by Lisa Ko
“It doesn’t cost nine thousand bucks. That’s only for celebrities. So where are you going to live?”
“What? I said, Colorado.”
“I mean, in Colorado. Where are you going to live in Colorado.”
“In a mountain! I said that. You’re not listening. Where Mike’s brother lives. The—I forget the name of the town. His name’s Chris.”
“When did you visit him?” This was ridiculous. Daniel wanted to tell Roland about getting faded with Cody Campbell at the pond at the bottom of Cedar, about going to Econ every morning with Amber Bitburger, but he hadn’t spoken to Roland since getting kicked out of the rehearsal space. It wasn’t like Roland had contacted him either, but he missed Roland, damn it, missed him like subways and rooftops and singing, even if being back in Ridgeborough was an unanticipated reprieve. He had eliminated the possibility of feeling out of place by banishing himself to no place, stoic nights alone in his bedroom or flipping through news magazines with Peter and Kay.
“I haven’t gone there yet, Wilkinson, I saw pictures. I told you, I’ve got to get my money in order, pay off that debt, but I’m working on it, I’m figuring it out. Like you. Gonna make our dreams happen, right?” Cody held out the pipe. “More?”
“Yes, please.”
Cody’s phone chirped, signaling a new text. “It’s Amber. She wants to know if we want to go to the stupid Open Mic at the stupid Black Cat.”
“Let’s go.” Daniel wanted to be around other people, even if they were Amber and Kelsey. He rolled down the window and heard crickets and frogs over the radio, but the woods seemed sinister, foreboding. One time in high school, Mike Evans had driven his brother’s moped into the pond.
“You serious?”
“Come on, we can grab a beer, chill.”
Cody considered this. “I am kind of parched.”
IN THE BACK ROOM of the Black Cat, the only business open on a block of boarded-up storefronts, four middle-aged men were playing a cover of Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” Amber and Kelsey waved Daniel and Cody over from a table near the stage.
“You guys found each other,” Amber said. “You smell like a bong.”
“Like Colorado,” Daniel said.
“How’s all that studying going for your test tomorrow, Wilkinson?”
“What test?” Daniel poured himself a glass of beer from the pitcher on the table. The band broke into a guitar solo and the lead singer, bald and stocky, started headbanging. Daniel laughed. “These guys suck.”
“They’re not that bad,” Kelsey said.
“They’d last half a song in the city until they got booed offstage.”
“Guns N’ Roses is all right.” Cody screwed up his face and played air guitar. His fingers weren’t even in the right places for the imaginary frets and strings. “You’re in the jungle now! I don’t care if they suck. I don’t care.”
Kelsey shrieked. “Oh my God, you guys are twins!”
Daniel looked down. He was wearing his hiking boots, even in the middle of the summer, because he didn’t have any other shoes. Cody was wearing a pair, too. Both of them wore blue jeans and black T-shirts.
“You’re like the Asian version of Cody,” Amber said, and everyone laughed.
Kelsey took a picture with her phone. Cody said, with a fake lisp, “We planned our outfits together.”
The singer screeched. The band, at least, looked like they were having fun.
He came home at midnight, his buzz long gone, and lay on top of the same quilt that had been there when he’d first become Daniel. Those early months in Ridgeborough had been suspicious, begrudging. But at some point it had become easier to play along; it had become second nature. The doubts had burrowed deeper until he barely felt them at all. By his last year in high school, thinking of Deming or Mama was like remembering a terrible band he had once loved but now filled him with mortification. Only once, in high school, after he saw the Chinese woman in the mall, had he let things slip. When Kay and Peter had told him that he had to stay home and study for the SATs instead of going to see a band with Roland, Deming had said his real mother would’ve let him go. It had popped out, unbidden, real mother an abstraction; Mama would probably have made him stay home. He hadn’t meant to hurt Kay and Peter that much, but he was angry at the injustice—if he missed this show he might never see this band again!—and Kay had winced and told him it wasn’t the end of the world. “We are your real family,” Peter had said.
Back then, the mystery of what happened to his real family had been too enormous to solve. But now he had found them, and nothing had changed.
He’d have to pull an all-nighter to finish the essays. Schenkmann had returned his last paper marked up in red pen. He typed his name out on a blank Word document, followed by the date. The cursor blinked back at him as he read the first question again.
Discuss two major theories that characterize the role played by interest groups in U.S. politics. Describe the insights these theories can offer regarding the operations of the legislative process.
He sighed. He had never seen the guy who was playing poker in Econ class again; Amber said he might have dropped out. Daniel closed his laptop and decided to take his guitar out instead. A new thing was forming, not the essay he was supposed to write, but the song he’d been working on before he left the city.
Two hours later, when he returned to the essay, he saw an e-mail from Angel. He’d been sending her the occasional message, but this was the first time she had responded.
Daniel, PLEASE don’t text me anymore. I wish you the best.
~ A
He read it again. She had wished him the best. It was proof she still cared for him, otherwise she wouldn’t have bothered to write at all. He recalled her clear, low voice, devoid of shrillness or forced emotion, and craved her decisiveness, her competence; he would keep writing her until she understood. Because here was a way he had changed: he’d lost his mother and Roland, things that should have made him feel worthless and rejected. Yet it hadn’t destroyed him.
He’d do it for Angel, then. School, grades, career, show her he could get it together. She would have to forgive him. He hit reply, a streak of hope:
i’m going to do better for you
Fourteen
The front of the card was pastel blue plaid. “Dear Dad,” he wrote. “Happy Father’s Day. Love, Daniel.”
“I was thinking,” Kay said, sitting next to Daniel at the kitchen table, “since it’s Father’s Day and all.”
He folded the card into the envelope, licked and sealed it, wrote “Dad” on the front.
“About how Mother’s Day has always been a little uncomfortable for me. I appreciate how you always give us cards. But I can guess that maybe these aren’t the most comfortable holidays for you either?”
“I don’t mind.”
“I mean, when you were younger I thought I didn’t deserve to celebrate the holiday, that it was, I don’t know, inauthentic for me to do so as an adoptive mother. Elaine was the one who told me, just embrace it. It didn’t do you any good to have a parent doubting her ability. You needed a mother, and if I wasn’t a mother, than who was?” Kay ran her fingers along the edge of the table. “I had those doubts a lot when you first came to live with us.”
Daniel pushed his empty sandwich plate around in a semicircle. Peter was upstairs in the study; he should go spend more time with Peter. It was Father’s Day.
Kay’s eyes flipped from Daniel’s face to the wall to the kitchen window. “We were so afraid of doing something wrong. We thought it would be better if you changed your name so you would feel like you belonged with us, with our family. That you had a family.”
Daniel never knew if Kay wanted him to apologize or reassure her. Either way, he always felt implicated, like there was some expectation he wasn’t meeting.
“Mom.” He didn’t want to see her cry, especially if it was on his behalf. “It’s okay.”
Kay got up, and he heard her o
pening the drawer of the dining room cabinet. She returned, placing a fat manila envelope on the table.
“What’s this?”
“It’s all the records we have concerning your adoption. The correspondence with the foster care agency, the forms we filled out. I’ve been meaning for you to have them.”
Daniel opened the envelope and flipped through the stack of paper, saw the forms and e-mails he’d read that afternoon ten years ago. “Thanks.” There would be nothing in here he hadn’t seen before.
“Your father didn’t agree with me about doing this. He said it would only stir up bad memories, but I insisted.”
Daniel bent the envelope’s metal clasp back and forth. “I do know some things, actually. I should tell you. I found my mother recently—I mean, my birth mother. She’s in China.”
He told Kay about how his mother had gone to work and never came home, how Leon had left for China six months after. How Vivian had gotten him fostered. That his mother might have been deported.
Kay looked like she’d been punched.
“I spoke to her,” he finally said. “Twice.”
“What did she say? What was it like?” Kay’s smile was trembling at the sides, so strained it looked like it hurt.
“It was good, though a little weird, and my Chinese is rusty but we managed to understand each other. She lives in Fuzhou, and she’s married and working as an English teacher.”
“Are you going to talk to her again?”
“Maybe.”
Kay picked up the envelope and tapped the bottom of it against the table, straightening out the papers inside. “By the way,” she said. “I received a curious phone call the other day. From Charles, Angel’s boyfriend.”
“Oh?”
“He said you borrowed money from Angel and haven’t paid her back. I asked him why he was calling me about and he said I should ask you. So, I’m asking.”
Daniel tried to detect whether he heard an accusation in Kay’s statement, whether she was still assuming the worst from him, if he was the Daniel that fucked up or the Daniel who needed to be cared for. “She must have been talking about this one time we met up in the city. I didn’t have any cash on me and I had to borrow some to pay for dinner.”
“It sounded like more than that. What Charles said, it sounded serious. And wasn’t she talking at Jim’s birthday party about a thief?”
“It’s not serious. He’s making it up.”
“But why would her boyfriend call me and make something like that up? Please, explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain. For all I know, he might be jealous. Of me and Angel being such good friends. Some guys get like that.”
Daniel saw, in Kay’s expression, the same mix of hurt and suspicion as when she learned about his expulsion from Potsdam. He got up, taking the envelope. “But you reminded me that I forgot to pay Angel back. I’m going to go do that now, on my computer.”
HE PASSED BOTH HIS classes for the first part of the summer term, a C+ in Comparative Politics and a B in Microeconomics. The second part proceeded in the same joyless vein, Macroeconomics in the mornings, an American History course in the afternoons. In late July, a lone text message appeared from Roland, asking Daniel how he was doing. Daniel wrote back, congratulating Roland on the Jupiter gig and wishing him the best, echoing Angel’s wish to him in her e-mail—which had been insincere, as she’d sicced Charles on him.
That night, he borrowed Peter’s Volvo and drove around by himself. He had missed driving while in the city, the steering wheel hard beneath his palm, free hand floating out the open window with air thick between his fingers, the easy slide down the curving two-lane roads. He remembered driving through the night with Roland their senior year, all the way to Boston, drinking gas station coffee and singing along to mix CDs. They’d been driving to a friend’s house when they decided to get on the highway and keep going east, couldn’t bear another Saturday night in Ridgeborough, and when they got to Boston they had breakfast at a diner, waffles and pancakes and Western omelets, a bright winter morning with flurries of snow. Daniel had watched the joggers in their thermal outfits crossing the bridge over the Charles River, college students in sweaters and scarves toting large cups of coffee. He had dreamt about leaving home and being on his own, about the life that awaited him once he left Ridgeborough. When he could be free, in the way Michael thought he already was.
Now, looping around town with no destination, his phone plugged into the car’s speakers, skipping from song to song and album to album and growing bored with each track after a few seconds—he was sick of all his music, five thousand songs and not a damn thing to listen to—the music went silent.
He pulled over to the shoulder. Either his phone’s battery had died, or the cable needed to be replugged. He rolled down the windows and heard layers of chirping crickets, opened the door and walked out to the street. There were houses in the distance, the occasional light, and a swath of tall grass on the corner he pushed around with his feet. He and Roland used to practice wheelies on their dirt bikes near here. He stood still, absorbing the night.
For so long, he had thought that music was the one thing he could believe in: harmony and angular submelody and rolling drums, a world neither present nor past, a space inhabited by the length of a song. For a song had a heart of its own, a song could jumpstart or provide solace; only music could numb him more thoroughly than weed or alcohol. With Roland, he had wanted to fill other people’s silences, drown out their thoughts and replace them with sound. It was less about communication, more about assault and plunder. That was how he’d preferred it. But standing on the dark street, a pressure released inside him, the crickets a consolation for his remorse over leaving the city, that he had pushed his mother away before she could tell him the truth.
Most nights Daniel began to stay in. He did homework, wrote music, used an old condenser mic to record several tracks onto Peter’s computer, which ran a pirated version of Pro Tools faster than his laptop. The songs he was writing weren’t anything like the ones he and Roland played. They lacked structure, didn’t cohere in a predictable way. They were too bare, too vulnerable, they cared too much to be cool. He no longer wanted to make music that forced itself on you, or tried to be something it wasn’t. The challenge was not to overstate, but to be honest, unguarded. In class, he worked on lyrics as Professor Nichols droned on about X and Y variables; it felt like he was defrosting a windshield, that the fog would eventually reveal clear glass.
In the back of his closet, he found a stack of cassettes. One of them had a label drawn in marker: NECROMANIA: BRAINS ON A SPIKE!!!! He remembered recording it on Roland’s mom’s old tape player one afternoon, his first year in Ridgeborough, the two of them wailing along to a three-chord backing track they had downloaded online. He put the tape in a padded envelope along with a note that said, “Remember when we used to jam?” and mailed it to Roland’s apartment.
HE WAS AT CODY’S on a Friday night in August, in the Campbells’ basement, watching an MMA fight. Cody was the only person he talked to these days, besides Peter and Kay. Amber wasn’t taking classes for the rest of the summer and had gone to visit family in Connecticut.
The match ended, the guy in the red shorts standing over the prone body of the guy in the black shorts. Blood ran down both their faces.
Daniel had transferred the tracks he’d mastered from Peter’s computer to his phone. “You want to hear something I’m working on?”
Cody looked over.
“Will you turn the volume down for a second?”
“Hold on.” Cody waited to see if the announcer was saying anything important. When the match switched to a commercial, he hit mute.
Daniel took out his phone. He heard the familiar first notes, the guitar, his own voice, tinny and monotone on the microspeaker. The sound was too poor to make out most of the words.
“That you?” Cody said.
“Yup.” The song didn’t need any more changes or rewrit
es. It didn’t matter if he’d ever perform. It was exactly what he wanted it to be.
“You’ve changed, Wilkinson,” Cody said, after the song ended.
“How so?”
“In high school, you were all like—” Cody hunched over, curling his shoulders in and looking down at the carpet. “Reave me arone,” he said. “You barely spoke English! Now you’re all American.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I spoke English.”
“You called that English?”
“Fuck off, Cody. Fuck you.”
“You need a drummer,” Cody said, as Daniel headed toward the door. “Like those guys at the Black Cat Open Mic. They rocked.”
HE COULDN’T SLEEP; HE decided to sit on the porch. Looking for his phone, he spotted the manila envelope from Kay, grabbed it and then went outside. Beneath the porch light, he examined the printout of the permanency hearing report. Foster parents plan to petition for termination of mother’s parental rights on grounds of abandonment. He held the envelope upside down and shook it hard, until the rest of the contents fell into his lap.
There was the surrender form, with Vivian’s signature. Placement: Indefinite. Another form she signed, authorizing his foster placement. There was a smaller envelope, too, tucked into the papers, which contained a transcript of his grades from P.S. 33. He’d gotten straight C’s and D’s in fifth grade. A note from his teacher, a Ms. Torelli, that said he should take remedial classes. Another note that said he had been in detention on February 15. He had forged his mother’s signature on the required line and must have neglected to return it to school after she disappeared.
There was a black-and-white photograph of him and his mother paper-clipped to one of the forms, the bottom half of the picture a printed illustration of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and a yellow cab driven by a googly-eyed giraffe, along with a caption for the South Street Seaport. He was a baby, fat cheeks and a swirl of dark hair, and his mother looked like a child herself, younger than he remembered her. It was the only baby picture of himself he had ever seen, the only picture of her he had. Why hadn’t Peter and Kay given it to him before?