Far from the Tree
Robin Benway
DEDICATION
For my brother
Thank you for being my bungee buddy
FALLING
GRACE
Grace hadn’t really thought too much about homecoming.
She knew that she’d go, though. She figured that she and her best friend, Janie, would get dressed together, get their hair done together. She knew that her mom would try to be cool about it and not get excited, but she’d make Grace’s dad charge the fancy, expensive camera—not the iPhone—and then Grace would take pictures with Max, her boyfriend of just over a year.
He’d look great in his tux—rented, of course, because what would Max do with a tux hanging in his closet?—and she didn’t know if they’d slow dance or just talk to people or what. The thing was that she didn’t make any assumptions. She thought it would happen, and it’d be great.
Grace thought like that about everything in her life. Homecoming was something that she knew she’d do. She didn’t question it.
Which is why it was so surprising that she ended up spending homecoming night not in a fancy dress, not sipping out of Max’s flask and dancing with Janie and taking cheesy photos of each other, but in the maternity ward of St. Catherine’s Hospital, her feet in stirrups instead of heels, giving birth to her daughter.
It took Grace a while to figure out that she was pregnant. She used to watch those reality shows on cable TV and yell at the screen, “How did you not know you’re pregnant?!” as actors re-created the most unbelievable scenarios. Karma, Grace thought later, really bit her in the ass on that one. But her period had always been erratic, so that was no help. And she had morning sickness the same time as the flu was going around school, so that was strike number two. It wasn’t until her favorite jeans were tighter during Week Twelve (which she didn’t realize was Week Twelve at the time) that she started to suspect something was off. And it wasn’t until Week Thirteen (see earlier comment about Week Twelve) that she made her boyfriend, Max, drive them twenty minutes away to a store where they wouldn’t see anyone they knew so they could buy two pregnancy tests.
It turned out that pregnancy tests were expensive. So expensive, in fact, that Max had to check his bank balance on his phone while they stood in line, just to make sure that he had enough in his account.
By the time Grace realized what had happened, she was in the fifth day of her second trimester.
The baby was the size of a peach. Grace looked it up on Google.
After that day, Grace knew that she wasn’t going to keep Peach. She knew that she couldn’t. She worked part-time after school at a clothing boutique that catered primarily to women forty years older than her who called her dear. She wasn’t exactly earning baby-raising money.
And it wasn’t even that babies cried or smelled or spit up or anything like that. That didn’t seem terrible. It was that they needed you. Peach would need Grace in ways that she couldn’t give to her, and at night, she would sit in her room, holding her now-rounded stomach, and say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” a prayer and a penance, because Grace was the first person who Peach would ever need and Grace felt like she was already letting Peach down.
The adoption lawyer sent over a huge folder of prospective families, each of them more eager looking than the next. Grace’s mom and she looked at them together like they were shopping in a catalog.
No one was good enough for Peach. Not the prospective dad who resembled a hamster, or the mom whose haircut hadn’t been updated since 1992. Grace nixed one family because their toddler looked like a biter, and another because they hadn’t ever traveled east of Colorado. Never mind that she hadn’t even traveled past Colorado, but Peach deserved better. She deserved more. She deserved mountain climbers, international voyagers, people who searched the world for the best things, because that’s what Peach was. Grace wanted intrepid explorers who mined for gold—because they were about to strike it rich.
Catalina was originally from Spain and she was fluent in both Spanish and French. She worked for an online marketing firm but also ran a food blog and wanted to publish a cookbook someday. Daniel was a website designer who worked from home. He would be the stay-at-home parent during the first three months, which Grace thought was pretty badass. They had a Labrador retriever named Dolly, who looked both affectionate and stupid.
Grace chose them.
She never felt ashamed, not with Peach inside her. They were like a little team. They walked, slept, and ate together, and everything that Grace did affected Peach. They watched a lot of TV on her laptop, and Grace told her about the shows and about Catalina and Daniel and how she would have a great home with them.
Peach was the only person Grace really talked to. All her other friends had fallen away. Grace could see it in their eyes, their uncertainty about what to say about her rapidly expanding stomach, their relief that it was she and not they who had gotten pregnant. Her cross-country teammates had tried to keep her updated at first, talking about meets and gossiping about other teams, but Grace couldn’t handle the way her jealousy pushed against her skin until it felt like she would explode. Even nodding silently became difficult after a while, and when she stopped responding, they stopped talking.
Sometimes when she was almost asleep, when Peach pushed up into her rib cage like it was a safe little space for her, Grace could feel her mom standing in the doorway to her room, watching her. She pretended to not know she was there, and after a while, her mom would leave.
Her dad, though. He could barely look at Grace. She knew she had disappointed him, that even though he still loved her, Grace was a different person now, and she would never be the same Grace again. He must have felt like they swapped out his daughter for a new model (“Now with baby inside!”), a Grace 2.0.
Grace knew this because she felt the same way.
Grace was forty weeks and three days when homecoming rolled around. Janie had kept asking her to go, saying they could go in a group with friends or something, which was probably both the dumbest and sweetest thing she had ever said to Grace. Her words were always tinged with apology, like she knew she was saying the wrong thing but didn’t know how to stop herself. It’ll be fun! she texted Grace, but Grace didn’t respond.