by Lisa Ko
“It’s a collectible. My friend Lily doesn’t have one because her parents stayed at a different hotel when they went to China. Her mom was so mad.”
Deming nudged a stuffed tiger with his toe. “Do you really believe in that? The red thread, all that?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“Yeah?” Angel deliberated.
“Bull-shit.” He squirmed under Going Home Barbie’s deadened gaze.
“Are you hot? I can ask Elaine to make the air conditioning higher.”
“My real mother might be in the Bronx.”
“You mean she’s there now?”
“My Yi Ba might be. Or my aunt, my brother—cousin.”
“Let’s go.”
“How?”
“I know how.”
He reached into his pocket. “I have five bucks.”
“Wait.” Angel kicked her way across the room and Deming watched her carefully. If she was going to tell on him, go fetch Peter and Kay, he was prepared to take her down. It wouldn’t be hard; he was bigger than she was. He bounced up on his ankles, ready, as she rummaged through her closet and pulled out a pair of pink stockings. “Daniel,” she said. “Look.” Inside the stockings was a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Deming sat back on his heels, laughing. “I steal them from Jim,” Angel said. “He doesn’t care.”
THERE WAS NO GUEST room or study in the Hennings’ apartment, so Kay and Peter had to cram onto an air mattress in Angel’s room, while Angel and Deming camped out on the living room floor, waiting until Gotcha Day hangovers defeated Elaine and Jim and the early morning rise overcame Kay and Peter. When snoring could be heard from both bedrooms, they stuffed towels into child-sized shapes under their sheets and made their move. Angel pressed the code to disarm the alarm system, keys in her pink plastic purse, Deming close behind her, backpack in hand. He resisted the urge to whisper good-bye to Peter and Kay. They skipped the elevator and took the stairs down ten flights, dashing out the service exit. On the corner Angel hailed a cab. Deming had assumed they would take the subway but Angel said no, she had it covered.
“We’re going to the Bronx,” Angel told the driver. “Our parents gave us money.”
“University and W. 190th,” Deming said. “My family is there.” As he said it he felt a cold lump inside him, growing. This call cannot be completed, the lump whispered. But she wouldn’t have abandoned him. The cab driver fiddled with the radio. “Can you turn the music up?” Deming asked, and the car filled with drums. Deming repeated Mama, Mama, Mama, and directed the driver as they pulled off the highway and entered the Bronx, and there it was, the glowing insistence of the Kennedy Fried Chicken sign, the shadows of subway tracks and the aching rise of the sidewalks up the bend in the block. The sneaker shop, the liquor store, the bodega. It all looked exactly the same. These past eleven months, everything had gone on without him. Forget Peter and Kay, forget Roland and Ridgeborough. He was home.
“Want me to wait?” the cab driver asked, but Deming was already out the door.
“Wait five minutes.” Angel unzipped her purse and passed the driver two of Jim’s twenties.
Deming couldn’t slow down for a second. Up the sidewalk to the dog-piss patch of weeds, through the courtyard, that masking-taped crack in a bottom window. He pulled on the front door and it opened. Angel was following him, up the first flight of stairs, linoleum groaning under their feet, up the second, faster, past chattering television sets, closer now, and as they jumped to the final landing, he saw it there.
A welcome mat. A green-tufted welcome mat resembling ill grass. The cold lump had been right. Leon and Mama never had a welcome mat.
“Is it here? Here?” Angel bounced in excitement, anticipating the grand reunion. “Come on,” she said, and he stepped on the mat that he knew wasn’t hers and knocked. The same layers of brown paint, the same dents. He knocked again.
“Hello?” he said.
Under the door, behind the mat, appeared a slit of light. He heard footsteps and murmuring, and even if he knew it was hopeless, he pictured his mother standing in that light, Leon and Vivian and Michael behind her.
He shifted his backpack. The door opened.
“Yeah?” A short woman with wrinkled skin peered out through a gap, the chain still on.
Angel gasped.
“I’m Deming,” he said.
“Yeah? So?” The door began to ease shut.
“I used to live here. My family—do you know where they went?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said.
A younger man with a goatee came up behind her. “Ma, who is it?” The woman answered in Spanish. The man replaced his mother behind the chain. “What’s going on?”
Deming swallowed hard. “I’m looking for my family. They used to live here. Did you know them?”
“Nah, this place was empty when we moved in.”
“When’d you move in?”
“September. You okay?” The man was closing the door. “All right, kid. It’s late.”
“What about Tommie?” Deming said. “He still around?”
The door opened an inch wider. “Yeah, Tommie got married. Polish girl.”
Polish? The door shut, the locks clicked.
“I’m sorry,” Angel whispered.
Deming walked downstairs to the waiting cab and crawled in, Angel beside him.
“Twenty-first and Madison,” Angel told the driver. “Can you turn the music down?”
The Leavers |
Five
Ten winters passed. On Rutgers Street in Chinatown, where Mama and Deming had lived pre-Bronx, there was a new high-rise on the corner, a white couple talking to a doorman in uniform, but farther down the block seemed unchanged, the same buildings with their reddish brown exteriors, fire escapes, and hanging laundry. The old apartment at 27 Rutgers had been smaller than Roland’s place, but home to Mama, Deming, and their six roommates.
Daniel Wilkinson was two and a half feet taller, one hundred-fifty pounds heavier than Deming Guo had once been, with better English and shittier Chinese. Ridgeborough had made Daniel an expert at juggling selves; he used to see Deming and think himself into Daniel, a slideshow perpetually alternating between the same two slides. He wanted Deming to walk out of the building, for the two of them to do that little dance people did when they tried to pass one another on the sidewalk but kept moving in the same direction, over-anticipating the other’s next move.
Deming wouldn’t have the scar on his right forearm that Daniel had gotten from skateboarding with Roland in eighth grade. While Deming was growing up in Chinatown and the Bronx, was Daniel hibernating, asleep in Planet Ridgeborough? Or had they grown up together, only parting ways after the city? Daniel had lay dormant in Deming until adolescence, and now Deming was a hairball tumor jammed deep in Daniel’s gut. Or Deming had never left Rutgers Street; he’d been here all along.
The front door of 27 Rutgers squeaked open, and a woman with a bouquet of grocery bags walked out. Worried he might seem like a creep, Daniel took out his phone and pretended to text. He knew it wouldn’t be Deming, couldn’t be Deming, yet he felt wasted with disappointment.
Under the Manhattan Bridge, the sounds around him coalesced. The fruit and vegetable vendors here were speaking Fuzhounese, and he knew what they were saying, the words not nonsense sounds but sentences with shape and meaning. The words plowed in, discovered a former residence, and resolved to stay. He repeated them until he was confident they’d be the right ones, then moved toward the vendors.
“Hey, you,” called a man weighing vegetables in a saggy blue coat, knit hat, and jeans. He had tobacco-stained teeth, a gray beard, and one gold crown. “What do you want?” he said in Fuzhounese.
“Hello,” Daniel said.
“Where are you from?”
“New York.”
“You Chinese?”
“Of course I’m Chinese.”
He fumbled for his wallet. The
word for watermelon had swum up and emerged, and he concentrated until the rest of the sentence returned. “Give me a watermelon. They’re fresh right? Good watermelon, right?” He recalled enough to haggle, bumping the guy’s price down twenty-five cents, and it felt like he’d been born again.
The man said, “Go lower than that and my family will starve, thanks to you,” but there was laughter behind his scowl.
Daniel accepted the watermelon, triumphant. He pointed to a pile of greens. “And those. Half a pound. Broccoli.”
He carried the groceries to Roland’s apartment. It was one o’clock on a Tuesday, the winter sunlight so bright he had to squint; he had no plans for the rest of the afternoon. For years, he hadn’t allowed himself to think of those days after Mama never came home, after Leon left and Vivian left him with strangers, and now he imagined his mother waiting for him on Canal Street with a cigarette, remembered her duck walk as she made her way across the ice, the firmness of her hand in his. He’d be taller than her now, but there would be safety in her hand. Once, when he and Angel had been talking about their birth families, she had asked if he still wanted to find his mother, and he said no, not anymore. It was enough for him to accept that she was gone. But he’d never had the chance to ask her why she returned to China—she hated Minjiang—or to understand why he ended up in Ridgeborough.
He stopped on a corner, took out his phone, and responded to the e-mail Michael had sent months ago, hitting send before he could change his mind:
you’ve got the right guy. what’s up?
In Roland’s kitchen, he steamed the broccoli and cut slices of watermelon. It beat eating another deconstructed burrito at Tres Locos, and was cheaper than eating out. His current credit card balance was $2,079.23, with eighteen-percent interest, and that wasn’t counting the ten thousand he owed Angel. Seeing the bill every month from the credit card company made him so anxious, he created an auto-withdrawal from his bank account for the minimum payment—last month it was twenty-two bucks. He hadn’t talked to Angel for months, but now he would have to see her on Saturday, at her father’s birthday party, along with Peter and Kay.
In high school, he’d played Texas Hold’em with other guys at parties and had a talent for noticing their tells while hiding his own, the years with Peter and Kay making him an excellent keeper of secrets. Sophomore year at Potsdam, he heard about online poker, and when he was procrastinating writing papers, he would play a few games, nothing big. Over the summer, living in Ridgeborough with a job painting new five-bedroom houses on the edge of town, he learned he had a knack for deciphering patterns online: the players who folded often and only bet when they had good hands, the action ones who bet foolishly and gambled too much. Back at school the following fall, he’d met a guy named Kyle who was winning real money, a thousand in one night, and Daniel started playing more, six, even ten hours a day, one sit-and-go tournament after another, winner takes all. Late one night he emerged from his dorm room to use the bathroom, hearing the sounds of chips and shuffling cards as he refilled his water bottle in the sink, then scurried back down the hall and resumed playing again, clicking to bet and raise and fold, betting thrice the big blind before the flop and watching his money tick higher. The hours blurred until he heard slamming doors and voices, his body cramped and sore. He’d played into the next day, or the day after. At some point, the overhead light had become painfully bright, and sunlight started falling across the keyboard. He drank Red Bulls, pissed into the empty cans. He bet the pot on a full house and realized he’d been panting out loud. The next day, he heard people shouting his name from a very far distance, and opened the door to see his hallmates there, checking to see if he was still alive. Cards moving across their faces.
When Peter and Kay called and asked if he was going to classes, he’d assured them he was. He could win $4,000 in one night of playing tournaments, then lose that much in thirty minutes. At one point, there was $80,000 in his account. It didn’t seem like real money, but it was. He could have withdrawn it and cashed out, but there was always one more game, and one more after that.
All he needed was one good win, but the number that constituted a good win changed whenever he hit it. He shut down the account at zero then put it back up a day later. He went two whole days without playing, drove to Montreal with some friends to see a concert, and afterwards he wanted to buy himself a new guitar, new gear, get back into music. One more game and he’d be set.
He’d taken out a private loan to pay for next semester’s tuition, since his grades had gotten too low to qualify for financial aid, and burned through the loan money in a day. He borrowed what he could from friends, twenty here, fifty there, opened new credit cards and maxed them out. The shakier he got, the more he lost, and the more he lost, the more of an action player he became. He borrowed two thousand from Kyle with a promise to repay him in two weeks, but knew it was over when he kept losing, got frazzled when he heard the warning beep that he was running out of time to bet. So he bet half the pot on a 7–2 off suit. This was a surprise: suicide was also a rush.
He paid Kyle back, two hundred dollars. “Where’s the rest?” Kyle said.
Kyle and his friends, two beefed-up brothers that looked like they lifted cars for fun, began to come by his room several times a day, asking for the money. Daniel stopped leaving his room or opening the door. Now he was $10,000 in the hole.
Angel was going to school in Iowa. She had waitressed all summer and fall, working nights and weekends to save up for her spring semester abroad in Nepal, where she was going to teach at a school for girls, then spend the summer backpacking around Southeast Asia. She’d always loved architecture, geeked out on the layouts of cities, the differences in public transportation. Daniel had been dodging her calls for weeks, but he answered one night and told her about the losing streak, the money he’d borrowed from Kyle. “I need a favor,” he finally said. “I’ll pay it back in a week.” She had been reluctant, but agreed to transfer him ten thousand dollars. He would get Kyle off his back, get his accounts square again, then take out another loan and use that money to pay her.
But after paying Kyle, he hadn’t planned on his credit being so shot that his application for a loan would be denied. He decided to play one last time, so he could make enough to at least pay Angel something, but he hadn’t planned on such a lousy beat—he’d been winning for most of the hand with a pair of aces for his hole cards, only to lose huge to a player named RichDanger who made two pairs on the river. And he hadn’t predicted the extent of Angel’s anger, or that when he didn’t pay her she would call Peter and Kay and tell them about the gambling, though not the money he borrowed. By the time the letter from the dean arrived, he was already in Ridgeborough, attending Gamblers Anonymous in a garage in Littletown. He had told Angel he would make it up to her, that he was going to change.
“You mess everything up,” she’d said. “Don’t call me again.”
Now he wished he could tell her about writing Michael, going to Rutgers Street. It wasn’t just that she was the only person he knew who’d also been adopted (when he had mentioned his adoption to his ex-girlfriend Carla Moody, she had sighed, “That’s so beautiful”), but talking to Angel was unlike interacting with anyone else his age. She had no pretense. When he talked about music she never pretended to know more than she did, and he never got bored listening to her, even when she was going on and on about the differences between the New York City subway system and the London subway system, or texting him pictures of cats she said she was going to get and never did, or telling him about the time she and her roommate had run out of gas on a long drive to nowhere and gotten lost in a cornfield. Maybe because they’d known each other all these years, she was almost like a sister.
One of the last times they had talked, Angel had told him that her parents had wanted her to be pre-med: “But I’d puke if I had to dissect a dead body. So I told Elaine sorry, okay, but you’re going to have to settle for a social worker or something like
that in the family. She said I was throwing my talents away. I mean, seriously, get a grip, Elaine.”
He had laughed and said, “I’m a shitty professors’ kid, too.”
“Then we’re both black sheep. Even if that term is racist. Like the white sheep are supposed to be good ones.”
“Let’s flip it and say white sheep as bad, instead. I’m the white sheep.”
“But you’ve always been so good to them,” she said.
“My parents? Nah. I’m not the kind of kid they want.”
Angel had sounded surprised. “If that was true, you wouldn’t even feel bad about it. I bet they’re proud of you, even if they can’t say it.”
She told him that in high school she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and Elaine and Jim had made her see a therapist who called her hostile. “I’ve never told anyone about that before.”
Daniel hadn’t deleted her phone number from his contacts list. There was still a record of all their text messages, the last one from four months ago. He opened a blank message and typed i miss you. He deleted the first and last words and changed it to: miss talking to you. im working on paying you back. thanks for letting my parents know about the poker, for real. He erased all that and replaced it with you going to your dad’s party saturday? and pressed send. Now that they were no longer friends, he seemed to have lost the ability to be sincere, and in a single swipe he deleted all of his and Angel’s texts, hundreds of them, then deleted her name and number from his phone.
He checked his e-mail. Michael hadn’t responded yet, and when the phone did ring, it was only Kay. “We’ll see you on Saturday,” she said. “Don’t forget to bring the forms.”
He retrieved the Carlough College forms and smoothed them out.
The Statement of Purpose provides an opportunity to explain any extenuating circumstances that could add value to your application as a transfer student to Carlough College. This is your opportunity to address the Admissions Committee directly and to let us know more about you as an individual in a manner that your transcripts and other application information cannot convey.