The Leavers

  pkwilkinson is calling, the window announced. Another window appeared with an accompanying message: daniel are you there?

  The window pulsed and glowed. He crossed the room and shut the door, muffling the party, then sat on the bed and clicked. Kay and Peter’s faces appeared, squinting into their computer screen. They were in the study in Ridgeborough. He recognized the bookshelves, the blue wallpaper, the framed diplomas and awards.

  “Daniel?” Kay said.

  “Where are you?” Peter asked.

  “In Fuzhou. China.”

  They were talking over each other. There was a split-second delay, so Daniel saw their mouths moving before he heard their voices, and their motions lagged a little, pixilated smears of color trailing their faces. He heard Kay say, “China?” and Peter say, “Happy birthday.”

  Daniel shouted into the screen. His English sounded knotty, peculiar. “I’m staying with my mom—my birth mom. I’m fine, I’m working. Teaching English. I haven’t been gambling. My Chinese is great now, I mean, it’s back.”

  Kay’s face was on the verge of crumpling. “We wanted to wish our son a happy birthday,” she said.

  He felt his eyes well up.

  “What time is it over there?” Peter asked.

  “Eight at night.” Daniel could hear the music from the living room. He wanted to stay and talk, but he didn’t want to miss out. “They’re throwing me a party here. How are you guys doing?”

  Kay said she had run into Cody at the Food Lion the other day. Peter said he had watched a Tom Petty concert from 1980 on YouTube. Daniel told them he was the favorite teacher at World Top English.

  “You may have found your calling,” Peter said.

  “Are you going to come home? To America?” Kay asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know you’re always welcome here,” Kay said.

  “Christmas is coming up,” Peter said.

  He swallowed. “I’ll have to see.”

  He heard footsteps outside. “Deming?” his mother called from the hallway. “Where are you?”

  “Just a minute,” he said in Fuzhounese. But the door opened and light and voices spilled into the room, and it was too late to cut the call short. He turned and saw his mother in the doorway.

  “The cake is ready,” she said. As Peter and Kay watched, she picked up the visa form, which had fallen on the bed. “You still haven’t filled this out?”

  She looked over him, at his computer, and Daniel could see her face on the small screen that reflected what Peter and Kay saw on theirs. His face, and her face, next to each other, looking into the camera together. He saw Peter’s expression move from confusion to recognition. Kay’s mouth hesitated for a moment before she caught herself and smiled.

  “Kay and Peter? This is my mother, Polly.”

  “Hello,” his mother said in English.

  “It is very nice to meet you, Polly,” Kay said, pressing her lips together. He thought he detected a slowness in her words that wasn’t usually there. The three of them studied one another as Daniel tried to think of the right thing to say.

  “You do look alike,” Peter said. “I can see it.”

  “Thank you for taking care of Daniel,” Kay said. “He must be having the time of his life in China.”

  His mother nodded, staring at the screen, and Daniel noticed her teeth clench. He wanted to protect her, but from what? When she had told him about Ardsleyville, he’d remembered what Leon had said: that there was something broken in her.

  He wasn’t sure if she didn’t understand Kay and Peter, or if she didn’t have the English words to respond, or if she didn’t know what to say, but he wanted her to say something, anything, for her to be as loud and demanding and opinionated as she usually was. He hated that he could see her the way Peter and Kay must be seeing her, a mute Chinese woman with a heavy accent. Their tense smiles were making him angry.

  “I should get back to the party,” he said in English.

  “Okay,” Kay said. “We’ll talk to you soon, Daniel.”

  “And maybe we’ll see you at Christmas,” Peter said. “Maybe we can help pay for a plane ticket.”

  His mother leaned over, blocking his face on the screen, and said, in English, “His name is Deming, not Daniel.” Daniel nearly laughed out loud; he bit the inside of his lip. Then Kay’s smile dropped, and he felt the need to apologize to her and Peter. Or should he apologize to his mother instead?

  He said good-bye and logged out of the program. In the living room, his friends were waiting with a cake, and his mother lit the candles and he blew out the flames, then looked up to see Leon and Yong, Eddie and Tammy, Shuang and Yimei. The sound of their clapping was a shimmering yellow, and the sound of his mother saying his name—Deming!—the warmest gold.

  HE COLLECTED PLATES AND spoons, empty bottles of Tsingtao; tied up the trash bags; vacuumed crumbs from the rug; swept the kitchen floor. If he kept busy he could ward off the possibility of his mother asking him about Peter and Kay.

  He didn’t want to go Carlough. He didn’t want to present papers at the Conference for English Educators. Peter and Kay had supported him, in their own way, so why did he feel angry with them? But he couldn’t let his mother down either, because while he had been playing video games with Roland and listening to Hendrix, she had been in a prison camp. She still had nightmares. At the very least, he didn’t want to make her feel bad.

  Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days. Like Vivian’s belief that she had helped him, his mother insisting she had looked for him, that she could forget about him because he was okay. In the hotel room in Beijing, he had wanted to hurt her when he told the truth about Vivian paying off her debt, so then he had gifted her with a lie: that he never called Kay “Mom.”

  “I saw this in your room.” She came into the kitchen in her pajamas, holding the visa form. “You must have forgotten to fill it out.”

  “Leave it on the table,” he said, scrubbing at a stain on the counter. “I’ll take care of it later. Wasn’t it funny when Eddie and my students sung that happy birthday song and wrote new lyrics so it had my name? I didn’t know Eddie had such a good voice, or that Tammy was such a good dancer.”

  “Stop scrubbing. I’ll clean up later.”

  “We drank so much beer! No wonder the neighbors were telling us to keep it quiet.”

  “Sit down. Let me do it.”

  “You threw me a party.”

  “Because I wanted to. You don’t have to repay me.”

  She took an orange from one of the plates of leftovers and brought it to the kitchen table. He put the sponge down and watched her peel it, rubbing the rind away with her fingernail, separating the wedges onto a plate, half for her, half for him. He stood over her shoulder and hugged her from behind. Surprised, she held his arms in her hands. Over the years, he had thought about what his life would have been like if Mama and Leon hadn’t left, if Vivian hadn’t taken him to the foster care agency. It was like watching water spread across dry pavement, lines going in all directions. Peter and Kay might have adopted another boy. He could be living in Sunset Park, or in the Bronx or Florida or some other place he’d never heard of. He had imagined his doppelgängers living the lives he hadn’t, in different apartments and houses and cities and towns, with different sets of parents, different languages, but today he could only see himself where he was right now, the particular set of circumstances that had trickled down to this particular life, that would keep trickling in new directions.

  He sat down. His mother passed him the visa form and a pen. “I’m going to send it out tomorrow.”

  He took an orange slice. All this time, he’d been waiting for his real life to begin: Once he was accepted by Roland’s friends and the band made it big. Once he found his mother. Then, things would change. But his life had been happening all along, in the jolt of the orange juice on his tongue or how he dreamt in two languages, how his students’ faces looked when t
hey figured out the meaning of a new word, the wisp of smoke as he blew out his birthday candles. The surge and turn and crunch of a perfect melody.

  “You’re going to New York for Christmas?” his mother said. “To your adoptive family?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “They call you all the time?”

  “I haven’t spoken to them since I came here. This was the first time.”

  “They want you to come home, though.”

  He was like Tammy, unable to meet his mother’s eyes.

  “This is my home.”

  “So you’re going to stay? With me?”

  It was a funny thing, forgiveness. You could spend years being angry with someone and then realize you no longer felt the same, that your usual mode of thinking had slipped away when you weren’t noticing. He could see, in the flash of worry in his mother’s face as she waited for his reply, like he had heard in Kay and Peter’s shaking voices when they said good-bye to him earlier, that in the past few months, his fear of being unwanted had dissipated. Because Mama—and Kay, and Peter—were trying to convince him that they were deserving of his love, not the other way around.

  He ate the bite of orange, took the visa form and uncapped the pen, scanning the paper for where he was supposed to sign.

  PART FOUR

  The Leavers

  Twenty

  In the spring, four months after you left, I left, too. Not just Fuzhou, but my life—Yong, my job, our apartment, everyone I knew. I decided to move to Hong Kong. While you were staying with me I had pretended we had never been apart, that Ardsleyville had never happened. But when you left Fuzhou, I understood that I could also leave, and maybe it wasn’t too late.

  It was a short flight to Hong Kong, less than two hours, and by the time I had gotten used to being up in the air, the flight attendants were already preparing to land. At the airport I rolled my suitcase, a small one containing all I had packed, through Immigration, then onto a train that took me into the center of the city. I exited onto a street outside a mall, where the cars drove on the left side of the road, not the right. It took me several tries to cross. Even at night, there were still crowds out, people talking in Cantonese, signs flashing in Chinese and English. I had the address of the one-room apartment I’d rented, sight unseen; and tomorrow morning I would start my new job at a school in Kowloon.

  At the ferry terminal I bought a ticket, then found a place on the upper deck. The boat rocked in the waves, and as I saw the lights of Kowloon come through the fog, I held the railing, breathless with laughter. How wrong I had been to assume this feeling had been lost forever. This lightheaded uncertainty, all my fear and joy—I could return here, punching the sky. Because I had found her: Polly Guo. Wherever I went next, I would never let her go again.

  The breeze my hair blew back, then forward. The water was Minjiang, New York, Fuzhou, but most of all it was you. I thought of the last time you and I had gone to the water together in New York, the summer before I was taken to Ardsleyville. Late August, afternoon edging into evening, the heat lessening its grip, we had walked to a bridge over the Harlem River, spanning the Bronx and Manhattan. The air was soft and thick, and the walkway swayed as cars drove past. The river below was brown and muddy.

  We’d stood in the middle of the bridge. You were ten, almost eleven; already you preferred your friends’ company to mine. I’d had to bribe you with a candy bar to get you away from the TV.

  I pointed to a building on the Manhattan side. “Can you see who lives there?” I asked, remembering one of our old games.

  You shook your head and rolled your eyes.

  “Maybe it’s a mother and son,” I said.

  Finally, you said, “No, a baseball team.”

  “The whole team? Or just a few of them.”

  “Everyone lives together in the same apartment. It’s a big apartment.”

  “They play at night,” I said. “They sleep during the day.”

  You broke into a smile. “They eat french fries. Play catch on the roof.”

  “But they never fall off.”

  Far below us, the water moved, revealing an umbrella, a mass of plastic bags. The river looked tough, decisive, but it always gave up its secrets.

  Now the ferry engine slowed as it approached the dock. A man tossed a rope overboard. “This is Kowloon,” I heard a woman say. We floated to a stop, and I lifted the handle of my suitcase, letting myself be pushed along with the crowd. Soon I would be walking onshore to a new place. The beginning, I knew, was always the best part.

  On the bridge above the Harlem River, an ice cream truck had tinkled its song, followed by the snort and stop of a bus. A car had rolled down its window, music pouring out, a woman singing, Some people want it all . . .

  We had stood and listened on the verge of a summer night. Then you’d cupped your hands around your mouth and leaned over the railing, shouted your name into the air. I joined you, shouting mine, and we let our voices rise, leaping and echoing, flying over the city. My heart unclenched. You were growing fast, and soon you would be taller than me, but there was always this game, this song.

  We started toward home, the sun coming over the rooftops, and when you began to run I followed, feet pounding the sidewalk, only a moment behind.

  Twenty-One

  The third time he played was on a Tuesday night. The opening act out of four, he sat onstage with his acoustic guitar and looper station, which had the back-up tracks he’d recorded at home in his room. Outside, what seemed like the twentieth snowstorm of the season was grinding up to its chorus, and inside, only one of the tables was occupied, and by members of the next band. A couple had wandered in from the main bar in search of the bathroom and left ten seconds into Daniel’s first song. He’d heard them talking during his short introduction (his name, a hello; he nixed the obligatory quip about the weather), and when they walked out he had wanted to run off stage after them.

  He hadn’t invited anyone to his shows, though the last time he played, two weeks ago, Roland had happened to be walking past the bar and had noticed Daniel’s name on the blackboard outside, alarming him by shouting “Daniel Fucking Wilkinson!” after the last song. “Why’re you being so secretive?” Roland had said afterwards. “We hung out two days ago and you didn’t say anything about playing.” It wasn’t about being secretive; it was about self-protection. “Just say the word and I’ll let Thad know and you can put this out. But don’t wait too long. No one else is doing stuff like this.”

  Christmas lights were strung up along the bar’s walls, points of blues and yellows and reds. Daniel heard the guys from the next band talking to one another, caught a glimpse of the bartender playing with her phone.

  The first two songs came out wobbly, his voice still froggy, the pacing rushed, but by the third song, the one about Deming and his doppelgänger, the initial terror had mostly burned off and his playing was steadier, his voice stronger, and he started to feel the words he was singing. Between songs, he paused for enough time to elicit a trace of dry applause from the next band, which made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in volume.

  What was the compulsion to expose himself so fully, to keep doing something that scared the shit out of him? It hadn’t been scary when he’d been playing other people’s music, or performing with other people. This was different. Roland had called his songs fresh, crazy honest, the real deal, and after each gig Daniel thought, May I never do have to do that again. But a few days later he’d be sending out links to his webpage, trying to book the next one.

  He made it to the final verse when he looked up at the near-empty room, the fear barging in. Do the audience a favor, he thought. Cut the set short. He stumbled, forgetting the next line. The song hung in freefall. He wanted to flee, to safety and also to humiliation, but knew these were good songs, that he was worthy of being heard, and he hated, more than anything, not being listened to. He remembered the line and the song righted itself, regained its balance.

&nbs
p; When he finished his set, no one congratulated him. It was the end of another winter, more than a year after Psychic Hearts’ first show at the loft party, and Roland and Nate were recording a full album. Toward the end of February, several days after Angel had deposited his sixth money transfer, she had e-mailed him, one line, which made him laugh:

  The white sheep comes home to roost.

  ~ A

  He was rarely home these days, working at Tres Locos and teaching private guitar lessons to middle schoolers on the Upper West Side. He met up with Roland a few times a week, and on Wednesday and Friday afternoons taught an after-school music class at a community center in Chinatown, where most of his students’ families came from Fujian Province, and more than a few had also been sent to live with their grandparents until they were old enough to go to school. The Upper West Side kids got frustrated when Daniel tried to teach them how to hold the guitar, and their parents wanted them to be the next Jack White (in their spare time, grades came first), and he looked forward to the days he taught in Chinatown, how the kids there called him Yi Go and got excited when they nailed the rhythm of a song. They hadn’t yet learned how to be afraid of not looking cool.

  It was less than ten blocks from the bar to the subway but felt farther, carrying his guitar and gear in the sleet, boots skidding along the sidewalk. Across from the subway station was a pizzeria, and he was hungry, but he would wait until he got back to Manhattan. There was food in the refrigerator, and he was becoming a good cook, trading meals with his roommate, perfecting a soup that was a decent rendition of the one at Leon’s spot back in Fuzhou.

  ONE MONTH AFTER HIS birthday, eating dinner by himself while his mother and Yong were at work, Daniel had come across a picture in an article he was reading online, Lower Broadway on a spring afternoon, delivery vans and cabs, halal food carts and fire escapes. That night, for the first time since he had come to China, he listened to the songs he had written over the summer. The music shot through his headphones in silver waves; it was the familiarity of feeling perfectly like himself. He wanted to tweak a few lines, so he typed up some notes, wishing he had his guitar.