Joaquin rarely felt off-kilter. He had gotten good at predicting what people would do, how they would react, and when he couldn’t predict their behavior, he knew how to provoke it instead. The therapist Mark and Linda made him see had called it a defense mechanism, and Joaquin thought that sounded exactly like something that someone who never needed a defense mechanism would say.
But Linda wasn’t saying the lines in the script that Joaquin had come to know by heart.
Mark leaned forward then, putting his hand on Joaquin’s forearm and squeezing a little. That didn’t bother Joaquin—he knew Mark would never hurt him, and even if he tried, Joaquin had three inches and about thirty pounds on him, so it would be a fast fight. Instead, he couldn’t help but feel like Mark was trying to keep him steady. “Buddy,” Mark said. “Your m— Linda and I wanted to talk to you about something important. If it’s all right with you, and you’re okay with it, we’d like to adopt you.”
Linda’s eyes were shiny as she nodded along with Mark’s words. “We love you so much, Joaquin,” she said. “You . . . you feel like our son; we can’t imagine not making it permanent.”
The buzzing in Joaquin’s head almost made him dizzy, and when he looked down at the skateboard wheels in his hands, he realized that he couldn’t feel them. He had only felt like this once before, when Mark and Linda had (casually, oh so very casually) told him that he could call them Mom and Dad if he wanted. “Only if you want to, of course,” Linda had said, and even though she had been turned away from Joaquin at the time, he could still hear the tremble in her voice.
“Your call, buddy,” Mark had added from the kitchen island, where he had been staring at his laptop. Joaquin noticed that he wasn’t clicking through websites, though, just scrolling up and down on the same page.
“’Kay,” Joaquin had said, and pretended to ignore their disappointed faces that night at dinner when he called her Linda, like nothing had happened that morning.
Joaquin had never called anyone Mom or Dad. It was either first names or, in some of the stricter homes, Mr. and Mrs. Somebody or Other. There were no grandparents, no aunts or uncles or cousins like other foster kids sometimes had.
And the truth was that he wanted to call Linda and Mark Mom and Dad. He wanted it so bad that he could feel the unspoken words sear his throat. It would be so easy to just say it, to make them happy, to finally be the kid with a mom and dad who kept him.
They weren’t just words, though. Joaquin knew, in a way that he knew every true thing, that if he spoke those two words, they would reshape him. If those words ever left his mouth, he would need to be able to say them for the rest of his life, and he had learned the hard way that people could change, that they could say one thing and do another. He didn’t think Mark and Linda would do that to him, but he didn’t want to find out, either. He had once dared to call his second-grade teacher Mom one afternoon during their math lesson, just to feel how the word felt in his mouth, how it sounded in his ears, but the resulting embarrassment from the other kids had been so sharp and acute that it still burned hot when he thought about it all these years later.
But that had been just a mistake. To call Linda and Mark Mom and Dad on purpose would mean that Joaquin’s heart would form into something much more fragile, something impossible to put back together if it broke, and he could not—would not—do that to himself again. He still hadn’t managed to pick up all the pieces after last time, and one or two holes remained in his heart, letting the cold air in.
But now Mark and Linda wanted to adopt him, and Joaquin felt the skateboard wheels rumble under his feet as he took a hard right past the library. Mark and Linda would be his mom and dad whether he called them that or not. He knew they couldn’t have children (“Barren as a brick!” Linda had once said in that super cheerful way that people do to hide their worst pain), and Joaquin wondered if he was their last