Far From the Tree Page 13

  Now, though, he was methodically shredding his napkin into evenly square pieces. Maya wondered if she was the only sibling to escape these disgusting habits. Dodged that bullet, she thought, as Grace stuck her straw back in her mouth and continued to chew it to oblivion.

  “I’m sorry,” Grace said to her, and in her defense, she really did look contrite. “I just wanted to make sure that you were okay, that’s all.”

  “I’m fine,” Maya said, and watched as Joaquin looked up and raised an eyebrow. “I am,” she said. “They fought like crazy. It’ll be nice to have a night when people aren’t screaming at each other so loud they shake the walls. I might actually sleep again.”

  Grace nodded but didn’t look convinced, and Maya threw a glance at Joaquin, desperate to have the subject changed. “So how are you?” she asked. “What’s new?”

  “Mark and Linda want to adopt me,” Joaquin said.

  Maya choked on her cookie.

  “What?” Grace said, yanking the straw back out of her mouth. “Are you serious? Joaquin, that’s amazing!”

  Joaquin just shrugged, though. “Yeah. They’re cool. They’re nice.”

  “They’re really nice,” Maya said, leaning forward a little. She had the urge to wrap a blanket around Joaquin for some reason. He always looked cold, hunched in on himself. She wondered what he had been like before Mark and Linda, then quickly realized that she didn’t want to know.

  “Seriously, Joaq, they’re crazy nice,” Maya said again.

  “You like them, right?” Grace added. “Like, they’re good to you and all of that?” She looked like the fate of the entire world hung on his answer.

  “No, yeah, they’re great,” Joaquin said. “It’s just . . . yeah. It’s a lot. Still trying to process it.”

  “Seventeen years is a long time to wait for a family,” Maya said, trying to sound encouraging, the way Claire always did when Maya felt down or ragged, and Joaquin’s mouth curled up into a smile that didn’t make him look either happy or sad.

  “It is,” he agreed, then laughed. “It’s a fucking long time.”

  “So do you have to do all the paperwork?” Grace asked. “Can we come to the ceremony?”

  “Grace, pump the brakes,” Maya told her.

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t know that I’m going to say yes,” Joaquin admitted. “They asked me a month ago, but it’s my decision.”

  Grace and Maya exchanged a glance between them. “Why . . . wouldn’t you?” Maya dared to ask. “You just said that they’re great.”

  Joaquin shifted in his seat, opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “Not sure,” he said. “Just a lot of things to figure out.”

  Maya wondered whether, if she shook Joaquin, all the thoughts he’d been holding in would fall out of him like candy out of a piñata. It was a tempting image.

  Grace was the first to speak. “Why wouldn’t you want them to adopt you?” she asked. “It’s not . . . You can say anything. I’m not judging, I’m just curious.”

  Joaquin looked like he wanted a car to drive through the shop window and interrupt the entire conversation. “It’s just hard to explain,” he said. “It’s a lot. There’s a lot.”

  Maya could see Grace starting to open her mouth again, so she gave her a tiny pinch, the same way she used to pinch Lauren when they were kids.

  “Ow!” Grace yelped.

  “My hand slipped,” Maya said.

  “It did not. You pinched me!”

  Maya shrugged. “You’re verbally assaulting Joaquin. Leave him alone already.”

  “Oh,” Grace said. “Sorry.” She was still biting her lip, though, and Maya knew that she was about to say something else—something equally delightful.

  “I still think we should meet our bio mom,” Grace said.

  There it is, Maya thought wearily.

  “Fuck. No,” she told her. “Absolutely not. Stop bringing it up—it’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s not ridiculous,” Grace shot back. “It’s totally reasonable.”

  Maya looked at Joaquin, who seemed like he’d rather be stuck in a broken-down car on the freeway than between the two of them. “Please back me up on this,” she said.

  Joaquin just looked at Grace while pointing at Maya. “What she said.”

  “Thank you,” Maya sighed, sitting back in her seat and reaching for her drink.

  “No,” Grace said, and now she seemed annoyed. “You tell me why you don’t want to, Joaquin. Don’t just say ‘what Maya said.’ That’s not fair. She’s your mom, too.”

  “No, she’s not,” Joaquin murmured. “She stopped being my mom a long time ago.”

  Maya raised an eyebrow at Grace as if to say, See?

  “If you want to go for it, Grace, do it,” Joaquin told her. “I’m not holding you back. I don’t really care. I just don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to know about her. I know when I’m not wanted, you know?”

  “Grace, why don’t you tell us something about your week instead?” Maya suggested. “My parents are divorcing, Joaquin’s parents want to adopt him, so you better have a good story. And don’t say, ‘I want to find my bio mom,’ or I’ll pinch you harder this time.”

  Grace’s face changed from annoyed to thoughtful before she finally said, “I punched a guy at school and now I have to be homeschooled until the end of the school year.”

  If Grace had said that she had been arrested for running an elephant-breeding program in her backyard, Maya would have been less surprised.

  “You what?” Maya said before she could stop herself. “No, you didn’t. I don’t believe you. Joaquin doesn’t believe you, either.”

  “I believe her,” Joaquin said gently, then pointed to Grace’s right hand. Her thumb was bruised, Maya suddenly noticed, and one of her fingers had a scabbed-over cut. “You didn’t tuck your thumb. Nice.”

  Grace just shrugged. “It all happened pretty fast.”

  “You seriously punched a guy?” Maya wished she had known this fact before pinching her just a minute ago. “What’s thumb tucking? Is Grace some secret boxer now?”

  Grace laughed in a way that didn’t sound funny, then ran a hand over her eyes. “Definitely not a secret.”

  “When you punch someone, you have to put your thumb over your first two knuckles. Here, like this.” Joaquin held up his hand to show Maya. “You can hit better and make more of an impact without hurting yourself.”

  “There’s not going to be a next time,” Grace insisted, but next to her, Maya nodded, pleased by this new piece of information.

  Maya was impressed that Joaquin knew all that. She wondered if this was what it would have been like to grow up with him, a big brother protecting her, teaching her how to protect herself, someone else to carry the burden, unearth the empty wine bottles from under the bed and inside the refrigerator. Maya had found another one in the bucket of cleaning supplies under the bathroom sink. She hadn’t told Lauren.

  “Why’d you do it?” Maya asked instead. “Did he touch you?” If that was the case, Maya wasn’t sure that she could stop herself from finding the guy and punching him again on behalf of Grace. (She’d remember the thumb trick, too.)

  “He just . . .” Grace looked as uncomfortable as Joaquin had earlier, squirming and biting her bottom lip. “He just said some pretty terrible things about my family, that’s all. I couldn’t let him get away with that.”

  “Family’s important,” Joaquin said.

  Maya nodded. She wondered how important it could be, though, when hers just seemed to keep fracturing into pieces.

  That night, she climbed into bed, the blissful silence ringing out throughout the house. Lauren had already gone to sleep. She and Maya had watched TV that night while their mom was upstairs on the phone. Maya could hear her voice but not her words, which made it hard to tell if she was slurring or not. Lauren had slumped next to her on the couch and didn’t argue when Maya changed the channel from a wedding show to a cheesy mov
ie, some romantic comedy that they had both seen at least fifty times before.

  She had tried to text Claire, too, but she hadn’t responded, and Maya felt that dark vine climbing up around her phone now, almost like it was keeping Claire’s response away. She knew that there were a million good reasons why Claire wasn’t writing back—she had homework, she was grounded, her phone was dead, she was at the movies with her grandmother, anything—but Maya kept checking it anyway, feeling angrier each time her text that read my dad moved out today went unanswered.

  By the time her head finally hit the pillow, Maya was exhausted. How nice, she thought, to be able to fall asleep without the muffled sounds of fighting, but after an hour of tossing and turning, she realized that the silence in their house was too loud, too still. Now that it was quiet, Maya could hear almost everything, including every tiny noise that sounded like someone was breaking into their house. It was ridiculous, of course. They pretty much lived in the safest (some people—like Maya, for instance—might say most boring) neighborhood in America. No one would actually break into their house. But Maya hadn’t ever really worried about the potential threat before. Her dad had always been there to protect her. Even when he had been gone on business trips, she’d known he would come back eventually.

  Now?

  She never thought silence could sound so scary.

  She eventually fell into a restless sleep, woken only by the buzz of a text message on her phone. It was Claire. I’m so sorry! it said. I was camping with my family. We just got back to civilization. Are you ok?

  Maya had forgotten about the camping trip, and she felt dumb for being upset about Claire’s absence. She held her thumb over the keyboard for a long time. It felt like there weren’t enough letters in the alphabet for everything she had to say, for all the words that wanted to tumble out of her.

  Where were you?

  I needed you.

  I need you.

  I’m scared of how much I need you.

  Instead she wrote back, I’m fine. Going to bed now. Chat tomorrow. Then she found a song on her phone that she hadn’t listened to in years, one that she had heard even before she had met Claire. She fell asleep to it, the words filling the silence in her room, the sudden cavity that seemed to be steadily growing, burrowing its way into her heart.

  JOAQUIN

  So how were Maya and Grace?” Mark asked from the front seat. Linda didn’t like driving on freeways, not if she could help it. She said they made her feel jittery. Joaquin thought that when Linda drove on the freeway, everyone in the car felt jittery.

  “They’re fine,” Joaquin said, then added, “Maya’s parents are getting a divorce,” because he knew that fine wasn’t going to suffice, not with Mark and Linda. They expected more from him.

  “Well, that doesn’t sound fine,” Linda said, turning around in her seat. Joaquin didn’t know how she could do that. He always got nauseous whenever he faced backward in a car.

  “I mean, not fine fine,” Joaquin explained. “I just meant that they weren’t missing any limbs or anything.”

  “Your standards for fine are pretty low.” Mark laughed as he changed lanes.

  “And Grace punched a guy,” Joaquin told them.

  “You sure you don’t want to rethink that ‘fine’ statement?” Linda asked, just as Mark said, “Grace punched a guy? She looks like the human equivalent of a kitten.”

  Joaquin had no idea what that meant, but he decided not to ask. Sometimes Mark’s brain worked in weird, creative ways. “I guess someone at school said something bad about her family, so she clocked them.”

  Later that night, though, when he was upstairs in his room, Joaquin regretted what he had said. Not the part about Grace, but the part where he’d told his sisters that he knew how to punch. Maybe Linda and Mark would think he was violent now. Maybe they would wonder why he was even capable of throwing a punch in the first place.

  Joaquin hadn’t actually been in a fistfight before. But he had lived with a family when he was ten—two foster sisters, an older biological one, and Joaquin. The mom was an executive assistant in Long Beach and the dad was an amateur boxer. At first, Joaquin had worried about the potential ramifications of having a fighter in the family, but the dad had been really nice. He would even show Joaquin how to punch the bag that hung in the garage, which was too packed with stuff to park any cars in it.

  “Like this,” he said to Joaquin one afternoon, and had tucked his thumb carefully around Joaquin’s small hand so that it was a perfect, solid fist. “Now hit the bag. Hit it hard.”

  Joaquin had punched, hard. He suspected that the foster dad just liked having a son to do things with (the girls weren’t interested in punching things in the dusty garage, apparently). The home had been pretty good, too, one of his best, but then one of the social workers had figured out that they had too many kids for the square footage of the house, and because Joaquin had been the last one in, he was the first one to go out.

  That’s when he had ended up at the Buchanans’.

  Joaquin had learned a lot of things in his seventeen years. One of the things that came from moving from family to family was that he learned how to adapt, how to change his colors like a chameleon so that he could blend in to his surroundings. He always hoped that if he did the correct things, said the correct things, no one would realize that he was a foster kid. Everyone—neighbors, people at school, the person who bagged their groceries—would just think that he was one of the bio kids, as permanent as blood, someone who could never be traded in, swapped out, sent away.

  So he had learned boxing from one family. He also knew how to make great chocolate chip cookies and loaves of bread from when he lived with the family whose dad was a pastry chef at a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles. Another mom taught him calligraphy, and then he had an older foster brother who was super into early punk music and used to greet Joaquin at the door holding an album and saying, “Wait until you listen to this.” Joaquin had loved the attention. Not so much the music, though. It jangled his nerves.

  He didn’t mind adapting like that. It felt like hopping from stone to stone, picking up tricks of the trade along the way, leveling up on his way to the final battle. He would watch the families to see if they waited to say grace before dinner, if they put their napkins in their laps and kept their elbows off the table. Whatever they did, Joaquin did it, too.

  It was when people assumed that he didn’t know things that he got upset. He still remembered one foster mother, an older woman who had smelled like cloyingly sweet powder, like someone had pulverized rose petals and sprinkled them on her clothes. She had crouched down in front of Joaquin upon his arrival at her house, smiled with her yellowing teeth, and said, “Do you know what iced tea is, sweetheart?”

  Joaquin knew immediately that she’d asked him that because he looked Mexican. He knew that tone of voice, the slow speech in case he didn’t understand English (like speaking more slowly would somehow be more effective), the assumption behind the question that he had never experienced something as basic as iced fucking tea before. When he had nodded and said, “Yes,” she had seemed almost disappointed, like someone else had planted their flag in Joaquin before she could get the chance.

  Since that day, Joaquin had hated iced tea.

  That night at dinner, both Mark and Linda kept glancing at each other. Joaquin felt like he was watching a tennis match, glancing back and forth between both of them.

  He finally couldn’t take it anymore.

  “What?” he said, spearing a piece of broccoli with his fork. (At Mark and Linda’s, Joaquin had adapted to eating vegetables at every meal. Broccoli and spinach were fine; brussels sprouts were death, even when they were cooked in butter.)

  “What what?” Mark replied, mostly because that was their routine.

  “You keep looking at each other,” he said, gesturing with his fork at them. “Something’s up.”

  Mark and Linda looked at each other again.

  �
��See?” Joaquin said.

  Linda smiled at that. “We just wanted to talk to you about what we discussed last month.”

  Joaquin set his fork down and readjusted his napkin. (In his lap.) “Oh,” he said.

  Mark cleared his throat. That’s how Joaquin knew he was nervous. Mark had all sorts of tells, but that was a big one. “We just wanted to know if you had had time to think about it. We know this has been a busy month for you, what with finding Maya and Grace and getting to know them.”

  “But,” Linda quickly added, “we’re fine with waiting if you need more time to think about it. We don’t want to pressure you at all, sweetheart.”

  Joaquin had thought about it so much that he didn’t think there was any possible way to have new thoughts about it.

  “I’m still thinking,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  Mark cleared his throat again. Linda tried not to look hopeful, but she didn’t have much success at hiding the expression that flitted across her face.

  Joaquin thought about Grace defending her family, about Maya’s parents splitting up, her dad moving out. “I have a question,” he said.

  Mark and Linda sat up at the same time like nervous rabbits, their ears pricking up. “Of course,” Mark said. “We imagined you would. You know we’re always here to answer questions if you need it.”

  “And we’ll answer them truthfully,” Linda added. She knew that was important to him.

  “Okay,” Joaquin said slowly, sitting back in his chair. “So if I say no, that I don’t want to be adopted, do I have to leave?”

  Linda seemed to wilt, while Mark looked like one of those helium balloons that Joaquin had gotten from a birthday party when he was seven. He had been so excited to bring it home and keep it, but the next day it was sunken and deflated, almost to the ground. Seeing Mark that way made Joaquin feel as bad as when he had woken up and seen the balloon.

  “I mean, I’m not saying no,” he quickly added. “But I just wanted to . . . yeah. I just wanted to know.” Now Joaquin was the one clearing his throat.

  “Joaquin,” Linda said, and her voice was as soft as it was whenever he had a nightmare, like it could be a protective barrier between him and any bad thing that would possibly happen. “No matter what you decide, no matter what happens going forward, there will always be a place for you in our home.”