Far from the Tree(3)

Grace went downstairs, her stomach empty, her hair wild, and she said to her parents, “I want to find my birth mother.”

Grace had always known that she was adopted. Her parents had never made a secret of it. They didn’t really talk about it, either. It just was.

At the breakfast table, Grace now watched her mom reflexively screwing and unscrewing the lid on the peanut butter jar. After the third time, her dad reached over and took it from her. “We should set up a family meeting,” he said as her mom’s hands moved to her paper napkin.

The last time they had had a family meeting, Grace had told them she was pregnant. At the rate they were going, her parents would probably never have a family meeting again.

“Okay,” Grace said. “Today.”

“Tomorrow.” Her mom had finally found her voice. “I have a meeting today and we should . . .” She glanced at her dad. “We should get some paperwork for you. It’s in the safe.”

There had always been an implied agreement between Grace and her parents. They would tell her everything they knew about her biological family, but only if she asked. She had been curious a few times—like when they studied DNA in freshman-year biology, or that time in second grade when she found out Alex Peterson had two moms and Grace wondered if maybe she could have two moms, too—but it was different now. Grace knew that somewhere in the world was a woman who had maybe hurt (and maybe was still hurting) like Grace was hurting now. Meeting her wouldn’t bring Peach back to Grace, or fill the cracks that were threatening to shatter her into pieces, but it would be something.

Grace needed to be tethered to someone again.

Her parents knew very little about her mother. Grace wasn’t entirely surprised. It had been a private adoption, through lawyers and courts. Her mother’s name was Melissa Taylor. Grace’s parents had never met her. Melissa hadn’t wanted to meet them.

There was no picture of Melissa, or fingerprints, or note or memento, just a signed court document. The name was common enough that Grace suspected she could Google it for hours and not find anything, but it seemed like maybe Melissa had never wanted to be found. “We did send a letter to her through the lawyer,” Grace’s mother said, passing her a thin envelope. “Right after you were born, us telling her how grateful we were, but it was returned.” She didn’t need to add that last part. Grace could see the red “Return to Sender” stamp slashing across the white paper.

And right when she started to feel a new, different (though no worse) despair, that there wasn’t a woman who had wanted her, who had craved her the way Grace craved Peach, who had writhed and ached and wanted to know anything about her, Grace’s parents said something that immediately closed the black hole that was threatening to swallow her up.

“Grace,” her father said gently, like his voice could hit a trip wire and destroy them all, “you have siblings.”

After Grace was done throwing up in the downstairs guest bathroom, she got herself a glass of water and came back to the table. The look of anxiety on her mother’s face made her twitch.

They laid out the story in careful and obviously rehearsed words: Joaquin was her brother. He had been one year old when Grace was born, and had gone into foster care a few days after her parents brought her home. “They asked us if we wanted to foster,” Grace’s mother explained, and even now, sixteen years later, Grace could see the lines of regret that Joaquin had etched on her face. “But you were a newborn and we—we weren’t prepared for that, for two babies. And your grandmother had just been diagnosed . . .”

Grace knew that part of the story. Her grandmother, Gloria Grace, the woman who Grace shared her name with, had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer a month before Grace had been born, and died right after Grace’s first birthday. “The best year and the worst year,” Grace’s mother described it, when she talked about it at all. Grace knew not to ask too many questions.

“Joaquin,” Grace said now, rolling the word over in her mouth. She realized that she had never known a Joaquin before, that she had never said the name before.

“We were told that he was placed with a foster family that was on track to adopt him,” her father told her. “But that’s all we know about him. We tried to keep track of him, but it’s a . . . complicated system.”

Grace nodded, taking it all in. If her life had been a movie, this was where the reflective, orchestral music would swell. “You said siblings? Plural?”

Her mother nodded. “Right after Gloria Grace”—no one ever called her anything except that—“died, we got a phone call from the same lawyer who helped us get you. There was another baby, a girl, but we couldn’t . . .” She looked to Grace’s father again, someone to help her bridge the gap between words. “We couldn’t, Grace,” her mother said, her voice wavering before she cleared her throat. “She was adopted by a family about twenty minutes away. We have their information. We agreed that whenever one of you wanted to contact the other, we would let them know.”

They slid an email address across the table to her. “Her name is Maya,” her father said. “She’s fifteen. We talked to her parents last night and they talked to her. If you’d like to email her, she’s waiting to hear from you.”

That night, Grace sat in front of her laptop, the cursor blinking at her as she tried to figure out what to write to Maya.