Far from the Tree(21)
Joaquin eventually carried his tamales home, then stowed them in the very back of the freezer, where he knew Mark and Linda would never see them. When he took them to school the Monday after their holiday break, Kristy had been so delighted—and Joaquin hated her, hated her for putting him in that position.
And that’s when Birdie spoke to him.
“You make tamales?” she said as soon as Kristy disappeared off to the teachers’ lounge. (Joaquin had been in the teachers’ lounge exactly once. It had been hugely disappointing.)
“No,” Joaquin said. He hadn’t even realized that Birdie had been behind him. She had been as quiet as a hawk on a branch, watching, and he suddenly felt like a very small mouse. “I just bought them for her.”
“Well, aren’t you nice?” Birdie said, then smiled at him. “Happy New Year, Joaquin.”
They were together for the next 263 days.
It was the happiest Joaquin had ever been.
Birdie liked people, liked when they did embarrassing things like talk too much when they were nervous, or act shy because they didn’t know how to hide it. She laughed a lot, but never in a mean way, and sometimes if she didn’t sleep enough, she got really snippy and cranky, which only made Joaquin like her more.
He hadn’t realized how much he had missed liking something, anything. He had numbed himself, according to Ana, the therapist who Mark and Linda sent him to, so that he wouldn’t feel any future pain. But it wasn’t until Birdie came along that Joaquin realized he had stopped feeling happiness, too, that the small curls of warmth that wound up his spine when she smiled at him burned and felt good at the same time. Like holding ice in his hand and having it melt against his skin. Joaquin wasn’t used to that.
He fell in love with Birdie a step at a time, going from one stone to the next until he made it safely into the shore of her arms, and he had thought that maybe now he could understand what people meant when they said that home was a person and not a place. Birdie was four walls and a roof and Joaquin would never have to leave.
But Birdie wanted things, things that Joaquin couldn’t get for her. She was going to move to New York and work in finance, she said. She was going to get her MBA from Wharton. She wanted to learn Italian and live in Rome for at least one year. She said all these things to him like she knew they would happen, and that he would be right there with her when they did. But when Joaquin looked forward, he could barely see anything at all.
One night, he had gone to dinner at her parents’ house. They were always really nice to him, and Joaquin called them Mr. and Mrs. Brown even though they kept asking him to call them Judy and David. After dinner, Mrs. Brown brought out some photo albums, and even though Birdie kept saying, “Oh my God, Mom,” it was obvious that she was pleased.
Joaquin looked at every baby photo, every first day of school, every Christmas morning, every Halloween. Birdie with her top two teeth missing, Birdie dressed like a cheerleader one year, a scientist the next. Birdie, whose smile never looked fake, who never wondered if anyone would show up at her academic decathlon, who never woke up in one house and went to sleep in another.
And Joaquin had the horrible, terrible feeling that he would never be able to give this kind of life to her. There was no one to tell her about him, no one to share embarrassing stories about him that Birdie would love, or show her baby pictures of him. Mark and Linda had photos around the house, sure, but it wasn’t the same. Birdie wanted—no, needed—the world. She was used to it. These photos were her map, and Joaquin knew then that he was rudderless, that he would only lead her astray.
He knew what it felt like to be held down.
He loved Birdie too much to do that to her.
He broke up with her the next day.
It was pretty terrible. At first Birdie had thought he was kidding, then she had cried and cried, and yelled and yelled, and Joaquin didn’t even say “I’m sorry” because he felt that apologizing for something meant that you had done wrong, and he knew he wasn’t wrong. He had tried to hug her, but she had slugged him in the arm. It felt worse than almost anything else in his life, and when he went home, he had gone straight up to his room and pulled the covers over his head.
Mark and Linda came up later that night, one of them sitting on either side of his bed, like bookends that kept him from falling over. “Judy Brown just called,” Mark said quietly. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” Joaquin said, not bothering to uncover his head. He wished they would go away, because nothing was worse than someone wanting you to talk when the words you needed to say hadn’t even been invented yet. And after a while, they left him alone, which somehow made him feel even lonelier, but at least that was familiar. Comforting, almost.
He saw Birdie in school, of course, but she only glared at him in the hallways, swollen eyed and furious. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?” her best friend, Marjorie, had said to him one morning when he was at his locker, and when Joaquin said, “I know,” she just looked surprised, then stormed off.
The next day, his social worker, Allison, came over and told them that he had two sisters who wanted to meet him.
Two empty branches where the bird had been.
“This is weird, right?”
Grace was sitting next to Joaquin now, and Maya was up at the counter getting napkins while they waited for their order. “Like, we just met each other and now we’re eating burgers like it’s a normal day.”