by Robin Benway
Joaquin wondered if his mom had eyes like his. He wondered if she still knew his dad. He wondered if she even wanted to see Joaquin and his sisters, or talk to them, or if Joaquin would only be a reminder of the worst time of her life. Would she think that he was trying too hard, dressing up for her? The last time he had gone to see her, he had worn his favorite Spider-Man T-shirt (Spider-Man didn’t have parents either, just like Joaquin), but she had never shown up, so maybe it didn’t matter if he wore his best shirt or not.
Joaquin looked in the mirror, straightened his collar, and wondered if he was the biggest idiot on the planet for trying so hard to find the woman who had left him so easily.
Mark and Linda were in the kitchen downstairs, eating breakfast and reading the paper. (Joaquin suspected that theirs was the only house on their street that still actually got the newspaper delivered every day.) “Whoa, looking fancy on a Saturday,” Mark said when Joaquin walked into the room. “Is it Formal Wear Day at the arts center?”
Any other day, Joaquin could have taken Mark’s teasing tone without a problem. It wasn’t any other day, though. “Why?” Joaquin said. “Is it too much?”
“No, no, you look great,” Mark said. “You just never really dress up, that’s all.”
Things with Linda and Mark had been a little off ever since they had given Joaquin the car. Or, more accurately, things with Joaquin had been off ever since they had given him the car. He had only driven it twice in the past week, once to work and once to go to the grocery store for Linda, but otherwise, it just sat in the driveway, a huge, metal reminder of all the things that Joaquin would never be able to pay back to his foster parents.
The more they gave him, the bigger the world felt, and Joaquin needed a fence, an edge, something to keep him from falling off the face of the thing. Everyone had a breaking point, after all, and the fact that Joaquin had spent almost three years with Mark and Linda and he still hadn’t been able to find theirs made him nervous. He had thought turning down the adoption would do it, that they would put him back in foster care and then Joaquin would know how the fairy tale ended, but then Mark and Linda turned around and bought him a car instead.
Joaquin felt like he was the star of a video game, dodging from one level to the next, swinging from vine to vine in search of some treasure that always seemed to be just out of reach. Some kids didn’t make it that far—some ran out of lives, or chances, or hope. But Joaquin had played long enough to know that for every level he managed to pass, for each thread of hope that Mark and Linda gave him, there was just something bigger, even more menacing, waiting for him at the end. Joaquin knew that he’d never get the treasure without first slaying the dragon.
So Joaquin started pushing back. At first, it was just ignoring Linda the first time she asked him to do something, or pretending like he didn’t hear her when they both knew that he had. He told Mark he would help him mow the front and back lawn on Wednesday evening, but stayed upstairs instead, listening to music. By Friday night, things were tense at dinner and Joaquin disappeared into his room without helping with the dishes. “You want to give Linda a hand?” Mark had asked.
“Nope,” Joaquin said, and they hadn’t answered, which made him even more nervous, out of control, teetering on the edge, bracing for a fall.
By Saturday morning, though, with a stomach full of butterflies, Joaquin felt ready for a fight.
“Hey, Joaq?” Linda said, glancing up from the paper. “Can you take a seat? Mark and I want to talk to you about something.”
Joaquin felt himself roll his eyes before he could stop himself, but Mark just pulled out a chair and patted it, so he sat. “What?”
“You’ve been . . . well, honestly, Joaquin, you’ve been sort of a jerk,” Linda said. “To me, to Mark. Is it . . . did we do something? Did we say something to hurt you? We just wish you’d talk to us about it.”
“Why do you always think it’s about you?” Joaquin snapped. “Why do you always think it’s something that you did? Why can’t it just be about me?”
Mark shrugged, pushing his chair back from the table a little. “Okay, let’s make it about you, then. Why are you being a jerk?”
It would have hurt a lot less if Joaquin hadn’t thought that they were right.
“Do you like the car?” Linda asked. “Or was it too much?”
Joaquin shrugged a little, crossing his arms over his chest. Just thinking about the car made his stomach flip, tossing the butterflies every which way. “I don’t really care,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t even ask for it. You’re the ones who got it for me.”
Mark turned in his chair so that he was facing Joaquin. Joaquin wished that Mark would hit him, push him, send him away. Anything but that soft look of sympathy that was scrawled across his face. “Joaq,” Mark said, “we’re trying here, but you gotta meet us halfway.” When Joaquin didn’t reply, he added, “Talk to us, buddy. What’s going on with you?”
He started to put his hand on Joaquin’s arm, and Joaquin, thinking that this was it, instinctively flinched away. Everyone froze when he did that. Even the clock on the wall seemed to stop ticking, its hands stuck in time. “Joaquin,” Linda said, her voice hushed. “Sweetie.”
“You know I would never hurt you,” Mark said, his hand still frozen in midair. “You know that, Joaquin.”
Joaquin huffed out a laugh. “You think that’s the only way to hurt someone? Seriously?”
“Joaquin—”
He thought that if he heard someone say his name one more time, his head would splinter into a thousand shards. “Just stop it, okay?” he cried, getting to his feet. “Just stop with, with everything! The car, the clothes, the skateboard, just stop!”
Now Mark and Linda were standing up, too, a triangle formed between the three of them. Mark looked confused, but Linda just looked scared.
“You always say you’re not going to hurt me,” Joaquin continued, his pulse fluttering wildly under his skin. “But you don’t get it, do you? Hitting someone is the easiest way to hurt them! You could hurt me so much more than that!”
“We don’t want to hurt you at all!” Linda insisted. “We just want to help you, we want to be there for you, support you. We want you to have the world, Joaq! We want so much for you!”
“Oh, yeah? You think I don’t see how people look at us when we’re out?” Joaquin felt his chest tighten just thinking about it. “These two white people who rescued the poor brown kid?”
“You know we don’t care what people think,” Mark said, his voice low.
“Yeah, of course you don’t, because they look at you like you’re a hero! They look at me like, like I’m . . .” Joaquin forced the words out. “Like I’m trash.”
“Do not say that,” Linda fumed. Joaquin saw that her hands were clenched into fists. “You are not trash, Joaquin. Don’t ever say that.”
“Yeah, easy for you to say,” he scoffed. “You think you can just adopt me and all of that will go away? What, you can teach me about what it’s like to be Mexican? You can teach me to speak Spanish? You can tell me where I’m from?”
“No,” Mark said, and he sounded somewhere between sad and furious. “We can’t do any of that. But we can help you find people who can! We’re not here to take anything away from you!”
They were saying all the right things, but it all felt wrong. Joaquin felt himself stepping toward the abyss with no boundaries to keep him from falling.
So he decided to leap.
“You think I can make up for the fact that you can’t have babies?” he said.
Linda and Mark stood there, stricken, and Joaquin felt himself smash against the ground, shattering wide open. Mark took a step toward him, and then Joaquin was moving, his feet faster than his brain.
He ran out of the house, Mark and Linda yelling after him, and was in the car and halfway down the street before he realized that he hadn’t grabbed his phone. “Fuck,” he muttered to himself, then saw Mark and Linda’s faces again, and he
raised his fist and smashed it down on the dashboard.
Mark and Linda would never let him back in their house now. Joaquin wouldn’t have wanted to let him back in, either, not after what he had said.
The dragon had won, and Joaquin was just a pile of broken bones and ash on the scorched ground, out of time and out of lives.
Game over.
GRACE
Grace had never kept such a big a secret from her parents for this long. Even when she’d discovered she was pregnant, she had told them within twenty-four hours. But she knew that if she told her parents about her upcoming trip, how she planned to just go up to the front door of a stranger’s house and knock on it and possibly meet her birth mother?
Grace had a pretty active imagination, but even she couldn’t imagine all the ways her parents would say no to that.
So she told Rafe instead.
“Wait, so let me get this straight,” Rafe said. They were sitting in what Grace had come to think of as “their” booth at the back of the restaurant near the kitchen supply store. “You’re just going to go up to some stranger’s door and knock on it and say, ‘Hi, Mom’?”
“Well, not exactly like that,” Grace said. “You’re making it sound like we’re going to egg her house or something.”
“Grace.” Rafe set down his fork and looked at her. “Look, no offense, but I don’t think this is your best idea.”
“It’s not my idea, it’s our idea,” Grace said. “Me and Joaquin and Maya, we’re all going together.”
Rafe didn’t look convinced. “So what are you going to do if she’s not home?”
“Leave a note?”
“Leave a note?” Rafe repeated. “‘Hi, your three bio kids swung by to say hey, sorry we missed you.’”
Grace rolled her eyes at him. This was not how this conversation was supposed to go. “You know, if I wanted someone to illustrate for me all the ways that this could go wrong, I’d just tell my parents.”
“You didn’t even tell your parents?” Rafe lowered his head to the table and started banging his forehead against the edge. “Grace, Grace, Grace. This has disaster written all over it.”
“You know, you could be at least a little supportive!” Grace said. “This is really scary, okay? You’re supposed to be my friend.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes your friend has to tell you the truth,” Rafe said. “You should tell your parents, at least.”
“They won’t understand.”
“Grace, you had a baby and they seemed to come through that experience just fine. I don’t think you’re giving them enough credit.”
“If I tell them, they’ll just give a million reasons why it’s a bad idea.”
Rafe just raised an eyebrow as if to say I told you so.
“God, never mind,” Grace said, pushing her plate away. She had barely touched her sandwich or fries, or much food at all, for that matter. Just thinking about Saturday made her feel nauseous in a way that she had never experienced during pregnancy.
“Okay, but can I just ask one question?” Rafe said.
“If I say no, are you going to ask it anyway?”
“Yep.”
“Fine, ask away.”
Rafe leaned forward a little, putting his hand on the table toward Grace. “What if your birth mom doesn’t want to be found?”
Grace sat back against the booth, the leather suddenly cold on her legs.
“I mean, all the letters were returned, her phone’s disconnected, she’s never tried to find any of you, not even Joaquin. What if she just wants to stay gone?”
Grace fiddled with the napkin in her lap. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t. But I just want her to know that I’m okay. Is that selfish?”
“I don’t think so,” Rafe said.
“Is this a stupid thing to do?”
“Maybe. I’m not really sure.”
“What would you do?”
Rafe thought for a minute, then pushed his hand farther across the table so that their fingertips were touching. “I don’t know,” he said. “But maybe this way, either way, you’ll have an answer.”
Grace raised her hand so that it was covering Rafe’s. “I told Joaquin and Maya about Peach.”
Rafe’s eyes widened almost comically. “Seriously?” he asked. “Why? How?”
“Maya saw an email from her adoptive parents. She was just teasing me with my phone and she saw it, and yeah. Hard to hide after that.”
“Wow. Are you good with that?”
Grace was, actually. She felt lighter after that day, like the heavy cloud that had hung over her had finally turned into rain. “They want me to visit her.”
“Joaq and Maya do?”
“No. Peach’s parents. They want me to visit in a few months, when she’s six months old. We had originally agreed to two visits a year back before the adoption.”
Rafe waited for her to go on, flipping his hand over so that their palms were pressed together.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“That’s fine. You don’t have to.”
“But what if she wants to see me? I mean, not now, but in the future.”
“You mean like you want to see your birth mom?”
Grace nodded. “I just don’t want her to wonder, you know? I don’t want her to have any questions like I do.”
Rafe shrugged. “Then go see her. Either way, it’s going to be hard, but you’ve always done the right thing for her. Don’t stop now.”
Grace didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure she could speak.
“You want to keep talking about this?” Rafe asked.
She shook her head.
“You want to talk about that return you’ve got there?” He nodded toward the package sitting next to Grace, a mail order from the kitchen store.
This time, she smiled, pushing the tears away. “This one’s pretty great,” she said.
“Your mom’s insomnia purchases are amazing,” Rafe agreed. “Let’s see.”
Grace pulled it out of the package. “I think it’s a pepper mill,” she said, holding up the small garden gnome. “You twist its hat and the pepper comes out of his beard.”
Rafe put his hand over his mouth. “Wow,” he said after a minute.
“Think we should name it?” Grace asked.
“No,” Rafe said, then started to climb out of the booth. “It’s probably best if we don’t get attached. C’mon—if we get back early enough, you can wear my apron.”
“Oh, goody,” she said, rolling her eyes, but took his hand anyway when he held it out to her.
On Saturday morning, it was a text from Rafe that woke her up.
good luck today, it said. call me if you want later.
Grace looked at it for a long minute before typing back, ok.
Then she went in the bathroom and threw up.
Her parents were already gone for the day, at some gardening show. They had left dinner defrosting on the counter for her, and seeing the Tupperware sweating on the countertop made something tug at Grace’s heart in the most painful of ways. They had forgiven her a lot over the past year. She hoped they could forgive this, too.
Maya pulled up in a cab just as Grace was finishing getting dressed. She had tried on at least ten different outfits. She wanted to look pretty, but not overdone. She wanted to seem casual, but not too casual, like she normally spent the weekend knocking on strangers’ doors and asking if they were her mom.
Rafe’s words echoed back at her, but Grace just pushed them away. Whether it was a bad idea or not, it was going to happen.
“Oh my God, I think I’m going to puke,” Maya said, wheeling her bike into Grace’s garage.
“I already did,” Grace admitted. “Twice.”
“Seriously? Are you pregnant again?”
“Ha. No.”
Maya just grinned at her, but the smile quickly fell from her face. “I don’t know. Is this a bad idea? Are we idiots?”
“I don’t know, and probabl
y.”
“Oh God, I really am going to barf.”
“Please stop saying that,” Grace said. “Do I look okay?”
“You look amazing. You look very . . . you. What about me?”
“You look great. Wait, what do you mean, very . . . me?”
Maya smiled. “You look very clean.”
“What does that mean!” Grace yelled, and was about to turn around and run back up the stairs so she could change her outfit for the eleventh time, when Joaquin’s car swung into the driveway.
Even before he got out of the car, Grace could tell that something was off. The way he parked the car was all wrong, in one fast motion that ended too sharply.
“Whoa,” Maya said next to her.
“I’m not going” was the first thing Joaquin said when he got out of the car.
“Ha!” Maya cried. “Nice try. Anyone else have to pee before we get on the road?”
“No, I’m serious,” he said. “Take the car if you want, I don’t care. But I’m not going.”
Grace felt like she had missed the second act of a three-act play. “Wait, what are you even talking about?” she said. “What happened? Why are you being like this?”
Joaquin was now pacing in front of the car. “I can’t go. I’m not.”
“But why?”
“Because!” he cried. “I ruin fucking everything!” He ran a hand through his hair, but it just flopped back into place like he had never touched it. “I’m the worst thing that could have happened to you. Either of you. Don’t you understand?”
Maya just crossed her arms and watched Joaquin pace. “Are you done?” she said. “Because we should get going.”
“I just told you. You’re going without me.”
“Nope,” Maya said. “This is an all-or-nothing thing.” She grabbed her bag and started to walk toward the car, then turned around when Joaquin didn’t follow her. “C’mon, Grace,” she said.
Grace stayed where she was. “Joaq, what happened?” she asked again. “You’re practically shaking.”
“I just . . . I can’t go back to Mark and Linda’s.”
“What? Why?”
“We had a fight. I ruined it. I pretty much obliterated it. Burned it to the ground.” Joaquin was chuckling to himself, but Grace thought it sounded more like a sob. “They’re not going to let me back in.”