Far From the Tree

by Robin Benway

  Grace had never heard her mother use the word magnificent before.

  Her dad took over. “Yes, thanks so much for having us over. Grace has really been looking forward to it.”

  Grace had, in a way, like the way she would look forward to a drop in a roller coaster. Only she wasn’t sure how good the seat belts were on this ride, or when was the last time anyone had done a safety inspection of the track.

  Luckily, her manners snapped into place, and she stepped forward and offered her hand to Diane. “Hi, I’m Grace,” she said. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

  Diane’s eyes looked wet as she shook her hand. “Grace,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “It is so, so lovely to meet you. I know Maya is looking forward to it, too. I think this’ll be really good for her.”

  Good for her? Grace saw trouble just around the bend.

  “She looks just like her,” Bob said. “Isn’t it uncanny, Di?”

  Grace smiled again, not sure what to say. She had no idea if that was true or not. She and Maya still hadn’t exchanged pictures yet, and she had been scared to look her up on social media.

  Grace wasn’t sure why.

  Just then, a girl came around the corner, also a redhead. Grace took a deep breath without realizing it. Did Maya have red hair? Was this her? Bob had said she looked just like Maya, but this girl and Grace couldn’t have looked more different.

  “Oh, this is our daughter Lauren,” Diane said, reaching an arm out to the girl and hugging her close. “She’s Maya’s sister.”

  Lauren smiled and Grace smiled back. Lauren was so obviously biological that it was ridiculous. Grace wondered what that was like, living in a house where the other three inhabitants looked nothing like you, like you were in a forever game of One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.

  “I thought Maya was on her way down,” Diane said, then took a step toward the stairs, Lauren still in tow. “Maya! Grace and her parents are here!”

  After a beat or two, Maya appeared at the top of the stairs. She was wearing cutoff denim shorts and a loose tank top, and her hair was in one of those topknots that Grace had tried to create many times but had never succeeded at because her hair wasn’t long enough. Maya looked like someone had dropped her into a life with these three well-dressed, redheaded strangers.

  And in a way, Grace realized, someone had.

  “Hi,” she said, waving a little. “I’m Grace.”

  “Hi,” Maya said. Her voice was oddly flat, but maybe she was playing it cool.

  When she got down to the end of the stairs, they both stood there looking at each other. Grace could hear the quiet sniffles from all four of their parents behind them, watching their two children meet for the first time. Maya looked like Grace, that was for sure. Eye color, hair color, even the same weird, ski-slope nose. She was a little bit shorter than Grace, but give or take a few freckles, it was like looking in a mirror.

  And Grace felt absolutely nothing.

  “Hi,” she said again. “Sorry, I don’t know what to say.” She giggled nervously, which she hated, but the whole thing was starting to feel so bizarre. They were in a house that looked like a princess’s castle! She had a biological sister who was staring at her, and who looked just like her! The dad was wearing a suit!

  Maya just looked at Grace, then turned to her dad. “Why are you wearing a suit?”

  “Because we have company,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and steering her toward the living room. Grace got the feeling that he was used to steering Maya away from things, like a distraction technique people used on toddlers. Redirection, that’s what it was called. Grace had seen it once when she’d dared herself to pick up a parenting book, in a bookstore fifteen miles away, where no one would recognize her.

  “Appetizers are this way!” Diane said, gesturing to Grace’s parents as she kept an arm around Lauren’s shoulders. Neither sister acknowledged the other, Grace noticed. As an only child, she had always studied how siblings interacted with one another. It was like watching one of those nature shows about weird animal species on TV that her dad always got obsessed with.

  “After you,” Grace’s mom said, following them into the (also white, also flawless) living room. “C’mon,” she said to Grace, and she walked between her and her dad.

  Grace’s dad leaned down to whisper in her ear as they walked. “You say the word,” he murmured, “and I’ll bring the car around. We’ll blow this fancy Popsicle stand.”

  Grace smiled and kind of swatted at him before her mom heard.

  Dinner was excruciating.

  The food was fine, of course; it wasn’t like they served sweetbreads or anything. (Grace had tried sweetbreads exactly once, before she realized that the words sweet and bread were the two worst possible ones to describe that particular food.)

  But they were basically seven strangers sitting in a dining room that was fancier than almost any restaurant Grace had ever set foot in, and two of them were related and had just met twenty minutes earlier. To make it even worse, the room had high ceilings, which seemed to make the silence echo around them, forks scraping against plates and sounding like someone yanking the needle off a record player over and over again.

  “Well, we’re just so glad that the two of you could meet,” Diane said, her voice a bit louder than necessary.

  Grace’s mom took the ball and ran with it, as moms often do.

  “Oh, same here!” she said, smiling at both Maya and Grace. “You both look so alike, too. I know Grace has always wanted a sister.”

  Grace looked at her mom, raising her eyebrow a little. Since when? But then she caught Maya glancing at her and quickly reset her face.

  “If you’d like a sister, may I offer a suggestion?” Maya said, then gestured toward Lauren. “We’ll even throw in a set of free steak knives, but you have to act now. Operators are standing by.”

  Lauren glared at Maya, and even though both Bob and Diane laughed, Grace could tell that they sort of wanted to murder Maya with their eyes. She laughed anyway, though. She couldn’t help it. Now she knew why Maya never wrote emails or texts like a normal human being: her humor was too dark.

  “Maya and Lauren are either best friends or worst enemies,” Diane said, picking up her wineglass and then setting it down while Maya took a bite of chicken. “We actually found out that I was pregnant with Lauren three months after we brought Maya home. I mean, we tried for almost ten years to have a child, and then that? Two miracles in three months! We couldn’t believe our good luck.”

  Grace saw her dad glance between Maya and Lauren, and she wondered if he was thinking what Grace was thinking: that those two were one dessert course away from a full-fledged cage match. Diane was either delusional or, more likely, trying to keep her children from ruining dinner.

  “So what’s it like being an only child, Grace?” Lauren asked her. “Is it amazing? It sounds amazing.”

  Maya’s mom cleared her throat and took a long swallow of wine.

  “Um.” Grace looked at her plate for a second, then back at Lauren. “It’s . . . quiet?”

  Every adult at the table laughed, and Grace smiled.

  “It’s okay, I guess. I don’t know, it’s fine.”

  Maya looked at her but spoke to her parents. “Can Grace and I be excused?” she asked. “We have, like, fifteen years of bonding to catch up on.”

  “Sure, I suppose so,” her mom said. “Take your food with you, though? You don’t eat enough.”

  “You know that’s a line straight out of the How to Give Your Daughter an Eating Disorder manual, right?” Maya said, but she was already pushing back her chair, grabbing her plate, and motioning to Grace to follow her.

  Grace glanced at her mom, the roller-coaster train climbing farther up the track. “It’s fine, go ahead,” her mom said, and she left her plate and scampered up the stairs behind Maya, slipping a little on the marble.

  The portrait wall Grace had seen when they’d first entered the house w
as more striking up close, and she found herself walking more slowly as she looked at the photos. They were candids and professional portraits from over the years, from Maya and Lauren as babies up until what looked like the most recent shot, taken last Christmas. Maya stood out in every single photo, the one brunette in a family of redheads, her smile getting less and less full over the years.

  The minute they were in Maya’s room, Maya shut the door and let out a huge sigh. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, that was brutal,” she said, untwisting her hair out of the bun. Grace realized that it was way longer than her hair, and she wondered if maybe she should grow hers back out, too.

  “Oh, it’s—yeah, it’s cool.” Grace looked around the room, at the blue ribbons won for . . . something sporty, probably. “Your parents seem nice.”

  Maya shot her a look in the mirror. “You know those ribbons are just participation awards, right?”

  “Oh,” Grace said.

  Maya pulled her hair over her shoulder, then tossed it back again. “I told my parents, like, a million times, don’t do a fancy dinner, let’s just get pizza or something, don’t make it weird. And what do they do? They make it weird.”

  “It’s not that weird.”

  “My dad is wearing a suit, Grace.”

  “Okay, that’s a little weird,” she admitted.

  Maya’s room, as opposed to the rest of the house, looked like there had been an explosion at a color factory. One wall was dark blue, another pale yellow, and then two white ones. Posters were up all over the walls, mostly of bands, plus dozens of Polaroids that had been stuck to the wall with bright blue tape. “Did you take these?” Grace asked, leaning in to look at one of Maya with her arms around a girl, kissing her on the cheek as the girl smiled with her eyes closed.

  Maya glanced over at her. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s my girlfriend, Claire.”

  “She’s cute,” Grace said. “She looks like Tinkerbell.”

  Maya paused. “You know I mean girlfriend, right? Not, like, girl, period. Friend, period.”

  Grace nodded. “No, I got it.” She suspected this was a test for Maya to see whether or not her newly discovered biological relative was a homophobic nightmare. “Girlfriend. One word. How long have you dated?”

  “Almost six months,” Maya said, and for the first time, she looked almost relaxed, not like a lab rat in a cage, waiting to see what would happen next. “She’s amazing. We met at Catholic school.”

  “You’re Catholic?”

  “Nope.” Maya flopped down on the bed and pressed her thumb against Claire’s face in the photo, scrunching up her nose. “It’s just the best private school around, so my parents sent Lauren and me there anyway. We’re basically sinning our way through religious school. It’s great.”

  Grace sat down on the edge of the bed, still looking at Maya’s Polaroids. There were overexposed shots of roses, hands pressed together in prayer, more selfies of Maya and Claire together. “So do you and Lauren, like, hate each other?”

  “You mean the Redheaded Golden Child?”

  Grace guessed she had her answer.

  Maya rolled over so that she was looking at Grace upside down. “So, no siblings for you, huh?”

  “Nope,” Grace said. Maya’s duvet was soft against her leg, the worn material reminding Grace of all the days and nights she had spent in her own bed after Peach, huddled up in her own sheets and blankets like they could protect her.

  “Why do you look sad?” Maya cocked her head at her. From that angle, she sort of looked like a parakeet.

  “Um, just because . . . it was sort of a bummer growing up an only child,” Grace said, covering.

  Maya groaned and flopped down on the other side of the bed. “Do you want my sister?” she asked. “A two-for-one deal?”

  “That’s the second time you’ve offered her. Is she that terrible?” Grace asked. For all the photos on the bedroom wall, she realized that there wasn’t a single shot of Maya’s family.

  “She’s not terrible, just annoying,” Maya said. “You know that smart kid that’s in your class and always knows the answers and the teacher leaves her in charge whenever she has to step out of the classroom for a minute?” Maya arched her back so she could look at Grace upside down again. “That’s Lauren.”

  “That sounds fun to live with,” Grace said.

  Maya smiled. “So we both inherited the sarcasm gene. Good.” Then she sighed and sat back up. “My parents don’t really get it when I’m sarcastic. It complicates things.”

  “Um, speaking of inheriting,” Grace said, and Maya looked over at her, suddenly still as a deer. “I mean, not money or anything, but I’m trying to find our biological mom.”

  Maya let out a huge sigh and slumped back down on the bed. “Ugh. Have fun.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  Maya rolled back over so they were face-to-face. She had a lot of energy, and Grace suddenly wondered if Maya was nervous. “Look,” she said, “I know we’re in the same boat here, so you do you or whatever, but she gave us away. She gave us up. Like, fly, little chickadees. Why would I want to find a woman who didn’t want me in the first place?”

  “You don’t know that, though!” Grace said, louder than she meant to. The room felt very warm all of a sudden. “What if she was young, or scared? What if her parents made her give us away?”

  “Well, then, how come she hasn’t come looking for us?” Maya asked, in a way that Grace knew meant she wasn’t waiting for a response. “Point, me.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to upset us or—”

  “Grace, look, if you want to find her, go for it. But I’m out. I just want to graduate, go to New York with Claire, and move away from here and finally start my life. I’m not interested in going backward, okay?”

  Grace knew right then that Maya was angry—at their bio mother. And that as a result, she could never tell Maya about Peach.

  “But it’s cool if we hang out,” Maya added, and Grace wondered what her face looked like if Maya felt the need to add that part. “You seem nice, your parents seem fine, and you know, if I ever need a kidney or a blood transfusion, it wouldn’t hurt to have you in my contacts.” She smiled a little. “And vice versa, of course, although I faint around needles.”

  Grace nodded. What was she going to do, force this new person to go on a wild-goose chase with her? “Okay,” she said. “If that’s how you feel.”

  “Really?” Maya picked up her pillow and hugged it to her. “God, that was easy. Lauren would just whine and whine until I finally said yes.”

  “Well, that’s a sister thing. Give me some time—I’m sure I can work on it.”

  “I would maybe be interested in finding our brother, though,” Maya said.

  Grace nodded. She hadn’t told anyone—and she had no plans to, either—but she kept having nightmares that Peach’s new parents gave her away, that she was suddenly gone all over again, lost in the system that had ensnared Joaquin. But instead of saying any of this, she dug her phone out of her pocket. “I talked to his social worker last week. My parents helped me track down her info, and she said that we could email him.”

  “She did?” Maya set her pillow down, leaning forward. “Why does he have a social worker?”

  “Because he was, um . . .” Grace squirmed a little, the duvet no longer as comfortable. “Because he wasn’t adopted. Like, ever? He’s been living with this family about an hour away from here, but he’s been in a lot of different homes since before then.”

  Maya’s eyes grew wide, and Grace finally saw the little-sister potential in her. She could imagine Maya toddling after her, annoying her, pulling her hair and borrowing her clothes without asking first. She didn’t tell Maya about all the people she’d talked to on the phone, trying to follow a seventeen-year-old trail of bread crumbs that had mostly blown to the wind and taken Joaquin with them. She didn’t mention that some people had been rude, others had been so helpful that it made Grace’s heart hurt, that Joaquin
’s family tree seemed to have way too many scraggly branches and not enough roots, not the kind of roots you would need when the storm was strong.

  “We should totally email him!” Maya said, then threw her pillow at Grace in excitement. “But you do it. You write really good ‘Hello! I think we might be related!’ emails.”

  “I took it as an elective freshman year,” Grace said, then smiled when Maya laughed at her joke.

  So that’s how Grace ended up drafting yet another email to a sibling she had never met.

  Hi Joaquin,

  You don’t know me, but I think we share some family. I know your social worker mentioned that we might email you. A girl named Maya and I recently found out that we’re biological sisters. We were both adopted and met each other for the first time and, after doing some research, realized that you might be our brother.

  Would you be interested in meeting up with us? We live about an hour away so we could meet you anywhere.

  Best wishes,

  Grace & Maya

  “Best wishes?” Maya said when she saw the email. “Seriously?”

  “It’s warm without being personal,” Grace explained, shrugging her shoulders.

  “Warm without being personal?” Maya repeated. “Wow, okay.”

  “So what’s it like being in a family of redheads?” Grace asked, trying to change the subject.

  Maya huffed out a laugh. “Did you see the Sears Portrait Studio out there?” she asked, then sang, “One of these things is not like the other . . .”

  “Are your parents cool with you being gay?” Grace suddenly felt oddly protective of her, like she had with Peach.

  “Are you kidding? This is basically their claim to fame. They pretty much joined PFLAG before I even finished telling them that I was a lesbian. My dad—get this—he wanted to go to a gay pride parade with me.”

  Grace couldn’t help but giggle, oddly relieved that Maya wasn’t in some awful, oppressive home. “Well, that’s good, right?” she said. “That they’re supportive?”