Far from the Tree(52)
Maya glanced at her in the mirror. “Where’s Mom?”
Lauren shrugged again.
“Laur,” Maya said.
“She’s asleep,” Lauren said quietly.
Maya sighed to herself. Asleep at five thirty in the afternoon. More like passed out. Fantastic. She had been “asleep” the day before when Maya came home from school. There had been more empties than usual that week, and both Maya and Lauren had started recycling them without even saying anything to each other. Their mom must have noticed.
Right?
“What do you want for dinner?” Maya asked Lauren instead.
“Pizza.”
“Pizza’s boring.”
“You asked me what I wanted. And the Greek place doesn’t deliver.”
Maya sighed. She had already had one disastrous fight with someone that day. She wasn’t up for another.
“C’mon,” she said to Lauren. “Let’s just walk to the Greek place. Mom can sleep it off. We’ll bring her back something.”
“You’re not going to invite Claire, are you?”
Maya froze. “Why?” she asked, her voice sounding strangled to her own ears.
Lauren didn’t seem to notice, though. “Because then you’re just going to be all lovey-dovey and canoodly with each other and I’ll have to sit there and watch—like a big weirdo.”
The fracture in Maya’s heart split a bit wider. “No canoodling,” she said. “Claire’s hanging out with her family tonight.” None of that, Maya thought, was actually a lie.
Lauren went to find her shoes while Maya tiptoed into their parents’—their mom’s—bedroom. The room seemed even bigger now that their dad wasn’t there, the bed emptier. Her mom was curled up on the far side of the mattress, her breaths deep and even, and Maya watched her for a minute before reaching down and pulling the blanket up over her shoulders.
Then she went over to the dresser and opened the top drawer, finding the wad of twenty-dollar bills that she knew would be there. She took out two, then counted the rest. Assuming her mom planned on sleeping through the rest of the week’s dinners, she and Lauren could eat out at least four more times. Five if Maya gave in to the pizza idea.
At the Greek restaurant, she and Lauren sat side by side at the counter facing the windows, eating pita and tzatziki and kabobs. (Steak for Maya, chicken for Lauren. Neither of them would even consider the lamb. It just seemed too mean to eat a baby lamb.) Maya wondered if it would ever be like this with Grace and Joaquin, the ability to just sit quietly side by side, content in the knowledge that no matter what happened with your parents, or your girlfriend, that your siblings will still be there, like a bookend that keeps you upright when you feel like toppling over.
When they got home, the house was still dark, and Maya turned on lights as she made her way into the kitchen, then stashed her mom’s takeout chicken souvlaki in the refrigerator. “Mom?” she yelled. The car was still in the driveway, at least. Her mom wasn’t that stupid.
“Mom!” she yelled again. “Wake up! We brought you food!” Secretly, she hoped the idea of Greek food would make her hungover mom nauseous. Then she wondered when she had become such a mean person. “Mom!”
There was silence from upstairs, and then she heard Lauren scream, “Mom!”
Maya was running up the stairs before she even realized she had left the kitchen.
“Mom!” Lauren kept screaming, and Maya followed the sound of her voice down the hall and into her parents’ bathroom. Lauren was on the floor next to their mom. She was crumpled like a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest, and there was blood coming from her head, staining the marble floor that was freezing cold under Maya’s bare feet.
“I just found her in here!” Lauren cried. “We need to call Dad!”
Maya grabbed for Lauren’s phone, which was still in her hand. “We need to call nine-one-one!” she said. “Jesus Christ, Lauren, what’s Dad going to do from New Orleans?”
It took her three tries to type in 911 because her hand was shaking so bad.
At her feet, her mom was moaning. Lauren had a towel pressed against her head, trying to mop up the blood. The 911 dispatcher promised to stay on the phone with her until the paramedics arrived, and Maya put the phone on speaker and set it down on the countertop.
“Maya?” her mom moaned.
“I’m right here,” Maya said, but she didn’t crouch down. She didn’t want to get too close to her mother. She didn’t want to break her. Instead, she just dug her own phone out of her back pocket and started to call Claire, getting halfway through the motions before remembering with a cold shock that Maya was the last person Claire would want to hear from at the moment.
“Shit,” she whispered to herself. Lauren was stroking their mom’s hair, holding the towel to the underside of her temple, and Maya forced herself to think straight, to not cry, to figure out this problem.
She called someone else instead. At first, she was afraid that she wouldn’t answer, but she suddenly picked up on the fourth ring. “Hello? Maya?”
“Grace?” Maya said, and then she started to cry.
JOAQUIN
Joaquin was pretty used to receiving random texts from Grace. Hey, how was your day? he would get sometimes after school, or a Did you see that new movie? last weekend. He wasn’t sure if it was because she was genuinely curious or because she just wanted to check the boxes when it came to bonding with him, but it was nice either way. He usually sent back a pretty standard answer—good, how about you or nope, did not—because he didn’t always know what to say. Grace was basically a stranger, after all. Blood relative or not, they had only met twice before with their other blood relative/stranger. It wasn’t exactly the warmest of fuzzy situations. (Joaquin once had had a younger foster sister who used to say that all the time. The phrase had stuck with him, even if he thought it made him sound like an idiot.)