“That’s good” was all he said now. “That’s good.”
“Can I, um, do you remember our mom?” Grace asked. “At all?”
Joaquin stopped walking then, not so much because of the question but because they had gotten to the end of the path. It was either go back or climb over a pile of slippery-looking boulders. Maya and Grace stopped walking, too, and the three of them looked out at the water for a moment. They had gone past the tourists and beachgoers, and the water was flat so there weren’t many surfers, just a boy and a girl on their boards way out in the distance. The girl was laughing about something, but Joaquin couldn’t hear her.
“I sort of remember our mom,” he finally said. “Like, the space of her. Not so much her.”
“Do you remember what she looked like?” Grace asked. She sounded so hopeful that Joaquin couldn’t let her down.
“She had brown hair,” he said. “Curly, like us. And she smiled a lot.” Joaquin was making it up, but he had pictured those features every time he had thought of his real mom. He had dreams about her, this woman smiling at him.
“Did you ever see her after, um . . . ?”
“You can say it,” Joaquin told Grace. “After she gave me up.”
“Yeah,” Grace said. “That.”
“We had some visitations before she lost her rights.” What Joaquin didn’t tell them was that she had never shown up to any of those visits. Joaquin could remember wandering the room, looking for this person who he probably wouldn’t have recognized anyway. His foster mother at the time had tried to placate him with candy from the vending machine, but he had just cried under the table until she dragged him out and they went home.
Joaquin still hated candy. And vending machines.
“She was beautiful,” Joaquin said now. “Really beautiful.”
By the time they got back to the arts center, where they had left the car, Joaquin could feel the sunburn on his nose and the beach tar stuck to the bottoms of his feet. He’d have to peel it off before he went home. Linda really liked her hardwood floors. He didn’t want to mess them up.
“So I wanted to say something,” Grace suddenly piped up, and Maya turned to look at her. Joaquin already knew what she was going to say, though. He had known from the minute she’d mentioned their bio mom, and he wished that she wouldn’t bring it up.
“I think we should look for our bio mom,” she said. She literally wrung her hands together in front of her as she said it. Joaquin had read about people doing that in books, but he had never seen someone actually do it before. It seemed painful.
Next to him, Maya was quiet. Joaquin was pretty sure that silence wasn’t a good sign. It felt more like that space between seeing a gun fire and hearing the shot.
He was right. He usually was.
“That’s stupid,” Maya snapped. “Why do we even want to find her? She gave us away. She gave Joaquin to strangers.”
“But that was almost eighteen years ago,” Grace protested. “She was basically my age, right? Or Joaquin’s age? She was just a kid! Maybe she wants to know how we’re doing. I mean . . .” She paused before adding, “I’m sure she still loves us.”
Joaquin laughed. He couldn’t help it. He envied Grace’s belief that someone would wonder about her. “Sorry,” he said when both girls looked at him. “It’s just . . . I don’t want to look for her. You two can do it if you want, but I’m out.”
“Ditto,” Maya said.
Grace looked like she was about to cry, and Joaquin felt a small well of panic rise up in his chest. Then she blinked and her face smoothed out into a steely veneer. “Fine,” she said. “You don’t have to. But I’m going to look for her myself.”
“You do you,” Maya said.
“That’s fine,” Joaquin replied.
“Fine,” Grace said.
The whole day ended on a strange note after that. They weren’t sure whether to hug or shake hands or just wave good-bye, so it ended up as an awkward combination of all three.
Joaquin wasn’t that great at hugging, but he tried.
GRACE
It took a while for Grace to figure out what to wear back to school on Monday morning.
Mostly because everything she had was either super baggy, super maternity, or way too tight. Her stomach was still a little . . . well, floppy was the only real way to describe it. She wanted to wear pajama pants, but she was pretty sure that it didn’t matter how many babies she had, her mom wasn’t going to let her go to school in plaid flannel PJs.
In the end, she put on a pair of boyfriend jeans and then a maroon shirt that she found in the back of her closet. The maroon matched the stress hives that were starting to appear on her chest and neck.
Her mom, of course, noticed.
“Are you sure you want to go back?” she said, holding a travel mug of coffee and her car keys. “I know it’s been a busy week, what with meeting Maya and Joaquin and all.”
“I’m going back,” Grace said, picking up her backpack, which felt way too light. “I can’t stay home anymore, and Maya and Joaquin don’t have anything to do with it.” Grace could barely say their names without wincing. She had lied to them both. She had barely known Joaquin for an hour and she had lied to them. The worst part was that they had believed she’d had mono. They were sympathetic.
Grace wondered if she could give up her sister duties or if someone would just come take them from her, like when beauty pageant winners got caught in a sexting scandal.
Her mom played the radio the whole way to school, laughing at some joke the DJ made, then glancing at Grace to see if she thought it was funny, too. It wasn’t (the DJ was a misogynistic jerk, and Grace had never thought he was funny), but she smiled back at her mom, her carefully practiced “I am a normal person and this is my normal smile” smile. Definitely not the smile of someone who’d had a baby four weeks earlier.
“Honey,” her mom said, when they pulled up to the school, “do you want me to come in with you?”
“Are you serious?” Grace asked. “No. Oh my God, no.”
“But—”
“Mom.” Grace cut her off. “I have to go at some point. You just have to let me.”
Grace had meant it literally, but it was pretty clear from her mom’s face that she took it metaphorically, and Grace could see her eyes fill with tears behind the sunglasses, even as she leaned in to kiss her good-bye. “Okay.” Her mom sniffled, then cleared her throat. “Okay, you’re right. Your dad told me not to cry this morning and here I am, crying.” She laughed to herself. “Call me if you need me, okay?”
“Okay,” Grace said, even though she knew she wouldn’t. Her mom didn’t really know the extent of the things kids at school had said to her when she was pregnant. Slut, baby mama, Shamu—the list went on. Grace didn’t tell her because she knew she would tell the principal and then the teasing would get even more brutal, but Grace also didn’t tell her because she knew her mom would feel bad for her.