Return to Me Page 5

  “I hope you like digging,” I muttered to Reid.

  My brother’s visualization powers must have been fine-tuned during our vision quest of a run, too, because he groaned, “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Okay, let’s head home!” Mom’s cheer wasn’t wind enough to blow Reid homeward. After one long block, he lagged so far behind us that I sighed like Mom, wishing again that Jackson were here in his Mustang to rescue us. But Mom had scanned the street, spotted a coffee shop at the corner, and asked, “Hey, kids, how about something cold to drink?”

  We hadn’t even begun to nod eagerly before Mom shepherded us inside to the welcome blast of air-conditioning. As I started feeling woozy from the aftereffects of the heat, we stepped behind a stylish woman with glossy black bobbed hair. Her son looked to be the same age as Reid. Mom asked me, “Green tea frappe?” while withdrawing a dollar and pushing the bill toward the cash register a scant second before the woman ahead of us discovered she was short some change for her iced coffee.

  “Are you sure?” the woman asked. Her cherry-red shoes made her look like a modern-day Dorothy, and when Mom handed her the calling card that Shana’s mother had designed as a bon voyage gift, I was positive the woman wished she could click her heels three times and be delivered far away from my mother.

  “Just promise to call me,” Mom continued breezily. “We’re new in town. I need friends!”

  Oh, geez, Mom wasn’t bribing a stranger to be her friend, was she? Mortified, I turned away, distancing myself from my mother. Before I knew it, she’d finagled the woman’s name—Angela—and arranged a playdate for Reid the next day, never mind that the boys didn’t even register each other’s presence. Never mind that Angela herself looked dazed, totally understandable since she had come for an iced beverage and left with an obligation.

  Soon after we gulped down our drinks, Mom hustled us toward an ATM machine. Not one to let any teaching moment pass, Mom made Angela’s empty wallet today’s lesson. As she fed her bank card into the machine, Mom told us, “Never leave the house without your phone, key, and wallet. And always carry an emergency twenty dollars. Oh, and a tampon.”

  “Mom!” Reid groaned. “Gross.”

  “Well, of course, I didn’t mean—” Mom started to say when the ATM rejected her request for a hundred dollars. The three of us read the bank message in disbelief; how could we have exceeded our maximum withdrawal limit for the day?

  “Dad must have taken out cash this morning for his trip,” I guessed as Mom tried—and failed—again.

  “Hmmm.” Mom pulled out her cell phone and called Dad, but he didn’t answer. After she left him a hurried message, I expected her to transform seamlessly into our cruise director, herding us home to tackle five more things before the day was over. Instead, Mom stared distastefully at this crystal ball of an ATM machine that had spit out a prognostication about an unsavory future.

  I couldn’t squelch the slow bubbling of unease. “Come on, Mom,” I said, and guided us home.

  “Okay, can you say embarrassing?” Rather than dissect every last detail of the ATM Incident with Jackson, I focused on Mom’s bribery for friendship, recasting that into an amusing anecdote. “Just you wait. I’m going to be able to write the best self-help book one day thanks to Mom, since everyone’s mistakes are my lessons.”

  But Jackson didn’t laugh the way I thought he would—not even a gratuitous chuckle. Instead, he asked, “Why would your dad need so much cash he’d max out the ATM?”

  “I don’t even know if it was Dad. Maybe the bank made a mistake. Who cares?”

  Jackson was silent.

  “Oh, please. It’s not like he’s buying drugs or anything.”

  “Hey, I didn’t mean that.” When I didn’t say another word, Jackson continued, “What can I do? Wire you some money?”

  “No,” I said firmly, and winced. Even to myself, I sounded too emphatic. “Dad’ll be home soon. And besides, we’ve got a credit card. It’s no big deal.”

  “Well, if you need anything…” Jackson’s voice trailed off, but he didn’t need to finish his thought. Even if I was annoyed at him, I knew he’d help me in whatever way he could. But the one whose reassurance I wanted was off the grid, not answering any of our calls.

  Chapter Seven

  Mom’s intentions were good—pushing what little cash she had left on me in the morning for a cab ride, despite my protests that I could take the bus and walk the three blocks to the architect’s office. “You can’t be flustered or sweaty for your interview,” she had declared. All my appreciation disappeared when she added, “You have your questions to ask Sam written down, don’t you? Like I told you to?” Of course, I hadn’t. I knew I’d remember them, but Mom had frowned when I said so.

  Like all good intentions, whether delivered via cab or not, I ended up flustered and sweaty in my form of hell anyway: waiting in a sleek lobby populated with beautiful people in tailored clothes, while I felt like a country bumpkin. Where my khaki pants, short-sleeved black T-shirt, and black flats would have been perfectly acceptable—and possibly even chic—in Peter’s casual office in Seattle, here on the East Coast I might as well have been dressed for yard work.

  The receptionist ignored me studiously, but twenty-five minutes after I was supposed to meet my potential boss, I approached her for the second time. She looked up at me from her awning of eyelashes, heavy with mascara—“Yes?”—as though I hadn’t been sitting six feet from her.

  “I’ll try his admin again,” she finally acquiesced, and didn’t lower her voice when she actually got a real human on the line: “Mollie, Sam’s interview is here. Yes, interview. Well, I don’t know, but she says she has an appointment with him.”

  That did not bode well. Embarrassed and feeling unwanted, I flushed.

  Another ten minutes, and at last I was escorted inside the architectural firm. Mollie, Sam’s assistant, was a middle-aged woman with a mission-driven click to her step. Her heels might have been as sky-high as her boss’s signature buildings, but she didn’t so much as wobble as she led me down the long hall. The only sign of warmth in this building was Mollie’s big smile, which she shared generously, as though she could feel my anxiety.

  “Have a seat,” Mollie said, gesturing me inside Sam’s vast corner office. “A client meeting ran long, but Sam should be wrapping up soon.”

  I perched awkwardly on the edge of the black leather chair in front of the glass-topped desk and shivered, not because of the air-conditioning but because the office’s aggressively modern lines made me feel insignificant and unwelcome. This was precisely how I had felt inside Synergy the one time Mom showed Reid and me where she used to work with the CEO. That corporate campus had been designed by Sam Stone, too. Strange thing was, if I told myself the truth, this remote distance was what I also felt inside our New Jersey house, built to be a statement, not an inner sanctum where you could safely retreat from the world.

  A long twenty minutes later, Sam strode in, all efficient energy, barking a few instructions to his assistant. My stomach tensed. Finally, as Sam rounded his desk, he noticed me, and Mollie quickly introduced us: “Your interview candidate, Rebecca Muir.”

  “Interview? Since when did I have an interview?”

  “For a summer internship…” Mollie said when I remained silent.

  How could I answer? I blushed, wanting to escape Sam’s intense, icicle-blue eyes that were sizing me up. His face was heavily wrinkled, though I doubted a single crease could be classified as a laugh line, since the corner of his mouth didn’t so much as lift a millimeter. Rather, he demanded, “How did you end up in my office?”

  All semblance of a response ran out of my brain.

  “Here? At Stone Architects?” he repeated, as though I were a dunce who had mistakenly crashed his advanced seminar for geniuses. He leaned against the edge of his desk, one hand on his thigh. “Well?”

  “Well, I’m going to Columbia this fall.”

  “G
ood, my alma mater. But who set up this interview for you?”

  “Oh, my mom talked to my uncle, Adam Muir, and he—”

  “Adam. That’s right.” At the mention of my real estate powerhouse uncle, Sam made his calculations and slotted me into his hierarchy. He held out his hand, but not to shake mine. “Let me see your sketchbook.”

  Every minute in this office had a lethal effect on my brain cells. All I could manage was to repeat one word: “Sketchbook?”

  “Any good architect worth his salt carries around his sketchbook at all times,” Sam said.

  That, at least, was no different from what Peter had told me, even though he hadn’t used the masculine pronoun, since I was clearly a she. On any other occasion, I might have been ashamed to show my doodles, but as I scrounged for my sketchbook in my messenger bag, I reminded myself that I had seen Peter’s. His book, like mine, was a chaotic mess of tiny drawings and musings, the creative process in action. What could Sam possibly have to denigrate about kernels of ideas and fledgling thoughts?

  Apparently, a lot.

  It took Sam all of five seconds to flip through my sketches of treehouses and research notes on sustainable materials. When he shut the book abruptly, it sounded—and felt—like a slap. I flinched.

  He asked, “Why are you here?”

  Sweat flooded my face. And under my arms. My gosh, I had no idea a body could leak so much fluid. I wiped my forehead nervously, wishing I had packed a bandanna the way Mom did—you never know when you’re going to need to staunch a wound. “Excuse me?”

  “You have decent ideas, but our aesthetics are diametrically opposed. You like small spaces.” He flipped open the journal, noted a page. His tone was patronizing. “Fairy villages.”

  “I love corporate workspaces!” I protested even as my underarms dampened. Great, exactly what I needed: to liquefy from embarrassment. Self-preservation launched me into a robotic synopsis of my college application essays. For once, I was grateful that Mom had made me rewrite the essays so many times, I had memorized them. “I want to learn everything I can about large-scale applications of sustainable building.”

  How a single word could convey so much doubt, I had never known until Sam’s dubious “Really.” Then he asked, “Have you ever been on a job site?”

  “Well, our architect back home—”

  “Who?”

  “Peter Nakamura.”

  “Does some nice urban fills.”

  Nice. The same damning word straight out of Mom’s arsenal of PR vocabulary. Nice suggested forgettable and mediocre and, above all, derivative.

  My voice might have been soft, but even I could hear its defensiveness: “Peter says it’s important to expand your creative palette. So that’s why I’m here.”

  “Do you always do what everyone tells you to do?” The slight shake of his head must have been a dismissal, because Sam parked himself behind his desk and punched a number on his phone. His assistant immediately rushed in to lead me to the lobby, far from Sam’s epicenter of condescension.

  “Someone will be in touch with you shortly.” Mollie’s look of compassion practically undid me. Before she sent me off to my regrets and second-guessing, she added, “His bark is a lot worse than his bite.”

  As I trudged to the bus stop, frustrated, I composed no fewer than five hundred different, scintillating answers to Sam’s questions. Why had I sounded so stupid, so inept?

  Later that night, I showered myself of sweat but couldn’t rinse off my shame. I tore every one of the sketches of fairy houses from my journal and shredded them.

  Not too surprisingly, the next morning Mollie called to tell me that Stone Architects was “unfortunately unable” to offer me an internship. So humiliated, I basically hung up on her. When I called Jackson right after that disastrous pseudo-conversation, he actually bristled: “As if you really wanted to work there, right?”

  “Well, yeah, I sorta did. Sam’s one of the best architects in the world. Plus, for the amount I sweated, I would have been model-thin in a week.”

  He didn’t laugh, not even a snort. “Why? The guy sounds like my dad. Besides, you should see your face whenever you talk about treehouses.”

  How many times had I overheard this conversation before, except that it featured my grandpa George explaining to Mom why he was quitting yet another pursuit to start a new one—carpentry one year, glassblowing the next? At his every excuse, my mother’s face would tighten with disapproval, while Dad reminded her later in private that they weren’t Grandpa’s retirement safety net.

  This time it was me responding to Jackson’s idealism with a pragmatic “Yeah, well, sometimes you have to pay your dues to pay your bills.”

  I knew I was parroting Dad and his career philosophy, but when had he ever been wrong? I was the one who failed, unable to reel in an internship that had been all but hand-delivered on a silver platter.

  Three nights later, Dad came home from his business trip just in time for Reid’s birthday cake. At the sound of his key in the door, Mom rushed to the kitchen to collect the chocolate cake we’d spent hours baking and frosting. Every last one of her attempts at conversation over dessert, though, sounded like interrogation: “Did you tell the board about your new marketing plan to target game developers?” I couldn’t blame Dad for his flatline responses. After all, he was the sought-after executive; he knew what he was doing. The closest thing to a career Mom had this last decade was managing our lives. So now we sat at the dining room table, silent, as Mom nibbled her scant sliver of cake while the rest of us devoured large slices.

  “Hey, little man, open your present,” said Dad, handing Reid his gift, a large box artfully wrapped and tied with an impressive bow. Inside was an autographed football encased in a clear acrylic box. “Brett Favre signed it. See? You can display it on your bookshelf.”

  Reid nodded, uttered a perfunctory “cool,” nothing compared with the awed “coooool” after he opened Mom’s gift, a leather journal filled with hand-torn paper.

  “To write your own fantasy novel,” Mom explained. Incredibly, even though we hadn’t coordinated, my gift to Reid was an old-fashioned fountain pen that matched the ancient-looking journal perfectly.

  Leaving the signed football on the kitchen table, Reid rushed upstairs, cradling his new journal and pen. Hurt, Dad scraped the last cake crumbs from his plate, and I glared at Reid’s receding back, wanting him to collect the football, fuss over the gift. Didn’t he know how to keep the peace? Who cared if he hated the sport? All he had to do was pretend.

  “Do you want another piece?” Mom asked Dad.

  “Sure,” Dad said as he retreated to the living room to work. After I served him his second helping, I escaped out the front door to text Jackson in the night air: SOS. He phoned me right away, as though he reciprocated my yearning.

  “I miss you,” I said.

  “Me too…” Jackson paused, then asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” I sat down on the front step and deliberately lightened my tone. “Tell me about today.”

  “So my dad sold the bird-watcher’s sanctuary,” he said.

  In one magical morning, that property had become Our Spot, just as Tuscany was Our Beginning. “Ohhh…” I sighed.

  “I know. But a really great couple bought it—the guy’s a carpenter, and the woman writes children’s books.”

  “That’s perfect,” I said, but what was even more perfect was how Jackson knew the type of people I’d approve to become caretakers of our property.

  I clenched the phone in my hand, ached to tell Jackson that ever since our move, I was afraid to sleep, petrified to see what lay behind my eyelids. I toyed with sharing this unshakable sense of uneasiness about how Dad had been incommunicado on his long business trip.

  But.

  Even as Jackson and I traded stories now, I remembered the way Dad had smirked at Mom the few times she voiced her forebodings. Like the winter night when seventy-mile-an-hour gales shook our anci
ent cedar trees as if they were maracas, the boughs rattling crazily as they scraped my skylight. The winds shrieked so loudly that Mom ripped the comforters and pillows off our beds and made Reid and me sleep in the living room, even though Dad scoffed that she was making a big deal about nothing. But the next morning on our way to the ferry, we passed our next-door neighbor’s house crushed beneath a thick Douglas fir. Mom didn’t say anything, just stared at that severed tree trunk and the demolished roof before her gaze darted over to Dad. He kept his eyes squarely on the road ahead.

  “I’m sorry, Rebel. I got to go,” Jackson said suddenly.

  “Oh, okay.” Gone for less than a week and the bonds connecting us were already overstretching. I bit my lip, disappointed. At what point would those bonds break?

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

  “You bet,” I said, even as a shiver made the phone tremble at my ear.

  I knew that, yes, I would talk to him tomorrow. But no, I wouldn’t reveal everything and risk Jackson thinking I was crazy. I hung up and stared at the dark cell phone screen that timed the minutes we had spent together. Together. So, like Mom, I kept my misgivings to myself. The price of admission was too high.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Dad said, peeking into my bedroom, where I lay on my stomach, journaling on the floor. He sounded more energetic and interested than he had during our entire dessert. “How’s the internship going?”

  “Oh,” I said and sat up, ashamed. I hadn’t even divulged the disaster that had unfolded in Sam’s office to my mom, too ashamed to admit that I should have listened to her advice and been better prepared. “Sam hated my work. I didn’t get the internship,” I said, holding my sketchbook up as proof. My doodles of cottages and treehouses had given way to sketches of skyscrapers in Dubai. It was about time I embraced modern architecture.

  “Well, here’s a trick I’ve used. Just figure out what the hiring manager likes and regurgitate it,” Dad said easily.