of the nondescript path beyond the yoga hut, just a discreet archway of boughs. I ducked, even though I didn’t need to. The arch was the perfect portal for someone my size.
After winding around primordial ferns, the path curled to a stout tree before connecting to a spiral staircase made of wood. Those stairs opened to a treehouse, ten feet off the ground, high enough to gain perspective on my life.
On the bookshelf, tea lights were piled inside a palm-size bird’s nest. Three thick glass votives, each the color of sea grass, anchored a column of hand-stitched journals that were crafted from rough banana paper. A bouquet of multicolored pens filled a tiny canister painted with a path that led not to a watery rainbow or a buried treasure but to a heart wide open. Above that heart, one word: Follow.
And there, lining the window ledges, were the tiny fairy houses I had crafted with Grandpa when I was a little girl. Offerings I had placed around his houseboat because I truly believed that the fairies themselves would call back Grandma Stesha, tell her we missed her. He had kept them all. I had never known.
The treehouse rocked gently in the wind, soothing as a cradle. Now I cupped my favorite fairy house delicately in my hand, studying its steeply pitched roofline punctuated with a hawk’s tail feather that I had found floating past Grandpa’s houseboat.
I followed my instinct now and lit three candles, marking this as sacred time with myself. What better way to begin than with a fresh journal? I selected a green one. Then I settled on an orange floor pillow, the fairy house before me.
It had been so long since I had consulted my heart about anything, relying as I did on my head. I was at a crossroads with college and Jackson,
and it was time to make some decisions that felt right both in my mind and in my soul. Until I figured out what it was that I truly wanted, I didn’t want to talk to Jackson. He deserved better than me jerking him around with texts that suggested I was getting back together with him. He deserved a girl who knew with a thousand percent certainty that she wanted to be with him, only him. I wasn’t there yet.
By the time the sky had dimmed to indigo, my sketches and flowcharts and ruminations filled fifteen pages, and I had run out of answers to the tough questions I had posed to myself. One thing I knew for certain: I didn’t want to go back to Seattle and apply to UW for next fall solely because a boy was there. That decision—that life change—had to make sense for me, too.
So I composed a final text to Jackson for the time being: I can’t do this right now. Life is too chaotic. I’ll be in touch when I’m ready and sure of myself again…. Please understand. Before I lost my resolve, before I could edit and rewrite the message a hundred times, I hit Send.
Later, much later, when the tea lights had burned out and I rested my fairy house back on the bookshelf, I heard Grandma Stesha’s incredulous voice: “You built this all on your own?”
Leaning out the window, I could see the merged shadows of my grandparents before they stepped into view.
“Well,” said Grandpa as he leaned against a tree trunk, “with a lot of help.”
“But you created a place for writers and artists. You dismissed that idea when I told you what I wanted to do with this land. You hate what I do.”
“Stesha, I was a kid. I was threatened by all the people who swarmed around you, wanting something from you.”
“Solace about their future.” My grandmother’s arms were crossed in front of herself protectively, defensively. “What was so wrong about giving them that?”
“I was afraid that I would lose you.”