Far From the Tree

by Robin Benway

  My parents also said you live thirty minutes away, so maybe we could meet for coffee or something? If you’d like to get to know me, I’d like to get to know you. No pressure, though. I know this has the potential to be super weird.

  Hope to hear from you soon,

  Grace

  She read it three times and then hit “send.”

  All she could do was wait.

  MAYA

  When Maya was a little girl, her favorite movie was the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. She loved the idea of falling down a rabbit hole, of plummeting into something that she wasn’t expecting, and of course, the idea that a small white rabbit could wear a tiny waistcoat and glasses.

  But her absolute favorite scene was the part when Alice grew too big to fit inside the White Rabbit’s house. Her legs and arms went out the windows, shattering the glass, and her head crashed through the roof, while people yelled and screamed all around her. Maya loved that part. She used to make her parents rewind it over and over again, laughing herself sick at the idea that a roof could go and resettle itself.

  Now, when her parents would fight and the walls on her house felt too small and she wished she could smash the glass windows and escape, the idea of a house blowing apart didn’t seem so funny.

  Maya didn’t really remember a time when her parents weren’t fighting. When she and her sister, Lauren, were younger, it was done behind closed doors, muffled voices and tight smiles the next morning at breakfast. Over the years, though, the quiet words became raised. Then came the shouting, and finally screaming.

  The screaming was the worst, shrill and high-pitched, the kind of noise that made you want to cover your ears and scream right back.

  Or run and hide.

  Maya and Lauren chose the latter. Maya was thirteen months older than Lauren, so she felt responsible. She would jump for the remote and turn up the TV volume until it was too hard to tell what was louder, who wanted to win the noise battle more. “Would you turn down that TV?” her dad had yelled more than once, and it felt so unfair. They had only turned it up because he was too loud in the first place.

  Maya and Lauren were fifteen and fourteen now.

  The fights were louder than ever.

  The fights were all the time.

  You’re always working! You’re always working and you don’t—

  For you! For the girls! For our family! Jesus Christ, you want everything and yet when I try to give it to you—

  Maya was old enough to understand that a lot of those angry words had to do with the wine: a glass before dinner, two or three during dinner, and a fifth sloshed into the glass when Maya’s dad was away on business. Maya never saw empty bottles lying in the recycling bin, and the pantry shelves always seemed to be stocked with unopened bottles, and she wondered who her mom was hiding the evidence from: her daughters, her husband, or herself.

  Then again, she would have let her mother drink three bottles a night if it kept her calm, complacent. Even, Jesus Christ, sleepy.

  But the wine only served to rev her parents up like cars before a race, gunning at each other until someone waved a flag and vroom! They were off. Maya and Lauren had learned to be out of the way by then, safely stashed away upstairs in their bedrooms, or at a friend’s, or even just saying they were at a friend’s and then hiding in the backyard until the coast was clear. It wasn’t that their parents’ fights got violent or anything like that; words could shatter harder than a glass breaking against a wall, hurt more than a fist plowing through teeth.

  It was easy to follow their pattern. Maya was fairly certain she could even write out their dialogue for them. Once the yelling began, it was always about fifteen minutes until her mother accused her father of having an affair. Maya didn’t know if it was true or not, and honestly, she didn’t even really care that much. Let him, if it made him happy. Maya suspected that her mother would be thrilled if it were true. Like she’d finally win a race she’d been running for decades.

  Would it kill you to be home before eight o’clock at night? Really? Would it?

  Oh, well, remind me again who wanted to redo the kitchen? Do you think that just pays for itself?

  A knock at her door made her look up. She half expected it to be Claire, even though she knew it wasn’t possible. She had been dating Claire for five months, and her arms were a place safer and better than all the backyard hideouts in the world. Claire was security. Claire, Maya sometimes thought, felt like home.

  It was Lauren at the door instead. “Hey,” she said when Maya opened it. “Can I hang out with you for a bit?”

  “Sure,” Maya said.

  At some point, and Maya wasn’t sure when, their conversations had gone from riotous giggles to whispered secrets to short sentences, and then just one- or two-word responses. The thirteen-month difference between them had spread them apart like a gulf, growing only wider with each passing month.

  Maya had always known she was adopted. In a family of redheads, that fact was pretty obvious. At night when Maya was little, in order to get her to sleep, her mom would tell the story of how they had brought her home from the hospital. She had heard it a thousand times, of course, but she always wanted it told again. Her mom was a good storyteller (she had been a radio DJ in college), and she’d always ham it up and do these big exaggerated gestures about how scared they were to put Maya in the car seat for the first time, and how Maya’s parents had bought pretty much every single bottle of hand sanitizer that Costco had.

  But Maya’s favorite part was always the ending. “And then,” her mom would say, pulling the covers up over her and smoothing the blankets down, “you came home with us. Where you belong.”

  At first, it hadn’t seemed to matter that Maya was adopted and Lauren wasn’t. They were sisters and that was that. But then other kids had explained it to her.

  Other kids could be real assholes.

  “They probably wouldn’t have gotten you if Lauren had been born first,” Maya’s third-grade best friend, Emily Whitmore, had explained to her one day at lunch. “Lauren’s biological”—she said the word like someone had just taught it to her—“and you’re not. That’s just facts.” Maya could still remember Emily’s face as she explained the “facts” to her, could still remember the sharp, cutting way she’d wanted to put her eight-year-old fist right through Emily’s smug little mug. Emily had been super into honesty that year, which was probably why she didn’t have many friends now that they were sophomores in high school. (Her face was still smug, though. And Maya still wanted to punch it.)

  But Emily had been right about one thing: Three months after her parents brought Maya home from the hospital, their mother had discovered that she was pregnant with Lauren. They had tried for almost ten years to have at least one baby, and now they were blessed with two.

  Well, blessed wasn’t always the word that Maya would have used.

  “Which one of you was adopted?” people would sometimes say to her and Lauren, and both girls would just blink at them. At first, they hadn’t understood the joke, but Maya caught on a lot quicker than Lauren. She had to. She was the only one who stood out, the only one who wasn’t pale with freckles and amber-colored red hair, the only dark brunette stain in every single family photo that lined the stairs.

  When their parents were fighting, Maya sometimes imagined torching their entire house. She always thought she’d spray the most gasoline on those family portraits on the stairs.

  By the time she was five, Maya got that she was different. When she’d been Star of the Week in kindergarten, all the kids had asked questions about why she was adopted, where her “real mommy” was, if she had been given away because she was bad. Not one of them asked anything about her pet turtle, Scooch, or her favorite blanket, which her great-grandma Nonie had knitted for her. She had cried afterward. She hadn’t been able to explain why.

  She loved her parents, though, with a desperation that sometimes scared her.

  Sometimes she dreamed abo
ut the ones who’d given her away, and she woke up running from faceless brown-haired people, their arms reaching out for her, Maya sweating from the effort it took to escape. Her parents—minus the wine, the fighting, the suffocating adultness of kitchen renovations and mortgage payments—were good people. Very good people. And they loved her deeply and wholly. But Maya always noticed that the books they read about child rearing were about adopted kids, not biological ones. They spent so much time trying to normalize her life that Maya sometimes felt like she was anything but normal.

  She cleared a space off her bed for Lauren. “What are you doing?”

  “Math homework,” Lauren said. Lauren was terrible at math, at least compared to Maya. They were only a year apart in school, but Maya was three years ahead in math classes. “What are you doing?”

  Maya just waved in the general direction of her laptop. “Essay.”

  “Oh.”

  To be fair, Maya was working on an essay. It was just that she wasn’t working on it right then. She had been working on it for a week and it had been due three days ago. She knew her teacher would give her a pass, though. Teachers loved Maya. She could wrap them around her fingers, and by the time she was done, she had extra-credit points without even having to do the work. And besides, it wasn’t like the world was waiting with bated breath to read yet another essay about the importance of characterization in Spoon River Anthology.

  Instead, she was chatting with Claire.

  Claire had been a new student at their school last March. Maya could still remember her walking up the front lawn, backpack slung over one shoulder instead of both, like how everyone else on campus wore it.

  Maya liked her immediately.

  She liked that her nail polish was always, always chipped, but her hair never had a split end. She liked that Claire’s socks never matched, but she had the best shoes. (Maya coveted her Doc Martens and cursed the fact that her feet were two sizes bigger than Claire’s.)

  She loved the way Claire’s hand felt in hers, how her skin could sometimes feel like the softest, most electric thing that Maya had ever touched. She loved Claire’s laugh (it was deep and, quite frankly, sounded like a goose being murdered) and Claire’s mouth and the way Claire would pat her hair like she was something sweet and precious.

  Maya loved the way that she had spent her entire life trying to figure out where she fit, only to have Claire snap right into place next to her, like they had been waiting their whole lives to find each other.

  Maya’s parents, because they weren’t antiquated dinosaurs, didn’t care that she was gay. Or, more to the point, they weren’t just fine with it. They were proud. Her dad even put a rainbow sticker on his car, which scandalized the neighborhood for a bit until Maya gently explained that a rainbow sticker on your car usually meant that you were gay, and maybe the neighbors were getting the wrong idea?

  But still, it was a sweet gesture. They gave money to PFLAG and she and her dad ran a 10K together. Maya had all the support she needed in that particular arena, and she was grateful for it. She just wished sometimes that her parents would pay attention to their own relationship, rather than focusing on hers.

  Another door slammed and Lauren jumped. Not too much, but enough for Maya to notice.

  Do you even care about seeing your daughters?

  How dare you say something like that to me!

  You didn’t even ask Maya about—

  Both girls looked at each other. “Did you get anything from that girl yet?” Lauren asked after a beat.

  Maya shook her head. “Nope.”

  The night before, Maya’s parents had sat her down—the first time in months that she had seen them together at home when they weren’t at each other’s throats—and they had told her about a girl named Grace. She was Maya’s half sister, who lived with her parents twenty minutes away. For the first time ever, it seemed, Grace had asked about her biological family. There was a boy, too, a supposed half brother named Joaquin, but no one seemed to know where he was anymore, like a set of keys someone had misplaced. “Is it okay if we give Grace your email address?” her father asked.

  Maya had just shrugged. “Sure, okay.”

  It wasn’t okay, not really, but she didn’t entirely trust her parents to be strong for her anymore. They could barely keep it together around each other—what sort of energy did they have left over for her? She had no desire to cry in front of them, or ask questions, or give them even the smallest glimpse into her brain. She didn’t trust them with her thoughts, not when they acted like two bulls in a china shop. She would have to keep herself at a remove—safe from that sort of damage.

  Last night, she had woken up from a horrible nightmare: the tall, dark-haired people were reaching out for her, trying to pull her through the window of her bedroom, and she had woken up gasping, her hands shaking so bad that she couldn’t even text Claire on her phone. She wasn’t sure what had been scarier: the strangers trying to spirit her away or the fact that she wasn’t sure she wanted them to fail.

  She never fell back to sleep.

  You know Maya. She won’t tell you things, you have to ask her! She’s not like Lauren! If you spent any time with them—

  It wasn’t like Maya was thrilled she was adopted, but in times like that, she was sort of glad that these people weren’t biologically related to her. (Sucks to be you, Laur, she would sometimes think when the fights got too loud, too close.) It was easier to imagine a world of possibilities, a world where literally anyone could be related to her. But then, sometimes, that just made the world seem too big and Maya started to feel untethered, like she could float away, and she’d reach for Claire’s hand and hang on tight, shocking herself back down to earth.

  “Do you think they’re going to get a divorce?” Lauren had asked her a few months ago, after their dad had stormed out of the house and their mom hadn’t even come to check on them. The girls had slept in the same bed that night, something they hadn’t done since they were little.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Maya had said, but then the thought kept her awake all night. If her parents split up, who would they pick? Lauren was biological, just like Emily Whitmore had pointed out. Maya wasn’t.

  It was a ridiculous idea, obviously.

  And yet.

  That night, after everyone had drifted back upstairs, after Lauren had gone back to her room and shut the door behind her and Maya had texted with Claire way past when she was supposed to be off her phone (my parents are totally getting a divorce lol) and no one came to stop her, Maya lay awake in bed.

  Everything seemed more terrible at three a.m. That was just a fact.

  Her phone suddenly dinged, an email notification, and she opened it. She read somewhere that for every minute you spent on your phone in bed, you lost an hour of sleep. She had thought that was bullshit, but now it seemed possible.

  Sister? the email header read.

  It wasn’t from Lauren.

  Maya opened it up.

  JOAQUIN

  Joaquin always liked early mornings best.

  He liked the pink sky that slowly turned yellow and then blue on clear mornings. When it wasn’t clear, he liked the fog that folded into the city like a blanket, curling itself over the hills and freeways, so thick that sometimes Joaquin could touch it.

  He liked the quiet of those mornings, how he could skateboard down the street without worrying about dodging slow tourists or toddlers making a sudden break from their parents. He liked being alone without anyone around him. The aloneness felt more like his choice that way. It was easier than feeling alone while surrounded by people, which was how he always seemed to feel once the rest of the world started to wake up, before reality settled in and the fog blanket was melted away by the sun.

  Joaquin leaned his body to the left as he careered down the hill toward the arts center. The wheels on his board were new, a “just because” gift from his eighteenth set of foster parents.

  Mark and Linda were good people, had be
en his fosters for almost two years, and Joaquin liked them. Linda had taught him how to drive on their ancient minivan, ignoring the small dent that Joaquin had put in the back passenger-side door; Mark had taken him to six baseball games last summer, where they sat next to each other and watched the games in silence, nodding in agreement whenever the ump made the right call. “Nice to see a dad and son at the game together,” one older man had said to them at the end of one game, and when Mark had grinned and hooked his arm around Joaquin’s shoulders, Joaquin had flushed so deeply that he felt almost feverish.

  He knew some basics about his early life, but not too many things. He had gone into foster care when he was one, put there by his mother. He knew from seeing his birth certificate once that her name was Melissa Taylor, and that his father’s last name was Gutierrez, but that had been about ten social workers ago, and Melissa’s parental rights had long been severed. She had never shown up for any visitations when he was a baby. Sometimes Joaquin wondered if he had been the worst baby in the world if his own mother didn’t even want to come to see him.

  He didn’t know anything about his bio dad, other than his last name and the fact that Joaquin only had to look in the mirror to know that his mysterious father hadn’t been white. “You look Mexican,” one foster brother had told him after Joaquin had to explain that he didn’t know where he was from. No one had ever said anything to argue against it, so that was that. Joaquin was Mexican.

  As far as foster parents and foster homes went, they had been good and bad. There had been the foster mom who once lost her temper and whacked Joaquin in the back of the head with a wooden hairbrush, making him feel like one of those cartoon characters who literally saw stars; the elderly couple who, for reasons that Joaquin never understood, would tape his left hand shut, forcing him to use his right (it didn’t work, Joaquin was still a lefty); a foster dad who liked to squeeze Joaquin by the back of the neck, literally grinding his vertebrae together in a way that Joaquin could never fully forget; the parents who kept the fosters’ food on a separate pantry shelf, the generic store brands lined up right below the brand-name cereals for the biological kids.