“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Maya suddenly screamed, and they both turned around to see her still standing next to the car, hands on hips.
“That’s exactly what family is, Joaquin!” Maya shouted at him. “It means that no matter where you go, no matter how far you run, you’re still a part of me and Grace and we’re still a part of you, too! Look at us! It took us fifteen years to find each other, but we still did! And sometimes, family hurts each other. But after that’s done you bandage each other up, and you move on. Together. So you can go and think that you’re some lone wolf, but you’re not! You’ve got us now, like it or not, and we’ve got you. So get in this fucking car and let’s go!”
Grace looked at Joaquin.
Joaquin looked at Maya.
And then he got in the fucking car.
“Thank you,” Maya sighed, then looked toward Grace. “Oh, yeah, one more thing.”
“What’s that?” Grace said, picking up her backpack.
“Shotgun!”
They spent most of the three-hour drive in silence, Grace sprawled out in the backseat and Maya curled up against the passenger-side window while Joaquin drove, her camera snapping a picture of the landscape every so often. Joaquin’s grip on the steering wheel was tight, but Grace could see the sad slope of his shoulders and neck, the way he seemed to almost hang his head. At one point, Maya looked up from the window. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked him.
“Nope,” he replied.
“Okay,” she said, and rested her cheek against the pane of glass once again.
They listened to the radio for a while, pop songs that Grace hated but always seemed to know the words to anyway. As they got closer to the desert, the station faded into crackling noise and Joaquin eventually turned it off. They passed the giant dinosaurs at the rest stop and then drove through what seemed like a sea of windmills. It made Grace think of Don Quixote. She wondered if she and Maya and Joaquin were on the same ridiculous quest as Quixote, racing toward something that was different from how they imagined it would be, destined for disappointment, for humiliation, for failure.
Her phone buzzed in the backseat, and she glanced at it.
how goes it? Rafe asked.
it goes, Grace wrote back.
you scared?
terrified.
it’ll be okay. everything always works out.
She wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but she was glad that at least one person thought so.
By the time Joaquin pulled onto the street, Grace’s palms were sweating. Maya was no longer slumped against the window and was instead sitting straight as a jackrabbit, her sunglasses pushed up onto her forehead. “There it is,” she said, pointing toward a small house.
Joaquin parked across the street and they sat there in silence, the three of them breathing in unison, looking at the house. It looked freshly painted, the trim a bright white against the bluish-gray of the house, and there was a pot of geraniums near the front door. A dark-blue sedan was parked in the driveway.
“It looks nice,” Grace said after a minute.
“Yeah,” Joaquin said. He had gone utterly still, not even flinching when Grace put her hand on his shoulder and started to get out of the car.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Maya said. “Not yet. Just . . . let’s just agree that no matter what happens here, that it’s the three of us together, okay?”
Joaquin’s jaw was clenching and unclenching, but he nodded and Grace said, “Agreed.”
Maya glanced out the windshield again, then took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
Grace would later wonder what the three of them must have looked like as they walked up the front steps of the house toward the front door, huddled together like a scared flock of ducks. Her own heart was beating so hard that it actually hurt. She was more scared than when she’d told her parents that she was pregnant, than when the doctor had told her it was time to push, than when Peach first rested in her new parents’ arms.
Grace wondered if Melissa was even home.
She wondered if she even still lived in that home.
What if no one answered the door?
What if someone did?
“You knock, Grace,” Maya whispered. Joaquin was standing behind them, almost like protection, and Grace steadied herself and reached out to the tarnished brass knocker shaped like a lion. It seemed almost to snarl at them, like they were intruders.
Grace hoped that wasn’t a bad omen.
The knock seemed to echo down the street, and after a minute, a woman opened the door. She was wearing nurse’s scrubs, her dark, curly hair pulled back into a ponytail, and when she saw them, she smiled. “Magazines or cookies?” she said.
“Wha—I’m sorry, what?” Grace stammered. She could feel Maya trembling next to her, her eyes gone wide as she stared at the woman with Joaquin’s nose, with Maya’s eyes.
“Oh, sorry!” The woman leaned against the door. “Just the high school always has kids selling stuff for fund-raising. I’m happy to just write a check, I told them, but you know, people like their stuff.” She smiled wider and Grace thought she saw a glimpse of Peach. “I hope it’s cookies, because I have a ton of magazines I haven’t read.”
“We’re not, um.” Grace realized with horror that maybe she should have practiced this. “Are you Melissa Taylor?”
The smile fell from the woman’s face as if Grace had slapped it away. “No,” she said. “Melissa passed away a long time ago. I’m her sister, Jessica.”
Grace didn’t even realize she had swayed on her feet until Joaquin was stepping forward to prop her up. She fumbled for what to say next, her head a clanging rush of noise and pain and shock, when the woman suddenly gasped, clasping a hand over her mouth.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, and then she was crying. “You’re her kids. You’re Melissa’s kids.” And then she was stepping forward, pulling the three of them into her arms.
That’s when Grace started to cry, as well.
MAYA
The inside of Jessica’s home was as neat as the outside.
Maya sat between Grace and Joaquin at the kitchen table as Jessica fluttered around them, getting sodas out of the refrigerator, setting them down along with paper napkins. “We would have called,” Grace said, her voice still thick and papery-sounding from crying, “but we didn’t have a number.”
“Oh, it’s okay,” Jessica said. She was smiling even though there were still tear tracks on her cheeks, her mascara pooling under her eyes. Every so often, Maya would see Joaquin in her features, and then Grace, and sometimes herself. It was like looking at a funhouse mirror, the image in it constantly shifting, and Maya was fascinated. “I got rid of the landline a few years ago,” Jessica added as she sat down across from them. “Didn’t make sense to have one when I’m always using my cell. They keep calling me and offering me a great deal if I get a landline, but I told them why would I—” Melissa suddenly stopped and smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. I babble when I’m nervous.”
“Me, too,” Maya told her.