The Leavers Page 4
“You want to change the band for Hutch?”
“I want to play Jupiter. I want to get signed.”
“What about your own music? You don’t even care?”
Roland shrugged. “Art evolves.”
“Oh, give me a fucking break.”
“We don’t have to.” Roland hit pause. “But we should.”
“It’s not like Hutch is going to book us after last night anyway.”
“Nah, I talked to him. And Javier’s playing a show in a few weeks, nothing big, but we can have one of the opening slots.”
“With the new sound. That Hutch likes.”
“Yeah, of course.”
Still, Daniel was closer to it than ever before. The oldest burrito wrapper at Tres Locos, a red-haired white guy named Evan who dropped frequent mentions about how New York had been so much cooler and more dangerous in the nineties, was thirty-six and still trying to get his band off the ground. Daniel had gone to see Evan open for four other acts on a Tuesday night, and the guy could barely sing. At work today, when Daniel mentioned he’d played the loft party, omitting the part where he had run away, Evan had said, “Get the hell out of here” and plopped down a spoonful of pintos with such force, bean juice had splattered his chest. If Psychic Hearts played Jupiter, he would be sure to invite Evan. In high school, Roland used to tell the other kids, “You have to see Daniel play,” and if they did a show and no one said anything Daniel would fall into a funk, consider tossing his guitar in the trash. But when people called him amazing he basked in it, couldn’t sleep, reviewing the compliments over and over in his mind.
He wanted to be complimented again, to be called amazing. “Okay,” he said. “The new sound.”
“We should record at Thad’s studio, the one that does cassette demos. This summer, after we have a few more songs. Or even before.” Roland had ferried a crate of his parents’ old eighties tapes down from Ridgeborough, the ones he and Daniel had once studied like they’d been unearthed from a Paleolithic cave and were now as bewilderingly valuable as the rarest, most pristine vinyl. Daniel had to admit there was an oddly comforting quality about tape’s crusty, decaying sound, a sincerity, a depth that digital couldn’t reach.
“Sure,” he said. This summer, he would be going to classes at Carlough, living in his old room in Ridgeborough. He wouldn’t be playing music at all.
“Where’d your parents go, to a hotel?”
“They went home.” By now they would be back in that big, cold house, reading in bed. He fiddled with his sweatshirt. “Oh, I got a strange e-mail a while back. From this guy I’d grown up with, when I lived with my mother—my birth mom. Before I came to Ridgeborough.”
“What did it say?”
“He said he had something to tell me about my mom. I didn’t write him back, but I’m a little curious.”
Daniel knew what Roland’s response would be before he even said it.
“Don’t do it. You’ll regret it.” On the topic of parental ghosts, Roland was dependable, unwavering. His own father had died when Roland was too young to remember, and he’d never shown interest in learning more. Daniel craved Roland’s decisiveness for himself. He had always wished he could be so sure.
HE PICKED UP THE Carlough application forms and put them back down. He returned to his guitar, played the refrain that had been bouncing around earlier, reshaped it, scribbled a few lines, then pictured Kay’s face, teary, as he told her he had found out what happened to his real mom. The song slipped away. Thinking of his mother brought a low, persistent ache in a spot he could never get to. He put his guitar away and picked up his laptop. Just a quick search; Peter and Kay would never know. In junior high, he had done these searches every few months, until the urge to know more had fallen away. He had stopped searching after realizing he was averting his gaze while scrolling through the results, relieved to never find the right one. Not knowing more excused him from having to change the life he had gotten accustomed to, and it had been years since he had searched for Michael Chen—Michael’s name had always been too popular, with nearly half a million results—or Polly Guo, or Guo Peilan, in English or even in Chinese characters, which never brought up anything matching his mother. He had never found the right Leon or Vivian Zheng.
But tonight he typed in “Michael Chen” and “Columbia” and pulled up a website for a university biology lab, scrolled down the page and saw Michael’s name and a headshot of a lanky guy, smug and happy in a dark shirt. Michael’s face was longer and he didn’t wear glasses anymore, but Daniel could see the kid version there, the wide-eyed ten-year-old who would go anywhere with him, the closest thing he’d ever had to a brother. Someone who had known Deming.
He shut the laptop screen as if it were on fire. If Michael had information about his mother, it wouldn’t change the fact that she had left him. Roland was right. There was no need to stir up bad memories.
He paced the living room, the kitchen, toyed with the box for the microphone, imagined Roland onstage at Jupiter as he sat in a college lecture hall. He couldn’t make Roland and Peter and Kay happy at the same time, but he might as well try.
Three
She promised she’d never leave him again on the day they found their doppelgängers. Back then, six-year-old Deming and his mother were still strangers to each other, but formed a satisfying pair. The same wide noses and curly smiles, big dark pupils underlined with slivers of white, a bit of lazy in their gaze. Her hand was foreign in his; he was used to his grandfather’s warmer grip and more deliberate walk. His mother was too fast, too loud, like the American city he’d been dumped back into, and Deming missed the village, its muted gradients of grass and water, greens and blues, burgundies and grays. New York City was shiny, sharp, with riots of colors, and everywhere the indecipherable clatter of English. His eyes ached. His mouth filled with noise. The air was so cold it hurt to inhale, and the sky was crammed with buildings.
He’d sought comfort in something familiar. He heard melodies in everything, and with them saw colors, his body gravitating to rhythm the way a plant arched up to the light. Crossing Bowery he felt the soothing repetition of his feet hitting the sidewalk, his left hand connected to his mother’s right, his two steps to her every one. She launched into the crosswalk. It was her one day off in two weeks. Deming examined the sidewalk droppings, cigarette butts and smeary napkins and, exposed between chunks of ice, so much gum. Who chewed these gray-pink wads? He had never chewed gum and neither had his mother, to his knowledge, or any of her six roommates in their apartment on Rutgers Street. This was before they moved in with Leon, before the University Avenue apartment in the Bronx.
They stood before the subway map with its long, noodley lines. “So what color should we do today?” she asked. Deming studied the words he couldn’t read, the places he’d yet to go, and pointed to purple.
He’d been born here, in Manhattan Chinatown, but his mother had sent him to live with his grandfather when he was a year old, in the village where she had grown up, and it was Yi Gong who starred in Deming’s earliest memories, who called him Little Fatty and taught him how to paddle a boat, collect a chicken egg, and gut a fish with the tip of a rusty knife. There were other children like him in Minjiang, American-born, cared for by grandparents, with parents they only knew from the telephone. “I’ll send for you,” the voice would say, but why would he want to go live with a voice, leave what he knew for a person he didn’t remember? All he had was a picture, where he was a scowling baby and his mother’s face was obscured by a shadow. Each morning he awoke to cht cht cht, Yi Gong sweeping the front of their house on 3 Alley, Yi Gong’s wheezing, silver smoke rings dissolving skyward, until the morning Yi Gong didn’t wake up and then Deming was on a plane next to an uncle he would never see again, and a woman was hugging him in a cold apartment full of bunk beds, her face only familiar because it resembled his. He wanted to go home and she told him the bunk bed was home. He didn’t want to listen, but she was all he had. That
was two weeks ago. Now he sat in a classroom every day at a school on Henry Street, not understanding anything his teachers said, while his mother sewed shirts at a factory.
Two transfers later and the purple line was running above ground, and Deming and his mother looked out the window at signs in languages they didn’t recognize. “This one’s for socks,” he said, pretending to read, “that one’s for dogs.” Near the end of the line the signs switched to Chinese, and his mother read each one out to him in a funny voice, deep and low, like a radio announcer. “Going Out of Business!” “Immigration Troubles?” “We Cure Bunions!” He liked her like this; he could trust that she was his. He kicked his legs in the air as she slapped her thighs in a giddy beat.
They had traveled to Queens, from one Chinese neighborhood to another, and when they emerged from the subway the buildings were lower and the streets wider, but the crowds and the languages were similar, and despite the cold air Deming could smell familiar aromas of vegetables and fish. It was a frigid, hard bite of a winter afternoon. Stopping at a corner, she introduced a new game. “There could be a Mama and Deming who live here, too, another version of us.” Like a best friend but better; like a brother, a cleaved self. They chose the building this Mama and Deming would live in, a short one with a flat front like theirs on Rutgers Street, and watched mothers and children walk along the sidewalk until they found a boy Deming’s age and a woman his mother’s height, her hair also cut so it settled in wisps against her chin. Like his mother, she wore a navy blue coat, and could be mistaken for her son’s older sister.
“Can’t we ask them to come over?”
“We shouldn’t disturb them, they’re busy. But let’s watch them, okay?”
She steered him into a bakery and he begged for an egg tart. In those days you could buy three for a dollar, but she refused, said it was a waste of money, and they sat at a table without buying anything, examining their doppelgängers through the window. The boy leaned up to his mother and she bent down to talk to him as they crossed the street. In the boy’s palm was a glazed, puffy object. A flaky yellow pastry.
“Can I have an egg tart? Please?”
“No, Deming.”
He pouted. Sometimes Yi Gong had let him guzzle Cokes for breakfast, but she never bought him anything.
“I want to meet them.” He stomped his boot on the floor. Again she said no. He tore down the sidewalk after them. “Wait!” he yelled.
They turned around; they knew Fuzhounese. The Other Mama was older and skinnier, and the Other Deming was eight or nine and not five or six, square-faced and squinty-eyed like the kind of boy who might light bugs on fire for kicks. A fat crumb of pastry dangled from his bottom lip. In the moment before his mother yanked him away, Deming met the Other Deming’s eyes and the Other Deming said, in English, “Hi?” Then they walked off, fading into a sea of winter coats.
“They’re gone,” Deming said. “They left.” Frightened, he longed for Yi Gong. “Are you going to leave me again?”
“Never.” His mother took his hand and swung it up and down. “I promise I’ll never leave you.”
But one day, she did.
BY JULY, DEMING’S MOTHER had been gone for five months. Ever since the February day she disappeared, he had been waiting for a sign that she’d be back, even a sign that she was gone forever.
The summer was one big dead-end sign. The city had been too hot for weeks, the sofa’s upholstery sweaty against Deming’s thighs during the long, overheated afternoons. He and Michael batted their faces against the rattling plastic fan and sang la-le-la-le-la, the vibrations taking their words and spitting them out in a watery brown croak. They melted ice cubes in glasses and sucked on them, dug into cushions to search for forgotten change for Mister Softee runs, the ice cream always a letdown, soggy orange sugar that soaked into its cardboard shell before Deming even got his tongue in.
The rest of the school year had been a derailing. Principal Scott said Deming could go on to sixth grade if he went to summer school and made up the subjects he had failed, but Deming didn’t feel like going.
“If you don’t go, you’ll be left back,” Michael said.
They sat on a metal railing, a row of benches below. Even Crotona Pool, which they’d gone to last summer with their friends, had lost its appeal.
“Fuck this summer,” Deming said, tasting the pleasing heft of the words. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, too.” Michael’s consonants were resonant with spit. “Don’t you want to graduate high school?”
That was not my plan, Deming heard his mother saying. Fuck a plan. He contemplated the drop-off to the street. An odor of rot mingled with more familiar scents, flatulent exhaust and sweet garbage, searing pavement and grass. Pot smoke and perfume. Somewhere, a barbecue.
“Dare you to jump down,” he said.
Michael laughed without making a sound. “It’s not far. I’ll make you jump.”
Deming sat with his knees bunched up, jabbing his chin into the air like Leon did when he knew you were full of shit. “No one’s making me do anything.”
“We’ll all be in sixth grade and you’ll be stuck in fifth.”
“Shut up.” Deming slid off the railing. On W. 184th, Michael trotting alongside him, they passed Sopheap’s building, the same as all the others on the block, squat and brown or taller and gray, the windows full of other families, the sidewalks noisy with other kids. They paused and observed the window where the same plastic blinds hung, the ones they had seen so many times from the inside of Sopheap’s apartment. But that summer it seemed like their friends had never existed, that they, like Deming’s mother, had vanished with no guarantee of return.
Elroy was visiting his aunt in Maryland, Hung was at a relative’s upstate, and Sopheap, that traitor, had promised he’d be home all summer but had decamped at first opportunity to outermost Queens, where his cousin allegedly had a large-screen television and lived in a building full of hot chicks. Last time Michael and Deming had seen Sopheap, four days or six weeks ago or whenever it was, Sopheap had described the peek-a-boo bra strap exposed on the shoulder of the hottest chick, how close she had sat to him while they watched TV. She smelled, he said, of bubble gum and pepperoni pizza, and Michael and Deming had hooted and said Sopheap was full of crap, how come he never invited them to outermost Queens. Instead of hot chicks Sopheap might be spending the days with his grandma, who had moley arms and a long yellow tooth that caused her to fling saliva as she barked away at the boys in Khmer, slapping her slippers against their shoulder blades to get them to sit up straight.
Everything was suspect. Had Sopheap’s family ever lived there in the first place? Would Elroy and Hung even show up for school at the end of the summer? What happened to his mother? Nothing, no one, was certain anymore.
Michael and Deming stood in the space beneath the overhead tracks and hurled curse words into the subway’s rattle. A car bumped past blaring a bass line in rich, glossy maroons, and a slow ache spread in the center of Deming’s chest. Before his mother disappeared, he and Michael had been united in the secrets they kept from their moms, like filching a can of beer from Leon’s twelve-pack. Michael had grimaced and belched as they drank, and Deming had knocked back more. They had giggled, teetered. Another time, they stole a pair of panties out of a cart at the laundromat across the street from Elroy’s building, and in Elroy’s room ran their hands over the tiny cotton panel where an actual girl’s actual crotch had actually nestled. Held it to their noses, sniffing exaggeratedly, saddened yet relieved when they smelled only detergent. Hung laid the panties on the bed and the boys stared at the scrap of pinkish fabric until Elroy plucked them up and smuggled them into his closet. “I’ll keep them here,” he said, “for safekeeping.” Deming said they might not even belong to a hot girl but to the woman who sat in front of Elroy’s building and rubbed her fingers into her ponytail after scratching her hairy armpits. The other boys yelped in horror, Michael’s shriek the loudest and highest.
He looked away so Michael wouldn’t see the tears that came so fast he almost let them fall.
They turned the corner. “Deming?” Michael sounded hesitant, like he was talking to a teacher or a friend’s mom. “Did you hear? Travis Bhopa’s moving to Pennsylvania.”
“So?” Deming didn’t know where Pennsylvania was.
“His mom left his dad for another man and now he’s got to go live with his grandma.”
“What other man?”
“Some neighbor.”
Deming dug his fingernails into his arm, ten sharp half-moons sparking pain. But what if she wasn’t dead? “That sucks,” he said. “For Travis.”
THEY ATE DINNER AT the folding table in the kitchen, the plastic top printed to look like wood, a corner peeling and exposing a foamy underlayer. Deming snatched a piece of chicken from Vivian’s plate.
She tried to grab it. “Stop it. Bad boy.”
Vivian’s fat was rearranging itself. Her belly and arms were thinner but extra skin had appeared beneath her chin and around her mouth, like plaster hastily slapped on top of an existing structure. She huffed when she walked upstairs, no longer danced to music on the radio, and fell asleep at the table, gave the boys food and claimed she wasn’t hungry. Deming had seen her look in her wallet and curse, and when he opened the refrigerator she yelled at him to shut it. He heard her and Leon fighting about the rent, who would watch the kids.