Far From the Tree Read online

  But then there had also been Juanita, the foster mom who stroked his hair and called him cariño when he had the stomach flu one winter; Evelyn, who organized water balloon fights in the backyard and used to sing Joaquin a song at night about three little chicks who curled up under their mother’s wing and fell asleep; and Rick, the foster dad who once bought Joaquin an entire set of oil pastels because he thought that he was “pretty goddamn talented.” (Six months later, after Rick had too much to drink and got into a fistfight with the next-door neighbor, Joaquin had been forced to leave that foster home and his pastels behind. He still wasn’t quite over losing them.)

  Mark and Linda were the latest foster parents, and they wanted to adopt Joaquin.

  They had asked him last night, when he was sitting at the kitchen table putting his new wheels on his board. They sat down across from him, holding hands, and Joaquin knew immediately that they were asking him to leave. It had happened seventeen times before, so he knew the signs well. There would be excuses, apologies, maybe even tears (never Joaquin’s), but it always ended the same way: Joaquin putting his few things in a trash bag and waiting for his social worker to pick him up and take him somewhere new. (Once, a social worker had brought him an actual suitcase, but that had gotten ruined at the next home when two of the other kids got into a fight. Joaquin preferred the trash bags. That way, he had nothing to lose.)

  “Joaquin,” Linda started to say, but Joaquin interrupted her. He liked Linda and he didn’t want one of his last memories of her to be full of quivering excuses and weak reassurances.

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “I get it, it’s okay. Just—is it because of the car door? Because I could fix it.” Joaquin wasn’t sure how he could do that—his job at the arts center wasn’t exactly making him into a millionaire, and he had zero idea of how to fix a car dent himself, but hey, wasn’t that what YouTube was for?

  “Wait, what?” Linda said, and Mark scooted his chair closer to Joaquin’s, which made Joaquin sit back a bit. “Don’t worry about the car, sweetheart, that’s not what we want to talk to you about.”

  Joaquin rarely felt off-kilter. He had gotten good at predicting what people would do, how they would react, and when he couldn’t predict their behavior, he knew how to provoke it instead. The therapist Mark and Linda made him see had called it a defense mechanism, and Joaquin thought that sounded exactly like something that someone who never needed a defense mechanism would say.

  But Linda wasn’t saying the lines in the script that Joaquin had come to know by heart.

  Mark leaned forward then, putting his hand on Joaquin’s forearm and squeezing a little. That didn’t bother Joaquin—he knew Mark would never hurt him, and even if he tried, Joaquin had three inches and about thirty pounds on him, so it would be a fast fight. Instead, he couldn’t help but feel like Mark was trying to keep him steady. “Buddy,” Mark said. “Your m— Linda and I wanted to talk to you about something important. If it’s all right with you, and you’re okay with it, we’d like to adopt you.”

  Linda’s eyes were shiny as she nodded along with Mark’s words. “We love you so much, Joaquin,” she said. “You . . . you feel like our son; we can’t imagine not making it permanent.”

  The buzzing in Joaquin’s head almost made him dizzy, and when he looked down at the skateboard wheels in his hands, he realized that he couldn’t feel them. He had only felt like this once before, when Mark and Linda had (casually, oh so very casually) told him that he could call them Mom and Dad if he wanted. “Only if you want to, of course,” Linda had said, and even though she had been turned away from Joaquin at the time, he could still hear the tremble in her voice.

  “Your call, buddy,” Mark had added from the kitchen island, where he had been staring at his laptop. Joaquin noticed that he wasn’t clicking through websites, though, just scrolling up and down on the same page.

  “’Kay,” Joaquin had said, and pretended to ignore their disappointed faces that night at dinner when he called her Linda, like nothing had happened that morning.

  Joaquin had never called anyone Mom or Dad. It was either first names or, in some of the stricter homes, Mr. and Mrs. Somebody or Other. There were no grandparents, no aunts or uncles or cousins like other foster kids sometimes had.

  And the truth was that he wanted to call Linda and Mark Mom and Dad. He wanted it so bad that he could feel the unspoken words sear his throat. It would be so easy to just say it, to make them happy, to finally be the kid with a mom and dad who kept him.

  They weren’t just words, though. Joaquin knew, in a way that he knew every true thing, that if he spoke those two words, they would reshape him. If those words ever left his mouth, he would need to be able to say them for the rest of his life, and he had learned the hard way that people could change, that they could say one thing and do another. He didn’t think Mark and Linda would do that to him, but he didn’t want to find out, either. He had once dared to call his second-grade teacher Mom one afternoon during their math lesson, just to feel how the word felt in his mouth, how it sounded in his ears, but the resulting embarrassment from the other kids had been so sharp and acute that it still burned hot when he thought about it all these years later.

  But that had been just a mistake. To call Linda and Mark Mom and Dad on purpose would mean that Joaquin’s heart would form into something much more fragile, something impossible to put back together if it broke, and he could not—would not—do that to himself again. He still hadn’t managed to pick up all the pieces after last time, and one or two holes remained in his heart, letting the cold air in.

  But now Mark and Linda wanted to adopt him, and Joaquin felt the skateboard wheels rumble under his feet as he took a hard right past the library. Mark and Linda would be his mom and dad whether he called them that or not. He knew they couldn’t have children (“Barren as a brick!” Linda had once said in that super cheerful way that people do to hide their worst pain), and Joaquin wondered if he was their last chance to finally get what they wanted, if he was just a means to an end.

  The library had a sign for a Mommy & Daddy & Me Storytime! on one of its windows as he sailed by.

  Joaquin had long gotten over not having parents. He wasn’t as dumb as he had been when he was little, when he’d tried to be charming and funny like those kids he saw on sitcoms, the ones with the stupid laugh tracks and the parents who just sighed when their children did something idiotic like drive a car through their kitchen wall. He changed foster homes so many times when he was five years old that he went to three different kindergartens, which meant he managed to dodge that brutal Star of the Week bullet, where kids talked about their homes and families and pets, all the things that Joaquin was already painfully aware that he lacked.

  Once, in tenth grade, Joaquin had had to write an essay in his English class about where he would go if he could travel back in time. He wrote that he’d go back to see the dinosaurs, which was probably the biggest lie he’d ever told in his life. If Joaquin could go back in time, of course, he’d go find his twelve-year-old self and shake him until his teeth rattled and hiss, “You are fucking everything up.” That’s when he had been really bad, when he would give in to the fury that bubbled up under his skin. He would writhe and scream and howl until the monster retreated, satiated for the time being, leaving Joaquin wrung out and exhausted, beyond comfort, beyond punishment. No one wanted a kid like that, Joaquin knew now, and they especially didn’t want one who wet the bed nearly every night.

  By the time Joaquin turned eight, he knew the game. His straight baby teeth had given way to buck teeth and gaps, his chubby cheeks had thinned into his approaching adolescence. He wasn’t baby-cute anymore, and it was a hard-and-fast rule that prospective parents wanted babies.

  He understood that there probably wouldn’t be anyone at his parent-teacher conferences at school, listening as the teacher told them what a good artist he was. There was no one to take a picture of him standing under the blue ribbon that someone had
pinned to his drawing at the school’s art fair in fourth grade, or to drive him to that one birthday party across town in fifth. Some of his foster parents had tried, of course, but it wasn’t like there was a ton of money or time to go around, and Joaquin had long ago figured out that if he didn’t expect people to be there, then he wouldn’t be disappointed when they didn’t show up.

  He still had that blue ribbon, though. He kept it buried at the back of his sock drawer, its edges frayed from the eighteen months that Joaquin had slept with it under his pillow.

  He hadn’t had that many strokes of good luck in his life, but Joaquin knew he had gotten lucky by not having any siblings. He had seen what that had done to other kids, how hard they fought to stay together and how destroyed they were when they were inevitably pulled apart. He had seen the older brothers try desperately to be adopted by families who only wanted younger sisters; he had seen older sisters wrenched away from younger brothers because there wasn’t enough room for three kids in a foster home, and social services sometimes separated siblings by gender. It was hard enough for Joaquin to keep himself together, keep his heart and mind above water in a tide that wanted only to drown him. He could never have kept someone else afloat, too. He was glad he didn’t have to, that he was untethered, even if he sometimes suspected that without that tether, he could just float away and no one would even know he was gone, that no one would ever look for him again.

  Mark and Linda would probably look for him, Joaquin realized as the arts center came into view, as the sun broke through the clouds. But they would not adopt him, he had decided.

  Joaquin had been adopted once before.

  And he was never going to let it happen again.

  GRACE

  After Grace’s parents had found out that she was pregnant, they had met with Max’s parents. “It’s a discussion,” her dad had said. “We just want to discuss our options.” But at fourteen weeks pregnant, Grace knew that there weren’t a lot of options on the table to discuss.

  Max’s parents didn’t want to discuss “options.” They all met in her living room, the one that Grace and her parents hardly ever used because the TV wasn’t in there; it was in the den. Nevertheless, there in the living room Max and Grace sat across from each other like they had when they’d first met in Model United Nations. To say that she and Max had united and become a single country was a joke that Grace kept thinking, but never said. She didn’t think anyone’s parents—or Max—would appreciate it. And it probably wasn’t that funny in the first place.

  Max’s dad was so angry that he was shaking. Even on a Saturday afternoon, he was wearing a collared shirt and a jacket, and he never took his hand off Max’s shoulder, but not in a comforting way. More like in a “you will sit here under my command” way. Max hated his dad. He always called him an asshole behind his back.

  “I don’t know what your daughter has done to my son—”

  “I don’t think that blame is going—” Grace’s mom started to say, and her hand was on Grace’s shoulder now, too. It was warm, though, too warm, and Grace already felt crowded enough with Peach continuing to grow inside her. She shook her off. She didn’t want anyone touching her, not even Max.

  Especially not Max.

  “Max has a future,” his dad said, while his mom sat silent. “He’s going to go to UCLA. This is not a part of his plan.”

  Grace’s parents didn’t say anything. She had plans to apply to Berkeley next year, but they weren’t talking about going up for a campus tour anymore. (Also, Grace knew that Max had cheated on his AP French exam, but she didn’t say anything about that, either.)

  “Grace has a future, too,” her dad said instead, speaking over Max’s dad. They looked like two hockey players about to start brawling on the ice. “And she and Max are both responsible—”

  “I don’t know what she said to get my son in this situation, but if you think you’re getting any of my money . . .” Max’s dad trailed off. His nostrils were flaring. Max shared that same trait when he was angry. Sometimes Grace called him Puff the Magic Dragon, but only in her head, and only when she was really mad at him.

  “It’s about the baby,” her mother interrupted. “And Grace and Max.”

  “There’s no Max and Grace,” Max’s dad said. His mom didn’t say anything. It was creepy. Grace guessed that you really got to know a guy’s family once you got pregnant with their son’s baby. “Max is dating a good girl now.”

  A good girl. The words hung in the air as Grace looked to Max, but he was looking down at the floor. “Max?” she said.

  He wouldn’t look at her. Or at Peach.

  Stephanie was the good girl, of course. Grace had no idea if she was a good person or not, but Max’s dad obviously equated “good girl” with “person whose womb is currently unoccupied.” So, if they were going by his definition, then yes, Stephanie was 99.99 percent a good person. Grace was 100 percent not.

  And that, in a nutshell, is how Grace and her boyfriend broke up.

  Max and Grace had dated for almost a year, which, if she thought about it, was about the same amount of time that it took Grace, later on, to grow Peach. But she couldn’t think about it that way, not at all. She couldn’t think about Peach without feeling a pain that sliced through her, splitting her open just like it did in the delivery room. Grace didn’t think it could be worse than that night, her mother gripping her hand, nurses urging her to push, but it was.

  Janie used to call Max Movie Guy because he was pretty much the guy in the movies: football player, white straight teeth, friend to all . . . but a better friend to some. She didn’t realize it at the time, but Grace liked him just because he liked her, and that wasn’t a strong enough tree to hang on to when the storm came. She knew that now, of course, because both Max and Peach were gone and her hands were empty, scratched from clinging too tight to something that should never have been held in the first place.

  “You’re fidgeting,” Grace’s mom said.

  “I’m not fidgeting, you’re fidgeting,” she replied.

  “You’re both fidgeting,” her dad said. “Stop it.”

  “But you have lint on your—” her mom interrupted him, reaching for his shirt. He playfully batted her hand away.

  “Fidgeting,” he said.

  The three of them were standing on a stone front porch, huddled together even though there was plenty of room to spread out. Grace probably could have done a cartwheel without taking out either one of her parents. That’s how big the porch was.

  And it wasn’t just any front porch. It was Maya’s front porch. Or, more accurately, Maya’s family’s front porch. A week after she and Grace had exchanged emails, Maya’s parents had invited her family to dinner, and they had accepted because, well, how exactly does one turn down that invitation?

  Maya and Grace had talked a few times, starting with Maya’s response to Grace’s first email: Well, it’s about time. It had been short and to the point, which Grace was starting to realize was Maya’s usual mode of response. And she didn’t use emojis or smiley faces made of semicolons and parentheses, either. Grace was beginning to wonder if her sister was really a humorless robot, but she assumed that even robots knew how to send the winking emoji. Maybe Maya was just super serious about technology. Or maybe she was one of those people who collected typewriters and longed for a landline like they used thirty years ago.

  Grace had a lot of questions for (and about) Maya, and she wasn’t sure how to ask any of them.

  When they pulled up to the house, Grace’s dad whistled under his breath and her mom said, “Oh my God, I knew you should have worn a suit.”

  “Dad hates wearing suits” is what Grace would have said if she hadn’t been busy staring at the house. It was a sort of stone mansion—only one turret short of being something out of a Disney movie.

  And it was where Maya lived.

  “I hate wearing suits,” her dad said. The three of them were still sitting in the car. Grace’s breath was foggi
ng up the glass; that’s how close she was to the window. It took them another few minutes to make it to the epic front porch, and when her mom rang the bell, the sound of chimes that came from inside the house played “Ode to Joy.”

  “Did we accidentally go to church instead?” Grace whispered.

  “You okay?” her dad said, turning to her as the doorbell continued to sing out.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Ask me again in an hour,” Grace whispered, just as the door was flung open and a smiling couple greeted them. They were both redheads. The man was wearing a suit.

  Grace heard her mom swear very softly behind her.

  “Well, you found the place!” the woman said. “Come in, come in!” She was A Lot, as Janie used to say. (And as she probably still said. Grace hadn’t talked to Janie in . . . a long time.)

  “It’s so nice to meet you!” the woman said. “I’m Diane, this is Bob.”

  They were both smiling at Grace like they wanted to eat her.

  Grace smiled back.

  She followed her parents into the house, which shone and gleamed and had the vague air of a mausoleum, thanks to all the marble. There was a double spiral staircase that wound up to a second-floor landing, also marble, and along the staircase, Grace could see a large portrait wall covered in professionally framed pictures.

  There was not a dust ball in sight.

  “Your home is so lovely,” said Grace’s mother, who read Architectural Digest the way—well, Grace had never met anyone who consumed anything the way her mom read Architectural Digest. Anyway, Grace’s mother was dying. Grace could see her mentally ripping out the carpet in their living room, adding a second wing, or quite possibly abandoning Grace’s father and her to live in this house instead. “This is just magnificent.”