Far From the Tree

by Robin Benway

  Joaquin hadn’t been able to disagree.

  Joaquin eventually carried his tamales home, then stowed them in the very back of the freezer, where he knew Mark and Linda would never see them. When he took them to school the Monday after their holiday break, Kristy had been so delighted—and Joaquin hated her, hated her for putting him in that position.

  And that’s when Birdie spoke to him.

  “You make tamales?” she said as soon as Kristy disappeared off to the teachers’ lounge. (Joaquin had been in the teachers’ lounge exactly once. It had been hugely disappointing.)

  “No,” Joaquin said. He hadn’t even realized that Birdie had been behind him. She had been as quiet as a hawk on a branch, watching, and he suddenly felt like a very small mouse. “I just bought them for her.”

  “Well, aren’t you nice?” Birdie said, then smiled at him. “Happy New Year, Joaquin.”

  They were together for the next 263 days.

  It was the happiest Joaquin had ever been.

  Birdie liked people, liked when they did embarrassing things like talk too much when they were nervous, or act shy because they didn’t know how to hide it. She laughed a lot, but never in a mean way, and sometimes if she didn’t sleep enough, she got really snippy and cranky, which only made Joaquin like her more.

  He hadn’t realized how much he had missed liking something, anything. He had numbed himself, according to Ana, the therapist who Mark and Linda sent him to, so that he wouldn’t feel any future pain. But it wasn’t until Birdie came along that Joaquin realized he had stopped feeling happiness, too, that the small curls of warmth that wound up his spine when she smiled at him burned and felt good at the same time. Like holding ice in his hand and having it melt against his skin. Joaquin wasn’t used to that.

  He fell in love with Birdie a step at a time, going from one stone to the next until he made it safely into the shore of her arms, and he had thought that maybe now he could understand what people meant when they said that home was a person and not a place. Birdie was four walls and a roof and Joaquin would never have to leave.

  But Birdie wanted things, things that Joaquin couldn’t get for her. She was going to move to New York and work in finance, she said. She was going to get her MBA from Wharton. She wanted to learn Italian and live in Rome for at least one year. She said all these things to him like she knew they would happen, and that he would be right there with her when they did. But when Joaquin looked forward, he could barely see anything at all.

  One night, he had gone to dinner at her parents’ house. They were always really nice to him, and Joaquin called them Mr. and Mrs. Brown even though they kept asking him to call them Judy and David. After dinner, Mrs. Brown brought out some photo albums, and even though Birdie kept saying, “Oh my God, Mom,” it was obvious that she was pleased.

  Joaquin looked at every baby photo, every first day of school, every Christmas morning, every Halloween. Birdie with her top two teeth missing, Birdie dressed like a cheerleader one year, a scientist the next. Birdie, whose smile never looked fake, who never wondered if anyone would show up at her academic decathlon, who never woke up in one house and went to sleep in another.

  And Joaquin had the horrible, terrible feeling that he would never be able to give this kind of life to her. There was no one to tell her about him, no one to share embarrassing stories about him that Birdie would love, or show her baby pictures of him. Mark and Linda had photos around the house, sure, but it wasn’t the same. Birdie wanted—no, needed—the world. She was used to it. These photos were her map, and Joaquin knew then that he was rudderless, that he would only lead her astray.

  He knew what it felt like to be held down.

  He loved Birdie too much to do that to her.

  He broke up with her the next day.

  It was pretty terrible. At first Birdie had thought he was kidding, then she had cried and cried, and yelled and yelled, and Joaquin didn’t even say “I’m sorry” because he felt that apologizing for something meant that you had done wrong, and he knew he wasn’t wrong. He had tried to hug her, but she had slugged him in the arm. It felt worse than almost anything else in his life, and when he went home, he had gone straight up to his room and pulled the covers over his head.

  Mark and Linda came up later that night, one of them sitting on either side of his bed, like bookends that kept him from falling over. “Judy Brown just called,” Mark said quietly. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” Joaquin said, not bothering to uncover his head. He wished they would go away, because nothing was worse than someone wanting you to talk when the words you needed to say hadn’t even been invented yet. And after a while, they left him alone, which somehow made him feel even lonelier, but at least that was familiar. Comforting, almost.

  He saw Birdie in school, of course, but she only glared at him in the hallways, swollen eyed and furious. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?” her best friend, Marjorie, had said to him one morning when he was at his locker, and when Joaquin said, “I know,” she just looked surprised, then stormed off.

  The next day, his social worker, Allison, came over and told them that he had two sisters who wanted to meet him.

  Two empty branches where the bird had been.

  “This is weird, right?”

  Grace was sitting next to Joaquin now, and Maya was up at the counter getting napkins while they waited for their order. “Like, we just met each other and now we’re eating burgers like it’s a normal day.”

  Joaquin sat up a little straighter. Grace’s posture was making him feel like a slouch. “Do you not want burgers?” he said. “There’s a burrito place across the street, or . . . ?”

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant,” she said. There was a steeliness in Grace’s smile, like it had been forged in a fire. Joaquin could respect that. He also knew not to ask about it.

  “I just meant that it’s strange, that’s all,” she continued as Maya came back, holding napkins under her arm and a bunch of tiny paper cups filled with condiments in her hands. “I feel like I should know what to say, but I don’t.”

  “I know,” Joaquin said. Maya plopped down on his other side with a sigh, then tucked one of her legs under her. “I, um, I actually Googled,” he admitted.

  “Did you really?” Maya giggled. “Me, too.”

  Joaquin was pretty sure their Google searches had looked a little different, but he didn’t say anything.

  What’s it like to have sisters?

  Will my sisters hate me?

  Will I hate my sisters?

  How does it feel when someone is your sister?

  Why did someone want my sisters instead of me?

  How do you talk to your sisters so they like you?

  “Yeah, Google was pretty useless in that regard,” Maya said as she arranged her condiments in front of her.

  “Hey,” Joaquin said, pointing at them. “You got mayonnaise. You got two of them.”

  “Oh, I know, it’s gross,” Maya said. “Everyone in my family always makes fun of me for it, but I love mayonnaise for my fries. It’s weird because I hate mayonnaise on everything else, but—”

  “No, that’s not—I like mayonnaise on my fries, too,” Joaquin said. It was hard to interrupt Maya. She talked like a run-on sentence, no pauses or periods.

  “No way,” Maya said.

  “Me, too,” Grace piped up. “It’s my favorite. My parents think it’s disgusting.”

  There was a quiet space after that, the three of them looking at one another before Maya broke into a huge smile. “We’re bonding!” she said. “Over condiments!”

  “It’s a start,” Joaquin replied, and Grace got up to get more mayonnaise cups for all of them.

  It was simpler once the food came and they could eat instead of talk. Joaquin still had no idea what to say, but they were easy to listen to, chirping to each other about families and school. He mostly just nodded.

  “Ugh, I have to go back to school on Monday,”
Grace said, using two fries like chopsticks to pick up a piece of pickle.

  “Were you on break or something?” Joaquin asked. He was also really good at asking open questions, making other people talk about themselves so he wouldn’t have to say anything about himself. His therapist called it a coping skill, but Joaquin just thought it was polite. They agreed to disagree on that one.

  Grace’s face became one big “Oh no!” Like something had slipped past the drawbridge at the castle, but then her forehead smoothed out. “I was out for over a month,” she said. “Mono.”

  “Lucky,” Maya said. “I’d kill for a month out of school.”

  “Yeah, super lucky,” Grace said. “It was just like going to Hawaii.”

  Maya rolled her eyes. Joaquin couldn’t believe how easy it was for them already. It was like they had a rhythm. Maybe it was because they were girls? Or maybe it was because there was something broken in him, something that everyone could see except him and—

  His therapist called that negative thinking. Joaquin thought that was a pretty obvious term.

  “Well, I’d still kill for a month off.” Maya shrugged. “School’s the worst. I mean, the only saving grace is that my girlfriend goes there.”

  Joaquin knew his cue.

  “How long have you been dating?” he asked. He could tell that Maya was ready for a fight about it, but she wasn’t going to get one from him.

  “Around six months,” she said, shrugging a little even as her cheeks flushed.

  “And your parents are . . .” Joaquin swirled what was left of his Coke in his cup. “You know, they’re cool with it?”

  Maya sat up a little straighter. “Oh. Oh, yeah, they’re totally fine with it. It’s, like, made them the cool parents in our neighborhood.”

  “One of my favorite foster sisters ever was gay,” Joaquin said. “We did time together for about six months in this one placement, but then our foster mom found out that she was gay so she kicked her out and took her back to the agency.”

  Maya looked smaller in her seat. “Because she was gay?”

  Joaquin nodded, suddenly aware that he had maybe picked the wrong anecdote to tell Maya. “She was cool, though,” he said. “I still miss her. Meeka. She left her iPod behind and I still listen to it sometimes. Good playlists. She wanted to be a DJ.”

  Maya just nodded, her eyes round like pennies. “Oh. Cool.”

  “Tell Joaquin how you and Claire met.” Grace said, and Joaquin turned back to his drink.

  He could see Maya’s cheeks flush as she talked about Claire, the way she bit her lip and smiled almost to herself, even though the restaurant was packed and Joaquin and Grace were sitting right there. He wondered if he had looked that goofy, that sappy, when he talked about Birdie. “Oh, you’ve got it bad,” Mark had said to him the night after his and Birdie’s first official date (they’d gone to the movies and then gotten frozen yogurt afterward), and Joaquin had wondered how Mark knew because he hadn’t even said anything.

  Watching Maya talk about Claire now, he understood what Mark meant.

  And it hurt so bad that Joaquin wished he had never let that ice cube melt.

  It wasn’t until after they were finished eating (and all three mayonnaise sides decimated) that the question came. They were down on the beach. Joaquin knew it was inevitable. That’s why he didn’t tell people that he was a foster kid. Their curiosity always got the best of them, making him feel like a science experiment, a cautionary tale.

  “So what’s it like in foster care?” Maya asked as they walked. Maya and Grace had left their shoes back by the steps, but Joaquin carried his. He didn’t have a lot of things and he wasn’t in the habit of leaving them for other people to take.

  “Maya,” Grace groaned.

  “It’s okay,” he said, shrugging a little. He knew that’s what they wanted him to say, that it wasn’t as bad as the news always made it out to be, that no one had ever hit him or hurt him, that he had never hit or hurt anyone. People always thought they wanted the sordid details, Joaquin thought, until they actually had them. “I like my foster parents now, Mark and Linda. They’re pretty cool.” That part, at least, was the truth.

  Maya looked up at him, her eyes worried. “I feel bad that you didn’t get adopted,” she admitted. She had her camera app open on her phone, snapping a photo every so often as they walked. “Is that bad to say? Because it’s true.”

  “No, it’s not bad,” he said, and it wasn’t. No one had ever actually said that to him before. “I was almost adopted when I was a baby. They put me with this family right after I went into the system and they were going to adopt me, but right before the paperwork went through, the mom got pregnant, and they only wanted one kid, so.”

  Joaquin shrugged again. He didn’t really remember the Russos, but he had seen the case file.

  Maya, though, looked horrified. “But weren’t you practically, like, their kid already?”

  “Bio trumps foster,” Joaquin told her. In a world where the rules kept changing from house to house, there was one hard-and-fast one. Joaquin could still remember the placement where the oldest biological son would greet each foster kid by saying, “I decide whether you stay or go.” He hadn’t been wrong, either. Joaquin had only lasted a month there.

  Maya didn’t look comforted at all, though. “Well, that’s . . . Wow.”

  Joaquin wasn’t quite sure when he had crossed that invisible line of too much information, but apparently he had. “I mean, that was just one home. There were others. They’re mostly fine.”

  “Then why haven’t you been adopted? You’re nice.”

  Joaquin made a decision to lie to them. Joaquin didn’t think of himself as a liar, not really, but he was good at knowing when to hold back information. “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably just too old. Most people want babies. Or girls.”

  “Like us,” Grace murmured.

  “It seems to be that way,” Joaquin said. “But your homes are good, right? Like, people are nice to you and stuff?”

  He hadn’t even realized it until he said it, but Joaquin thought that if anyone had ever hurt either one of these girls, he would grind them into dust.

  “Oh, we’re fine, we’re fine,” Grace said, Maya nodding at him from his other side. “Our parents are nice.”

  “Well, mine are probably getting divorced,” Maya said, kicking at the wet sand a bit with her toe. “But they’re still pretty nice. When I came out, my dad actually put a rainbow sticker on his car for a few days. The whole neighborhood thought he was the one who was gay until I explained it to him.”

  Joaquin couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to swing with that kind of net waiting to catch you. He thought of his foster sister again. She had cried when she had been kicked out of the home, had begged to stay. No one ever liked being sent back to the agency, of course, entering into the Russian roulette of a brand-new home. Maya had really gotten lucky, but Joaquin wasn’t going to say that to her. Sometimes it was better to not know how lucky you were.

  “That’s good” was all he said now. “That’s good.”

  “Can I, um, do you remember our mom?” Grace asked. “At all?”

  Joaquin stopped walking then, not so much because of the question but because they had gotten to the end of the path. It was either go back or climb over a pile of slippery-looking boulders. Maya and Grace stopped walking, too, and the three of them looked out at the water for a moment. They had gone past the tourists and beachgoers, and the water was flat so there weren’t many surfers, just a boy and a girl on their boards way out in the distance. The girl was laughing about something, but Joaquin couldn’t hear her.

  “I sort of remember our mom,” he finally said. “Like, the space of her. Not so much her.”

  “Do you remember what she looked like?” Grace asked. She sounded so hopeful that Joaquin couldn’t let her down.

  “She had brown hair,” he said. “Curly, like us. And she smiled a lot.” Joaquin was making i
t up, but he had pictured those features every time he had thought of his real mom. He had dreams about her, this woman smiling at him.

  “Did you ever see her after, um . . . ?”

  “You can say it,” Joaquin told Grace. “After she gave me up.”

  “Yeah,” Grace said. “That.”

  “We had some visitations before she lost her rights.” What Joaquin didn’t tell them was that she had never shown up to any of those visits. Joaquin could remember wandering the room, looking for this person who he probably wouldn’t have recognized anyway. His foster mother at the time had tried to placate him with candy from the vending machine, but he had just cried under the table until she dragged him out and they went home.

  Joaquin still hated candy. And vending machines.

  “She was beautiful,” Joaquin said now. “Really beautiful.”

  By the time they got back to the arts center, where they had left the car, Joaquin could feel the sunburn on his nose and the beach tar stuck to the bottoms of his feet. He’d have to peel it off before he went home. Linda really liked her hardwood floors. He didn’t want to mess them up.

  “So I wanted to say something,” Grace suddenly piped up, and Maya turned to look at her. Joaquin already knew what she was going to say, though. He had known from the minute she’d mentioned their bio mom, and he wished that she wouldn’t bring it up.

  “I think we should look for our bio mom,” she said. She literally wrung her hands together in front of her as she said it. Joaquin had read about people doing that in books, but he had never seen someone actually do it before. It seemed painful.

  Next to him, Maya was quiet. Joaquin was pretty sure that silence wasn’t a good sign. It felt more like that space between seeing a gun fire and hearing the shot.

  He was right. He usually was.

  “That’s stupid,” Maya snapped. “Why do we even want to find her? She gave us away. She gave Joaquin to strangers.”

  “But that was almost eighteen years ago,” Grace protested. “She was basically my age, right? Or Joaquin’s age? She was just a kid! Maybe she wants to know how we’re doing. I mean . . .” She paused before adding, “I’m sure she still loves us.”