Far from the Tree(30)

“Do you think Dad knows?” Maya asked.

“No,” Lauren replied. “Dad travels. He’s not looking in Mom’s boots during his free time.”

“Do you think she’s driving?” she asked. “You know, after?” She shook the bottle in her hand. Maya wasn’t used to asking Lauren questions like this. Usually she was the sister who knew everything, the one who was in charge, who made up the rules for the games and decided who won or lost.

“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “I don’t think so. She picked me up from school yesterday and she seemed okay.”

Mom could drink at lunch, though, Maya thought. Two glasses of wine with a salad and some bread from the bowl. That would be pretty easy to hide.

She was still holding the bottle of zinfandel and she carefully set it down on the floor, like it could suddenly shatter and stain the carpet with all of their secrets.

“Should we put it back?”

“Give it to me,” Lauren said instead, and Maya handed it over. When Lauren went downstairs and didn’t come back, Maya followed her and found her standing in the kitchen, one hand holding the cork and the other hand dumping the bottle down the drain.

“What are you—” Maya started to say.

“What’s she going to do?” Lauren said. “Get angry at us for dumping out her contraband? She’s not going to do that. She can’t. Because then she’d have to admit what she’s been doing.”

Maya watched her for a long minute, then went upstairs and brought back the second bottle. Lauren opened it and they dumped it out, watching it swirl down the sink before turning on the faucet and rinsing it all away.

When their parents finally made their big announcement, it really wasn’t that much of a surprise. Maya later thought that it was more like ripping off a huge bandage—inevitable, but you still knew it would hurt like hell.

She had been doing physics homework when the knock came at her door. It had been quiet that night, way too quiet, and Maya had done the same problem four times and still hadn’t gotten the right answer. She wondered how fucked up it was that she worked better when her parents were fighting. If she was ever going to make it through high school, she’d probably need a nuclear explosion every night.

Great.

When she said, “Come in,” her parents were both standing there, looking apprehensive and nervous. Like children, in a way. Maya had never seen that kind of look on their faces before. Lauren was behind them, and Maya didn’t need to look in a mirror (or at a birth certificate, for that matter) to know that her own expression was similar to her sister’s.

“Your dad and I want to talk to you,” their mother said, and Lauren pushed past her parents and went to sit on Maya’s bed. Maya, who had actually been doing homework at her desk for once, got out of her chair and went to sit down next to her sister. She suddenly found herself wishing that her other sister was there, too, and her brother. And Claire. She wished for an army of people to stand behind her, swords at the ready.

Of course, no one actually came.

“We’d like to talk downstairs?” Their mom’s voice sounded a bit strangled, and Maya felt like someone was pushing down on her throat now, too, that three-a.m. feeling creeping back in. “It’s okay,” her mom said quickly. “We just need to have a family meeting.”

They hadn’t had a family meeting since Maya was eight and Lauren was seven and accused Maya of killing her goldfish. (Maya would still swear on a stack of Bibles that she hadn’t touched that creepy, scaly thing. Lauren was paranoid and a terrible fish parent, that was all.)

“I’ve got this homework,” Maya started to say. She suddenly prayed for inertia. An object in motion stays in motion until acted upon by an outside force, the words said in her physics textbook. She wanted things to keep going the way they had. For all the terrible fights, it was still familiar. Maya wasn’t ready for that to change, and she wasn’t ready for what would potentially take its place.

“Maya,” her mother said. “Please.”

She didn’t need to say anything else.

Downstairs, Maya and Lauren sat next to each other on the couch while their parents explained things.

You know we haven’t been getting along.

It’s going to be so much better this way.

You get to spend time on the weekends with Dad now, just you and him.

You girls will be so much happier.

Lauren cried, of course. She had always been the emotional one (see: family meeting about a dead goldfish), the one who had to be taken out of the movie theater during sad scenes because she would sob too loud and disturb everyone else.

Maya, though, just sat there quietly while her parents explained that Dad was moving out, that they loved both of their girls so, so much, that it had nothing to do with them at all, that it wasn’t her or Lauren’s fault.

“Of course it isn’t,” Maya muttered, because that was the stupidest thing she’d heard in a while. “We’re not the ones who have been fighting for the past ten years.” And hiding wine in the closet, she almost added, but thought better of it. Lauren was still crying and Maya didn’t want to hurt her sister any more.

Her mother blinked while her father cleared his throat. “That . . . is true,” her dad finally said. “That’s very true.”