Far from the Tree(43)

Now?

She never thought silence could sound so scary.

She eventually fell into a restless sleep, woken only by the buzz of a text message on her phone. It was Claire. I’m so sorry! it said. I was camping with my family. We just got back to civilization. Are you ok?

Maya had forgotten about the camping trip, and she felt dumb for being upset about Claire’s absence. She held her thumb over the keyboard for a long time. It felt like there weren’t enough letters in the alphabet for everything she had to say, for all the words that wanted to tumble out of her.

Where were you?

I needed you.

I need you.

I’m scared of how much I need you.

Instead she wrote back, I’m fine. Going to bed now. Chat tomorrow. Then she found a song on her phone that she hadn’t listened to in years, one that she had heard even before she had met Claire. She fell asleep to it, the words filling the silence in her room, the sudden cavity that seemed to be steadily growing, burrowing its way into her heart.





JOAQUIN


So how were Maya and Grace?” Mark asked from the front seat. Linda didn’t like driving on freeways, not if she could help it. She said they made her feel jittery. Joaquin thought that when Linda drove on the freeway, everyone in the car felt jittery.

“They’re fine,” Joaquin said, then added, “Maya’s parents are getting a divorce,” because he knew that fine wasn’t going to suffice, not with Mark and Linda. They expected more from him.

“Well, that doesn’t sound fine,” Linda said, turning around in her seat. Joaquin didn’t know how she could do that. He always got nauseous whenever he faced backward in a car.

“I mean, not fine fine,” Joaquin explained. “I just meant that they weren’t missing any limbs or anything.”

“Your standards for fine are pretty low.” Mark laughed as he changed lanes.

“And Grace punched a guy,” Joaquin told them.

“You sure you don’t want to rethink that ‘fine’ statement?” Linda asked, just as Mark said, “Grace punched a guy? She looks like the human equivalent of a kitten.”

Joaquin had no idea what that meant, but he decided not to ask. Sometimes Mark’s brain worked in weird, creative ways. “I guess someone at school said something bad about her family, so she clocked them.”

Later that night, though, when he was upstairs in his room, Joaquin regretted what he had said. Not the part about Grace, but the part where he’d told his sisters that he knew how to punch. Maybe Linda and Mark would think he was violent now. Maybe they would wonder why he was even capable of throwing a punch in the first place.

Joaquin hadn’t actually been in a fistfight before. But he had lived with a family when he was ten—two foster sisters, an older biological one, and Joaquin. The mom was an executive assistant in Long Beach and the dad was an amateur boxer. At first, Joaquin had worried about the potential ramifications of having a fighter in the family, but the dad had been really nice. He would even show Joaquin how to punch the bag that hung in the garage, which was too packed with stuff to park any cars in it.

“Like this,” he said to Joaquin one afternoon, and had tucked his thumb carefully around Joaquin’s small hand so that it was a perfect, solid fist. “Now hit the bag. Hit it hard.”

Joaquin had punched, hard. He suspected that the foster dad just liked having a son to do things with (the girls weren’t interested in punching things in the dusty garage, apparently). The home had been pretty good, too, one of his best, but then one of the social workers had figured out that they had too many kids for the square footage of the house, and because Joaquin had been the last one in, he was the first one to go out.

That’s when he had ended up at the Buchanans’.

Joaquin had learned a lot of things in his seventeen years. One of the things that came from moving from family to family was that he learned how to adapt, how to change his colors like a chameleon so that he could blend in to his surroundings. He always hoped that if he did the correct things, said the correct things, no one would realize that he was a foster kid. Everyone—neighbors, people at school, the person who bagged their groceries—would just think that he was one of the bio kids, as permanent as blood, someone who could never be traded in, swapped out, sent away.

So he had learned boxing from one family. He also knew how to make great chocolate chip cookies and loaves of bread from when he lived with the family whose dad was a pastry chef at a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles. Another mom taught him calligraphy, and then he had an older foster brother who was super into early punk music and used to greet Joaquin at the door holding an album and saying, “Wait until you listen to this.” Joaquin had loved the attention. Not so much the music, though. It jangled his nerves.

He didn’t mind adapting like that. It felt like hopping from stone to stone, picking up tricks of the trade along the way, leveling up on his way to the final battle. He would watch the families to see if they waited to say grace before dinner, if they put their napkins in their laps and kept their elbows off the table. Whatever they did, Joaquin did it, too.

It was when people assumed that he didn’t know things that he got upset. He still remembered one foster mother, an older woman who had smelled like cloyingly sweet powder, like someone had pulverized rose petals and sprinkled them on her clothes. She had crouched down in front of Joaquin upon his arrival at her house, smiled with her yellowing teeth, and said, “Do you know what iced tea is, sweetheart?”