The Leavers

  A former co-worker named Santiago was starting a moving company, and when Leon said he was thinking of joining, I was so happy I pounded my fist on the kitchen table and said, “That’s a great idea!”

  Whenever he mentioned it might be nice to have a baby together, I’d say I didn’t want to while I still had debt. But each month I paid only the minimum. I just didn’t want another child. You were almost eleven, and in a few years you wouldn’t need me to look after you all the time. I could work more, get a better job, learn English. Not take care of a baby.

  Two months after Didi’s wedding, Leon met me after work, and as we were walking in Riverside Park, he slowed down as we approached a big tree. Then he stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “What, your shoelace got untied?”

  He rooted around his pocket and removed a box. My heart started to pound. He fumbled with the lid, finally opening it to reveal a gold ring.

  “Do you want to get married?” he asked.

  Eyes pleading, brow furrowed, Leon leaned forward with his chest. We stared at each other, and every second that passed, he looked more nervous, and it became clear that whatever I said, I wouldn’t be able to take back. But I couldn’t say no; I couldn’t hurt him. So I said yes.

  Vivian and Didi threw us a party to celebrate, and we put on the radio and danced—Vivian loved to dance, had great rhythm, and even you and Michael joined in.

  “Now Leon will be my real Yi Ba,” you said.

  Vivian raised a bottle of beer. “To my brother and sister!”

  All my life I had wanted sisters, and now I was so glad to have Vivian and Didi. Leon wanted to go to City Hall right away, but I said let’s wait until spring, when it was warmer, and we could afford a proper banquet.

  THAT MONDAY, I WOKE up alone in the apartment on my day off. You and Michael were at school, and Leon and Vivian were visiting a family friend in Queens. I walked through the apartment, not bothering to pick up your clothing or a pair of Leon’s boxers, lying plaintive on the bedroom floor. I made a cup of tea and let the rare quiet settle over me. On Rutgers Street I had felt alone all the time, even with so many roommates, and now I was rarely alone, though there were times when I was so lonely, like when you and Michael spoke to each other in too-fast English as I sat next to you, or when Vivian and Leon reminisced about their parents and siblings.

  For the first time in months, the day was all mine. I got dressed, walked outside into a sunny morning, early October, and boarded a nearly empty 4 train, the rush-hour crowd already at work, the kids already in school. I stayed on as it went underground, through Manhattan and into Brooklyn, got off at a stop I had never been to before, climbing the stairs up into a quiet street with large trees. The buildings, though not too tall, were wide and regal, with wrought iron fences, brick walkways, and arched entrances. I waited for the light to change alongside a young woman pushing a stroller, shoulders shaking to a secret song, headphones in her ears, the baby girl in the stroller dressed in a miniature jacket and denim pants with pink cuffs. I smiled, the baby gumming back at me, and saw myself at nineteen, pushing you in a stroller I’d bought at a secondhand store on the Bowery. That was my first year in America. I would look down as I walked and see your tiny sneakers poking out in front of me. Now your feet were bigger than mine.

  I was often fatigued by the city, its bad breath belching through vents in the pavement, a guy testing his cell phone ringtones on a packed subway, but this neighborhood felt peaceful. Leaves crunched beneath my shoes, and the breeze didn’t bite. I turned at the next block, onto a street with narrower buildings. A delivery man, Chinese, bags dangling from his bicycle handlebars, cut me off at the corner.

  I looked up at the rows of fire escapes and air conditioners, the barred windows and scraps of curtains. In two weeks, I would be thirty years old. My own mother had been dead at my age. One day Yi Ma had been alive, and the next, gone.

  A door opened onto the sidewalk, a bell jangling from its handle. The deliveryman walked into a takeout joint, and I followed him and ordered a plate of chicken and rice, taking the container to eat at one of the two tables.

  The food was salty. I asked the man if I could have a cup of water.

  “We don’t have water,” he said.

  “Who doesn’t have water?”

  The woman at the other table held out a plastic bottle. “Here, you can have mine,” she said in Fuzhounese.

  I hesitated, not wanting to share a stranger’s bottle.

  “Take it, it’s fine,” she said.

  I was so thirsty I didn’t care if I was being rude, so I uncapped the bottle, wiped its rim on a napkin, and took a long swig. “Thank you.”

  “No problem, sister,” said the woman. Her clothes were well-made, tall brown leather boots, a long skirt printed with purple flowers, and a loose, chocolate-colored sweater. An empty food container was on the table in front of her. She had a wide, pretty face. “How long have you been in New York?”

  “A long time,” I said. “Ten years.”

  “I’ve only been here for three. But I’m leaving soon.”

  The woman smiled and exposed a crooked incisor that seemed familiar, as if I had seen it in a movie or on a relative I’d only met once.

  “Leaving for where?”

  “California. San Francisco. I hear it’s beautiful.”

  “You been there before?”

  “I’ve only seen pictures. I knew a man that moved out there, but he’s somewhere else now.”

  “So you’re going out there by yourself.”

  “Sure, why not? It’s time for a change. New York is hard.” The woman tossed out her container. “So long, now.”

  “Good luck to you, sister.” I watched the woman walk out, skirt swishing, hair hanging down to the middle of her spine. Once I might have become this woman, free to move across the country because she heard a city was beautiful. Instead I had become a woman like Vivian, watching TV, cooking for you and Leon, making sure the dumplings were fried and not steamed, unsure if I should marry my boyfriend but not wanting to lose him either. An uneasiness settled into me. This October would be followed by another winter, another spring, until it was time for October again.

  It wasn’t until I was on the subway that I realized whose crooked tooth the woman’s had reminded me of: Qing, my old friend in the factory dormitory in Fuzhou. The more I ruminated on it, the more I was convinced. This woman was Qing, ten years later. They spoke a similar dialect; they were around the same age. She had called me yi jia, big sister. Qing, I remembered, had wide-set eyes and a wispy voice that sounded like she had a little spit in her mouth. The woman in the takeout joint had wide-set eyes, and her speech could’ve been a little wispy. She hadn’t recognized me, but perhaps I no longer resembled my younger self.

  The subway went express through midtown Manhattan. I leaned against the door, absorbing each bump on the tracks. I knew I should get back on the train to Brooklyn, leave a note in the restaurant asking Qing to call me if she ever returned. But I remained inside, locked down by indecision, as if I was allowing something valuable to slip away.

  When I got off at Fordham Road, the sun was already low. I walked up the stairs to our apartment, passing Tommie from next door. “Not-bad-not-bad-not-bad,” he said. Flustered, I dropped my keys, and he bent down to retrieve them for me.

  For days after seeing the woman who might have been Qing, I slept poorly. Eight-hour shifts at the nail salon seeped by in a haze, and Leon only registered at the periphery of my vision. To your delight, I heated up frozen pizza for dinner. You asked if you could have money to buy bootleg DVDs from the lady who sold them in the Colombian restaurant and I handed the cash over without a word. When I came home from work to find you and Michael and Vivian engrossed in a movie about a man blowing up people with a machine gun, I went into the bedroom and shut the door. It was too much effort to protest. Soon it would be winter again.

  I sat at the window, looking down at the block, t
he darkening sky filling me with a strange terror. I saw a man with a cane making his way across the street, Mrs. Johnson walking arm in arm up the hill with her daughter, the two women talking close to each other. I went into the living room and joined you in front of the TV.

  THE BUS TO ATLANTIC CITY smelled like feet, its upholstery dusty, faded into uniform shades of beige and brown, and its seats were at capacity, rows of heads protruding from ski jackets, topped with baggy knit hats in primary colors. Leon and I sat in the back, half the age of the other riders, eating pork buns from a bag emblazoned with a yellow happy face. The bus emerged from a tunnel onto a garble of highways. The high-rises flattened and spread into parking lots and concrete dividers, dim and gray in the winter light. Only the signs were bright green, the names of New Jersey towns I read aloud to myself: Hacken Sack. Pah Ramus. Old people snored against the windows, some coughing and hacking and rattling, as if they were running low on batteries. My sneakers produced kissing noises as they moved against the floor. I took the last pork bun, sinking my teeth into the sweet, spongy dough.

  Atlantic City was a gift from Quan, who’d bled so much money at the casinos they gave him vouchers for free hotel rooms, dinners, drinks. Didi had accompanied him in the past, but this time gave a voucher to me and Leon, though we weren’t gamblers. “You need the time away more than I do,” she said. “It’s a pre-wedding gift.” Besides, Quan had quit gambling. Now he was attending weekly meetings for people who gambled too much.

  So Leon and I checked into Caesars for free, a carpet-padded casino of ringing noises and lights. We bought a bottle of Hennessy and drank too much, which gave me a headache. Yet the freshness of being out of the city, even in this too-bright room that felt like the oxygen had been sucked out and run through a machine and pumped back in, made me reach for more Hennessy. Two shots, slammed fast, and the heaviness receded. Four shots and Leon was reshaped into the man he had been when I first met him, a prize I had wanted to win, whose attention was sudden, precarious, instead of this man whose aging sometimes took me by surprise, like when he was putting money on his card at the subway station and I noticed how his body was stiffer, his neck thinner, the skin around his throat loosening. There were days his arms hurt so much he couldn’t work. And I was different, too, though I lived in the same body that had once slept with Haifeng, been packed into a box, delivered a baby, craved Leon so much its hands shook. A body changed in increments, and while this shifting seemed slow, it was unstoppable. The flesh got weightier, the skin coarser. Hairs in places they hadn’t been before. But it was the same body, even if there was no visible sign of its past. Like muscle memory, a body could recall things on a hidden, cellular level.

  “What happened to the moving company?” I asked Leon, and he said Santiago had changed his mind.

  “He’s going into landscaping now. He says there will be a job for me there. So I’m going to work in landscaping.”

  Leon’s optimism was ridiculous, even harmful. “But does he have a plan?” I doubted he would ever work for Santiago. “Is he taking out a loan? Does he have a business partner?”

  “Oh, Santiago is Santiago. He’ll figure it out.”

  I was irritated at Santiago, at Leon, even at Rocky. Nearly six months had passed since I had gone to her house, but when I asked how the visit to the space for rent in Riverdale had gone, she chirped, “We’ll see!” I was still a nail tech, still working for the same lousy tips.

  At the lower-limit blackjack table, tugging choppy pieces of hair around my ears, I tried to remember the rules. Twenty-one was bust. Dealer stood on seventeen. Coming straight from work, I hadn’t had a chance to wire my pay to the loan shark, and my payday cash was inside the pocket of my denim jacket. I parted with a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, the dealer delivered an ace and a five, and I signaled for a hit. The dealer gave me a four, totaling nineteen, and stood at eighteen.

  “Look, I won.”

  “Let’s win more,” Leon said, and we wandered to Palace East, where the old people from the bus pressed hungrily on slot machines. Fueled by Hennessy, Leon bet big, and when we won at blackjack, we moved on to poker. The couple across the table was pointy and pale, the woman’s low-cut dress displaying cleavage dotted with sunspots, bisected by a large diamond dangling from a chain. Leon gave the dealer so many chips I had to look away.

  When I looked back at the table, the couple’s faces were pinched and the dealer was pushing the pile toward us.

  “Three of a kind,” Leon said.

  “Yes!”

  We jumped up and down.

  “It’s a game,” I said. “It’s all a game.”

  He thought I was talking about cards.

  “No, no, nonono.” It wasn’t real money. Nothing was real. Twenty could become two hundred in a minute. I wanted to hear the bells go off on the slot machines, see the walls fill with the reflections of flashing lights. I wanted, badly, to win.

  We drifted out to a hallway, the carpet so fluffy I wanted to rub my face across the fibers. No one else was around. “I mean, us. Me. Leon!” I grabbed his arm. “We’re living in a game.” Not only the card tables and slot machines, but our lives. We lived as if we were still villagers, forbidden from changing jobs or moving to a new place, but all this time, we could have been playing and winning.

  He poked my nose with his finger. The lines around his mouth deepened. “You’re drunk, Little Star.”

  He flashed that gap between his front teeth, I nibbled his earlobe and the floor swayed. I had forgotten how much I loved him. How could I have forgotten, why was I so serious, what was there to worry about? I would marry him. He was more than enough.

  He steadied my shoulders. “You should go lie down.”

  “Aren’t you going to come with me?”

  Leon looked at the money in his hands.

  “Okay, go play.” I took the skin on the back of his elbow and twisted it. “But come to the room soon so you can be with me.”

  “Yow,” he said, jumping a little.

  I squeezed his butt. “Hurry.”

  He moved down the hall away from me, walking backwards, blowing smacky kisses.

  At home we slept facing opposite sides of the bed, exchanging the occasional peck on the cheek. It had been months since we’d had sex, and instead of frustration I felt nothing and wanted nothing, like I had outgrown that part of me. Only rarely did I think of how it had been when I had first moved in with Leon. When you and Michael were at school and Vivian took a shower, we used to run into the bedroom. Standing up, palms hard against the wall, Leon’s hand over my lips, his fingers crammed into my mouth. But ever since I saw Qing, I’d been noticing hot men on the subway, on the street.

  In the hotel room, upstairs from the casino, I flopped across the bed and called the apartment. You answered.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Watching TV.”

  “Be good and listen to Vivian. I’ll be home tomorrow and have something for you.”

  You answered in English. “A present? I love presents.”

  “I know you do.”

  Buzzed, liquored, I folded myself into the blankets and floated on visions of my hair pulled up in an elaborate froth of curls like Didi’s, Leon in a suit and tie. The money he was winning could pay off my debt and pay for a wedding banquet, one bigger than Didi and Quan’s.

  Didi was taking English classes at a school in Midtown. She told me how good the teachers were, how much she was learning. Her teacher had published a newsletter with his top students’ essays, and she brought a white pamphlet to the salon and pointed to an article on the front. “Look, I’m a published author.” All the nail techs had gathered around as she read the article out loud, a paragraph about how she and Quan had visited her sister in Boston. Didi had used the wrong word in one sentence, “wake” when she meant “woke,” but there were so many other words I didn’t recognize.

  I was being left behind. I saw Leon injured, unable to work, eating chips in an under
shirt like Rocky’s husband, while I worked longer shifts to pay his doctor’s bills. I rolled from one end of the giant bed to the other, then off the bed and onto the floor, spooning myself against the legs of a chair. I raised myself up, grabbed my jacket, and stumbled out to the boardwalk. As I walked away from the hotel, the wooden slats squeaked beneath my feet.

  For over a decade, ever since I’d come to New York, I hadn’t left the city. I had gone to Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, to beaches and parks, taken subways and buses in all five boroughs, but I hadn’t gone beyond the city’s borders until now, though nothing had been stopping me except a vague fear of the outside, whispered warnings about how you could be picked up by police, deported. But there was nothing to worry about. The farther I walked from the hotel the darker it got, and when I looked up I could see stars, so many more than I remembered, showering the sky with light. Stars were obscured in the city, but here they were, still bright and beating. The ocean waves, somewhere beyond the boardwalk, crashed and echoed around me, a distant, salty smell. Minjiang.

  My feet were sandwiched around a loose plank. An entire country existed, a world. There was another life I should be living that was better than this. Reeling down the boardwalk, I felt it, a small, familiar friend: the pinch of freedom, a dash of possibility. I had become too complacent, accepting.

  I walked back to the hotel and went up to the room, hoping Leon had returned so we could fall asleep together in that giant bed. I didn’t want to see him in the casino diminished by the noise and colors, engulfed by his old brown coat. But the bed was the same as I had left it, the covers rumpled, the sheets halfway down. No sign of Leon. I got undressed and pulled the blankets over me, no longer drunk, and fell asleep in minutes.