The Leavers

  Didi said she’d look after you when I was at the factory, and I tried to line up my shifts to coincide with the times she wasn’t working, but when I couldn’t, I had to stay home. Hetty had told me about a babysitter, and I visited her, twelve kids inside a two-bedroom apartment that smelled of mold, most of them crying, a few of them coughing. The woman had sat and smoked as one kid swatted another in the face. I wasn’t going to leave you in a place like that. I couldn’t even afford her on my salary. Imagine what a cheaper babysitter would be like.

  Then it was fall. Didi’s mother was sick. There were medical bills to pay back home, and Didi needed to take on more hours at the salon.

  “It’s not a problem,” I said. “I can take him with me.”

  As soon as I walked into the factory you started to cry. Can’t say I blamed you—the room was packed and windowless, a quarter of the size of the room I’d worked in back at the Fuzhou factory. Your wails chorused along with the sewing machine motors, and I held you close, tried to avoid the other women’s nasty looks.

  I put a bag of diapers and bottles beneath my machine. “What are you thinking?” hissed the woman to my left. “That baby came out of your pussy last week.”

  I placed some scraps of fabric inside an empty box and set you down in it, hoping the noise would mask your crying.

  A mass of shirts awaited me. My job was hems. Fold the fabric, run it through the serger. A job that required focus and steady hands, things I’d always prided myself on, fold, press, sew, fold, press, sew. Each shirt bringing me closer to zero debt.

  Today, the hours that usually passed with a numbing dullness were crawling by even more slowly than the longest day in the history of school. I kept thinking about when I’d have to feed you, and where I could go to do that. There were no breaks in a six-hour shift. The woman at the next machine shot me incredulous looks as you wailed ceaselessly—as if the noise and heat had given you permission to cry even louder—and my hand slipped. The thread veered sideways off the hem, the fabric violently bunched.

  I tossed the ruined shirt and picked up a new one. My mind was running in half-time, hands twitching from not enough sleep, and again the needle staggered away from its path. “Damn it!”

  The woman next to me clucked her tongue. According to the clock on the wall, only ten minutes had passed.

  “Looking at the clock instead of doing work,” my neighbor sang, firing off another shirt.

  “Mind your own business,” I sang back. I did three shirts successfully, but the detours had thrown off my game. Again I looked at the clock. The woman next to me picked up a fresh pile of shirts, my first pile unfinished. Your sobs had sputtered out into hyperventilating hiccups.

  I crouched down. When you saw me, you held your arms up.

  “Little Deming,” I said. “Mama’s right here.”

  It was hot down there. Dusty. Beneath the table, I saw feet pressing their machine pedals. One woman wore mismatched socks, another a sneaker with a hole in the side. I kissed you. “Mama’s busy now,” I said, in a soothing tone I hoped matched Didi’s. “Be quiet for a moment, and I’ll feed you soon.”

  I put you down and sat back in my chair. Finally, you were quiet. The woman next to me was already on her third pile of shirts, but at least I’d finished one.

  Fold, press, sew. Fold, press, sew. You were crying again. I raced the serger to the end of the fabric and threw the shirt into the finished stack. “Hold on,” I said, but you were screaming. I fumbled for a bottle, struggling to lift you while keeping you obscured inside the box, one hand behind your neck, the bottle in my right armpit. You tugged at the bottle. My knees hurt from squatting. You yanked, I lost my balance, and as I fell backwards my head hit the underside of the table. Ass to the floor, the bottle slipped from my hands and fell into the box, landing on your legs. You wailed. I rubbed my head. That was how the forelady found me, under the table with a crying baby and a box of fabric stained with spilled formula.

  THAT’S WHEN I WALKED out. Down the block, past Grand, Pitt, Madison, Pike. Clinton, Henry, Essex, Cherry. Cars honked as I zigzagged in the middle of the street with you strapped to my chest. Montgomery, Jackson, Water.

  I didn’t know where I was going. I paused at the chain-link fence of a playground, no children outside on this late September day, just crooked basketball hoops, a flag flapping in front of an elementary school and a row of tall buildings in the background. The forelady had given me the rest of my shift off without pay, said I could keep my job as long as I showed up tomorrow without a baby.

  My brain returned to calculating how little I would make this month. Even if I worked fourteen-hour shifts there wouldn’t be enough to pay rent and the loan shark and a babysitter. Didi’s mother was sick.

  To the water, then, with its choppy gray waves, the muffled thumping of cars on the bridge above. The row of benches deserted on a weekday afternoon. Barges floated along the river.

  I was so tired. All I wanted was to be by myself in a silent, dark room.

  Send him back. It’s the only way.

  You kicked me like you wanted to be freed. I don’t want to tell you what I did.

  Fast now, before I could change my mind, looking around to make sure no one could see me, I set the bag on the pavement under the bench and lowered you inside. The bag was taller than you, its sides a stiff, insulated plastic. When I got up I was lighter, relieved.

  I ran.

  “I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY!”

  You sobbed. I squeezed your body against mine.

  I’d gone almost two blocks before coming to a crosswalk. The light was moving from yellow to red, but a bus was slowly making its way through the intersection. If the light had remained yellow a moment longer, if there’d been no bus, would I have kept running?

  But I did return, and the bag was there, and you were still inside.

  I stroked your hair. “Mama,” you said again. “Ma-ma!”

  I called Yi Ba and told him I had a son I was sending to the village until I paid down my debt and until you were old enough to go to school in New York.

  Yi Ba made a sound like he was clearing mucus. “Hrm. Going all the way to America to end up pregnant.” He said he would take you, he’d accept any money I sent home. “But to take care of your son. He needs the money, not me.”

  Didi’s sister, who’d married her American-born boyfriend in Boston, wanted to visit their mother in China. I took out another loan and offered to pay for the sister’s flight if she brought you to Yi Ba.

  I packed a bag with your clothes, pillow, and a photo of the two of us taken in a tourist booth at the South Street Seaport. In the photo my face was shadowed by sun and you looked cranky and hot. The background was a cartoon Statue of Liberty, a checkered yellow cab, and the Empire State Building all on the same block.

  The night before you left, I stayed up and memorized your face. We fell asleep curled together. In the morning, my eyes pink and crusty from crying, I gave you to Didi’s sister. You stayed asleep. Didi walked with you and her sister to the airport bus on East Broadway, but I didn’t go with them. I couldn’t bear to watch you carried off in another woman’s arms and trust that you’d be okay, that I would see you again.

  After you left I lay with my face against the spot on the pillow where you had slept. The spot, which had been so warm only minutes ago, was now cold.

  Ming tapped my shoulder. “Polly. Hey.” She shook my arm. “You did the right thing.”

  I didn’t believe it, at the time.

  Eight

  In the end, he hadn’t expected it to be this easy. Leon answered on the second ring, and hearing his voice felt like being petted by a pair of giant hands. “Deming! You sound like a grown-up! I was waiting for your call. Vivian said she was going to see you.”

  Daniel was the only one home at Roland’s apartment at ten o’clock on a Friday night, bloated from the food he’d eaten earlier at Vivian’s. In Fuzhou, it was Saturday morning, thirteen hours in the fu
ture.

  “Did Vivian tell you she gave me away to a foster family? To get adopted?” He had looked up how to say the words in Chinese.

  “Not until much later, when I’d been in China for a long time.”

  “Because she knew it was wrong.”

  There was a pause on Leon’s end of the line. Daniel scratched the inside of his arm and listened to the anxious hiss of the radiator.

  “I wish we could have stayed together,” Leon said.

  “I wish you hadn’t left.” He didn’t call Leon Yi Ba. Leon said he had a daughter now, and it might creep him out to hear the word from Daniel.

  Leon coughed. “I have your mother’s phone number. At least it was hers seven years ago. That’s when I last heard from her.”

  So the permanency hearing report had been right. She’d gone to China. “You saw her?”

  “She was about to get married then, was working in an English school.”

  English? Married? “What do you mean, you saw her?”

  “I didn’t see her,” Leon said, “we only spoke on the phone.”

  “Did she go to Florida?”

  “She didn’t really say. But I know she would have never left you on purpose.”

  “Did you tell her I was adopted?”

  “I did.”

  Daniel lay on the floor, saw a ball of dust under the couch, a sock he’d been searching for. Ever since he spoke to Michael, he had constructed a new storyline—Deming and Mama torn apart by Vivian’s evil machinations, victims of a family tragedy. Leon was saying his mother hadn’t left him on purpose, but she hadn’t gotten in touch with him either. She hadn’t looked for him, yet she had looked for Leon?

  “Come visit,” Leon said, “I’ll take you out for real Chinese food, none of that pretend shit they have in New York. By the way, your Chinese sucks. What happened, you forgot how to talk?”

  “I’m just out of practice,” Daniel said. “After you all left.”

  He didn’t call the number Leon had given him right away. He didn’t want to call and have her not want to talk to him.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, DANIEL ironed his one good shirt on the kitchen counter, pressed the hems and flattened the collars. He didn’t have any pants other than jeans, but he put on his dark gray pair instead of the blue. His hiking boots would have to do. He put the Carlough College forms in his pocket, the statement of purpose he’d printed on Roland’s printer.

  For Jim Hennings’ birthday, Elaine and Angel had rented out an Italian restaurant in the West Village, a neighborhood Daniel always got lost in, the streets west of the subway station switching from orderly numbered blocks to ones with old-fashioned names—Perry, Jane, Horatio. There were no chain stores in this section of the Village, only restaurants and boutiques with small signs in restrained fonts, and compared to Chinatown, the streets were nearly empty at five thirty on a March afternoon. As Daniel backtracked after taking a wrong turn, he passed a man walking a tiny white dog, both of them bent sideways against the wind, and a woman in an enormous dark coat, moving her walker, clunk by clunk, up the sidewalk. He wondered where his mother lived now, if she was still in the house on 3 Alley. The fire escapes here were painted matte black, a contrast to the glass high-rises downtown, and none of the buildings were over five stories tall. Inside these large front windows were chandeliers and tall bookshelves, kitchens with round wooden tables and hanging plants, and in one apartment, a room with nothing but a grand piano. Even the buildings’ brick exteriors looked like they’d been given a scrubdown, preserved and buffed to a shine. Neither this nor the new luxury buildings downtown appealed to Daniel. They both seemed calculated, disingenuous.

  The closer he got the slower he walked, until he was standing outside the restaurant looking at a handwritten sign that said CLOSED: PRIVATE PARTY, the bottoms of the letters nudging in toward one another like he’d seen girls posing for photos, with pigeon-toed feet. Angel hadn’t responded to his text message. He opened the door. The restaurant wasn’t large, and the room felt crowded. He took one of the glasses of champagne lined up on a cream-colored cloth and saw Kay and Peter talking to Jim and Elaine. They were more casually dressed than the other guests, in slightly more formal versions of their usual outfits, a sports jacket instead of a cardigan for Peter, a skirt for Kay in place of corduroys. They waved at him, and Daniel thumped over in his hiking boots, feeling a surge of fondness for them.

  He hugged them hello. That they didn’t seem angry was a good sign. Angel hadn’t yet told them about the money he’d borrowed. He hadn’t seen Elaine and Jim for years, and Jim had gone bald, Elaine’s long, curly hair all gray. Daniel shook Jim’s hand and wished him a happy birthday, and Elaine kissed Daniel on the cheek, jewelry clinking under her pashmina scarf. “You stranger, you’ve been in New York all this time and haven’t let us know. We’ll have to have you over for dinner as soon as possible.”

  “Angel is by the appetizer table.” Jim pointed across the room. An Asian guy with a shaved head and thick eyebrows, handsome in a rugby player kind of way, had his arm around Angel, and she was laughing. This guy was too big, too handsome. His suit jacket stretched across his wide shoulders, and Angel’s light blue dress had short sleeves and a matching belt. She was undersized, still, hair cut briskly below her shoulders. The guy looked like he could be Chinese, or Korean, but Daniel had never been good about guessing these things. “That’s Charles, her boyfriend,” Jim said, and Kay looked at Daniel.

  “He’s a senior, in the same program as her,” Elaine said. “We met him for the first time over winter break.”

  “Good head on his shoulders,” said Jim. “Very polite, well spoken.”

  He thought about the guys Angel had spoken about. There’d been an ex-boyfriend who was now one of her best friends; a co-worker she had a crush on.

  “Angel,” Elaine called. “Look who’s here.”

  Angel saw Daniel and said something to Charles, who scowled.

  “Angel,” Jim called.

  She crossed the room with Charles’s hand in hers. When Daniel hugged her, she flinched. “Hey,” he said. “Good to see you.”

  “This is my boyfriend, Charles,” she said, looking over Daniel’s head.

  Daniel shook the guy’s hand, which felt like shaking air. His suit looked expensive. “Nice to meet you. How long have you guys been together?” He heard a swell of voices behind him. Jim and Elaine greeted another couple and got pulled away in the crowd.

  “We should head back to our table,” Angel said to Charles.

  Kay touched Angel’s arm. “Angel, we haven’t had a chance to catch up. How’s school? We heard you were supposed to go to Nepal?”

  “I was, but I had money stolen from me.”

  “Stolen?” Peter said. “In Iowa?”

  “Even in Iowa.”

  Daniel turned to Charles. “So where are you from?”

  Charles laughed, a sharp bark. “Thieves are everywhere. You don’t need to be in the same place as someone to steal from them.”

  Daniel drained his champagne.

  “How awful,” Kay said. “Did they catch whoever did it? What happened, exactly?”

  “Look, Mom, the food is coming.”

  “What happened is that the thief knows exactly what he did,” Charles said.

  “Oh, he does,” Angel said, her eyes meeting Daniel’s.

  Daniel took Peter and Kay by the elbows. “We should sit down before the food gets cold.”

  “It hasn’t even arrived yet,” Kay said.

  They walked to a table across the room. “That’s so strange,” Kay said. “What Angel and her boyfriend were saying.”

  Peter said, “Something about a thief?”

  Daniel took off his coat and hung it on the chair next to Kay’s. He took out the forms for Carlough College and passed them to Peter.

  “Good,” Peter said.

  Kay’s smile was so big, her whole face crinkled. Daniel smiled back. He was still full from last night’s din
ner at Vivian’s, but ate marinated olives and arugula salad and linguine and lamb with eggplant, ordered a glass of red wine, another. As the servers cleared away the plates he saw Angel leave the room by herself. Maybe if he apologized to her in person, she wouldn’t tell Peter and Kay who the thief was. He excused himself, taking another glass of champagne as he crossed the room. Angel stood in the front entrance with a short-haired woman in a white jacket, one of the restaurant staff, and he heard them talking about candles and cake.

  “Angel,” he said.

  She stopped in the middle of her sentence, astonishment flickering on her face.

  “Is there a problem?” the woman said.

  “No,” Daniel said.

  “As I was saying,” Angel said, “we’ll dim the lights, then sing. He’ll like that.”

  He waited for her to finish talking, and when she turned to leave with the woman, Daniel blocked her.

  “Okay,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “Did you get my text?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “What text?”

  “I’m sorry about everything.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “Can you do me a favor? Please don’t tell my parents about the money. Or your parents.”

  She snorted. “Why not? You’re scared?”

  “I don’t want them to know. I’m working on fixing things. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “You want them to think you’re perfect? Then you shouldn’t have screwed up so hard in the first place.”

  “They already know I’m a fuck-up. I’m just trying to make things better.”

  “You know you can’t please everyone, right? Me included.”

  “I swear I’m going to pay you back.”

  “You need to figure your shit out, but don’t expect me to do it for you.” She turned and left the room.

  Elaine intercepted him as he made his way to the table, said they’d have to set a date for dinner, she would get his number later, at the apartment. His parents were staying over tonight, and they’d have coffee there after the party. “You’ll have more time to talk with Angel once we’re all back at our place. Did you get to meet Charles, at least?”