Return to Me by Justina Chen Page A

unlucky source of our drawing, the treehouse from Tolkien’s fantasy world. So I asked, “How would you get us out of this ick if we were a fantasy novel?”
    “Us?”
    “Mmm hmm. Us.”
    That one simple question filled Reid with ideas so rapidly, so abundantly, I could practically hear them collect like raindrops in a cistern during a storm. It was as though he had been waiting his entire eleven years of life to be a fantasy novelist. All he needed was the right trigger. Without another word, Reid leaned forward in his chair, plucked the pencil out of my hand, and began to write furiously. Whatever story he had begun to concoct in this wild, gasping rush of hope, I was confident he would write his way to safety. That was far better than I could manage. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t even string together a simple one-hundred-sixty-character response to Jackson’s latest text:
Talk to me.

    “I’m not sure what you’re doing,” Grandpa George told Mom later that morning as he set a bag of Kona coffee beans and a boxof chocolate-covered macadamia nuts on the counter, “but I’m hanging out with my grandkids.”
    “I thought you might like to go to the nature reserve. It’s supposed to be just ten minutes away,” Mom said, plucking a hot-pink binder from the bookshelf where the cookbooks were haphazardly stacked, some even upside down. “I’ve got the information right here.”
    “I’ve got this covered, Betsy. Relax today. Take a nap. Eat a chocolate.” His brows drew together as he glanced down her scrawny frame. “Or the entire box. Do whatever you want.”
    Mom nodded quickly as her eyes filled with tears, and with chagrin, I realized how rarely I offered to help her.
    “So, what sounds good to you?” Grandpa asked me.
    “I’d love to check out Columbia,” I said.
    “Oh, honey, that’s all the way in Manhattan,” Mom started to protest.
    “No problem,” Grandpa said.
    “You’d take her there? The city? You hate cities.”
    “Yeah, but I’d love to see where my granddaughter is going to learn to be an architect. And then she can show you around later.”
    Mom flipped to another section of the binder. “Oh, I have some info about Manhattan.”
    “Elizabeth, put that away,” ordered Grandpa George.
    Since Mom didn’t look like she was going to obey anytime soon, I took the binder from her. Each section was neatly labeled with colorful tabs: gardens and nurseries, farmers’ markets,architecture, antique dealers, bookstores and libraries, sports, and pubs. Every single one of these activities mapped to our interests, each meticulously researched from websites and blogs, articles neatly clipped from the
New York Times
, brochures Mom must have curated.
    I flipped another page over and found listings for paint stores that Mom and I loved to troll for their colors. After that, a page with contact information for all the local treehouses featured in the three coffee-table books she had given me for Christmas.
    “Mom, this is amazing!”
    Pleased, Mom smiled, her first real smile in a day. “Really?”
    “Yeah! When did you make this?” I asked.
    “Before,” she answered vaguely, as though she knew all her efforts to create a wholesome family had been futile.
    Grandpa led the way out to his rental car. “Kids, what we need is a sense of adventure. And we’ve got plenty of that. Did your mom ever tell you about the time she thought she could fly?”
    “What?” I asked.
    “Oh, yeah. Your mom had just watched
E.T.
and got it in her head that if she hopped on her bike and launched off a big enough boulder, she could fly. She did… for half a second before she crashed and knocked out her front tooth.”
    I stared at my mother, who had followed us to the car, opening the passenger-side doors for us.
    “Dad, sheesh!” she said with a smile, and only then did Inotice the slight discoloration in one of her front teeth. Despite her words, Mom flushed, a daughter beloved. “How did you