Return to Me by Justina Chen

found myself in the backyard, foraging for materials to build my first fairy house in years. Kneeling on the grass edging the flower beds, I collected a few blue-gray pebbles and tiny fern fronds that would dry into a rich brown roof.
    “Reb! Hey, Reb!” Reid stood at the edge of the deck, clutching his journal in one hand, my cell phone in the other. Even though Mom had instructed him to get ready for the day, Reid was still in his pajamas. No doubt he’d been lost in yet another one of his fantasy novels. “Your phone’s driving me crazy.”
    Straightening, I approached Reid, knowing who had called yet again. I set my brown bag of building materials on the deckbefore taking the phone from Reid. Text message number three from Jackson was noticeably salty:
Silence is not golden.
    I sighed. Even though I knew it wasn’t fair, I shut off my phone altogether.
    “What’re you doing?” Reid asked, disturbed as though his world had been rocked a second time by my setting my phone down instead of responding.
    “I’m making a fairy house,” I answered.
    “Really? Like Tolkien’s Lórien?”
    “His what?”
    If Reid raised his eyebrows any higher, his hair would be wearing a toupee. “The treehouses where elves lived…”
    Startled, I realized that Reid had never seen me construct a fairy house. After all, I had stopped building them when he was four. So ignoring his pained disbelief that anyone could be so ignorant of
The Lord of the Rings
, I plucked a few rocks from my bag and placed them on his open palm.
    “Here,” I said, beckoning for his journal. “I’ll design a hobbit house for you. Unless you want an elven treehouse.”
    I hadn’t even finished my sentence before he entrusted me with his birthday gift.
    “This is so cool,” Reid breathed when we finished the sketch: tiny stones for walls and a thatched roof woven from strips of bark. For the first time, I experienced what it must be like to be an architect collaborating with a client, and I loved it. As Reid scrutinized our plan, completely absorbed, I felt at once how much I was going to miss my quirky brother when I was away atcollege… and worried that I was leaving him to navigate this torn home life by himself.
    “Reb…” Reid began hesitantly.
    I erased an errant line, blew away the rubber droppings. “Yeah?”
    “Do you think we’re going to be okay?”
    I jolted, and the eraser skidded across the drawing but, luckily, didn’t mar the sketch. I knew what Reid was requesting: ping the future, report back in the present. But that was an invitation to a secret society I wasn’t sure I wanted to belong to, a faith in my visions I wasn’t sure I deserved. Look at Mom, who was joining the women in our family as yet one more oracle cursed to stand alone in life without a partner, soul mate, helpmate.
    “Do you?” Reid asked persistently.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “Don’t know or don’t want to know?”
    I narrowed my eyes at Reid for having the audacity to ask me the question I was too afraid to ask of myself. It was one thing to have visions, but to court them deliberately? To look unflinchingly at all the other ugliness that might linger in the Pandora’s box of our father’s deception?
    No, thanks. Maybe Ginny had it right all along. Maybe my wish was a curse, a self-fulfilling prophecy. With a start, I recalled my last wish on Lewis Island, that Mom’s life would be as upended as mine. My God, what had I done? Had I changed her fate somehow, some way?
    Reid stared intently at the drawing as though he wanted to vanish within the lines on that page. I would have gone willinglywith him if I could. His question stretched invisibly between us, a taut tightrope. He deserved an answer, no matter how precarious it made me feel.
    But what could I say that could possibly comfort him? A prophecy was no promise of solace. Just look at how mine about Ginny’s dad had unraveled her. I grasped for anything and found inspiration in the