Far from the Tree(31)

“You girls will stay here with me, in the house,” their mother said. “But you can visit your dad whenever you want.”

“What if we want to live with Dad?” Maya asked. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to, but she felt the overwhelming need to put herself in between them, to see which one of them would tug her closer. To know if either of them would fight to keep her after trying so hard fifteen years ago to get her.

“We can figure that out,” her dad said. Maya’s mom couldn’t answer; she was too busy blinking back tears and moving to put her arm around Lauren. She tried to put her arm around Maya, too, but Maya moved down on the couch so that there was space between them. She didn’t want anyone touching her.

“We’re going to try and make this as easy as possible for you two, don’t worry,” her dad added.

Maya laughed, short and sharp and bitter. She couldn’t help it. “I think we sailed past easy a long time ago,” she said.

“Maya,” her dad started to say, but she held up her hand.

“No. I don’t—” The words suddenly got caught in her throat, the walls were too close to her, the air too thin. She felt like a character in a movie running away from an explosion, with the road crumbling into gray ash just steps behind her, struggling to stay ahead of the abyss that pulled at her like hands, sucked her in like a tar pit, like a black hole that only wanted to absorb the light.

“I have to go,” she said, and then she was grabbing her phone and running out the front door, down the grass and their driveway. It wasn’t until she reached the end of the street that she realized she was barefoot, and that her feet were throbbing even from that short a distance, but it didn’t matter.

She texted Claire. Meet at the park? I need you.

Her heart pounded through her body as she waited for the response bubble, and then Claire was there, as steady and sure as she always was. On my way. Everything ok?

Maya didn’t bother answering. She just ran. Once she hit the park, it felt like green, sharp and cutting against the soles of her feet. Her lungs burned like gray, like smoke that she couldn’t breathe out.

She just ran faster.

Claire was just climbing out of her car when Maya rounded the corner and into the parking lot. “Hey,” Claire said, and when Maya ran into her arms, she stepped back only a little bit, Maya’s momentum throwing both of them off.

“Hey, hi . . . hey, hey,” Claire said, and then Maya was crying and she couldn’t say anything, not because she didn’t know what to say, but because there was too much of it. She could have every dictionary in the world and it wouldn’t be enough to begin to explain the darkness of that space, the fear of being alone like Grace, unwanted like Joaquin.

Claire held her for long minutes in the parking lot. “Don’t go” was the first thing Maya managed to whisper when she could speak again.

“Not going anywhere,” Claire whispered back.

Her voice was as soft as a prayer.





JOAQUIN


The first time Joaquin had met with his therapist after moving in with Mark and Linda, it hadn’t gone well.

They had met in an office that was in a high-rise building, so high that Joaquin could see all the way to the ocean. That alone had made him a little woozy, but the office itself was clean and white and modern. The only color in the room had been a purple orchid (in a white pot, of course) on his therapist’s, Ana’s, desk, and all that glaring white had reminded Joaquin too much of thin white sheets on a bare cot, of restraints and chafing on his wrists, of that drugged-up sleepiness that had made him feel like he wasn’t really sleeping at all. It was so quiet in the office that he could hear the whoosh of the air-conditioning when it came on.

Joaquin made it all of two minutes in there before walking out, the sweat beading at his hairline, his hands shaking.

“I’m not going back in there,” he told Linda and Mark at the time, which was the first time he had actively told them something that they didn’t want to hear. He had tried so hard to make them happy, to make them want him, but he couldn’t set foot back in that room.

They had sat with him on the curb while he got his breath back, Mark’s hand resting carefully on his shoulder as his heart slowly returned to a normal pace. They had sat with him for the better part of twenty minutes, waiting silently for him to explain, and when Joaquin didn’t—couldn’t—explain, they started asking questions. Sometimes he liked when they asked him questions, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes it felt like they cared too much; other times, it felt like they wanted to know too much.

“Too much like the hospital,” Joaquin finally managed to say. He hadn’t minded the questions that time.

“Ah,” Linda said.

“Got it,” Mark agreed.

The next week, he and Ana met in a diner closer to Mark and Linda’s house. (Joaquin still hadn’t and still didn’t think of it as “my house” or even “our house,” just “their house.” It was okay, though, because it was still a nice house. It didn’t have to be his for him to like living there.) “Is this spot okay?” Ana had said, sliding into the booth across from him. “I heard my office is a little too antiseptic-looking.”

“It’s fine,” Joaquin said.

“You do know that the word fine is basically kryptonite to a therapist’s ears, right?” Ana said, then signaled the waiter for a lemonade. “Fucked up, insecure, neurotic, emotional,” she recited, ticking the emotions off on her fingers. “Therapy 101.”