Anne stood watching for a while, and then she dove in.
It was almost too easy, navigating the abundance of grips and footholds offered by countless roots and branches. So easy that she glanced down and experienced a sudden wave of vertigo when she saw how high above the ground she was.
She retreated back along a wide branch until her back met with the trunk of the tree, and she sat in that secure nook while she caught her breath.
“Hey Mom!” Pete shouted. “Look at this!”
He swung from a narrow branch one-handed and made a flying leap to the next, catching it with his other hand and pulling himself into the canopy. He was high enough to give Anne a shock, but she bit back theBe careful!that rose in her throat.
“Amazing!” she shouted instead.
Pete beamed.
She stood and looked down, holding a branch for stability. Getting up had been easy enough… getting down safely was the tricky part.
Anne bent forward, clinging to her handhold as she surveyed her path back down the tree, and suddenly a memory rose up with startling clarity.
She must have been about the same age as Claire. Her dad had dropped a whole group of them off in Hilo for a change of scenery on a summer’s day. They had started at the beach, wandered across town, and finally ended up at Wailuku River State Park.
She’d climbed this exact banyan and gotten stuck – maybe even in the same spot. Oakley had tried to talk her down while their classmates jeered, but Anne was frozen. The longer she looked down, the worse it got.
And then Noah clambered up the trunk, nimble as could be, and offered her his hand. It was the first time Anne had put herhand in his, and she remembered it as clearly as if it had just happened. She could still feel the warmth of his skin and the way that her terror had evaporated, gone as quick as it had come on.
Suddenly, she’d been certain that she wouldn’t fall.
She had, of course.
Just not from the tree.
An entire year had passed in between that moment and their first kiss, but to Anne, that had always been the start of things. For her, it was the moment when their relationship had shifted from a childhood friendship into something more complicated and difficult to navigate.
It had always been strange to her that all of the angst and anguish that followed had begun with a moment of such simple steadiness… but that was always the way with her and Noah.
When they were together, things felt easy.
The rest of the world faded away.
And then as soon as she was alone again, she spiraled. As a teenager, she’d hated how he could make her forget everything else that mattered: her hopes and dreams, herself.
In the end, that was why she had driven him away. She had needed to figure out who she was without him – without all of them.
And where had it taken her?
Right back to the beginning.
Anne blinked with surprise when she found herself back on solid ground. She had been so lost in thought that she hadn’t even been fully conscious of her movements as she made her way back down the tree; muscle memory had kicked in, a relic of those long-ago summer days.
She refocused on the day in front of her, a sad sort of smile playing across her face as she watched her children climb.
It was impossible to regret mistakes that led to people… and yet it was hard to avoid the thought that she had wasted nearlythirty years trying to prove something to herself only to end up right back where she had started: living in her family home with no career and no direction, nothing driving her beyond motherhood and survival.
It was a good life, really. If she let it be.
And maybe that was the hardest part.
If she had stayed, she might have been able to build something. A real life. A real family. Not this fractured mess that she had created: one daughter abandoned and traumatized, two more children uprooted and fatherless.
She thought of all the extra time she would have had with her dad – and that was such a gut punch that she forcibly wrenched her attention back to the present. She would drive herself crazy thinking that way. Anyway, what she really wished was that Claire and Pete had grown up closer to their grandfather – but if she hadn’t moved to the mainland, they wouldn’t exist.
