Far From the Tree

by Robin Benway

  “We can figure that out,” her dad said. Maya’s mom couldn’t answer; she was too busy blinking back tears and moving to put her arm around Lauren. She tried to put her arm around Maya, too, but Maya moved down on the couch so that there was space between them. She didn’t want anyone touching her.

  “We’re going to try and make this as easy as possible for you two, don’t worry,” her dad added.

  Maya laughed, short and sharp and bitter. She couldn’t help it. “I think we sailed past easy a long time ago,” she said.

  “Maya,” her dad started to say, but she held up her hand.

  “No. I don’t—” The words suddenly got caught in her throat, the walls were too close to her, the air too thin. She felt like a character in a movie running away from an explosion, with the road crumbling into gray ash just steps behind her, struggling to stay ahead of the abyss that pulled at her like hands, sucked her in like a tar pit, like a black hole that only wanted to absorb the light.

  “I have to go,” she said, and then she was grabbing her phone and running out the front door, down the grass and their driveway. It wasn’t until she reached the end of the street that she realized she was barefoot, and that her feet were throbbing even from that short a distance, but it didn’t matter.

  She texted Claire. Meet at the park? I need you.

  Her heart pounded through her body as she waited for the response bubble, and then Claire was there, as steady and sure as she always was. On my way. Everything ok?

  Maya didn’t bother answering. She just ran. Once she hit the park, it felt like green, sharp and cutting against the soles of her feet. Her lungs burned like gray, like smoke that she couldn’t breathe out.

  She just ran faster.

  Claire was just climbing out of her car when Maya rounded the corner and into the parking lot. “Hey,” Claire said, and when Maya ran into her arms, she stepped back only a little bit, Maya’s momentum throwing both of them off.

  “Hey, hi . . . hey, hey,” Claire said, and then Maya was crying and she couldn’t say anything, not because she didn’t know what to say, but because there was too much of it. She could have every dictionary in the world and it wouldn’t be enough to begin to explain the darkness of that space, the fear of being alone like Grace, unwanted like Joaquin.

  Claire held her for long minutes in the parking lot. “Don’t go” was the first thing Maya managed to whisper when she could speak again.

  “Not going anywhere,” Claire whispered back.

  Her voice was as soft as a prayer.

  JOAQUIN

  The first time Joaquin had met with his therapist after moving in with Mark and Linda, it hadn’t gone well.

  They had met in an office that was in a high-rise building, so high that Joaquin could see all the way to the ocean. That alone had made him a little woozy, but the office itself was clean and white and modern. The only color in the room had been a purple orchid (in a white pot, of course) on his therapist’s, Ana’s, desk, and all that glaring white had reminded Joaquin too much of thin white sheets on a bare cot, of restraints and chafing on his wrists, of that drugged-up sleepiness that had made him feel like he wasn’t really sleeping at all. It was so quiet in the office that he could hear the whoosh of the air-conditioning when it came on.

  Joaquin made it all of two minutes in there before walking out, the sweat beading at his hairline, his hands shaking.

  “I’m not going back in there,” he told Linda and Mark at the time, which was the first time he had actively told them something that they didn’t want to hear. He had tried so hard to make them happy, to make them want him, but he couldn’t set foot back in that room.

  They had sat with him on the curb while he got his breath back, Mark’s hand resting carefully on his shoulder as his heart slowly returned to a normal pace. They had sat with him for the better part of twenty minutes, waiting silently for him to explain, and when Joaquin didn’t—couldn’t—explain, they started asking questions. Sometimes he liked when they asked him questions, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes it felt like they cared too much; other times, it felt like they wanted to know too much.

  “Too much like the hospital,” Joaquin finally managed to say. He hadn’t minded the questions that time.

  “Ah,” Linda said.

  “Got it,” Mark agreed.

  The next week, he and Ana met in a diner closer to Mark and Linda’s house. (Joaquin still hadn’t and still didn’t think of it as “my house” or even “our house,” just “their house.” It was okay, though, because it was still a nice house. It didn’t have to be his for him to like living there.) “Is this spot okay?” Ana had said, sliding into the booth across from him. “I heard my office is a little too antiseptic-looking.”

  “It’s fine,” Joaquin said.

  “You do know that the word fine is basically kryptonite to a therapist’s ears, right?” Ana said, then signaled the waiter for a lemonade. “Fucked up, insecure, neurotic, emotional,” she recited, ticking the emotions off on her fingers. “Therapy 101.”

  Joaquin knew all that, of course. One of his older foster brothers had actually gotten a tattoo that said “I’m Fine” across his shoulder blades. Joaquin knew all the tricky ways the phrase worked. “Well, it’s accurate,” he told Ana, who smiled.

  Joaquin hadn’t wanted to see her, even if she was nice and didn’t tell Linda when he drank three Cokes in a row. (Refills were free.) But then he had figured out that Mark and Linda were paying for Ana out of their own pockets, and Joaquin guessed that he owed it to them to at least go. Foster parents weren’t always crazy about spending their own money on things. Joaquin didn’t want to push his luck.

  Eighteen months later, Ana and Joaquin were still meeting in the diner every Friday after school. They always got the same thing—Cobb salad and lemonade for Ana; veggie burger, fries, and a Coke for Joaquin—and sat in the same booth at the back of the restaurant, where the acoustics made the restaurant sound way busier than it actually was.

  “So,” Ana said as she slipped into the booth across from him the Friday after he first met Maya and Grace. “How did it go?”

  It had taken Joaquin a while to appreciate Ana’s no-bullshit approach to therapy. She also dropped a lot of f-bombs, which he liked. Most therapists treated him like he was his own bomb, about to explode, which, to be fair, was how he had felt for most of his life.

  But still.

  “It was fine,” Joaquin said, then grinned when she glared at him. “Just kidding. It was nice.” If fine was Ana’s gold-medal word, then nice definitely took the silver.

  “They’re white,” Joaquin added, tearing the paper off his straw as the waitress brought their drinks. She knew their orders by heart now; Ana and Joaquin hadn’t seen a menu in three months.

  “You thought that might be the case,” Ana said. “What about them? Were they nice?”

  Joaquin smiled to himself. “They’re funny. They get along really well already. And that made me feel,” he said, beating Ana to the question, “fine. I’m glad they like each other.”

  “And did they like you?”

  Joaquin shrugged and took a sip of his Coke. “Guess so. We have a group text now. We’re meeting on Sunday again.”

  “That’s good,” Ana said. Good, nice, fine. Ana was trying to pave a very rocky road, Joaquin could tell.

  “It’s just—” he started to say, then reached for his Coke.

  Ana raised an eyebrow. “It’s just . . . ?” she prodded.

  Joaquin ran his thumb down the glass, leaving a dry stripe down the center of condensation. “They were both adopted, you know? Their parents paid a lot of money to get them.”

  Ana nodded. “Probably so, yes.”

  When Joaquin didn’t respond, she added, “Does that bother you?”

  “It doesn’t bother me for them,” he said, then made another stripe on the glass. “It’s just . . . people got paid to keep me, and that still wasn’t enough.”

  Ana
looked at him across the table. “How does that make you feel?”

  Joaquin shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about his sisters anymore. He was still finding the words to describe how he felt about them, and he knew that Ana would wait for him to discover the right ones.

  “I broke up with Birdie,” he said instead. He hadn’t brought it up at their last meeting because of the Maya and Grace decision. And also because he hadn’t wanted to talk about Birdie. Discovering two new sisters had been really helpful when it came to avoiding difficult subjects.

  Ana blinked at him. It took a lot to surprise her. Joaquin had seen her composed face many times over the past year and a half; surprising her felt like a weird sort of victory, a Pyrrhic one. “Wow,” she said after almost a full ten seconds, during nine of which Joaquin questioned his decision to bring Birdie up at all.

  “Want to tell me why?” The surprise was gone and Ana’s face had smoothed back into its normal therapist mode. “I thought you really liked her.”

  “I do,” Joaquin said. “That’s why I broke up with her.”

  Ana cocked her head at him. “You know, that sounds like something the Joaquin I met eighteen months ago would have said.”

  “I’m the same person,” Joaquin told her. He hated when Ana tried to sort his past from his present. Joaquin knew that that was impossible, that he would always be intertwined with the things he had done, the families he had had. He knew this because he had spent years trying to outrun them. “I just realized that it was a bad idea, that’s all.”

  “You told me last month that Birdie made you happier than any other person in your entire life.”

  Joaquin sometimes wished that Ana didn’t have such a good memory.

  “She does—she did,” he corrected himself. “I just . . . She has all these baby pictures.”

  Ana sank back against the booth and reached for her lemonade. “And you don’t.”

  Joaquin shifted a little in his seat and wondered where their food was. He was starving. He was always starving. Mark and Linda used to joke about how much food he ate, so he took the hint and scaled back on eating. When they realized what he was doing, they were horrified. No one joked about food anymore. They even kept extra bread in the freezer just for him.

  “Joaquin,” Ana said. “Just because you don’t have baby pictures doesn’t mean that you don’t have a past.”

  “I know that,” Joaquin said. “You think I don’t know that? We meet here every single week because of my past. I just don’t want that for Birdie.”

  Ana waited a beat before saying, “What about what you want for you?”

  “That’s not important. She’s more important.”

  “You’re both important, Joaquin. Did you ever tell Birdie about what happened before you came to Mark and Linda’s?”

  Joaquin scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Yeah,” he said sarcastically. “I told her all about how they put me on a psychiatric hold when I was twelve. Girls love that story. Especially the pretty ones.”

  “What about—”

  “Birdie wants things, okay?” Joaquin said, interrupting her. Sometimes it was so frustrating talking to Ana, because she refused to see it from his perspective. If anyone was an expert on Joaquin’s life, it should be Joaquin, after all. “I mean, not things, but just a life . . . I could never give her what she wants.”

  “Did she say that?” Ana shot back. “Or did you say that?”

  Joaquin looked away. They both already knew the answer.

  “What about Maya and Grace?” Ana asked him. “Are you going to tell them about what happened?”

  “Nope,” he replied, popping the p sound at the end and looking out the window. An entire van full of kids drove past them, some surfboards sticking out of the back. Joaquin was pretty sure some of them went to his school. He both envied them and never actually wanted to be them.

  “You don’t think they would understand?” Ana asked now, pulling Joaquin’s attention back to the restaurant, to the waitress setting their food down on the table.

  “Of course they’re not gonna understand!” Joaquin said as soon as he was gone. “They live with these perfect families, they have these perfect lives. What am I going to say, that their older brother who looks nothing like them is crazy?”

  Ana raised an eyebrow. She hated that word.

  “Sorry,” Joaquin said.

  “I don’t know either one of them, but I can tell you that their lives aren’t perfect,” Ana said gently. “Your problems may not be the same, but they have their own shit, I guarantee it.”

  Joaquin crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Are you upset that your sisters were adopted and you weren’t?”

  “Why should they have bad lives just because I did? That’s stupid. They should have good families. They have good families.” He paused before adding, “Grace—she’s the older one—she wants us to look for our bio mom.”

  “And what did you say to that?”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. So did Maya. Well, she actually said, ‘She gave Joaquin to strangers.’” Joaquin tried to mimic Maya’s indignance, the way she had spit out the word like a swear, like it was the worst thing in the world to not know your family. “Grace is on her own for that one.”

  “Did Grace say why she wanted to look for her?”

  Joaquin shrugged. “Don’t know. She can talk to her own therapist about that shit.”

  Ana smiled at him, and Joaquin smiled back. “Can we go back to Birdie for a minute?” Ana asked.

  “Sure. Metaphorically.”

  “Touché. Do you miss her?”

  Joaquin missed every single thing about Birdie. He missed the smell of her skin, the way her hair would fall across and down his arm whenever she would rest her head on his shoulder. He missed her laugh, her furious anger whenever someone said something she disagreed with.

  “A little,” he said. “Sometimes.”

  He missed her every single minute of the day.

  “So what about your sisters, then?” Ana asked. “Are you just going to push them away when you get to know them better? Run away like you did from Birdie because you think you’re not good enough for them, for anyone?”

  Joaquin ate a french fry and didn’t answer. French fries were really terrible when they were cold, but these were hot and crispy. He ate another one.

  “Because I’ve got news for you,” Ana continued. “You can’t just push family away. You’re always going to be connected to them.”

  Joaquin drew a pattern on the table from the condensation of his glass. “Really?” he said. “Tell that to my mom.”

  “Joaquin,” Ana said, and now her voice was gentle. “You deserve to have these people in your life. Mark and Linda, too. You have to forgive yourself for what happened.”

  “I can’t,” he said before he could stop himself. “I can’t forgive myself because I don’t even know who I was when I did it. I don’t know that kid at all. He’s a fucking idiot who fucked everything up.”

  Ana’s eyes were a little sad as she looked at him. She knew the truth, of course. She had seen the hospitalization records, the police reports, the statement from Joaquin’s adoptive family, the Buchanans.

  “I just want to pretend it didn’t happen,” he said after a minute.

  “Oh, yeah?” Ana said. “And how’s that working out for you?”

  “Really shitty,” he replied, then laughed before he could stop himself. “But at least I’m the only one getting hurt this time.”

  “You sure about that?” Ana asked.

  Joaquin looked out the window and didn’t answer.

  The nightmare woke him up later that night, his sheets and T-shirt damp with sweat, his blood pulsing so hard through his skin that it felt like something was shaking him from the outside.

  “Kid, kiddo. Hey, it’s okay.” Mark’s hand was warm on his back, his fingers pressing down and grounding Joaquin. “It’s okay, just wake up a little.”

  “’M fine
,” Joaquin managed to say. The colors behind his eyes had been too bright, too sharp, like they could pierce his skin.

  Linda was standing next to Mark, and she handed Joaquin a glass of water. She always looked softer in the middle of the night, her hair down, her makeup gone.

  “Sorry,” Joaquin said. “Sorry, I’m fine. Sorry I woke you up.”

  Mark and Linda sat down on either side of him on the bed. Joaquin should have known that they wouldn’t leave him. He had spent seventeen years trying to get someone to stick around for him, and now that they did, he just wanted them to go.

  “Want to talk about it?” Mark asked. In the beginning, Joaquin couldn’t even handle Mark being in the room with him after a nightmare. He guessed that this was what Ana would call progress.

  “Just . . . I can’t remember,” Joaquin said, rubbing his hand over his face. He needed a clean, dry shirt. He needed a brand-new brain. “It just woke me up.”

  That wasn’t true, of course. He had seen his sisters in the dream, Maya and Grace standing on the edge of the ocean, calling for him as the waves crashed harder onto the sand. He tried to get to them, but his feet were stuck in the ground, and he could only watch as they were washed out to sea.

  “You were yelling for Grace and Maya,” Linda said gently. “Did you dream about them?”

  Joaquin shrugged. “Dunno.”

  He didn’t have to look up to know that Mark and Linda were exchanging a look over his head. If he had a dollar for every time they did that, he could move out and get his own place. And a car.

  Two more people shoved away.

  “Think you can get back to sleep?” Mark asked after a minute of silence. His hand was still steady on Joaquin’s back. Joaquin liked both of them, but he liked Mark’s ability to be quiet, to not always need an answer right away. Mark sometimes realized that Joaquin could say a lot more without using words.

  “Yeah, I’m good,” Joaquin said, sipping at the water again. “Sorry I woke you up.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Linda said. “Mark was still awake. Reading something stupid on the internet, I’m sure.”