The Leavers

  They had roast duck for dinner in a fancy restaurant with thick white tablecloths, and he ate as much as he could, which seemed to please her. By the time they got to the Park Hotel, it was nine at night. His mother’s room was on the fifth floor, a double room like the one he’d had in Fuzhou, but cleaner and less shabby. He took a shower as she wrote e-mails on her laptop, and after toweling off and brushing his teeth, he studied the reflection of his face in the bathroom mirror. Before he left, he would take a picture of the two of them together, for proof.

  She sat on her bed in her pajamas, removing makeup with a cotton ball. “We each have our own big bed. So different than how we slept in New York. I always say I could never go back to living like that, but we never saw ourselves as being deprived, did we?”

  “We weren’t deprived.” He unzipped his backpack and took out the old photo of them at the South Street Seaport. “I wanted to show you this.”

  His mother held the photo by the corners. “How’d you find this?”

  “Kay. My adoptive mother.”

  “How did she get it?”

  “Vivian, I think.”

  His mother kept staring at the photo. “You were so small. And look how young I was.”

  He had to ask her. She wouldn’t kick him out of the hotel this late at night. He coughed up the first sentences that came to him. “You were going to never talk to me again? You were good with that?”

  She passed the photo back to him. “I didn’t know if you wanted to speak to me, after everything I did.”

  “Of course I did. I called you first, remember? And I called you, again. Twice.”

  “You told me to never call you again on your last message.”

  His face grew hot. “I didn’t mean it. I was angry.”

  She waved a hand at him, cutting him off. “You were right when you said I couldn’t pretend I didn’t mess up.”

  She went to the bathroom, then returned to her bed. It was late. She had an eight o’clock meeting tomorrow morning with teachers at the conference, and after that, she would leave him. At any moment she could switch off the light and he would never find out what happened.

  He got under the covers yet remained sitting. His mother checked to make sure the blinds were down, the curtains shut. She removed an eye mask, lined in pink fabric, from her bag.

  “I can’t have any lights on when I sleep, so if you want to stay up, I’ll wait for you to sleep first.”

  Then he would keep her up for as long as he needed. “I don’t remember you being like that in New York. We always slept with the blinds open.”

  She uncapped a bottle of pills. “I have nightmares,” she said. “One time, Yong got up to use the bathroom and forgot to turn the light off in the hallway, and I woke up screaming. Then he screamed, too, because he heard me scream, and we were both scared. It was funny.”

  It didn’t sound funny. “You have these nightmares a lot?”

  “As long as I take my medication, I’m okay.” She shook out a pill and reached for a glass of water. “They help me sleep.”

  “Wait,” he said. “Can you not take it yet? Just wait, please?”

  She hesitated, then put the pill back in the bottle. “I have to make sure it’s dark.” She switched the light off next to her bed, so the room was lit solely by the lamp next to his. “In Ardsleyville, it was light all the time, dogs waking you up in the middle of the night. You can’t sleep like that.”

  “Ardsleyville. That was—”

  “The name of the camp, the detention camp.”

  A chill ran up his back. He studied a framed picture on the wall, a print of the same lake they’d visited today. “Tell me about it.”

  She laughed, nervous. “I can’t.”

  “I won’t be mad. I promise.”

  “I can’t, Deming. It’s too much, I don’t want you to know.”

  “I want to know the truth. How did you get there? What happened to you when you went to work that day? Please, I deserve to know.”

  She put her head in her arms. “There was a van. They raided the nail salon.” He leaned forward, holding his breath. “There were no phones there, no way to contact anyone. When I got out, they sent me to Fuzhou. I wasn’t myself anymore.” She stopped. “If I tell you, you wouldn’t get it.”

  “Please try.” He touched the wooden headboard behind him. He was in Beijing, China. New York and Ridgeborough and Daniel Wilkinson had fallen away and the world consisted only of him and his mother, their voices in the hotel room.

  She told him she remembered being in a crowded room, looking at the numbers on a telephone.

  “In Ardsleyville?”

  “No, this was still in New York.”

  Seventeen

  The van that took me from the salon had no windows so there was no way to tell if we were five or fifty blocks away. I couldn’t see any of the other women from Hello Gorgeous, only shouting strangers, more officers in uniforms. One of them passed me a phone and said I could make a call.

  My finger hovered over the keypad as I tried to remember Leon’s number: 347, that part I was sure of. 453-8685. Or was it 435? 8568? 445? His number was programmed into my own cell phone, but that was in my bag.

  “Where’s my bag?” I asked in English. The officer didn’t answer.

  I dialed. 347-453-8685. The phone rang. Leon might be at work, but I could leave him a message.

  It kept ringing. There was no message, so I tried again. 347-435-8685.

  Two rings and a man picked up who wasn’t Leon. I asked for Leon, but the man said something in another language.

  The officer reached for the phone. “One call only.”

  I ignored him and dialed again. 347-453-8658. After several rings came a recording, a computerized one that repeated the number, followed by an instruction to leave a message. It wasn’t what Leon had on his phone, but I spoke fast. “It’s Little Star. The police took us from the salon. I don’t know where we’re going, but find out and come get me. Hurry.”

  Later I’d feel certain that the number was 435-8586. In the tent, there was a single telephone that hung from the wall, but it had no dial tone. Each morning, for the next four hundred and twenty-four days, I would pick up the phone in hope that there would be one.

  “But there never was,” I said. “That damn phone never worked.”

  “You were there for four hundred and twenty-four days?” You sounded like you didn’t believe it.

  “I counted.”

  “That’s almost two years!”

  “Fourteen months. See, I told you, it’s too much to hear.”

  “It’s not. I need to know.”

  I wanted to stop talking, but also I wanted to tell you. I said, “The hours in between lying down and getting up were a nightmare.”

  THE PLANE HAD TOUCHED down in darkness and sand. In the distance, swollen tents were boxed in by barbed wire, big white boxes in a harsh sprawl of nothing. Texas, though I didn’t know it then. The endpoint, the ultimate waijiu. Too cold in the winters and too hot in the summers, a mean, scorchful hot that grasped for rain.

  Heavy white plastic stretched over the tent’s metal frame. Uneven concrete floors, like the cement had been poured in a hurry. The food looked sickly: waxen bread, pasty oatmeal, noodles with fluorescent cheese, and because the dining area was next to the toilets, it all tasted like piss and shit. The sharp tang of urine eventually faded, leaving only hunger, and I ate milk and cheese that left me cramped on the toilet.

  The lights never turned off, so my eyeballs ached and throbbed. I’d lay in my bunk and hear Leon sleep-talking next to me in the bed we had shared, you and Michael next to us in the bed you had shared, and I’d curse at the guards in Fuzhounese. Fuck your mom. Fuck yourself. The worst part was that you would think I abandoned you.

  When sleep did come, it was jagged and soundless. I’d wake to voices, not sure if it was hours or minutes later, and see a guard standing over me, marking a piece of paper.

  Bed che
ck, the guard would say.

  I’m here, I’d respond in English.

  The tent was the length of a city block but narrower. Two hundred women slept in two-person bunks grouped into eight rows of three bunks each. We wore dark blue pants with elastic waistbands, baggy blue shirts. Shoddy sewing; sloppy hems. None of us had any money and we couldn’t get any, unless our families knew where we were. We could work on the cleaning crew, sweeping floors, scrubbing toilets, taking out trash for fifty cents a day, but there was a long waiting list to join, seventy-three names ahead of mine.

  The toilets and showers were in a large open stall ringed by a low wall that came up to my waist. Most days there wasn’t any soap and often, no water. Hives broke out across my face and a rash oozed up my arms, and my skin got raw and dry. In the middle of the tent was a glass octagon with tinted windows, where the guards watched us. They could see us but we couldn’t see them. I’d stand under the octagon’s stepladder and wave.

  I asked the guards for a lawyer, for Immigration, but they told me to wait. No one offered advice or answers. Some women didn’t speak any English, and others spoke in such rapid English I couldn’t keep up. Any day now, I kept telling myself, Didi and Leon would find me and get me out of here.

  ON THE TWELFTH DAY, a Chinese woman with freckles came up to me in the oatmeal line and said in Mandarin, “Come eat with me. I’m Lei.” I was so happy to talk to someone I wanted to kiss her.

  Over oatmeal, I found out Lei was originally from Shandong and had been in the tent for almost eighteen months. She’d gotten a speeding ticket in Chicago and was shipped off to ICE.

  “Eighteen months?” I’d been trying so hard to tamp down my panic by picturing myself back home with you, these twelve days just a blip in our regular routines. Thinking of these routines comforted me. Cooking dinner with Vivian. Riding the train to work. Telling you and Michael to shut the TV off and go to bed. Now that hope of returning was being yanked away. “I can’t be here for that long. I have a family and they don’t even know I’m here.” I looked around at the tables of women scooping up clumps of oatmeal with their hands. There were never enough forks or spoons.

  “There are some women who’ve been here a lot longer,” Lei said. “There’s a woman named Mary who’s lived in America since she was six months old. Born in Sudan. Was in college, had a travel visa, got arrested at the airport after coming home from studying in France. The government says her parents never adjusted her immigration status when she was a baby and she needs a physical examination to complete her application to change her status. Of course, an exam costs three hundred bucks and they won’t give it to her at Ardsleyville. And she can’t access her bank account because ICE put a hold on her name.” Lei shook her head. “Typical.”

  Nobody knew anything. There were too many cases in the immigration courts, Lei said, and we didn’t get things like lawyers, only a judge who decided if you would stay or go. None of us knew when we would see this judge, if the authorities would release us from custody, where we would end up.

  I WAS SLEEPY, SO sleepy all the time. My legs ached from not walking enough. Once or twice a week, the guards let us out into the courtyard for an hour, a rectangle ringed by barbed wire, large enough for us to stand no more than arm’s length apart. Beyond that was a giant American flag, flapping in the hot wind, and an open yard surrounded by more wire, which housed a separate prison that Lei called the Hole. The men were in other tents beyond that, tents we couldn’t see.

  There were days I stayed in bed, itching under the blanket. I assumed the sun was still swapping seats with the moon every twelve hours, though for all I knew the sky could’ve become green, the sun now square, the stars extinguished and smeared like mosquitoes on the underside of a slipper. De-ming, de-ming—your name hammered a drumbeat between my eyes. I had wanted to move and now you would think I left on purpose.

  I scratched my arms so hard the skin broke into angry red snarls. You might forget my face. The next time I saw you, your voice might be lower. Leon might find another woman. I had the ring he gave me, and I twisted it around my finger, felt it pinch my skin.

  Starry night. Grassy field. Cricket chorus. Clucking chicken. You. I tried to visualize all the things I loved. If I produced more saliva, I could pretend I wasn’t so thirsty. Glass of water. Cup of tea. Wet kisses. Leon. I tried to relax, hoping for a few hours of sleep before the first bed check. Warm hands. Loud music. You.

  I told Lei about you, how good your English was, the way you took care of Michael. But every day I worried more. Were you doing okay in school, was Vivian feeding you enough, and were your clothes clean? You needed a new pair of shoes, your feet were growing so fast, you couldn’t walk if your shoes were too tight, and who would buy you shoes, how could you walk?

  WEEKS, THEN MONTHS PASSED. I lay on my back in the top bunk. There wasn’t enough space to lie in any position except on my back and perfectly still, a lesson I’d learned when I rolled off the bunk and fell onto the floor. I pulled the blanket over my face, exposing my feet. Then I got up and went to eat with Lei.

  She was sitting with a woman named Samara, who was from Pakistan. The three of us could communicate using the spotty English we knew.

  Some of the women were planning a protest, Samara said. There were church people who held a vigil outside the tent, and somehow Mary, the woman who’d lived in America since she was a baby, had gotten in touch with them.

  “The guards won’t care if we protest,” I said.

  “I saw what they did to people who protested before you both came,” Lei said. “Three guards kicked these women until they bled. Then they got deported. What makes you think it’s going to be different now?”

  DAY 203. SUNLIGHT BLAZED onto the tent roof. I sat on my bunk, reached under my shirtsleeves, applied nails to skin, and scratched. I knew my arms were already inflamed and split red, but scratching produced the sweetest pain, the most exquisite fire. When I scratched I could dig my fingernails into all the unspoken words of the past months.

  I began to hate Leon and Didi, to want to forget them. Had they even tried to find me? Maybe it was better this way, to pretend they didn’t exist. Missing them was worse. So was waiting.

  WE MADE A PLAN. When the guards let us into the courtyard, we weren’t coming back in. One woman would deliver a list of our complaints. The church group had gotten in touch with journalists, who would come and film us so that Americans would learn about the tents. The government would shut down Ardsleyville and we could go home.

  I didn’t think it would be that easy, but we had to try something. It was better to participate than to acknowledge we had no options.

  Lei refused to be a part of it.

  After lunch, the guards unlocked the door to the yard and we walked outside. After a few minutes we began to move around, changing from bunches to lines and corners. We spelled out letters. H-E-L-P. So that the news helicopters could see us from above.

  I stepped behind Samara, rolling my sleeves up in the heat.

  “Your skin is broken,” Samara said. “It looks painful.”

  I pulled my sleeves back down. “It’s nothing,” I said.

  We stood for a long time, waiting for something to happen, for the church people, the journalists. But nothing happened except the guards got angry, yelling at us to go in. Lei and the other women on the opposite side of the yard returned to the tent. Samara and I stayed standing. The sky remained blue and still. There were no birds in the desert, no cars driving on a nearby highway, no cool ocean lapping my ankles, only hot sky. Then I heard it, a buzz slicing the air. The buzz grew louder and I saw a shape circling the clouds, a blue dot no larger than a bird, and the bird grew bigger and the buzz was thundering.

  But when the plane flew away the silence was monstrous. “We haven’t figured out what to do after this,” I said to Samara.

  Guards with helmets and plastic shields pushed into the yard, and as the air filled with burning, my eyes seared and my tongue b
ecame bitter. I could only see clouds and helmeted men. I felt a stick in the side and hit the ground hip first.

  THE LENGTH OF MY new room was eleven footprints up and eight across. All those months in the tent waiting in line for the toilets and now I could spend a week sitting on a toilet by myself. There was a mattress on a concrete shelf, a chair shaped from a concrete block, and a little light that was forever on.

  Three times a day, the steel door on the front wall would open and a tray would push through the slot like a tongue protruding out a mouth. I am breakfast, I imagined the mouth saying. Hello, I’m lunch! The tray contained a brown slab. Breakfast or lunch, a slab. Dinner a slab. It tasted like mush. I talked to the mouth as I shoved the empty trays back. Do you how like that feels, Big Mouth? You like it. You love it.

  Three times a week the guards would thread a chain around my ankle, another around my waist. Three hours a week I was allowed outside, in a cage inside a yard surrounded by tall walls, my legs and arms sore from not moving, my eyes sore at having to focus so far, unused to seeing anything farther than eleven footprints up and eight across. Sometimes I’d see traces of others. Was that shape Mary? Samara? But I never saw anyone close enough to be sure.

  Against my will I’d think of your smile ripping open as we rode the subway, of the words that had dripped and skipped so easily on Polly’s tongue, delivered without having to strain or translate. I thought of Peilan kissing Haifeng, how Peilan’s body had been so new that she would catch a glimpse of herself in a window and think, Yeah, that’s me. When Peilan was supposed to be doing the wash she would brush her hair for hours until it shone, linger outside so her hair could catch the light and drink it in.

  The walls were a lie, a trick. I could pull them apart with my hands, gentle and determined, like pulling a shirt over a child’s head, blow on the floor until it fell away and then I would be in the grass, sunshine rolling up my body, lapping at my fingers. The sun would have a tongue, nice and fat, licking slow and lazy, and the grass would smell like worms and dirt. My body would pick up speed as I rolled, bouncing into the air, soaring over hills and oceans. There was my house, Yi Ba in the yard with chickens. I’d arch up, kick my legs, and coast.