Far from the Tree(19)

“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 shadows 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 na?ve 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.”