“We were told that he was placed with a foster family that was on track to adopt him,” her father told her. “But that’s all we know about him. We tried to keep track of him, but it’s a . . . complicated system.”
Grace nodded, taking it all in. If her life had been a movie, this was where the reflective, orchestral music would swell. “You said siblings? Plural?”
Her mother nodded. “Right after Gloria Grace”—no one ever called her anything except that—“died, we got a phone call from the same lawyer who helped us get you. There was another baby, a girl, but we couldn’t . . .” She looked to Grace’s father again, someone to help her bridge the gap between words. “We couldn’t, Grace,” her mother said, her voice wavering before she cleared her throat. “She was adopted by a family about twenty minutes away. We have their information. We agreed that whenever one of you wanted to contact the other, we would let them know.”
They slid an email address across the table to her. “Her name is Maya,” her father said. “She’s fifteen. We talked to her parents last night and they talked to her. If you’d like to email her, she’s waiting to hear from you.”
That night, Grace sat in front of her laptop, the cursor blinking at her as she tried to figure out what to write to Maya.
Dear Maya, I’m your sister and
Nope. Way too familiar.
Hi Maya, my parents just told me about you and wow!
Grace wanted to punch herself in the face after reading that sentence.
Hey, Maya, what’s up? I always wanted a sister and now I have one
Grace was going to have to hire a ghostwriter.
Finally, after almost thirty minutes of typing, deleting, and typing again, she came up with something that seemed reasonable.
Hi Maya,
My name is Grace and I recently found out that you and I have the same biological mom. My mom and dad told me about you today, and I have to admit that I’m kind of in shock, but excited, too. They said that you knew about me already, so I hope you’re not too surprised to get this email. I also don’t know if your parents told you about Joaquin. He might be our brother. It’d be nice if we could try and find him together?
My parents also said you live thirty minutes away, so maybe we could meet for coffee or something? If you’d like to get to know me, I’d like to get to know you. No pressure, though. I know this has the potential to be super weird.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Grace
She read it three times and then hit “send.”
All she could do was wait.
MAYA
When Maya was a little girl, her favorite movie was the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. She loved the idea of falling down a rabbit hole, of plummeting into something that she wasn’t expecting, and of course, the idea that a small white rabbit could wear a tiny waistcoat and glasses.
But her absolute favorite scene was the part when Alice grew too big to fit inside the White Rabbit’s house. Her legs and arms went out the windows, shattering the glass, and her head crashed through the roof, while people yelled and screamed all around her. Maya loved that part. She used to make her parents rewind it over and over again, laughing herself sick at the idea that a roof could go and resettle itself.
Now, when her parents would fight and the walls on her house felt too small and she wished she could smash the glass windows and escape, the idea of a house blowing apart didn’t seem so funny.
Maya didn’t really remember a time when her parents weren’t fighting. When she and her sister, Lauren, were younger, it was done behind closed doors, muffled voices and tight smiles the next morning at breakfast. Over the years, though, the quiet words became raised. Then came the shouting, and finally screaming.
The screaming was the worst, shrill and high-pitched, the kind of noise that made you want to cover your ears and scream right back.
Or run and hide.
Maya and Lauren chose the latter. Maya was thirteen months older than Lauren, so she felt responsible. She would jump for the remote and turn up the TV volume until it was too hard to tell what was louder, who wanted to win the noise battle more. “Would you turn down that TV?” her dad had yelled more than once, and it felt so unfair. They had only turned it up because he was too loud in the first place.
Maya and Lauren were fifteen and fourteen now.
The fights were louder than ever.
The fights were all the time.
You’re always working! You’re always working and you don’t—
For you! For the girls! For our family! Jesus Christ, you want everything and yet when I try to give it to you—
Maya was old enough to understand that a lot of those angry words had to do with the wine: a glass before dinner, two or three during dinner, and a fifth sloshed into the glass when Maya’s dad was away on business. Maya never saw empty bottles lying in the recycling bin, and the pantry shelves always seemed to be stocked with unopened bottles, and she wondered who her mom was hiding the evidence from: her daughters, her husband, or herself.
Then again, she would have let her mother drink three bottles a night if it kept her calm, complacent. Even, Jesus Christ, sleepy.
But the wine only served to rev her parents up like cars before a race, gunning at each other until someone waved a flag and vroom! They were off. Maya and Lauren had learned to be out of the way by then, safely stashed away upstairs in their bedrooms, or at a friend’s, or even just saying they were at a friend’s and then hiding in the backyard until the coast was clear. It wasn’t that their parents’ fights got violent or anything like that; words could shatter harder than a glass breaking against a wall, hurt more than a fist plowing through teeth.
It was easy to follow their pattern. Maya was fairly certain she could even write out their dialogue for them. Once the yelling began, it was always about fifteen minutes until her mother accused her father of having an affair. Maya didn’t know if it was true or not, and honestly, she didn’t even really care that much. Let him, if it made him happy. Maya suspected that her mother would be thrilled if it were true. Like she’d finally win a race she’d been running for decades.
Would it kill you to be home before eight o’clock at night? Really? Would it?
Oh, well, remind me again who wanted to redo the kitchen? Do you think that just pays for itself?
A knock at her door made her look up. She half expected it to be Claire, even though she knew it wasn’t possible. She had been dating Claire for five months, and her arms were a place safer and better than all the backyard hideouts in the world. Claire was security. Claire, Maya sometimes thought, felt like home.
It was Lauren at the door instead. “Hey,” she said when Maya opened it. “Can I hang out with you for a bit?”
“Sure,” Maya said.
At some point, and Maya wasn’t sure when, their conversations had gone from riotous giggles to whispered secrets to short sentences, and then just one- or two-word responses. The thirteen-month difference between them had spread them apart like a gulf, growing only wider with each passing month.
Maya had always known she was adopted. In a family of redheads, that fact was pretty obvious. At night when Maya was little, in order to get her to sleep, her mom would tell the story of how they had brought her home from the hospital. She had heard it a thousand times, of course, but she always wanted it told again. Her mom was a good storyteller (she had been a radio DJ in college), and she’d always ham it up and do these big exaggerated gestures about how scared they were to put Maya in the car seat for the first time, and how Maya’s parents had bought pretty much every single bottle of hand sanitizer that Costco had.