“A pony.”
Joaquin started to laugh despite himself. “Weirdos,” he said. “Okay, here goes nothing.”
He lifted the lid.
At first, he thought it was just a bunch of postcards, photographs of people he had never met in places he had never been, and then Grace let out a strangled gasp as Joaquin’s eyes focused on one postcard of a woman holding a laughing, curly-haired baby boy. She was laughing, too, and their eyes were the same, and Joaquin realized that they weren’t postcards at all, that it was a photo of him and his mother, and the entire box was full of them.
The tears started before he could stop them, his hands digging into the photos and turning them faceup. There was one of him as a newborn in the hospital, red and wrinkled like a raisin, and another of him sitting in a playpen, grinning up at the camera.
Joaquin felt the emotions rush up and over him again and again with each new picture, each one a heartbreak and a joy. His mom looked just like Grace and Maya, bright-eyed and cheerful, and it wasn’t until he realized that his tears were splashing down onto the photos that he tried to wipe his face. Next to him, Grace was quietly sobbing against Maya’s shoulder blade, and Maya had her forehead pressed against Joaquin’s shoulder, and he reached out and gathered them to him, their past spread out on the table like an invitation to something more, something better, something true.
“Look,” Maya whispered, reaching down for a photo. “Look.”
Joaquin took the picture from her, holding it up. His mom was holding him on her hip, pointing toward the camera, an obvious bump in her stomach. “It’s Grace,” he said, smiling.
Grace leaned forward to look at it. “Wow,” she said.
Joaquin started to sift through the photos again, looking at the baby in each of them, looking at himself. It was easy to forgive a baby who looked like that, all wide-eyed and apple-cheeked. Joaquin had to keep reminding himself that it was him, that someone had once loved him enough to save his pictures for nearly eighteen years. They weren’t on a wall or in an album, but they had been kept safe.
Someone had thought that he was worth saving.
There was one that didn’t have a baby in it, though, a professional one taken at what looked like a high school dance, and he realized that he was looking at a picture of his mom and dad at the prom. They were both the same height, dressed in cheap-looking formal wear, but his dad’s eyes were focused on his mom, gazing at her with the exact same adoration that Jessica had described. On the back, someone had written “Melissa hearts Joaquin xoxo.”
Joaquin felt something crack open in his chest, and at the same time, another fissure started to seal itself back up. He felt like he was flying apart and coming together at the same time, and he sank down in a chair as his sisters sat on either side of him, the three of them quietly sorting through their past.
It was the greatest gift anyone had ever given to him.
When they finally left, it was closing time, and they had to borrow a paper bag from the teller at the front desk to transport all the photos. “Do you want to keep the box?” she asked Joaquin.
“No,” he said. “I’ve got everything I need.”
Grace drove home, too, Joaquin curled up in the front seat with the bag of photographs between them. A couple of times, he peeked inside the bag, just to make sure they were still there.
His younger self gazed back up at him every time.
“Good day,” Maya murmured, leaning forward from the backseat and resting her head on Grace’s shoulder, her arm stretching out to wrap around Joaquin. Grace just hummed in response, the setting sunlight and wind hitting the girls’ hair so that it swirled like a dark flame around their faces, and Joaquin thought that they were beautiful, like their mother.
Joaquin reached up to hold Maya’s wrist in his hand, their skin and blood the same, and they drove home, the three of them together, just like they had promised.
By the time they exited the freeway, though, Joaquin started to worry. The fight with Mark and Linda felt like it had been a million years ago, not just that morning, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Maybe they’d let him come home long enough to get his stuff? Or was it their stuff now? Joaquin hadn’t paid for any of it, after all. He had no actual claim to it. Maybe he should just find a phone and call Allison and tell her that he needed a new placement. Maybe he could crash at Grace’s or Maya’s house, just for a night or two until he knew where he was going.
He was so busy thinking about it that he didn’t even notice Mark and Linda standing in Grace’s driveway, their car parked out front, their faces full of worry.
“What?” he said once he saw them. “Wait, what? What are they doing here?”
Maya didn’t even bother to look apologetic. “We called your phone,” she said. “When you went to use the bathroom at Jessica’s. They answered and we told them that you were with us. They were really worried about you.”
Joaquin was so shocked that he couldn’t even get out of the car. He had left many houses many times, but no one had ever come looking for him. Not even, he suddenly realized, his mother.
He stayed in the car for so long that Mark had to walk over and open the door. “Hey, bud,” he said. “Heard you had an adventure.”
Joaquin had thought he had cried enough for a lifetime, but seeing Mark standing there was too much. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Mark.”
But then Mark was reaching into the car and undoing his seat belt and pulling Joaquin to his feet, and then Linda was there, too, wrapping her arms around both of them, and Mark held him steady and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, we’re not angry,” and Joaquin hung on to them so tight that his arms ached and he thought that this must be what forgiveness felt like, pain and hurt and relief all balled up together, pressing against his heart so that it might burst.
“Dad,” he whispered. “Mom.”
Joaquin’s parents just held him tighter.
And they never let him go.
LANDING
MAYA
The inside of the rehab center feels chilly after she’s been out in the late-February sun of Palm Springs. Maya feels her eyes relax once she steps inside, the bright blue sky no longer bearing down on her, and it’s so quiet in the front lobby that she can hear her own footsteps as she walks up to the front desk.
“I’m Maya,” she says. “I’m here to see my mother, Diane?”