Return to Me (9 page)

I glared at Reid.

“What?” he asked, cramming in another two cubes of cheese. “Dad’s not on another business trip, is he?”

When Mom remained silent, I intended to answer, but how? What words do you use to tell your little brother that Dad has been cheating on Mom? On all of us? Whatever was said would end Reid’s childhood. Mom dragged herself over to the table, aging three decades in that minute. Gently, she slid the barstool back as though a single sound would scare us away.

Steam warmed my cheeks when I lifted the mug to my lips, and I was grateful that I didn’t have to break the news and break Reid’s heart. Mom sat down heavily next to Reid, stared at her dry hands before she rallied like a general before a battle. She straightened and stated without preamble, “Your father’s been dating another woman.”

“But he’s married.” Reid frowned, refusing to look at either of us.

“Your dad is really confused right now. This has nothing to do with you. With either of you.”

The room careened wildly as anger filled me.
Divorce lawyer!
“That’s because this has everything to do with you. You’ve never once appreciated him.”

Mom’s eyes welled up like she had been twice betrayed—by husband and daughter, always the partners in crime. No way, had I really just said that to her? Had I? I felt like I was free-falling, limbs flailing. I don’t know which of us shot out of our barstools first—Reid to punch me in the arm or me to flee the kitchen, Mom’s hurt, Dad’s lie, our messed-up lives, what I had said.

I bolted.

Jackson. I needed his voice. His belief that everything was going to be okay, that I was still a good person. That he loved me even when I hated myself.

Retreating to my balcony, I recounted everything that I could remember to Jackson. My mouth was dry and parched when I was done, but I still felt teary and welcomed the reviving power of Jackson’s support:
Your mom’s a great lady. Guys have been known to be inordinately stupid. Your dad will come back. My dad did after he had an affair….

“He did?” I asked, astonished. The breeze cooled my cheeks, which still felt flushed from bailing on Mom and Reid downstairs. “When?”

“Five years ago.”

“What happened?”

“He hooked up with my au pair.” The sudden bark of Jackson’s wry, embarrassed laugh hurt my ear. I moved the phone away from me a fraction of an inch. “What a cliché, huh?”

“How old was she?” I asked.

“Twenty-two.”

I wasn’t sure why I sought those tawdry details, as if someone else’s worse transgressions could redeem my own father, but I did. “So,” I continued, “what happened to her?”

“Her agency sent her back home to Brazil, I think. I’ve never seen her again.”

There it was, a tendril of hope, so tender it could barely support the weight of my growing fantasy. Given another day or week, Dad would surely inventory all that he was sacrificing: our family, Reid, me. The balance sheet would tilt in our favor—how could it not?—and then Giselle would vanish from our lives, a shiny light that had temporarily blinded my father, blindsided the rest of us. So enamored with this homecoming vision, I was caught off-guard by what Jackson was now saying: “In a weird way, the affair was good for their relationship.”

“Good?” I asked, honestly flummoxed. “How is that even possible?”

“I’m not saying it’ll be good for your parents, but for mine, it was what they needed to appreciate each other.”

The echo of my accusation at my mother—
you’ve never once appreciated him
—rumbled in my head. But I refused to follow Jackson’s path of rationalization, not when I kept stumbling over the rocky shore of truth: How could “affair” be uttered in the same breath as “good”?

“Anyhow,” Jackson trailblazed over my silence, “my parents went into pretty intensive counseling for a couple of years and threw me into therapy. My sister was already in college, so she
escaped that torture. But you know, they worked through it. We all did.”

“How can this be good?”

“It opened up their communication and made them deal with a bunch of issues they’d been brushing under the rug. Like money and Mom’s shopping. And Dad’s control-freak ways.”

Suddenly, combustive anger flared through me. “So your father justified his affair because your mom liked to shop?”

“No…”

“And are you suggesting that sleeping with someone outside of your relationship is a good thing?”

“Rebel—”

I surged to my feet and gripped the metal railing. “Because if you are—”

“I’m not. Look, even though things worked out for the best for my parents, it doesn’t mean it was easy.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Did you really want to know?”

Feeling more at odds with Jackson than ever before, I wrapped an arm around my middle. Shivering, I said, “You know what? I’m tired. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

Without waiting for Jackson’s response, I hung up. Even though I set the cell phone far from me on the balcony floor, no amount of distance could fend off the foreboding that there was yet more hard news ahead. Jackson’s secret was a boulder that had sheared without warning off a mountain cliff, marooning me on one side of a trail, him on the other.

Around midnight, I vacillated in that infuriating state of being exhausted but unable to sleep. Every time I thought I might drift off, my mind replayed the conversations from the day until they jumbled into one giant morass of Mom-Dad-Jackson confusion. The thought of organizing my space—despite my moving out in a few weeks—felt comforting. So I methodically opened the boxes stacked neatly against the back wall.

The first box contained everything I held most dear: the artifacts from my summer architectural program and the first present Jackson ever gave me. I set the smooth river rock down beside a framed photo of us, so easy with each other from the start that I had convinced myself we were fated to be together. But if I could be stunned by Dad and his ability to cheat and his capacity to lie, then how well did I truly know anyone?

What other secrets, unknown and untapped, resided within Jackson?

I dove back into the moving box and retrieved my clock, the one Grandpa had given me shortly after Grandma Stesha left. That clock had lulled me to sleep night after night, each tick a heartbeat of steadfast love. The journey across the country had broken its delicate inner workings. No matter what knobs I pushed or dials I twisted, the timepiece had stopped when none of us were looking, freezing us in the unchangeable past.

On my desk, my phone lit up with Jackson’s text:
Rebel, call me.

I yanked the comforter off my bed, draped it around my
shoulders, and escaped to the small balcony outside my bedroom. For the first time since we moved, I deliberately left my cell phone inside. The air had cooled off drastically from its earlier mugginess.

How was it possible that on this day when my family fell apart, the stars could twinkle so bright—especially the North Star, which Jackson, stargazer, had pointed out to me once. “Just look up in the sky and you’ll find your way home, wherever you are.” What we had lost in our home, I wasn’t so sure we could ever find again. An invisible fault line had lurked beneath my family, and this move had triggered an unexpected seismic reaction.

A car came to a crunching halt in front of the house. In the dark, I could barely make out Dad’s silhouette as he climbed out of his car and sauntered down the driveway, his arms swinging, absurdly carefree.

Dad had come home, just as I knew he would.

I sprinted through my bedroom to the hall. Mom must have been holding vigil for him, too, because she beat me to the stairs, racing down with hope-lightened footsteps.

“Thom?” she called softly, not wanting to wake Reid or me.

From upstairs, I leaned over the railing to find Dad in the living room. He looked neither somber nor brokenhearted. Not even guilty. With a start, I recognized the way his chin jutted out: defiance. That expression stopped me at the top of the stairs.

“You didn’t know, did you?” Dad actually looked proud of
himself. Proud that he had conducted the affair so clandestinely that not even Mom’s purported sixth sense could detect it.

“So when did it start?” Mom lowered herself onto the edge of the sofa. Her fingers were woven together like mine, gripped tight while I huddled in the shadows.

“You want to know how it started?” Dad smirked. I recoiled from this stranger masquerading as my father. This wasn’t how I wanted to view him, even if, in a way, I could understand what Dad was doing. And why. Was it any different from how I wanted to skewer Mom with the truth, especially when she was caustic with impatience?

Dad remained silent for so long, arms crossed, that Mom had to ask: “How did it start, Thom?”

“It started in March. In Florida.”

March…

I sucked in my breath. March was when we went to Tuscany. March was when we celebrated Dad’s forty-fifth birthday and the launch of his new game. The back of my head rested against the cool metal slats, my mind stuck in March.

This last spring break, my family went on our first and only vacation where Mom was forced into the backseat, literally. Instead of Mom driving every decision down to the order of the sites we’d visit, a fancy tour company managed the details: the bikes waiting for us in Tuscany so we didn’t need to ship our
own. The air-conditioned van for riders who weren’t fit enough to handle long, hot rides. The guides who pointed out all the interesting spots they’d scouted earlier so we could maximize our sightseeing.

I swear, the entire time leading up to the trip, Mom was fixated on the exorbitant cost because she could have done all the organizing herself. So when her “This is so expensive” monologue began yet again that first morning in Italy, I rolled my eyes. They landed on Jackson, who was standing across the posh hotel lobby. If I thought my first look at Jackson was thorough, that was nothing compared with his gaze: wholly male, wholly appreciative, and wholly disconcerting.

Maybe it was because Jackson flushed, embarrassed at being caught staring, but I found myself grinning at him reassuringly. That was invitation enough for my Jackson. Later, he’d tell me, “Oh, yeah. That was as come hither as a smile could get.” In any case, he hithered around the couches in the lobby toward me.

Less than two minutes later, Mom ascertained from his parents that they had moved to Seattle at the beginning of the school year—“My husband went to Viewridge Prep, too!”—and that Jackson’s dad, Stan, was a Navy officer turned real estate tycoon—“My husband’s family is in real estate development, too. Muir and Sons.”

“You’re Adam Muir?” Stan said, looking at my dad, impressed.

“No, that’s my brother.” Dad shrugged without meeting Stan’s eyes.

“What are the chances of this?” Mom marveled aloud, echoing my thoughts uncannily, as we followed the bouncy, cute
tour guide outside. “Meeting you all the way here in Italy? Right, Thom?” Mom nudged Dad’s arm. If she had elbowed me instead, my mouth might have opened. Words I didn’t want to say aloud might have leaked out as I stared at Jackson and he stared back at me. Words like “Behold: proof of God.”