Authors: Justina Chen
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Family, #General, #Marriage & Divorce, #Girls & Women, #Juvenile Fiction / Girls - Women, #Juvenile Fiction / Family - Marriage & Divorce, #Juvenile Fiction / Family / General
Return to Me (34 page)
Grandma had chimed in then, as we closed the front door to the Nookery for the last time: “How else do you clear space for new opportunities? And we just have to have faith that something better is in store for us.”
As far as I’m concerned, that’s true. Look at my life that’s flourished after an unexpected, unwanted pruning.
Like Jackson.
When we both headed our separate ways to different graduate schools three years ago, we had let each other go. It wasn’t because our love for each other had faded or that we’d drifted apart. Far from it. When life presented Jackson with the opportunity to work in the Canary Islands, where one of the world’s largest telescopes is located, I insisted that he take it. He had to. Meanwhile, I was being pulled around the world for research trips during my breaks.
For people who claim that platonic relationships are impossible or that people can’t remain friends with their exes, I have one thing to say: Puh-lease. Look at Mom. While she and Dad aren’t exactly BFFs, he and his wife number three have taken Mom and me up on our invitation to visit Toda Vida this summer. After two years of boycotting my treehouse campouts with Dad because they were too bittersweet, I proposed that we
change instead to a yearly adventure: rock climbing in the Gunks one summer, canyoneering in Bryce Canyon another. Dad actually accompanied me on a trip to Rwanda. There, we visited a church where two thousand parishioners had been slaughtered, every last one of them. He surprised himself and me by admitting that he could feel the residual horror and sorrow in the ocher building. After we stumbled back into the sunlight, he held me tight and whispered, “I’m sorry.” So while people may not make one-eighty changes, transforming dramatically from cynic to believer, for instance, it’s completely possible and infinitely probable that we are all able to make small shifts in understanding, small steps toward forgiveness.
Just yesterday Jackson called me, telling me that he wanted to spend a few days here this summer, timed so that we can finally watch the Pleiades meteor shower together. He followed up that conversation with a texted factoid that the star cluster is also known as the Seven Sisters, a perfect symbol for Mom, Grandma, the Bookster moms, Ginny, Shana, and me. That startling fact made my heart bloom in ways that Grandma might call True Love. So you never know. That is the wonderful weirdness of life. The twisting of fate can happen at any given moment and hand-deliver a second chance.
Like now.
Mom speeds past a wooden sign with an etching of a large wave:
RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
.
“You are kidding me,” I say, whipping around to make sure I had read the sign correctly. “Did that really say ‘river-rafting outfitter’?”
My mom and grandmother cackle. To be accurate, they guffaw, which deteriorates into gasped snorts at the sight of the inflated river rafts tied on top of a fleet of vans. I join in with my own high-pitched hysteria because, really, who would have imagined us—us!?—white-water rafting?
“Our people drown,” I finally manage to mumble.
“That’s why we’ve been taking swim lessons for the last seven summers, remember?” says Grandma Stesha smartly before she waves at Grandpa George, Reid, and Peter, who are milling in front of a raft, wet suits on.
“Come on, honey,” Mom says, holding my door open for me.
“Hey, isn’t that my denim jacket? When did you commandeer it?” I ask as I check out Mom’s outfit, a flirty short skirt and a T-shirt silk-screened with a compass, topped with my favorite, long-lost denim jacket that I haven’t seen since the summer our lives were upended.
“I literally just dug it out of a box that must have gotten misplaced between all the moves.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you’ve got to see this.” She unbuttons the front pocket and draws out a river rock, my wishing rock that she had plucked from the shores of our island home so long ago. “Here. For you, again.”
“Come on already!” yells Reid, his voice at eighteen deeper now. What I never tell him is that sometimes I miss his boy voice. Every once in a while, I catch a fleeting expression that reminds me of him at ten, which, oddly, makes me love my brother even more. He tips back his baseball cap, embroidered
with the title of the novel he’s been busy revising:
Delphi
. Mom had those hats made for all of us over Thanksgiving, after Reid snagged one of the best agents in publishing.
Before long, dressed in our wet suits, we join the guys. And let it be known: Armor, whether neoprene or metal, is never a good look.
As brave as I fancy myself, my courage flees when we are deposited at the put-in spot for our raft. Now every warning from our five-minute training session about how the Taos Box is the “most exciting rafting trip” and “
not
for the timid” comes rushing back at me as I stand before the merciless river. My breathing quickens. If anyone so much as brushes against my hand, they’ll gag at its clamminess.
How could I have forgotten that the river isn’t a swimming pool, still and calm, the only way I like my water? The river is churning with life, its breath the current, its emotions the rapids. This is no docile pony ride at a petting zoo.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” the guide asks as he beholds me staring at the raft bobbing madly in the river.
“Drowning!”
“You won’t drown. The worst that would most likely happen is you falling in.” As if he could picture that scenario all too well, he double-checks my helmet and tightens the chin strap. It’s a good thing he hadn’t chosen medicine as his vocation; his clinical bedside manner has left me more worried than before. “So just lean back. Don’t fight the water.”
The last time I had been in open water, nobody noticed that
I was drifting down to the lake’s bottom until Dad jumped in to rescue me.
And now it’s Mom who hands me an oar.
“You first,” she says, gesturing to the raft.
“But you’re the wise mother,” I retort, gripping the oar tightly. “Aren’t you supposed to show me the way?”
“You’re young; you’ll heal faster.”
“You’re older and more experienced.”
“Watch and learn, then.” Mom shoots a cheeky grin at me. Peter holds his hand out to help her board.
Serious. Directed. Goal-oriented.
Those were the words I had heard applied to Mom before the divorce. But now? How would people describe her? Describe any of us?
As if he hears my question, the guide answers, “I’ve never taught three generations of newbies before. Adventuring must run in your blood.”
“It does,” Grandma Stesha, Mom, and I say in unison.
Upriver, a raft launches into the water. A woman screams. I shiver, alarmed, until I hear the encore performance: her peal of laughter, a sound that sings of life and fun and adventure.
I close my eyes and consult my heart. My inner voice whispers:
Yes.
Maybe that’s just it. We all have a choice after being hurt by people we love, pummeled by life circumstances we cannot control. We can choose to cower at the river’s edge, watching as life sails past us, always the bystander, never the participant. We can shade our eyes and fret about all the untold dangers below
the surface. We can play and replay all the warnings we’ve ever heard.
Or.
Or we can equip ourselves with what we need to survive: wet suit, helmet, a good guide. And our own oar. We can quiet our fears and shore ourselves up:
Enough. This is enough. I have all I need.
I board.
“See?” says the guide loudly above our exuberant cries after our raft drops precipitously and we are airborne for the first of many long, frightening, exhilarating moments. “Nothing to be scared about.”
Yeah, right
, I want to correct him, but I’m too busy oaring and clinging and laughing and screaming.
An hour into the rafting trip, the guide tells us that we’re all way too dry. So he steers us over to a cliff, some twenty feet high, and asks in half challenge, “Who wants to jump in?”
Grandma, Mom, and I glance at each other swiftly, and our answer can be read in our actions. We clamber out of the raft, one after another, and ascend the narrow trail cut into the hill. Twenty feet seemed a whole lot shorter from the raft than it does standing on the edge of the cliff.
“Who’s going in first?” the guide calls from the raft.
“Wait! I need to do something first,” I say, and I unzip my wet suit enough to remove the smooth wishing rock from inside my bikini top. I hold that skin-warmed stone to my heart, close my eyes, and lift my head toward the sun. And then, and only then, do I throw my wishing rock, which has journeyed so long and come so far, into the river.
What I wish for, I already have.
I hold my hands out now to my mother on one side and my grandmother on the other. You would think from the matching silhouettes of our shadows that we are sisters.
“Ready?” I ask them.
I don’t know if I squeeze their hands or they squeeze mine. Sistered together, side by side, we fly.
The last few years have convinced me that I am the luckiest woman to have the friends and family I do…
My thanks to Mama and Baba: my parents, who are Love and Strength.
Pete Higgins, Robbie Bach, John “JB” Williams, Craig Beilinson, Mike Wagner, and John Launceford: my guardian angels whose wingbeats sound of beginnings and yes. Lorie Ann Grover, Dia Calhoun, and Sue Lim: my beloved sanctuaries on two continents, always. Sherilyn Anderson, Lauren Stolzman, Molly Goudy, and Ardeth Hollo: my guides, wise and beautiful. Janet Lee Carey and Martha Brockenbrough: my muses, who kindled this book with walks and retreats. And Peter and Jill Rinearson: my innkeepers, who opened their haven to me so I could finish this story.
Deep gratitude to Blaise Goudy, Cindy Edens, Jim Graham,
Lisa Chun, and Josh Brevoort: the creative spirits who shared their love for all things architecture. Pardon any mistakes and creative liberties I took, especially with Columbia University.
Jerre Learned, Michelle Morgan, and Sophia Everett: gorgeous women in the know.
Steven Malk: my champion and warrior whose unrelenting belief in me is oxygen. Alvina Ling, Bethany Strout, Connie Hsu, Megan Tingley, Tracy Shaw, Victoria Stapleton, Zoe Luderitz, Barbara Bakowski, and the entire Little, Brown team: My goodness, how I adore you.
Derek Dohn: my great adventurer of a friend. You are so spy! And Sofia and Tyler: you are my every word. Always.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Justina Chen
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-0-316-20201-5