Far from the Tree(23)

Watching Maya talk about Claire now, he understood what Mark meant.

And it hurt so bad that Joaquin wished he had never let that ice cube melt.

It wasn’t until after they were finished eating (and all three mayonnaise sides decimated) that the question came. They were down on the beach. Joaquin knew it was inevitable. That’s why he didn’t tell people that he was a foster kid. Their curiosity always got the best of them, making him feel like a science experiment, a cautionary tale.

“So what’s it like in foster care?” Maya asked as they walked. Maya and Grace had left their shoes back by the steps, but Joaquin carried his. He didn’t have a lot of things and he wasn’t in the habit of leaving them for other people to take.

“Maya,” Grace groaned.

“It’s okay,” he said, shrugging a little. He knew that’s what they wanted him to say, that it wasn’t as bad as the news always made it out to be, that no one had ever hit him or hurt him, that he had never hit or hurt anyone. People always thought they wanted the sordid details, Joaquin thought, until they actually had them. “I like my foster parents now, Mark and Linda. They’re pretty cool.” That part, at least, was the truth.

Maya looked up at him, her eyes worried. “I feel bad that you didn’t get adopted,” she admitted. She had her camera app open on her phone, snapping a photo every so often as they walked. “Is that bad to say? Because it’s true.”

“No, it’s not bad,” he said, and it wasn’t. No one had ever actually said that to him before. “I was almost adopted when I was a baby. They put me with this family right after I went into the system and they were going to adopt me, but right before the paperwork went through, the mom got pregnant, and they only wanted one kid, so.”

Joaquin shrugged again. He didn’t really remember the Russos, but he had seen the case file.

Maya, though, looked horrified. “But weren’t you practically, like, their kid already?”

“Bio trumps foster,” Joaquin told her. In a world where the rules kept changing from house to house, there was one hard-and-fast one. Joaquin could still remember the placement where the oldest biological son would greet each foster kid by saying, “I decide whether you stay or go.” He hadn’t been wrong, either. Joaquin had only lasted a month there.

Maya didn’t look comforted at all, though. “Well, that’s . . . Wow.”

Joaquin wasn’t quite sure when he had crossed that invisible line of too much information, but apparently he had. “I mean, that was just one home. There were others. They’re mostly fine.”

“Then why haven’t you been adopted? You’re nice.”

Joaquin made a decision to lie to them. Joaquin didn’t think of himself as a liar, not really, but he was good at knowing when to hold back information. “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably just too old. Most people want babies. Or girls.”

“Like us,” Grace murmured.

“It seems to be that way,” Joaquin said. “But your homes are good, right? Like, people are nice to you and stuff?”

He hadn’t even realized it until he said it, but Joaquin thought that if anyone had ever hurt either one of these girls, he would grind them into dust.

“Oh, we’re fine, we’re fine,” Grace said, Maya nodding at him from his other side. “Our parents are nice.”

“Well, mine are probably getting divorced,” Maya said, kicking at the wet sand a bit with her toe. “But they’re still pretty nice. When I came out, my dad actually put a rainbow sticker on his car for a few days. The whole neighborhood thought he was the one who was gay until I explained it to him.”

Joaquin couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to swing with that kind of net waiting to catch you. He thought of his foster sister again. She had cried when she had been kicked out of the home, had begged to stay. No one ever liked being sent back to the agency, of course, entering into the Russian roulette of a brand-new home. Maya had really gotten lucky, but Joaquin wasn’t going to say that to her. Sometimes it was better to not know how lucky you were.

“That’s good” was all he said now. “That’s good.”

“Can I, um, do you remember our mom?” Grace asked. “At all?”

Joaquin stopped walking then, not so much because of the question but because they had gotten to the end of the path. It was either go back or climb over a pile of slippery-looking boulders. Maya and Grace stopped walking, too, and the three of them looked out at the water for a moment. They had gone past the tourists and beachgoers, and the water was flat so there weren’t many surfers, just a boy and a girl on their boards way out in the distance. The girl was laughing about something, but Joaquin couldn’t hear her.

“I sort of remember our mom,” he finally said. “Like, the space of her. Not so much her.”

“Do you remember what she looked like?” Grace asked. She sounded so hopeful that Joaquin couldn’t let her down.

“She had brown hair,” he said. “Curly, like us. And she smiled a lot.” Joaquin was making it up, but he had pictured those features every time he had thought of his real mom. He had dreams about her, this woman smiling at him.

“Did you ever see her after, um . . . ?”

“You can say it,” Joaquin told Grace. “After she gave me up.”