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.”
I took a sip of my water as I thought about Grandma’s words. “But what about our visions of other people?”
“We can choose to tell people what our intuition says about them, but ultimately it’s their choice about how they want to live.” Grandma leaned back and closed her eyes. “We can’t take responsibility for what other people decide to do.”
I thought about Dad and his choices, made to optimize his happiness alone. The last words I remembered Grandma Stesha saying before she left us—But, Betsy, isn’t it better to know?—pealed in my memory.
“It really is better to know.” So now I asked the question I’d wondered but had been too afraid to ask: “Grandma… was it hard to leave us on your trips? We haven’t seen you in years!”
Slowly, Grandma Stesha held out her upturned hand, as if she wanted to both receive and support me. I placed my hand atop hers. Our palms touching, she answered: “Leaving you and Reid and your mom, knowing what your father was going to do, was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. But it would have been worse if I had stayed, despising your dad for something he hadn’t even done and coming between him and your mother.”
I leaned back to study the overhanging branches, dangerously laden with fruit. There was comfort in the image of Dad struggling with his decision and grappling with the unfairness of his actions—no different from the way I was waffling about Jackson. Perhaps deciding to leave us had been the hardest decision Dad had made, too. Perhaps staying would have been worse for reasons I didn’t understand now—and might never understand.
Grandma Stesha squeezed my hand tight in both of hers. “I missed you all so much. But I knew I’d come back for good when the time was right.”
It helped knowing why Grandma had made her decision to leave us, even if I might have made a different choice. The wind blew, and a handful of mangoes on a branch swayed. Since I wasn’t a little girl who was a victim of my circumstances, I stood up, uneasy about remaining underneath this mango bomb of a tree. Grandma mistook that for me leaving: “Reb, I hope you’ll forgive me someday.”
“Grandma, I’m just moving us to where it’s safe,” I said, smiling as I held my hand out to help her to her feet. As soon as I saw the tears of relief brightening Grandma’s eyes, words flew out of me in an eager, heartfelt rush: “I’d love to go on one of your tours. With you.”
With you.
Those were the same warming words Jackson had given me in the bird-watcher’s sanctuary: a promise, a plan. Words that made me feel united with him, as if we were stronger together. Words that made me yearn to reach out to him now.
“We’ll have to plan that soon, then.” Grandma spread her age-spotted hands out in front of herself. “It’s getting harder to get around airports. All those lines! And hauling luggage and dealing with clients. My gosh, my cli
ents and their special dietary needs…” Mildly exasperated, she shook her head and rolled her eyes.
I could easily envision traveling with Grandma Stesha—sampling spices and produce I’d never encountered before, befriending strangers, all the while weathering stomach woes, high-maintenance tour guests, and lost luggage. Every bit of those experiences, the fateful coincidences and the accidental setbacks, would become our history together.
“I’ve been thinking it’s time to start arranging tours in the U.S.,” said Grandma Stesha as I pulled her chair, then mine, into the sun.
“Like Sedona?” Another wind rattled the branches. I was glad we’d moved, particularly when a green mango fell right where Grandma Stesha had been sitting.
“You listened to yourself,” she said, smiling before continuing. “And Santa Fe. Maybe even Seattle.”
“Seattle?” I stared at Grandma, shocked, as she refreshed my glass of water. “What’s in Seattle?”
“Not what but who. There’s a Native American ghost whisperer who a lot of real estate agents hire to clear old houses of spirits.”
“For real?”
“For real. And a woman, Belly-button Grandmother. She divines your future through—”
“Your belly button? Really?”
“Really.”
A plan began to coalesce as Grandma smiled to herself, reminiscing privately about tours past. Or perhaps she was divining my private brainstorm, this bounty of ideas ripening in my mind. What if I spent my gap year traveling with Grandma, working as her go-to girl? I could deal with people’s luggage and complicated dietary requirements. Or I could do reconnaissance work for her stateside tours, researching amazing places to visit in Sedona and Seattle, the way Mom had done for us with her binder of activities. What better way to learn about sacred spaces than to study and see them for myself?
Grandma Stesha leaned closer to me, as if she wanted to share a secret: “I would love to take you with me to Taktsang Monastery in Bhutan, and Machu Picchu in Peru.”
My grandmother’s words must have unlocked a secret yearning I hadn’t even realized I possessed. “I’d love to see the world with you!”
“Me too.” Her face softened with fond memories. “I absolutely adore traveling.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Traveling gives me such startling clarity that I can see the life I have… versus the life I can choose to create.” Grandma Stesha stared out into the vast horizon as if she were brailling all the possibilities as boundless as the sky. She gazed at me fondly. “There are places in this world that are so imbued with spirit, you become rearranged just by breathing the air.”
“Rearranged.” I breathed in that idea and grinned back at Grandma Stesha, feeling as if I had completed the first expedition of my gap year. “I love that.” And because it was a benediction worth repeating, a barometer worth using to measure life, I whispered as I wrote the word in my journal: “Rearranged.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Stay right there.” Mom sprinted toward Grandma and me, sitting in our matching Adirondack chairs. She held a camera in one hand and her hot-pink journal in the other. Then she added in a firmer voice when Grandma started fussing about how she hated having her photo taken, “I hardly have any pictures of you two together.”
That was true, but we could change that fact.
“Come on, Grandma, humor us,” I said.
The breeze sent Grandma Stesha’s long earrings bobbing and blew back her short hair so I could see the fine lines on her beautiful face. A pang clenched my heart; my grandmother really was getting older, and our moments really were finite. Like Mom, I wanted to document this.
“Smile,” I ordered as I pressed my cheek against hers and grinned for the camera.
Standing in front of us, Mom looked more carefree than I had ever seen her, dressed in what I recognized as my grandmother’s flirty little skirt and vintage Hello Kitty T-shirt.
“Mom, what are you doing in Grandma’s clothes?” I asked after what felt like a thousand shots.
“I forgot a change of clothes.”
“These are actually your clothes from college,” Grandma said, her eyes twinkling. “Don’t you remember? I’ve been borrowing them.”
“Those were yours?” I asked in disbelief, unable to recall Mom wearing anything but her boring uniform of boyish khaki pants, a pressed skort or two, and practical flats.
Mom laughed again before she sank onto the grass, legs out and leaning back on her hands. “Your grandmother was always raiding my closet.”
“You used to dress so… funky,” said Grandma, frowning momentarily, as if she, like me, wanted to bomb Mom’s conservative wardrobe and start all over. “So think about it this way: They’re going back to their rightful owner.”
“You know something? I feel like me again.” Mom tossed her hair that had air-dried into a mess of curls. Each strand sprang with life, as if glad to be free from the flattening constraints of corporate life. Stay or go? Married or divorced? Maybe those had never been the questions Mom had been asking herself, but this one: Was she Bits or Betsy? Or was she someone else altogether: Elizabeth?
In a funny way, as I touched the sun-warmed pendant from Mom that I had never removed since I found it in New Jersey, I felt like I had reclaimed a part of myself, too. The dreamer who constructed whimsical fairy houses and the bold creator who declared, “I want to build a treehouse.” And just possibly the one who said “Why not fate?” when it made no sense to start a relationship at the tail end of my senior year in high school.
I closed my eyes and imagined my life on the trajectory it had been on before everything happened. There it was, the deadening dread of sitting in a birdcage of a cubicle, trapped and unable to fly. No wonder both Grandpa and Grandma had shunned the corporate world, trading steady income for a life of their own authoring. I took a deep breath and let myself speak freely even as I watched for Mom’s reaction: “Mom, I don’t want to build big, huge corporate buildings.”
“Are you sure it’s not because you don’t like Sam?” she asked, probing.
“It’s not that I don’t like him; I’m afraid of him!” I said.
Even Mom laughed at that before saying, “I can understand that, but we don’t run from anything just because we’re scared. We’ll talk about different strategies for you to work with people like him, okay?”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with me being scared. It’s everything to do with me creating what I love.” I squeezed Mom on the arm.
Before, she might have argued with me, citing ten different reasons why my decision wasn’t prudent. Today, she nodded, respecting my opinion, and opened her journal, which was half full of her thoughts. “You weren’t the only one doing some more thinking this morning,” she said as she flipped through pages of numbers and sketches, others covered with writing in bold capitals, and still more dotted with long lists of bullets, some circled and crossed off. “I feel like I’m at a standstill.”
“Maybe it would help if we made a list of people you could talk to?” Grandma suggested. “How about listing all your mentors? All the people who love you. Like Ethan Cheng, from your first job.”
“Oooh,” I said, leaning down from my chair to tap Mom’s journal. “And his daughter, Syrah. Didn’t she want to hire you to make all the centerpieces for some fund-raising event for bone marrow transplants?”
Mom’s list grew rapidly, with people added every time we jogged her memory—“Remember your volunteer work with the pediatric camp?” and “How about your college friends?”
“I keep coming back to gardening, decorating, and PR,” Mom sighed. “None of them feels exactly right, though.”
“Maybe there’s something you could do that combines all of them,” suggested Grandma, looking at me thoughtfully, expectantly.
I remembered what Grandma had advised me. “Mom, maybe you should think about your passion and power. What you love doing and what you’re best at…”
Those words—spoken first by Grandma, shared by me with my mother—created an earthquake effect, shaking loose a deep wish I never knew I had. Now I felt compelled to open my own journal. I listened to that urgency.
My gaze fell on sketches of my treehouse and the urban refuge that was the High Line park in Manhattan. Without any plan, without knowing what I’d find, I turned a few pages to the ob-gyn’s office, cold and sterile compared with the healing Place of Refuge and the dolphin cove and my grandfather’s soulful inn. Past the frayed remains of the pages I had ripped out after my disastrous meeting with Sam Stone, ashamed of my whimsical fairy houses. I flipped back to a study of our backyard: the pergola draped with purple-blossomed wisteria, the sleek fire pit, the stone-paved path. And finally the healing garden.
As these images dangled like loose threads in my mind, the back of my neck prickled, no longer a warning sign of an impending premonition but a welcome inkling of a future I sought.
“Maybe there’s something that combines what we all love doing….” Electrified, I had to stand. With my hands on my hips and the breeze playing with my hair, I felt like a sea captain overlooking a coastline that was taking shape, clearer and clearer as I drew close. And there, there it was. Land ahoy. The vision that had been waiting for me all this time. I welcomed it.
“What if one day we created a treehouse sanctuary?” I asked aloud. “Where people could come heal… like us? Or people who are recovering from cancer. We could design a place where they’d be nurtured with awesome food. And gardens they could roam and experts to guide their journey? We would pamper them.”
It wasn’t my globe-trotting grandmother who encouraged me to explore further, but my mom, whom I once believed to be deathly dull. She built on my idea: “We’d want people who couldn’t afford fancy spas like Canyon Ranch or Miraval. They’d flock to us to rejuvenate.”
Grandma chimed in, “And we’d have a mud bath. Oh! And a labyrinth. Must have a labyrinth.”