Return to Me by Justina Chen Page B

remember that?”
    Grandpa George added in a voice meant to carry to Mom before he shut his door, “My one and only job when your mother was growing up was to make sure she stayed alive. She’s a daredevil but a terrible planner.”
    “Mom? She’s the most detail-oriented person on earth,” I said as I buckled myself into the passenger seat. “I mean, did you see that binder?”
    “No, being organized is a foreign language she forces herself to speak to keep your lives in order. Your mom is a zero with details. So is your grandmother. Who do you think taught them to make daily to-do lists so they wouldn’t forget anything?” He tapped his chest. “Did you know your mom broke her nose skateboarding down our steps?”
    “Mom did?” Reid said. Both of us peered at her as Grandpa reversed out of the driveway. I didn’t recognize the brazen girl Grandpa was telling us about any more than the broken woman behind us.
Carefree
and
adventurous
—those weren’t the words I’d ever apply to my detail-obsessed, khaki-wearing mom. I rethought the binder: It wasn’t to control how we spent our time but to direct it. She knew what we loved doing, which was why she knew to give Reid the journal to encourage him to write his own stories.
    Mom followed us up to the edge of the driveway. There she stood, hugging the binder close to her, a shield that was supposed to protect our family in our cross-country move. I wavedvigorously at Mom, and she grinned back at me, both of us touched by these simple gestures of affection.

    Instead of eating in a restaurant, we brought our gyros, stuffed with cucumbers and dripping with garlicky tahini sauce, to the High Line, an urban oasis three stories above the city. Grandpa told us that this public park had been reclaimed from a defunct elevated railroad in the Meatpacking District originally built in the 1930s. Now birch trees and meadow grasses sprouted among the abandoned trestles. And we were stretched out, three peas in a pod of lounge chairs set on casters atop the rail lines.
    One bite, and I was disturbingly full. Who knew that my heart and stomach had a symbiotic relationship: Both felt shrunken.
    “Your mom would love this place,” Grandpa said.
    Humbled, I tilted my face to the sun. Even though Grandpa hadn’t lived with Mom since she left for college, he knew the core of her: what she loved. What made her happy, filled her with joy. Years from now, would Dad know the same about me, considering he had dismissed my fairy houses, steered me to large-scale architecture, ignored my love for treehouses?
    Grandpa crossed his arms behind his head while he stared up at the cloud-pocked sky. “You’ll have to bring your mom here.”
    “But then she’d want to make a mini version of this back home,” Reid said with his mouth full.
    “Probably,” Grandpa and I said at the same time.
    We all laughed. I laughed again; I couldn’t help myself. Nor could I explain my spontaneous burst of tears until Reid asked, “What?”
    “Mom’s home alone,” I said, sniffling.
    Grandpa reached over to rest his hand atop mine. “It’s okay to feel happy even during this ordeal. In fact, you should grab as much happiness as you can, especially during this time. People are resilient. Your mom is. You are. You always have been.”
    We never talked about my near drowning off Grandpa’s houseboat; none of us did. Grandpa tightened up whenever I mentioned missing his houseboat, sold shortly after the accident.
    “Isn’t it weird to think that you can find something this soulful… even here in a big city?” I asked as I watched a blonde girl with a birthmark like a cloudburst on her face sketch a robin bathing in a water fountain. The boy at her side wasn’t studying the bird or her artwork or the GPS device he held, but her, as though she was the most beautiful being he’d ever seen.
    Grandpa smiled, a Cheshire cat smug with a delicious secret. “When you come to the Big Island, you’ll