Far From the Tree

by Robin Benway

Grace looked at her.

  “Shutting up now,” she said, then pretended to lock her lips and throw away the key.

  The beach was crowded for a Saturday, and their pace slowed to a crawl as they got closer to the arts center. “Ugh, traffic,” Maya said, but Grace shot her a look and she immediately went quiet again. No one had ever really locked her in the trunk before, and she didn’t quite know Grace’s limits well enough to push them yet. Silence was definitely golden.

  It was almost one p.m. by the time they parked, and Maya groaned as they crawled out of the car. “It wasn’t even an hour and a half,” Grace said, squinting into the sun. Maya had no idea why she didn’t just get some sunglasses.

  “Whatever, I’m young, I’m still growing. I hope.” Maya was sort of sensitive about being short. (Well, shorter.) She looked around. “Yep. Lots of art.”

  “So the fact that it’s called an arts center isn’t just a clever disguise.”

  “Hey, sarcasm is my job,” Maya said, tossing her bag over her shoulder as Grace slammed her door shut and checked to make sure that the car was locked.

  “What sarcasm? I’m just—” Grace started to say.

  Maya lowered her sunglasses long enough to look at her.

  Grace sighed. “I’m just stressed.”

  “I kind of figured that out when you threatened to lock me in the trunk,” Maya scoffed.

  “It’s . . .” Grace took a deep breath and shook out her arms. “You’re seriously not even a little nervous to meet him?”

  Maya shrugged, tossing her empty Starbucks cup into a recycling bin. She wasn’t sure what she felt, but it was bright orange, like a warning, like a question. “Not really. The way I see it, if he’s a big weirdo or a psycho killer or something, then we can just be like, ‘Oops, sorry, the lab screwed up the DNA results, later gator,’ and then we just block his calls and emails. Oh, look, they made a whale out of gum wrappers! That’s pretty cool.”

  Grace followed Maya’s gaze to see that yes, someone had in fact made a whale out of gum wrappers. “So you’re ready to just bounce on our biological brother. Were you going to do the same thing with me?”

  “Well, yeah, but only if you were a weirdo who drove alternately like a grandma and a Fast and Furious extra and listened to NPR.” Grace’s face stayed the same and Maya wondered if Grace’s interest in her sense of humor had been a one-time thing. “Just kidding!” she finally said. “C’mon, let the family bonding begin!”

  They paid the admission fee (“Do you have a friends and family discount?” Maya asked the woman at the box office), then made their way into the center. It was hot and crowded, and it took a few minutes to find the information booth. “Hi,” Maya said, sidling up to the window and pushing her sunglasses up on her head. “Do you happen to know Joaquin?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the guy said. “He’s over at the pottery tent.”

  “Pottery. Ooh, so real,” Maya said, then looked at Grace. “He must take after me.”

  Grace moved so that she could block Maya out of the information window entirely. “And where’s the pottery tent?”

  He pointed over Grace’s head toward the center of the festival. “Just follow the line of kids,” he said. “You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks,” Maya said. “You’ve been a pal.”

  “Hey, wait! Are you his sisters?”

  Maya shoved her way back into the window. “Maybe,” she said. “What have you heard?”

  The man smiled. “Just that he said that he had two sisters coming to see him today.”

  Maya stuck her hand through the window. “Hi! I’m Maya. This is Grace.”

  “Hi,” Grace said, but only after Maya nudged her in the side.

  “Gus,” the man said. “Lucky ladies, having Joaquin for a brother. Yeah, he’s working in the pottery booth.”

  “Would you say he has artistic ability?” Maya asked Gus. “On a scale of normal to Manson family, how would you rate his—”

  “Thank you so much,” Grace said, shoving Maya out of the window again. “We’ll go find him now.” She took Maya’s arm and led her away a few feet before she shook her off. “You know, you might not want to share your concern that Joaquin’s a psychopath with people we just met.”

  “Whatever, Gus seems cool. We could hang.” Maya readjusted her sunglasses, then glanced around. “And you never know, maybe the whole point of meeting Joaquin is so we can become friends with Gus. You’ve got to look at the big picture, Grace. Now where’s the pot throwing?”

  They eventually found the tent, and Gus hadn’t been wrong: there was a huge line of kids wrapped around it, all of them looking in to where there were two volunteers, each with a kid, carefully turning clay on a pottery wheel. One of the volunteers was older looking, like she could have been a grandma, and the other volunteer had dark hair that he had pulled back from his face in a short ponytail. Even though he was sitting down, Maya could tell he was tall.

  When he looked up at Maya and Grace, both of them gasped a little.

  It was Joaquin.

  “He looks like you,” they both said at the same time, and Maya supposed that neither of them was wrong.

  The three of them stood looking at one another for a long minute, children and parents carrying clay pots weaving between them. Joaquin was definitely not white like his sisters, that much was obvious, but he had Maya’s brown eyes and curly dark hair and Grace’s tight, set jaw, and Maya felt something in her rib cage catch and pull tight, like a muscle that had never been used before. Her feeling was green, like grass, like a seed coming up through dirt, sprouting and growing toward the sun.

  Maya smiled at him and he smiled back. They had the same crooked teeth in front, one front tooth slightly overlapping the other. Well, Joaquin still had his, but Maya’s parents had put her through two years of braces in order to correct it. She regretted that now. She wanted to look like the people who shared her blood. She wanted people to stop them on the street and say, “You must be related.” She wanted to belong to them, wanted them to belong to her the way that no one else in the world could.

  Grace was sniffling next to her. “Seriously?” Maya whispered to her just as Joaquin made the international gesture for Give me one minute and I’ll be over. “Do we really need the waterworks right now?”

  “Shut up,” Grace mumbled, wiping at her eyes. “I’m hormonal.”

  “Are our cycles already syncing?” Maya said, her eyes widening. “Because I’m totally going to start my period, like, tomorrow, and—”

  “Hey,” someone said. Maya looked over—and up, way up, her hopes of being tall in at least one family dashed—to see Joaquin standing next to them. “Hey, I’m Joaq.” He pronounced it like wok.

  Maya tried to hide the fact that her hand was shaking when he shook it. She wasn’t used to touching boys, and she wondered if all of their hands felt this dry. Next to her, Grace was still wiping her eyes, and when Joaquin turned toward her, she reached out and hugged him around his waist. “Hi!” she said. “It’s so good to meet you!”

  Joaquin looked like an animal who had just realized that he was prey instead of predator, but he did a good job of hiding it. “Hey,” he said, his hand awkwardly patting her shoulder. “Hey.”

  “Why didn’t you cry when you met me?” Maya demanded, putting her hands on her hips and turning toward Joaquin again. “She didn’t get teary even once. You should feel lucky.”

  “I do! I mean, totally. I do,” he said, still patting Grace’s shoulder. Finally, Maya yanked her away from him.

  “You’re freaking him out,” she whispered. “Pull it together, seriously.”

  “Maybe we can go get something to eat?” Joaquin asked, gesturing toward the exit. “I’m done for the day, so I can get lunch or . . . ?” He left the question hanging in the air, like he wasn’t sure if it was the right one to ask.

  “No, yeah, that’s perfect,” Grace said. “Let’s go.”

  And Maya watched as all three of their shad
ows turned at the same time, heading in one direction.

  JOAQUIN

  Joaquin knew even before he met his sisters that they would be white.

  His social worker, Allison, had approached him and Mark and Linda about it several weeks ago. They sat at the kitchen island and ate chips and salsa while Allison carefully explained the situation—that Joaquin had not one but two sisters, that they all shared a mother, that the girls had been adopted at birth but had just found out about him and were looking to get in touch.

  That’s when Joaquin knew.

  He wasn’t naïve about the ways of the world. He knew that white baby girls were first-ranked on most people’s list of Children We Would Like to Have One Day. He knew they were more expensive, too, that people paid almost $10,000 more in legal fees for babies who were white, so he knew that these girls’ adoptive parents had some money. Well, good for them. Joaquin couldn’t resent his sisters for that.

  His sisters.

  Holy shit.

  Joaquin had sat very still and steady while Mark and Linda nodded and Allison kept talking. “Yeah, it’s cool,” he said when Allison asked if maybe Grace and Maya could email him, and then said he had homework and went upstairs and listened to music and worked with some charcoals on his new sketch pad and didn’t do any homework at all and definitely did not think about the fact that there were at least two people in the world who were related to him, and that one of his biggest fears had come true not once, but twice.

  Mark and Linda knew not to push him, so they didn’t. And when Joaquin got the email, he read it three times before filing it away, then read it twice more and put it away again. He wasn’t sure if he should reply. By lassoing himself to these girls, he might pull them down from the sky and out of their perfect elliptical orbit, throwing everything off-balance.

  “Did you hear from Grace and Maya?” Linda asked one night while they were loading the dishwasher. Joaquin could tell that she and Mark had practiced this conversation, but it didn’t bother him. He liked that they practiced things for him, that they wanted to get it right for him. It was a nice gesture. Sometimes he felt like someone’s parent at a school recital whenever Mark and Linda did that, like he should be giving them a thumbs-up and whispering loudly, “Good effort!” the way he had seen other parents do for their kids.

  “Yeah,” Joaquin said, then turned on the garbage disposal. When he couldn’t run it anymore, he turned it off. Linda was still standing there.

  “Did you write back?” she asked.

  Joaquin just looked at her.

  “Okay, fine, busted,” she said, then playfully smacked his shoulder with a rubber glove. (She had done that the first week that he had lived with them and Joaquin had almost flown out of his skin.) “Mark and I were just wondering, that’s all.”

  “They sound nice,” Joaquin said, passing her some spoons. “Pretty girly.”

  “Well, sometimes girls are girly,” Linda said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “You think they want to meet me?”

  Linda paused. “I’m pretty sure that when someone emails you asking to meet them, that’s a good sign.”

  Joaquin just shook his head. “No, I mean, like . . . meet me.”

  Linda paused again, but there was a gentleness between her words. “I think lots of people want to meet you, kiddo,” she said, then put a warm, soapy hand on his shoulder. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  So he wrote back.

  He tried to keep it casual, like he had tons of practice emailing his biological siblings about getting together. He wondered if he’d managed to pull it off, but they wrote back the very next day (Grace seemed to be the spokesperson for their little group, so Joaquin guessed she was the older one) and said that they’d be happy to meet him on Saturday at the arts center.

  Well, then. That was that.

  Joaquin had a hard time sleeping the night before. He hadn’t looked them up online, didn’t want to know who they were until he actually met them, but that left his brain with too much space to fill, so it felt like he was floating instead of sleeping. At three a.m., he went downstairs to eat cereal because that’s what Mark always did when he couldn’t sleep, and that’s where Mark found him fifteen minutes later.

  “Any Golden Grahams left?” was all Mark said, and Joaquin passed him the box. “Can’t sleep?”

  “Nope.” Joaquin shook his head, then pushed the milk toward Mark.

  Mark, to his credit, managed to eat half the bowl before asking another question. “Nervous about meeting Grace and Maya?”

  Two years ago, Joaquin would have answered “Nope” to that question, too, but it wasn’t two years ago anymore. “What if they don’t like me?” he asked before shoveling a huge spoonful of cereal into his mouth.

  Mark just nodded thoughtfully. “Well, if they don’t like you, then the unfortunate fact is that you’re related to idiots. I’m sorry. A lot of us are, though. You’re in good company.”

  Joaquin tried to hide his smile by eating again, but Mark caught him. “Seriously,” he said. “Meeting people for the first time is hard. But they’re your . . . well, you’re related to them. You all deserve to get to know one another. At least meet them first and then decide who likes who.”

  Joaquin wrinkled his nose.

  “Not like that, you perv.” Mark reached for the cereal box again, then looked at him. “Did you already finish the box?”

  “Night!” Joaquin said, putting his bowl in the sink and taking the stairs two at a time.

  He got so busy at the pottery station the next day that he actually forgot about Maya and Grace for a few minutes. He was working with Bryson, a little boy who refused to make anything except vases that would eventually become pencil holders, but his parents seemed to be thrilled with each and every one. Joaquin wondered if they had an entire room in their house dedicated to lopsided pencil holders, and just when he was picturing what that would look like, he looked up and saw two girls staring back at him. One of them teary-eyed and the other one just, maybe, scared.

  It was the first time that Joaquin had looked at someone who was related to him.

  They were white—he was right—but the shorter one had piles of curly hair that looked a lot like his own, and a nose that leaned to the left like his did. The taller one, the one who was trying desperately to not look like she was crying, had his tight jaw. He could tell just by looking at her that she had a secret. Her posture was too straight, her backbone too rigid. Well, good for her. Joaquin had secrets, too. Maybe they’d respect each other’s privacy and not go around trying to dig things up.

  He was the one who said they should go and eat, and he sort of regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. But Maya, the younger and shorter one, didn’t seem to regret any of the words that came out of her mouth. And there were a lot of them.

  “So I was totally freaked out at first,” she was saying as they walked, Maya strolling in between Joaquin and the other girl, Grace, who still hadn’t said much other than her initial outburst.

  “Because I already have one sister, Lauren? She’s like their miracle baby—they had her right after me, oh joy—and sometimes she’s crazy annoying and I was like, ‘Another one? I don’t know about this.’ But then they told me about you, too? And I was like, ‘Get. Out.’ I mean, it’s like insta-family, right? Just add water. Like sea monkeys.”

  Joaquin nodded. It was like listening to a cartoon character talk while sucking helium and he was only really hearing every third word. Baby, miracle, insta-family.

  “Maya,” Grace said.

  “Sorry, I talk when I’m nervous,” she said. She stuffed her hands in the pocket of her hoodie.

  “It’s all good,” Joaquin said, then pointed down the street. “There’s a burger place right around that hill. Fries are pretty good. Unless one of you, um, doesn’t eat meat? Or fries?”

  “Bring on the cow,” Maya said.

  “Fries sound good,” Grace said, smiling at
him. Her nose wrinkled when she did that. Joaquin knew that he did the same thing because his girlfriend Birdie used to love that about him.

  Wait. Ex-girlfriend Birdie. He kept forgetting that part.

  Which was weird, because he was the one who’d broken up with her.

  Joaquin had known who Birdie was for approximately 127 days before they’d actually talked. He wasn’t used to knowing other kids for that long since he moved around so much, but Mark and Linda had gotten him into a magnet high school in his junior year, and on his first day, Birdie was in his math class. Not that she knew who he was, of course.

  That year, right before Christmas break, the teacher’s aide in his U.S. history class had pulled him aside and handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Hey, Joaquin,” she said, smiling at him. Her name was Kristy and she had always been pretty nice to him. Joaquin was sort of a sucker for people who were nice to him. It was his greatest downfall.

  “I was wondering,” she said, “could I buy some tamales from your family this Christmas?”

  Joaquin didn’t say anything at first. Mark and Linda were the closest thing he had to family, and Mark was Jewish and didn’t eat pork and Linda went to a drumming circle down at the beach every month during the full moon. Neither of them could have made tamales if they’d had an instructional YouTube video and a sous chef at their side.

  And then Joaquin realized that Kristy didn’t realize that he was a foster kid. She thought he had a big Mexican family that made tamales on Christmas Eve.

  He didn’t bother to correct her. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth.

  The next day, he found himself on his computer, researching the best tamale places, and on Christmas Eve, he went down to stand in line with a bunch of other people, Kristy’s twenty-dollar bill stuffed safely in his hoodie pocket. The guy at the counter spoke to him in Spanish and Joaquin had to say, “No español,” which he had gotten used to saying whenever someone greeted him that way. “You’re too much and not enough,” one of his old foster siblings, Eva, had told him once. “White people are only gonna see you as Mexican, but you don’t even speak Spanish.” It was clear from her tone of voice that this was a huge black mark in her book.