Joaq,” she said quietly. “It’s fine. Just take a deep breath.”
He nodded, trying to get his heartbeat back under control, tried to put the tiger back in its cage. “When I was twelve,” he said before he could stop himself, and then he couldn’t start again. He had only told the story once before, to Ana and Mark and Linda, but that had been in Mark and Linda’s living room, where he was surrounded by people who—well, if not loved him, then definitely cared about him—and the room had been soft with sunlight and specks of dust dancing between the rays.
The sun poured through the trees of the park, and Maya and Grace waited for Joaquin to speak again.
“When I was twelve,” he said again, “this family adopted me. The Buchanans.” Just saying their name made his mouth feel funny, and he paused and waited until he could talk again. “They became my foster parents when I was ten, and they decided they wanted to adopt me.”
“Did you want them to adopt you?” Grace asked when he paused. He wouldn’t have thought that her hand could be so strong, but she was holding on to him, not letting go.
“I thought I did,” he said. “They had a couple of other foster kids who they had adopted, and they had an older daughter and a, um, a baby, later.” Joaquin could still see her, bowlegged with dark curls hanging like a halo around her head. It made him sick to even think about her.
“Were they nice to you?” Maya asked.
“They were fine,” he said. “I don’t know if they were nice. They weren’t not nice, though. Sometimes that’s enough. I had my own room, my own bed. We went shopping and they let me pick out sheets. That was a big deal.”
Joaquin’s heart still felt like it was vibrating in his chest, and he took another deep breath, Maya’s hand still warm on his shoulder. “Living with them was fine, the kids were nice, all of that. They had a baby”—Joaquin could hardly bring himself to say her name—“Natalie, and that was cool. I was like . . . I thought that it was the real thing, you know? I thought that this was my family.”
“What happened?” Grace asked, and Joaquin could hear a deeper kind of fear in her voice, different from when Adam had called her a slut.
Joaquin bit the inside of his cheek, waiting until he could say words again. “I just started . . . I don’t know, I just started having these tantrums. They called them meltdowns. I would just black out with this anger. It felt like my skin was exploding, you know? Like I couldn’t even breathe. And the closer we got to the adoption, the worse it got. I was starting fights with everyone except Natalie and I couldn’t even explain why. The Buchanans still went through with the adoption, though.”
Joaquin wondered if they regretted that, if they sat up late at night and reminisced about that time they’d made a terrible decision by bringing Joaquin into their home.
“I knew something was wrong, though,” he said now. “I couldn’t even call them Mom and Dad. Two years later and I only called them by their first names. It felt like . . .”
“Like what?” Grace asked softly.
Joaquin sagged a little, leaning against both girls. They were strong enough to hold him up, he realized. “Like once the adoption went through, then that was it,” he said. “It’d be final. I just thought that if our mom ever came back, if she actually, finally just came fucking back and showed up at the house and saw that I had a new mom, a new dad, that she . . . she’d think I replaced her. It’s stupid, I know, it’s so fucking stupid. I was such an idiot.”
“No, no,” Maya said, leaning into him. “It’s not stupid, it’s not stupid at all. You were a kid, right? That wasn’t your job to figure all that out.”
Joaquin laughed a little. “Well, I haven’t actually told you the bad part yet.”
The girls were quiet, waiting for him to speak again.
“So one day, about six months after the adoption went through, Natalie was almost two, and it was a Saturday afternoon, and I was having this epic meltdown.” Joaquin tried not to feel the carpet on his back, the way his hair tangled against it as he writhed on the floor, howling for something, for someone, that