Return to Me (28 page)

“What do you mean?” Mom asked, lifting her gaze off the paint chips.

“He’d ask, ‘So, how do you want to feel when you walk through the front door?’ ” I modulated my tone, trying to sound more patient than I was feeling. Personally, I was getting a smidge antsy because Mom, usually decisive, couldn’t make up her mind. This was the side effect of a more relaxed mother that I had to accept.

“I’m not sure,” Mom answered.

“Energized? Peaceful?”

She blinked fast, bewildered. But then what Mom said next raised a red flag of alarm: “This is your house, Reb.”

That admission held an entire world of fear that Dad’s abandonment had knocked loose: to be homeless. I knew the words my mom ached to hear, even if she didn’t know it: “Mom, this will always be your home, too. Besides, you and Reid are going to live in it by yourselves while I’m in college. It so doesn’t make sense to have to repaint it in a year. So you choose.”

She nodded, pressed her fingers to her eyes.

“Take your time, Mom,” I said, gently. “There’s no need to rush. How about I go get the supplies?”

Just as I selected a few aluminum pans, paintbrushes, and roller sponges, I heard my name in the laughter-lush voice I had been expecting: “Reb?” Even so, I wrenched around so fast, I could have left skid marks on the linoleum floor.

Grandma says there are no coincidences in life, only synchronicity. That life presents us with moments and openings that line up in logic-defying ways, and it is our job to be aware of these opportunities and poised to accept them. Pity the list-checker who is so heads-down focused on the what-must-be-done that he misses the what-could-be-now, a twinkling jewel of an unexpected moment.

Like standing with a world-class, hugely respected architect who had turned me on to sustainable building and intimate spaces in the first place.

“Peter!” I cried as I threw my arms around him. He smelled like charcoal pencil and wood shavings the way I remembered.

“You remember Cameron?” Peter said, gesturing to the broad-shouldered young man standing next to him once I let go.

“Cameron?” The last time I saw Peter’s nephew, I was ten and he was a scrawny, pimply high school senior. Our remodel project was stuttering to an end because, as Peter had warned Mom, men were better at demolition than at reconstruction. Having none of that, Mom threw an impromptu barbecue for the crew, partly to thank them but mostly to prod them to complete the last fit-and-finish items. The beer was held hostage until the punch list was done. Cameron had joined the job for the final week and was mingling with the men, although they were swigging beer and he was drinking root beer, like me.

Right in front of all those manly men, Mom asked Cameron point-blank, “Are you popular with girls?”

As expected, his face reddened, which only heightened the angry splotchiness of his acne. Even if he wanted to melt in embarrassment, Cameron gave a halfhearted shrug—gracious, considering I wanted to incinerate Mom on the spot.

But Mom’s gaze was steady, and her voice was clear with conviction: “High school girls are way too young for you. When you’re twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, you won’t know what to do with all the women who are after you. Trust me.”

A brilliant blush cascaded from Cameron’s cheeks to his neck. To my astonishment, his eyes stayed riveted on Mom as if she were an oracle: “Really?”

“I promise.”

After that exchange, I was ready to scurry away, embarrassed, when I overheard the foreman say, “Can you imagine if a
woman told you that when you were seventeen? Do you know what a difference that could have made?”

“That was a gift,” Peter had agreed.

Eight years later, Peter was grayer at the temples but still crinkly-eyed, as though he’d spent the last few years of his life smiling, and Cameron… My gosh, was Mom’s prediction spot on or what? At twenty-five, Cameron was gorgeous, not because he had a model’s chiseled physique but because his stance was so confident and his eyes glittered with humor. I was the gawky one, fidgeting under his scrutiny. When I fumbled my hold on the painting supplies, Cameron caught them with an athlete’s grace.

Fortunately, neither Peter nor Cameron did the awkward “Whoa, just look at you—I remember you in pigtails” routine. Instead, Peter asked, “What are you working on these days?” Again, I was struck by how he treated me as though I were one of his contemporaries, so different from Sam Stone.

“I’ve been sketching,” I said.

“Treehouses?”

“You remember?”

“I don’t forget special clients.” And then, as if there was one special client he wanted to remember in particular, Peter asked even as he scanned the store, “Is your mom here?”

Before I could nod, he’d located Mom. I knew she was as aware of Peter because she was dithering before a panel of lifeless tans that would never, ever disgrace a single millimeter on any wall inside her home.

“Elizabeth,” Peter said softly.

Mom’s answering grin was one hundred percent heartfelt.
They fell into the hug-or-shake-hands dance, with Mom extending her right hand just as Peter widened his arms. Peter won. He wove his arms over Mom, and she sank into his embrace… as though she belonged right there, tucked under his chin.

Shocked, I stood there, watching them even as part of me wanted to turn away. Their undeniable attraction felt so wrong. Would I ever get used to my parents being with other people? But as Mom burst into easy laughter, glowing up at Peter, I finally understood what Jackson had been trying to tell me: Perhaps the affair had been the best thing for Mom and Dad. Perhaps they had married way too young—after all, even if they denied it publicly, they hadn’t gotten engaged until Mom was pregnant with me. Who knows what path they would have taken—whether independently or jointly—if that condom on that particular night hadn’t broken?

Perhaps now that my parents had grown up, they were better suited to other people.

Perhaps Dad had found his soul mate, and Mom was free to find hers.

Perhaps…

“Weird, we were just talking about your mom this morning,” Cameron said, his voice deeper than his uncle’s. Despite being flustered by the appreciative way Cameron looked at me, I knew all too well what the next dance step was, because Shana had spoken of flirting so often. All I had to do to engage Cameron was angle my head just so, gaze slant-eyed up at him, drop a sentence that was at once witty, to make him laugh, and provocative, to gain his interest.

But there was Jackson.

My Jackson.

Unlike Dad, I didn’t want to start anything new, no matter how tempting, no matter how exciting, because I valued what I had—and what I had given up. I intended to fight to win Jackson back, even if it meant possible rejection. Even if everyone was right and we were too young. Even if there was no guarantee that Jackson would forgive me for my abrupt breakup and equally abrupt silence. No matter how many
even if
s my fears and insecurities could manufacture, I would dare to try because Jackson was worth the risk of heartbreak.

“My dad wants a divorce.” More than a way to distance myself from flirting with Cameron, these words had to be said. The situation marked clearly. This was fact. “My boyfriend thinks he’s crazy.”

“For what it’s worth, your boyfriend’s right. Your dad’s crazy.” Cameron strode to Mom then, as if to show her exactly how highly he thought of her. She was dwarfed in his tight embrace. And as loudly as Mom had declared way back at that summertime barbecue, he pronounced, “You were right.”

Mom knew exactly what he meant, because with unabashed smugness, she poked him in his broad chest and crowed, “I knew it. Women can’t keep their hands off you, can they?”

Cameron flushed, but an electric, satisfied grin lit his face.

“I knew it, I knew it.” Mom raised her arms in victory and shimmied in the aisle, a public display that would have mortified Dad. She and the Bookster moms danced in the dark, laughed until they wet their pants, but never once had I seen Mom
behave this freely with Dad. Maybe Dad had truly loved my mother to Bits, grinding her down in a million ways I had never noticed, smoothing the rough edges of her humble upbringing, but leaving her less than she was. And maybe Mom had been so enamored with the idea of being the upwardly mobile all-American family—the family she didn’t have when she was growing up—that she had sacrificed who she was to keep our family together.

Maybe.

Peter grabbed my mother’s hand to twirl her to a song no one but they heard. They danced in complete time with each other, anticipating each other’s steps. “Elizabeth,” he said as if he, for one, saw her whole and cherished every last bit of her, “you knew it.”

The moment Mom and Peter’s impromptu dance ended, awkwardness rekindled between them. She looked at me meaningfully: Do something. So I gathered all the gumption I could from generations on my maternal side—my grandmother who was afraid of water but led tours around the world, and my mother who was derailed from her life plan but was authoring a new one—and asked, “Peter, would you be able to give me some career advice?”

“I will if I can,” he said automatically.

“I need to take a gap year,” I said, alert with keen interest. “I’d love your advice about what I should do.”

Peter checked his watch, then asked, “Do you have time for coffee now?”

Mom took a half step closer to my side in silent encouragement:
Seize this opportunity.
But the time wasn’t right: Reid was exhausted, and the Bookster moms were waiting. More importantly, I knew I wasn’t prepared, not for what I had in mind.

So I said, “Actually, we have to run home, but would you have some time this week?”

“I’ll make time,” Peter promised.

“I’ll e-mail you tomorrow morning, then,” I said, closing the deal.

Once back at our cottage, Mom fumbled with the house key, her hand shaking so badly we could have been entering Bluebeard’s bloody lair haunted with specters of Dad and memories of when we were whole. I thought it would be hard, if not surreal, to walk into our denuded house, stripped of our furniture and family photographs. After all, what we’d left behind were objects that made the house rentable in an impersonal, Pottery Barn–catalog kind of way.

But I was wrong.

One quick scan, and I knew that the Bookster moms hadn’t only cleaned, but they’d emptied their own homes to fill ours. New immigrants to our living room included the butter-yellow couch from Ginny’s rec room and a heavy coffee table from Shana’s family room. And on the mantel was a new framed
photograph, the last picture Shana took of Jackson, Reid, Ginny, and me on the back porch, before we left for the airport.

So when we all gathered inside the kitchen, our homecoming felt more like a victory parade than an advance party scouting hostile territory. That, more than anything, convinced me I could never emulate Sam Stone’s austere creations, his vast buildings that orphaned their inhabitants. However many awards he won, however lauded he was by peers and panels, he didn’t create Home.

“What did you all do?” Mom wondered aloud, tears in her eyes, before the Bookster moms led her into the living room. And as they did, I heard a voice, so beloved to me, from the front door that was still open: “Hey.”

“Jackson,” I said, and drank him in, grateful that his velvety green eyes looked at me with lambent tenderness.

Where before we would have thrown our arms around each other, kissing hungrily, now he scratched the side of his nose, then his jaw. The moment was awkward, both of us uncertain of our standing: Were we or weren’t we? From the living room came the welcome call of Mom’s laughter, followed by the answering hoot of her girlfriends’ even louder cackles. I peeked around the corner to catch Ginny’s mom wriggling suggestively before the fireplace, whipping a pair of lacy undies like a lasso over her head. Mom covered her eyes with her hand.

“Girlfriend, meet your new wardrobe.” Shana’s mom snickered. “But I like what you’re wearing now. So much better than your androgynous, pseudo-guy uniform. So. Much. Better. You know what I always said about Thom….”

“Ack,” I muttered, backing up into Jackson’s broad chest. Instead of sidling away as a platonic friend might, I stayed in this intimate province of a girlfriend. “You know, there are some things you should never see. Let’s go.”