Far From the Tree

by Robin Benway

  “Did they say that?” Maya called from where she was standing by the passenger-side door.

  “They didn’t have to.”

  “Well, we’re not going without you,” Grace told him. “C’mon—we can talk about it in the car.”

  “No!” Joaquin said. “Are you not listening to me? I don’t want to ruin this, too. Not for you.”

  “Can you open the doors, please?” Maya called.

  Joaquin ignored her. “Here,” he said, tossing the keys to Grace. “Just text me when you get back.” Then his face changed. “I left my phone at their house. Shit.”

  Grace felt like she was scrambling to stay ahead of a tornado. “Joaquin,” she said, then stepped forward and put her hand on his arm. “If you don’t want to meet our mom, that’s fine. That’s totally fine. But if you’re not going because you think you’ll ruin it? Then that’s not fine. And it’s not true, either.”

  Joaquin shook his head. “Look, you two are my sisters, right? You’re my family. I won’t hurt you like that.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Maya suddenly screamed, and they both turned around to see her still standing next to the car, hands on hips.

  “That’s exactly what family is, Joaquin!” Maya shouted at him. “It means that no matter where you go, no matter how far you run, you’re still a part of me and Grace and we’re still a part of you, too! Look at us! It took us fifteen years to find each other, but we still did! And sometimes, family hurts each other. But after that’s done you bandage each other up, and you move on. Together. So you can go and think that you’re some lone wolf, but you’re not! You’ve got us now, like it or not, and we’ve got you. So get in this fucking car and let’s go!”

  Grace looked at Joaquin.

  Joaquin looked at Maya.

  And then he got in the fucking car.

  “Thank you,” Maya sighed, then looked toward Grace. “Oh, yeah, one more thing.”

  “What’s that?” Grace said, picking up her backpack.

  “Shotgun!”

  They spent most of the three-hour drive in silence, Grace sprawled out in the backseat and Maya curled up against the passenger-side window while Joaquin drove, her camera snapping a picture of the landscape every so often. Joaquin’s grip on the steering wheel was tight, but Grace could see the sad slope of his shoulders and neck, the way he seemed to almost hang his head. At one point, Maya looked up from the window. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked him.

  “Nope,” he replied.

  “Okay,” she said, and rested her cheek against the pane of glass once again.

  They listened to the radio for a while, pop songs that Grace hated but always seemed to know the words to anyway. As they got closer to the desert, the station faded into crackling noise and Joaquin eventually turned it off. They passed the giant dinosaurs at the rest stop and then drove through what seemed like a sea of windmills. It made Grace think of Don Quixote. She wondered if she and Maya and Joaquin were on the same ridiculous quest as Quixote, racing toward something that was different from how they imagined it would be, destined for disappointment, for humiliation, for failure.

  Her phone buzzed in the backseat, and she glanced at it.

  how goes it? Rafe asked.

  it goes, Grace wrote back.

  you scared?

  terrified.

  it’ll be okay. everything always works out.

  She wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but she was glad that at least one person thought so.

  By the time Joaquin pulled onto the street, Grace’s palms were sweating. Maya was no longer slumped against the window and was instead sitting straight as a jackrabbit, her sunglasses pushed up onto her forehead. “There it is,” she said, pointing toward a small house.

  Joaquin parked across the street and they sat there in silence, the three of them breathing in unison, looking at the house. It looked freshly painted, the trim a bright white against the bluish-gray of the house, and there was a pot of geraniums near the front door. A dark-blue sedan was parked in the driveway.

  “It looks nice,” Grace said after a minute.

  “Yeah,” Joaquin said. He had gone utterly still, not even flinching when Grace put her hand on his shoulder and started to get out of the car.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Maya said. “Not yet. Just . . . let’s just agree that no matter what happens here, that it’s the three of us together, okay?”

  Joaquin’s jaw was clenching and unclenching, but he nodded and Grace said, “Agreed.”

  Maya glanced out the windshield again, then took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

  Grace would later wonder what the three of them must have looked like as they walked up the front steps of the house toward the front door, huddled together like a scared flock of ducks. Her own heart was beating so hard that it actually hurt. She was more scared than when she’d told her parents that she was pregnant, than when the doctor had told her it was time to push, than when Peach first rested in her new parents’ arms.

  Grace wondered if Melissa was even home.

  She wondered if she even still lived in that home.

  What if no one answered the door?

  What if someone did?

  “You knock, Grace,” Maya whispered. Joaquin was standing behind them, almost like protection, and Grace steadied herself and reached out to the tarnished brass knocker shaped like a lion. It seemed almost to snarl at them, like they were intruders.

  Grace hoped that wasn’t a bad omen.

  The knock seemed to echo down the street, and after a minute, a woman opened the door. She was wearing nurse’s scrubs, her dark, curly hair pulled back into a ponytail, and when she saw them, she smiled. “Magazines or cookies?” she said.

  “Wha—I’m sorry, what?” Grace stammered. She could feel Maya trembling next to her, her eyes gone wide as she stared at the woman with Joaquin’s nose, with Maya’s eyes.

  “Oh, sorry!” The woman leaned against the door. “Just the high school always has kids selling stuff for fund-raising. I’m happy to just write a check, I told them, but you know, people like their stuff.” She smiled wider and Grace thought she saw a glimpse of Peach. “I hope it’s cookies, because I have a ton of magazines I haven’t read.”

  “We’re not, um.” Grace realized with horror that maybe she should have practiced this. “Are you Melissa Taylor?”

  The smile fell from the woman’s face as if Grace had slapped it away. “No,” she said. “Melissa passed away a long time ago. I’m her sister, Jessica.”

  Grace didn’t even realize she had swayed on her feet until Joaquin was stepping forward to prop her up. She fumbled for what to say next, her head a clanging rush of noise and pain and shock, when the woman suddenly gasped, clasping a hand over her mouth.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, and then she was crying. “You’re her kids. You’re Melissa’s kids.” And then she was stepping forward, pulling the three of them into her arms.

  That’s when Grace started to cry, as well.

  MAYA

  The inside of Jessica’s home was as neat as the outside.

  Maya sat between Grace and Joaquin at the kitchen table as Jessica fluttered around them, getting sodas out of the refrigerator, setting them down along with paper napkins. “We would have called,” Grace said, her voice still thick and papery-sounding from crying, “but we didn’t have a number.”

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Jessica said. She was smiling even though there were still tear tracks on her cheeks, her mascara pooling under her eyes. Every so often, Maya would see Joaquin in her features, and then Grace, and sometimes herself. It was like looking at a funhouse mirror, the image in it constantly shifting, and Maya was fascinated. “I got rid of the landline a few years ago,” Jessica added as she sat down across from them. “Didn’t make sense to have one when I’m always using my cell. They keep calling me and offering me a great deal if I get a landline, but I told them why would I—” Melissa sud
denly stopped and smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. I babble when I’m nervous.”

  “Me, too,” Maya told her.

  Joaquin was very, very quiet as he sat next to Maya, but she could see his head following each of Jessica’s movements.

  “So,” Jessica said, giving them all a watery smile. “I bet you have some questions for me.”

  “How did she die?” Maya whispered. It felt like she had both lost and gained something huge. Melissa was gone, but Jessica was still here. A door had been closed, but another had been opened.

  Jessica nodded to herself as she looked down at her untouched glass of water. “It was a truck accident,” she murmured. “She was twenty-one, crossing the street, and she got hit by a trucker who ran a red light. He said he didn’t even see her. She died instantly, they said. She didn’t suffer. I worried about that, but that’s what they told us.”

  “Did you know our dads?” Grace asked.

  “Maybe I should just start at the beginning,” Jessica said, looking at each of them in turn as her eyes overflowed again. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she whispered. “I just haven’t seen Melissa’s face in so long, and now I’m looking at three versions of it and it’s so . . .” She fumbled for words. “All three of you are just so beautiful. You look just like her.”

  Maya felt Grace’s hand press against her own, and she wrapped her fingers around Grace’s and squeezed tight. She was afraid she would start crying if she didn’t hang on to something, and Maya wanted to remember every single word of this conversation. She wanted to breathe in each memory of her mother until it filled her up and made her fly across a pink-streaked sky, warm with fading light.

  “Do you,” Joaquin started to say, then cleared his throat. “Do you, um, have any pictures? Of Melissa?”

  Jessica shook her head, her lower lip trembling. “Your grandfather, our dad, he disowned her when she got pregnant with you, Joaquin. She was seventeen, and our parents were just beside themselves. They kicked her out. Our dad, I think it just broke his heart. He burned all of the pictures of her.”

  Maya thought of her own home, her parents, her bedroom, the photos on the stairs. She couldn’t imagine leaving any of them without having somewhere else to go.

  Joaquin leaned forward, and Maya felt herself reach up and put her hand on his arm, anchoring him to her and Grace. “Did you know my dad?” he asked.

  Jessica nodded, her eyes lighting up. “You should know, your parents were in love. They were high school sweethearts, they were so head over heels with each other. It was a little disgusting, actually.” Jessica chuckled to herself, wiping at her eyes. “She used to plan their wedding during study hall. He was so good to her, he just adored her.

  “But he got deported. Melissa didn’t know she was even pregnant at the time. I would hear her cry in her bed every single night, and then she started throwing up. At first, we both thought it was just because she was so sad, but then, well . . .”

  Joaquin nodded, his jaw set tight, his shoulders up around his ears. “Okay,” he said. “Do you remember his name?”

  Jessica looked at him. “Did you not know? Your dad’s name was Joaquin. Melissa named you after him.”

  “Oh,” Maya said softly, squeezing his shoulder. She couldn’t even imagine what that meant to him, but next to her, Joaquin was still, unmoving.

  “Did he, um, did he have a family?” he asked.

  Jessica nodded. “Yes, two parents and a little sister. They adored Melissa—she was always over at their house. They were all deported, just gone one day.” Maya could tell that Jessica was trying not to cry again. “Your mom, she just . . . it shattered her.”

  Maya watched Joaquin’s jaw start to tense and flex. She tried not to think of what his life would have been like with this other family, rooting him to the ground, sheltering him in their wings.

  “What happened when your dad kicked Melissa out?” Grace asked.

  “Well, she met another boy at this restaurant where she was a waitress, and then she got pregnant with you, Grace. I was only fourteen at the time, but I used to go into the restaurant and she’d give me free Cokes. They agreed to give up the baby—you, I mean—for adoption. I think he only stuck around because Grace’s parents paid for rent, utilities, all of that while Melissa was pregnant with Grace. And then when Grace was gone, things got worse, and social services showed up, and yeah. It wasn’t a safe place for you, Joaquin.” Jessica looked down at the table, her finger tracing an invisible pattern.

  “Is that when she gave me up?” Joaquin asked. “After that?”

  Jessica nodded. “She was trying to get it together, get you back, but then she met Maya’s dad, who wasn’t great”—Maya suspected that Jessica was leaving out some important details, trying to spare them—“and then she got pregnant with Maya, and it all fell apart again. She couldn’t keep any of you. She couldn’t keep her own life together. I think losing you broke her.” Jessica wiped at her eyes, and Maya thought of Lauren possibly hurting and hopeless. Next to her, Grace sniffled quietly, and Maya held her hand tighter.

  “Did you get adopted?” Jessica asked Joaquin, her eyes hopeful. “Were they a good family?”

  Joaquin shifted a little in his chair. “Um, no. There was one family, but they got pregnant right before the adoption went through, and they only wanted one kid, so . . . yeah. Ended up back in the system for a while.”

  Maya watched as Jessica’s face fell. “For how long?”

  “My entire life.”

  “But he’s with a really good family now,” Maya interrupted as Jessica started to cry again. “They’re crazy about him. They really love him a lot. They even bought him a car!” Maya wasn’t sure who she was talking to at this point, Jessica or Joaquin, but she knew they both needed to hear it. “Mark and Linda are really great people.”

  “I’m okay,” Joaquin said softly. “Really. I’m fine now.”

  Jessica got up and came back with a box of tissues. “This is for all of us, even though I may use most of them,” she said. “God, I just can’t believe that you’re all here. She wanted so badly to know the three of you. I know she wanted your parents to take Maya, Grace, but they couldn’t.”

  “No, my grandma, she died from cancer right before Maya was born,” Grace said. “But they helped me find her and Joaquin after . . .” Grace’s voice faded out for a few seconds. “I had a baby a couple of months ago. I gave her up for adoption, too.”

  There was a moment of silence as Jessica stared.

  “But my parents are wonderful,” Grace said immediately. “They’ve been really supportive of me, nothing like what happened to Melissa. I’m very lucky. I have great parents. They love me a lot.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Jessica sighed.

  “And I have a good situation with her adoptive parents,” Grace said. “They send me pictures.” She opened up her phone, flicking to the photograph that Maya had seen the week before and holding it up for Jessica.

  “She’s beautiful,” Jessica said, and Maya watched as Grace beamed, the pride shining through her like the sun.

  “Did you ever meet my dad?” Maya asked. “Did you know him?”

  “No, I never met him. I think after losing both Grace and Joaquin, Melissa was just untethered, you know? She couldn’t come home; our parents wouldn’t even speak to her on the phone. I think she was lonely, and she kept meeting men who promised her the world and never followed through.

  “But she would always refer to you as ‘the baby,’” Jessica added. “And she remembered all your birthdays.” Jessica’s eyes started to fill again. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, especially for you, Joaquin,” she whispered. “But God, she loved you. She did. I can’t tell you what it would mean to her to see the three of you sitting next to each other like this.”

  “What about your parents?” Joaquin asked, and Maya knew him well enough by now to hear the quaver there. “Are they still alive?”

  “No, they passed away a few years ago. Heart attack
and stroke, both within a year of each other. I don’t think our dad ever forgave himself after Melissa was killed. I think he regretted a lot of the decisions that he made. He would return all the letters that your parents would send to her.”

  Maya reached into her back pocket and pulled out the envelope from the safe, sliding it toward Jessica. “Like this one?” she asked.

  Jessica smiled sadly. “Like that one.”

  “And there’s no one else?” Grace asked. “You don’t have any other brothers or sisters?”

  “Just me,” Jessica said, smiling a little.

  Maya felt her own eyes spill over. “You’re all alone?” she asked.

  “Oh, sweetie, please, don’t,” Jessica said, then pushed the box of tissues toward Maya. “I’m not alone. I have a boyfriend, I have wonderful friends. I inherited this house when our parents died and remodeled it a little. I’m so not alone—please don’t be sad for me.”

  Grace was crying now, too, and Maya pushed the tissue box toward her.

  “And,” Jessica added, her mouth quivering a bit, “I’m an aunt. I’ve thought about all three of you every single day. I didn’t know how to find you, but I never forgot about you.”

  Now even Joaquin had tears on his cheeks, and Maya steered the tissue box back in his direction.

  “Having a new aunt would be very, very nice,” Maya said. “We could use one.”

  Jessica stood up, then reached up to cradle each of their faces in her hands. She lingered on Joaquin for the longest. “She loved you,” she whispered to him again. “She loved your dad and she loved you like crazy. I know it may not seem that way, but she did. I promise you that, Joaquin. She wanted the world for you.”

  Joaquin brought his hands up to hold on to Jessica’s wrists, and she ran her thumbs under his eyes and then kissed the top of his head. “Oh!” she suddenly gasped. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I forgot! I’ll be right back.”

  She hurried out of the room, leaving the three of them tearstained and dazed. “You’re named after your dad,” Maya whispered to Joaquin. “How crazy is that?”