The Leavers

by Lisa Ko

  He started typing.

  MICHAEL WROTE BACK TWO hours later and suggested meeting tomorrow at a Starbucks near Columbus Circle. The next day, Daniel showed up twenty minutes early and walked around the block three times before deciding to wait inside. He ordered a coffee and sat at a table near the door, looking up each time it opened.

  One minute had passed since Daniel had last looked at his phone. 3:42 p.m. No missed calls, no new messages. Michael was supposed to meet Daniel at three thirty. Michael himself had suggested three thirty at this specific Starbucks on Sixtieth and Broadway. Daniel had agreed to meet Michael out of curiosity, but resolved to maintain a healthy suspicion. Whatever Michael had to tell him, it wasn’t going to change his life. He sucked up coffee. If Michael didn’t show in the next ten minutes, he’d leave, call it a day.

  The door opened again. A beefy white man in a long T-shirt walked in, hand in hand with his similarly built daughter, but before the door could close all the way, a tall Asian guy in a navy blue coat, white sneakers, and a big backpack caught it and came inside.

  Michael looked around, brightening when he saw Daniel, shoving his way through the tables and chairs. Daniel stood and his resolve fell away. They hugged, hard. Michael was an inch taller than Daniel, and they stood there, in the middle of Starbucks, slapping each other on the back.

  “Deming.” Michael took off his bag and pulled out a chair. “Sorry I’m late. My professor was talking to me and wouldn’t stop.” Michael’s voice was lower, no longer a kid’s voice. Daniel had never heard this not-child Michael. Michael hadn’t seen him past the age of eleven.

  “No one’s called me Deming in a long time.”

  Michael scrutinized him. “You look different. Your face is thinner, though your features are the same. I bet if we saw each other on the street we would’ve walked past each other.”

  “You look different, too.” Michael’s nerd exterior might be gone, but the core of who he was remained, and there was something familiar, visible only to those who had known him when he was a kid. “But also the same.”

  “It’s weird, you having another name. Do you prefer Daniel or Deming?”

  “Daniel, I guess.”

  Michael folded his hands in front of him, as if they were in an interview. “So, you must be in your junior year of college?”

  “I was upstate at SUNY, but I’m taking some time off.” He was failing the interview already.

  “Where are you living?”

  “Down by Little Italy, Chinatown. I’m crashing at my friend Roland’s on Hester Street. We have a band—I play guitar. We’ve been playing shows around the city.”

  “I can totally see that. I remember you used to beg our moms to let us stop and hear the subway musicians and we’d stand there so long we’d miss the train.” Michael laughed. “So what’s your band called?”

  “Psychic Hearts. I’m working on my own songs, too, just me singing and playing guitar. Real pared-down, almost confessional kind of stuff.” It was the first time he’d ever spoken about this out loud.

  “Let me know when your next concert is. I’ll come.”

  “All right.” Daniel pictured a guy like Michael at a loft show, someone more out of place than himself. “And you’re going to Columbia, right?”

  “Yeah. I went to Brooklyn Tech for high school.” Michael put his phone down on the table. “I was late because I’m applying for this assistantship thing. I have to propose this genetics research project and I’m trying to decide between two of them. One’s the kind of stuff that my faculty sponsor does—that’s the professor I was talking to before. He’s writing my recommendation, so if I go with that project I might have a better chance. But there’s this other project that has less precedence, so less chance for success. It’s the one I want to do.”

  “When’s the application due?”

  “In two weeks. Wish me luck.”

  Their eyes met for a moment. Daniel wanted to observe Michael for as long as he needed, attempting to reconcile the guy across the table with the skinny kid who had tagged alongside him in the Bronx. For five years, they had shared a bed. “How’s your mom doing?”

  “She’s good, real good. She married my stepfather, Timothy, a few years ago, and we moved to his place in Brooklyn, in Sunset Park. I’m still there, commuting to school, but I’m hoping to move out soon.” Michael passed his phone over, displaying a picture of a family in a grassy yard, Vivian and Timothy with their arms around Michael. “This is from last summer.” Timothy had a small potbelly and a receding hairline. Vivian’s hair was short and permed curly.

  Daniel peeked at the photo and passed the phone back. “You still in touch with Leon?”

  “Uncle Leon? Yeah, yeah, he’s still in Fuzhou. He got married and has a daughter now. He works for a manufacturing company. We’ve talked a few times but he’s not much of a phone person. But he’s doing good.” Michael played with the strap on his watch. It was a chunky, silver watch, something a middle-aged man might wear. “We didn’t stay in that apartment too long after you left. We moved in with this family in Chinatown. Then we moved to Queens and my mom got this job in the building where Timothy worked.”

  “Oh.” Some small part of Daniel had been hoping Leon and his mother had found each other and had been living together, and for some perfectly logical reason, though he couldn’t figure out what that might be, they had been unable to get in touch with him.

  “So I found these papers over Christmas break when I was helping my mom clean out boxes in our apartment,” Michael said. “There was this form she signed, voluntarily transferring you to the care of social services. It said the placement would be for an indefinite period of time.”

  Daniel said nothing, remembering the papers he’d seen in Peter and Kay’s desk, the report from the permanency hearing. Hadn’t it said something about Vivian signing a surrender form? He didn’t remember anything about it being from an indefinite period.

  “I know, I know, it’s screwed up,” Michael said. “And there was this other form, that said she’d gone to court for a hearing, a few weeks after you left. She approved a foster placement with Peter and Kay Wilkinson.”

  On the Starbucks speakers, a woman was braying along to a strumming ukulele. Daniel was plummeting from the final board of a video game down to level one after accidentally missing the most elementary of jumps. Vivian and Leon had never planned on coming back for him. The thought of Vivian going to court after dropping him off with that Chinese couple, signing him over to the Wilkinsons without his knowledge, made him nauseous.

  “I’m sorry. I wanted you to know.” Michael shook his head. “I thought about you and your mom all the time. She was a cool mom. One time, I don’t know where you were, but she took me to Burger King because she was craving fries, and she bought me fries, too, and on our way home we passed this empty lot full of pigeons and she said, super seriously, ‘Michael, in China we’d eat those bitches. But steamed, because their meat is tough.’ She was real funny, you know?”

  “I know she was. How did you even find me?”

  “I googled Peter and Kay Wilkinson and found a website with an article Kay Wilkinson wrote and it said in her bio that she had a son named Daniel. I found a profile picture of a Chinese-looking Daniel Wilkinson that looked like it could be you. It mentioned SUNY Potsdam, so I looked that up and figured out your e-mail address.”

  “Shit. I’m glad you did.”

  “I’m glad you wrote me back. When I found those papers, I thought you could’ve ended up with a bad family, anything could have happened to you.” Michael looked away. “That morning, that last time I saw you? I would’ve tried to stop my mom if I knew where she was going. You guys went out and when she got home, you weren’t with her. I was scared.”

  After he and Angel took the cab to the Bronx and saw the family who wasn’t his, Daniel had gone home to Ridgeborough and cried at night for weeks. Four months later, he and Peter and Kay had gone to court and a judge had
approved his adoption. They’d signed papers. The judge congratulated them on becoming a forever family. He received a new birth certificate, listing Peter and Kay as his birth parents, and his name as Daniel Wilkinson.

  “What did your mom tell you?” he asked Michael.

  “Back then? She said she found another family for you to live with and take care of you. At first, she said it was only going to be for a little while. I was pissed, freaked out. Especially since it wasn’t for a little while, you know? It never seemed right. But I couldn’t do anything, I didn’t know how to find you. So over Christmas, after I found the forms, I asked her and she didn’t want to talk about it, but I kept bugging her, and finally she said she’d done it because she had no choice. We were broke. She said she did the best thing for you.”

  “The best thing.” Daniel concentrated on reading the list of drink specials over the cash register. VEN-TI LA-TTE. The words seemed strange, like they weren’t English. The smell of coffee and artificial sugar was overpowering and cloying. “Does Leon know I was adopted?”

  “I’m assuming my mother told him, but I can’t say for sure.”

  Daniel rested his face in his hands, pressing down on the spot between his eyebrows. Indefinite placement, he thought. “I can’t believe this.”

  “You were like my brother, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I tried googling you before but there were never any results for Deming Guo.”

  “Well, that’s no longer me.”

  “Your parents—I mean, Peter and Kay Wilkinson. Were they good parents?”

  “Sure. But I lost my whole family.”

  “You never heard from your mother?”

  “No. And I guess you never did either.”

  Michael shook his head. “But my mom wants to see you.”

  “What?”

  “She wants to have you over for dinner.”

  Michael watched Daniel’s face, awaiting Daniel’s response. Like he used to when he was a kid, ready to pack up and run away to Florida without hesitation.

  “Are you serious?” Daniel said. “No fucking way.”

  FRIDAY NIGHT, DANIEL TOOK the subway out to Sunset Park, Brooklyn Chinatown, and as he walked down Eighth Avenue he recognized the neighborhood as where the Chinese couple had lived, where Peter and Kay had come to get him. He didn’t know how he would get through this dinner without saying something terrible to Vivian, but the chance to say anything to her pushed him on.

  They lived on one of the numbered streets off Eighth Avenue, in the bottom half of a two-family home, a two-bedroom apartment with a large front window that looked out onto the street. The house smelled like rice and pork and garlic. He removed his shoes and jacket, returned Michael’s hug, and saw Vivian padding toward them in fuzzy purple slippers, plumper than she’d been ten years ago. He didn’t remember her teeth being so bright before.

  “Deming! You look the same,” she said in Fuzhounese. “Big and tall and healthy. Exactly like your mother.”

  How could she mention his mother after what she had done? “Hi, Vivian.”

  “Do you still like pork?”

  “Of course.”

  “I made pork and fish.” Vivian pointed to the kitchen. “We’ll eat soon.”

  Michael and Daniel sat on a dark brown couch facing a wide-screen television and a shelf with glass figurines of unicorns. “Remember that couch we had?” Daniel asked.

  “That thing was busted,” Michael said. “It had those giant flowers in puke colors. Remember that time that kid beat me up and you went and beat him up?”

  “And then your mom went and beat me up.”

  Michael laughed. “Yeah, sounds about right.”

  “I really loved that apartment.”

  “You remember that kid Sopheap? I heard he’s in jail. And there was that time those guys got killed in the park—”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  Daniel ran names, tried to match them to faces, the kids of P.S. 33 with their giant backpacks. He tried to remember Sopheap, the park—which park?—and was alarmed at the inaccuracy of his memory, wondering what else had he forgotten, how much had he gotten wrong about his mother, Leon, even himself.

  “Remember Tommie? Our neighbor? I used to think my mom ran away with him.”

  “That guy?” Michael cracked up. “No way.”

  “I heard he got married.”

  “God. I haven’t thought about him in years.”

  Timothy arrived, carrying with a white bakery box wrapped in red string. “You must be Deming,” he said. “I’ve heard so much about you.” His English had Chinese-shaped tones, and his vowels were warm and curved.

  Vivian had cooked a casserole of tofu and beef and mushrooms, greens with garlic, noodles, crispy pork, even a whole steamed fish. The smells were comforting, ones Daniel hadn’t experienced in years. Timothy handed him a plate. “You’re in school, Deming?” he asked in English.

  He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be called Deming. “I’m a Communications major, at SUNY. I play music, too. Guitar. I go by Daniel now.”

  “Daniel. So you like the arts and the humanities. Michael is more into the sciences.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m a CPA. Accountant. That’s how Vivian and I met.” Timothy switched to Mandarin. “Vivian worked in the office across the hall.”

  Vivian cut the greens. “I cleaned the office.” It sounded like a script she and Timothy had recited before. “Me and Michael lived with my friends in Queens. We had no money.”

  “One day we met in the elevator at work,” Timothy said.

  “That was a long time ago,” Vivian said. “Things are so much better now. Michael’s going to Columbia, and Deming is in college, too. Your mother would be proud.”

  Daniel picked out fish bones, wanting to ask Vivian what she knew. His mother might have wanted him, after all. She couldn’t have known that Vivian would give him away. He took seconds, thirds, fourths, trying to ignore Vivian’s pleased expression as he loaded up his plate again, the credit she was surely taking for cooking so well, for feeding the starved orphan boy. He couldn’t get sucked into how good the food tasted, how familiar it felt to be here.

  Timothy passed Daniel the plate of greens. “Deming, I mean, Daniel, you still speak Chinese?”

  “Yes,” Daniel said in Mandarin. “I still speak Chinese.”

  “You have an American accent. I have it, too.”

  “Michael still speaks perfect Chinese,” Vivian said. “He can even write in Chinese.” She unveiled the contents of the bakery box, revealing a fluffy white sponge cake, a cloud of frosting studded with strawberry slices, and Daniel pretended he was watching a scene from television, narrated by the authoritative male voice of nature documentaries. The female animal cares for only its biological young. It rejects any nonbiological children as a threat to the family unit.

  When they finished dessert, Michael collected silverware from the table. Vivian brought plates into the kitchen, and Daniel got up. “Sit, sit,” Timothy said, but Daniel grabbed the dishes and trailed Vivian. He was much taller than her and could see the white roots in her thinning hair, a baby bald spot on top of her skull.

  He spoke fast, in English. Vivian’s English was much better than it had been ten years ago, but he still had the upper hand. “Why did you do it?”

  She transferred food to plastic containers and pressed down on the lids, double-checking to make sure they were sealed. “Do what?”

  He turned the faucet on and pumped soap onto a sponge. “You said you’d be back for me soon, but you signed a form that gave me away to strangers. Indefinitely.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Vivian opened the refrigerator, restacked the containers, and pulled out other leftovers to make room. She removed a carton of orange juice, squinted at the label.

  “You made me think my mother abandoned me, that she didn’t want me.”

  Vivian
studied a gallon of milk. “You could’ve been deported.”

  “How? I’m an American citizen.” He turned to check that Michael and Timothy were still at the table. “What do you know about my mother? Where is she?”

  Vivian’s face was hidden by the refrigerator door. “I don’t know anything.”

  He scrubbed the dishes, scraped hard, making his skin sting. “You actually went to court to get rid of me forever. You screwed up my whole life.”

  “I didn’t screw up anything. You wouldn’t be in college, otherwise. You wouldn’t be living in Manhattan and playing on your guitar. If you stayed with your mother, you’d be poor. You’d be back in the village.”

  “That’s where she is? Minjiang?”

  Vivian’s words were quiet and tunneled. “I don’t know.”

  It didn’t add up. There was no explanation for Mama’s absence, her never getting in touch. Daniel looked at Vivian, staring hard, daring her to face him.

  “Is she dead?”

  At last, she turned around. “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of Leon.”

  HE WALKED TO THE subway after hugging Michael and shaking Timothy’s hand. “See you soon,” Michael said. “Don’t forget to let me know about your next concert.”

  In Daniel’s pocket was an envelope that Vivian had given him as he was leaving. Less than half a block from the house, he ducked beneath a store awning and opened it. Inside was a hundred-dollar bill and a slip of a paper with a bunch of numbers that could pass for a long distance phone number in China. Leon, it said.

  Daniel put the envelope in his pocket and laughed, a hot jelly laugh, until he was shaking. As if one hundred dollars was supposed to make it all better. He walked until the block of shuttered storefronts dead-ended and took a left, reaching the entrance of Sunset Park. The air was warm, the trees in bloom. He made his way up a hill, above the streets and storefronts, a family trundling along the path below, the father pushing a stroller with a silvery red balloon tied to the handle. Daniel saw the Manhattan skyline, recognized the sketched spire of the Empire State Building, the sparkle of bridges, and from this vantage point the city appeared vulnerable and twinkling, the last strands of sunshine swept across the arches as if lulling them to sleep, painting shadows against the tops of buildings. No matter how many times he saw the city’s outline he pitched inside. He had Leon’s number. His mother was alive. Leon knew where his mother was; they had been in touch. The prospect made him rubbery. Knees quivering, he folded in half and burped garlic and strawberry cake.