Far From the Tree

by Robin Benway

  “So is it weird . . . you know, now? After?”

  Grace lowered her spoon. “Do you always ask strangers questions like this?” Her own parents hadn’t asked her that question. Come to think of it, nobody had asked her any questions at all. Though she guessed that was the smart move. Rafe was basically chipping away at the Hoover Dam, and there was a lot of water behind that wall, just waiting to get out.

  He shrugged at her question, though. “Do you always answer strangers’ questions like this?”

  At that point, Grace would have answered questions about the clothes dryer’s lint trap from the lady behind the makeup counter. She was starved for conversation.

  “It’s not weird, it’s just that everything is different. I mean, I don’t have any friends anymore, my parents are on eggshells around me, nobody texts me—”

  “Really? Because your phone keeps buzzing at you.”

  “That’s probably just my mom. Or Maya. She’s my . . .” Sister. Another word that felt strange in her mouth. “It’s a long story.”

  Rafe paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth. “My favorite kind.”

  “She’s my biological sister. We just met each other. And our brother, Joaquin.”

  “Your bio— Wow.” Rafe started to laugh. “Look, Grace, I don’t know what you’re planning on doing next year to top this year, but it’s going to have to be immense. Like, skydiving-while-being-devoured-by-piranhas immense.”

  “I’ll take a rain check on that experience,” Grace replied. Her yogurt still wasn’t sitting right with her, even though Peach was gone. She pushed the cup toward Rafe. “But Maya’s basically the only person who texts me now.”

  “No friends, no texts. Your life sounds a lot like mine.”

  “Pretty pathetic.”

  “Yep.” He bit a head off a gummy bear, then sighed. “We can’t even get dates. Terrible.”

  Grace smiled despite herself.

  “Well,” Rafe said, looking at his phone. “I have exactly four minutes before I have to get back to the store and clock in. Want to walk me back?”

  Grace pretended to think about it.

  “I’ll let you wear the apron if you want.”

  “Pass,” she said, but stood up and followed him out.

  He held the door for her. Max had once done that, too.

  Grace waited to look at her phone until she was back in the car, the doors locked and the windows rolled up. It was hot in the car, the air too still, the outside sounds of people muffled from the windows being rolled all the way up.

  Grace almost felt like she couldn’t breathe.

  It was a text from her mom.

  There’s something in the mail for you.

  Grace drove home at the pace of the snail, if a snail could get its driver’s license and didn’t really want to go back home. She knew what was waiting for her in the mailbox, she just knew it, the same way she had known from the beginning that Peach was not hers to keep.

  When she got home, her mom was standing in the kitchen. There was a small manila envelope on the kitchen counter, glaring against the white tiles, and Grace looked at it and then at her mom.

  “It’s for you,” her mom said, and Grace knew that her mom was all too aware of the envelope’s return address, the adoption agency’s address. Daniel and Catalina had promised to update Grace on Peach’s progress every month for the first year via emails and pictures, and Grace wasn’t surprised to see the first update.

  Grace ignored her mom’s look, then picked up the envelope and took it upstairs. She knew her mom wanted her to open it in the kitchen, wanted to see everything that was in that envelope, but Grace was afraid that as soon as she slit it open, she would shatter across the floor, and she wanted to be alone if that happened.

  It had been over thirty days since she had given Peach to Daniel and Catalina. Thirty days to take Peach back, contest the adoption, grab her daughter, and bring her back into her arms. On that thirtieth day, Grace had huddled in bed and watched the clock tick down. When her phone flipped to 12:01 a.m., something in Grace wilted.

  Thirty days had passed. The adoption was official. Peach was truly gone.

  Once in her room, Grace cleared a space in the debris on the floor—laundry that she hadn’t done, books and magazines that she hadn’t read—then sat down cross-legged and slit the envelope open with her thumb, ignoring the sting of the inevitable paper cut that followed.

  A letter and two photos tumbled out, and Grace caught one of the photos before it could hit the floor. It was a picture of a baby, fat and not as red and wrinkly as Grace remembered her being.

  It was Peach, her eyes cool and clear as she looked at the camera, and she was so perfect.

  Grace stared at the photo for a full minute before picking up the piece of stationery that had tumbled to the floor. It was personalized, Milly Johnson scrawled in a trendy pink-colored font at the top, and it took Grace a beat before realizing who Milly Johnson even was.

  Peach had her own stationery. Grace would have never thought to give her that. She wondered how many other things she would have forgotten, both big and small, things that she wouldn’t have even known that Peach needed until it was too late.

  Dear Grace, the letter began.

  We know we agreed to send emails regularly, but we thought our first update should be a handwritten letter for you. Anything else seemed a bit too impersonal.

  From the depths of our hearts, we cannot begin to thank you for the beautiful, precious gift that you have allowed us to bring into our lives. Milly has been a joy from the very first moment we laid eyes on her, and our love for her has only grown deeper and more vast as the days have progressed. We can’t wait to see who she becomes, how she changes. Our hearts are too full, our cups runneth over, as the saying goes.

  Within that love, however, is an immense gratitude for the love that you have also bestowed upon Milly, and for the sacrifice you made for our family. We tell Milly every single day that her biological mother is brave and beautiful and loved her in ways that we will never be able to describe to her, and we will always want her to know you, to know about you and the selfless way that you have brought her into this world.

  We can only imagine the conflicting emotions that you might have had in the past thirty days, but please know that we cherish and adore Milly more than anything else in the universe, that she is our baby girl, but that she was once yours, too, and that the grace of your gift will never be forgotten.

  With our warmest wishes and deepest gratitude for you and your family,

  Daniel, Catalina, and Amelía (Milly)

  Grace read it again, and then once more. Each word felt like it was being engraved at the base of her heart, cutting into her, burning, and she picked up the second photo and turned it over. “Amelía Johnson, four weeks old” had been written in careful script on the back. On the front, Peach was wearing a little sailor outfit, complete with a teeny hat and itty-bitty boat shoes, and Grace picked up both photos and carefully tucked them under her shirt, pressing them against her stomach, where Peach had once been.

  She knew it was ridiculous, that they were just photos, that Peach would never be anchored to Grace the way she once had been, but she tried to feel it again anyway, tried to remember the press of her tiny foot against Grace’s ribs, the way she would drum her fists at three in the morning.

  But in the end, they were just photos, and Grace finally took them away and placed them in a drawer, feeling foolish. She wanted to look at them forever, and she never wanted to see them again. The letter she folded up and tucked into the back of her sweater drawer, right where her favorite sweater was, the one she had worn when she was pregnant, its knit soft and warm.

  Grace knew that she couldn’t go back, but as she stood in her messy room, one hand over her stomach as if to keep Peach there, she also realized that she had no idea how, exactly, to go forward.

  MAYA

  Maya’s dad moved out on Sunday morning.


  At first, he had promised that he wouldn’t move out for a while, that they were still in the beginning phase of “planning the separation,” which Maya thought made it sound like her parents were about to extract something out of the ground instead of divorce.

  But then he found an apartment in a neighborhood ten minutes away, and there was a good deal on the rent, and he signed the papers and came home one night with a bunch of collapsed cardboard boxes under his arm and disappeared upstairs without saying anything.

  The apartment was a two-bedroom, so Maya guessed the conversation about whether she and Lauren would have separate bedrooms was out of the question. “Can you have dogs in your building?” she asked him one night, leaning against the doorjamb while he placed books in a half-open box. Maya had always wanted a dog, but her mom said that they shed and drooled and barfed on the rug. “So did Lauren, but you kept her,” Maya had pointed out more than once, but the joke had worn thin by now and she had stopped asking for a dog.

  “No pets, unfortunately,” her dad said. “Maybe a goldfish?”

  “Goldfish don’t have such a great track record at our house,” Maya pointed out, then watched as her dad stood on his tiptoes to reach the books from the highest shelf. When she had been little, she had thought that he was the tallest man in the world. When she would wake up in the middle of the night now, she always thought that at least her dad was in the house, that he would always be able to frighten any burglar, bear, monster.

  She wasn’t used to seeing him look so small now, reaching with his fingertips for the book at the far edge of the shelf. It made her hate him suddenly, hate him for leaving so fast, so soon, like he couldn’t wait to get away from all of them.

  She wondered if he knew that there was currently a bottle of room-temperature sauvignon blanc in one of the dresser drawers. She wondered if she should tell him. Would he still move out? Would he take her and Lauren with him? Who would watch out for her mom if that happened?

  The day he left, Maya had planned to meet up with Grace and Joaquin. They’d agreed to meet every Sunday—that was their plan. Maya couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before someone couldn’t make it, until someone had something better to do, better people to see. She wondered when the novelty of having new siblings would wear off. And then they’d drift apart just as easily as they had come together.

  Her money was on Grace bailing first. That girl seemed nervous all the time. Typical only child, Maya thought. Used to having everything for herself, not wanting to share. Then she felt terrible for thinking that about someone who had only ever been nice to her.

  Maya wasn’t sure why, but she could feel a spiral of darkness starting to weave around the people she loved. Lauren grated on her nerves, to be sure, but now it had a sharp edge of annoyance to it, the edge of an envelope that caught your fingers when you slit it open, slicing deeper each time. Her mom—Maya could barely look at her without thinking of all the bottles that were currently in their house, both obvious and hidden, the contents of all of them dwindling at a steady, fast pace. Her dad—he was weak for leaving, and for forcing Maya and Lauren to pick up the pieces behind him.

  The worst, though, was Claire. Maya loved her with all her heart, loved every single cell of Claire’s body like it was a puzzle made only for her to put together, but Maya was starting to feel like she could easily rearrange those pieces, too, smash her fist down on the finished picture and scatter everything to the wind, leaving nothing but the shards of who Claire had been with her in her wake.

  Maya had never realized how much power there was in loving someone. At first, she thought it was a source of strength, but now she was realizing that, in the wrong hands, on the wrong day, that power was strong enough to destroy the very thing that had built it. Maya looked at Claire and wanted to say, “Run away, get out while you can,” but instead she said nothing and felt the dark vine swirl up around her, trapping her legs, keeping her in the same place while everyone else seemed to only drift farther away.

  When Maya’s dad moved out, she thought she would cry.

  She didn’t.

  Lauren did, though, huge gulping sobs like when she had been little and infuriated that Maya wouldn’t play with her. Lauren was the baby, after all. She was used to getting her way.

  But their dad just packed up the car with his clothes and boxes and books, then came over and hugged Lauren tight, whispering something into her hair before letting her go and embracing Maya. The vines held her steady, though, keeping her quiet and immobile as her dad whispered into her hair, too. “I love you so much,” he said. “I’ll see you soon. I’ll call you tonight. I love you, I love you.”

  Maya felt herself nod against his chest, then pulled back. The whole thing felt so forced, so cheesy. She half wondered if she was starring in a movie, or dreaming, or maybe even dreaming about starring in a movie. Behind her, she could feel the presence of her mom standing on the porch, watching the scene with her bathrobe still clutched tightly around her. Maya knew she was hungover by the way she winced against the sunlight, the way her shoulders seemed pulled too tight against her robe.

  She wondered if the sauvignon blanc was still in the dresser, or if it was all gone now.

  Maya’s dad tried to hold on to her, but she just kept stepping back until her feet hit the porch’s front step. Next to her, Lauren was wiping at her face with the sleeve of her hoodie, and all Maya could think was, Gross.

  “Take care of your sister,” her dad said, and then she could see his own chin wobbling. She had seen her dad cry before, of course, but that had been during movies or really sad TV commercials, not during real life. She wondered if he had cried when he’d first seen Maya, or Lauren, or even their mom. Probably not on that last one. That would be super weird to date a guy who cried when he first saw you. Maya hoped her mom had had better sense than that.

  “My,” Lauren said, nudging her out of her thoughts.

  “What?”

  Lauren pointed toward her dad, who was handing them both a package. “Oh,” Maya said, then took it from him.

  “You can open it after I leave,” he said. “I just want you to remember me, that’s all.”

  “You’re not dying,” Maya said. She meant to sound funny, to ease the mood, but her words sounded sharp, like not dying was an accusation instead of a good thing. “You’re just moving out. We could have dinner with you tonight, even.”

  She waited for him to say, Have dinner with me tonight.

  He didn’t.

  Instead, he kissed them good-bye one more time, his unshaved cheek scratchy against Maya’s, and then climbed into his car and drove away. Lauren waved, but Maya didn’t. A trail of blues floated across her mind as his car turned the corner, drifting away and then disappearing, just like him.

  “Girls,” her mom started to say, but Maya just brushed past her and went back inside. She didn’t want a speech from her, not now, not ever.

  “So,” Maya said, Joaquin and Grace sitting across from her at the coffee place. “My parents are getting divorced.”

  She had practiced saying that sentence in the shower that morning. At first it had been hard to get the words out, but then she just turned off the hot water, and the cold water shocked the words out of her. By the time she had gotten through the sentence, her teeth were chattering and her lips were blue.

  “Whoa,” Joaquin said, but he didn’t seem too amazed. Maya thought that, objectively, her half brother was a pretty handsome guy, but his eyes watched everything in the room, constantly flitting from person to place to thing. It reminded her in a way of those cats who followed the laser point on the ground, trying forever to trap it between their paws, but she didn’t tell Joaquin that. She wasn’t sure he would see the humor in it.

  “Wow, really?” Grace said, and okay, she looked pretty taken aback. She hadn’t stopped chewing on her iced-coffee straw, and now it was stained with her pink lip gloss, the top starting to fray into pieces. “When did they tell you?”<
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  “Last week,” Maya admitted. “My dad just moved out this morning.” She shrugged, then reached for a piece of the cookie that they were ostensibly supposed to share, but Maya had eaten most of it already.

  “Yeah, he got a place that’s about ten minutes away, or that’s what he said. I guess he was pretty eager to leave.” She had practiced saying those words out loud, too, but no amount of icy water had been able to pull them from her. Even now, they hurt coming up.

  “Is your mom freaking out?” Joaquin asked, just as Grace said, “Does that affect the adoption at all?”

  “What?” Maya screeched. “Why would that affect the adoption? For fuck’s sake, I’m fifteen years old! The deal is done!”

  “I just meant—” Grace was wide-eyed with guilt, not innocence. “Like, that doesn’t invalidate it, right? Your parents can get divorced and it doesn’t mean anything in the long run.”

  Maya rolled her eyes skyward. “Joaquin, help me out here,” she said, pointing to Grace. “Tell her that it doesn’t affect the adoption.”

  Joaquin glanced from one sister to the other. “It doesn’t affect the adoption,” he said. “At least, I don’t think so. But I’m not exactly the best person to ask.”

  Both Maya and Grace looked away. It was too easy to forget sometimes that Joaquin hadn’t always lived with Mark and Linda, his foster parents. They were the ones who had dropped Joaquin off at the coffee place that afternoon. They had said that they needed to do some shopping nearby, but Maya was 99 percent sure that they just wanted to scope her and Grace out for themselves.

  Still, they had been really nice. Mark was tall, way taller than Maya had ever even imagined her dad being when she was little. He had shaken both girls’ hands and smiled like you would expect someone’s proud dad to smile. Linda had seemed warm and kind, squeezing Joaquin’s arm a little just before they left the three of them alone. “Stay as long as you like,” she had said, and Joaquin had nodded. They seemed like parents. Joaquin seemed like their kid.