The Leavers Read online

  He licked the chicken before she could get to it, ran his tongue up and down the salty skin. Leon glared at Deming and passed Vivian the rest of his food.

  Leon looked like hell, reminded Deming of pictures of cave men in a school textbook, standing straight and de-haired into upright Homo sapiens. Leon after Mama was reverse-order evolution; he had developed a stoop, a paunch, a spotty beard specked with gray. It scared Deming, like Leon had aged a hundred years while other people remained the same.

  Once, riding the Staten Island Ferry with his mother and Leon, the wind had stung his face but he felt warm, as if nothing could go wrong. His mother had said, “Do you like this boat, Kid? Isn’t it better than Yi Gong’s fishing boat?” And Leon had laughed, a belly chuckle that made Deming feel like he’d outrun the other kids at the playground. Now he couldn’t recall he last time he had heard Leon laugh. Had Mama left, refused to marry Leon, because Leon got ugly? Deming chewed chicken. They had a lot of neighbors. Mrs. Johnson, Tommie Not-bad-not-bad-not-bad, Miss Marie with the baby girl. There was the bodega owner, Eduardo, who’d been asking, “Haven’t seen your mother lately, how’s she been?” Deming would say good, busy.

  “Eduardo’s always asking how Mama is.” Deming watched Leon for a reaction.

  “Who?”

  “The guy at the bodega.” Leon’s face was blank. Deming tried again. “I saw Tommie the other day.” No answer. “Yi Ba? Can we go to Florida?”

  He had never referred to anyone but Leon as his father, and when his mother had first told him he could call Leon “Yi Ba,” it had seemed a little illicit. In school, spacing out as the teacher chalked the multiplication table, trying to ignore the other kids who were hyped on sugar and rocking back and forth, busting out in Tourettes-y curse strings (one particularly restless kid liked to chant Balls, titties, balls balls titties all day), Deming would mouth his own words: Yi Ba, can you come here? Yi Ba, can I watch TV?

  Leon looked up. “Florida? Why?”

  “If Mama’s there, we’re not trying hard enough to find her. What if she’s in danger?”

  “She’s not in danger.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “I know. She’ll call soon.”

  “Mom?” Michael asked. “Can we go to Florida?”

  “No,” Vivian said.

  “I want to go to Disney World,” Michael said.

  “No, no, no, no.”

  As Deming scooped rice out of the pot, a clump fell on the table. “Don’t waste food!” Vivian swept the spilled rice onto her plate and took his bowl away. “Maybe your mama left because she was tired of feeding such an ungrateful boy.”

  She took Deming’s plate to the sink. “Don’t listen to her,” Leon said. “She didn’t leave because of you. We’re all going to stay together, you and me and your mama. We just have to wait.”

  Vivian said, “I’m going to the store.”

  Leon went to work. Michael fell into the couch like it was eating him. Deming didn’t know what he was doing here. Leon wasn’t his real Yi Ba, Michael and Vivian not his real cousin and aunt. If his mother ran away with another man, he had to let her know that she couldn’t get rid of him that easily. He grabbed clothes and stuffed them in a plastic bag.

  “Stop blocking the TV,” Michael said.

  “I’m going to Florida to find my mom.”

  Laughter from the studio audience rattled out. Michael stared at Deming, his eyes enormous behind his glasses. “Then I’ll go, too.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course. We’re brothers, right? Like brothers.”

  “Okay, then we have to hurry.” Deming dumped a ball of Michael’s clothes into the bag. “We have to go now.” He took his keys, tossed Michael’s shoes at him, and they moved out the door.

  “How are we going?” Michael shouted as Deming ran up University, taking a right on 192nd. He didn’t know which store Vivian had gone to, which block she’d take back to the apartment. “My shoelace!”

  “I have a plan,” Deming said, though he didn’t. As they neared the subway station they heard a train pulling away, and they ducked into the stairwell, panting.

  “I don’t have a MetroCard,” Michael said.

  Deming swung the bag of clothing against his leg. It was heavier than he’d expected. “Me neither.”

  “I’m going to tie my shoelace now.” Michael bent down, tied one loop, then another.

  “I don’t have any money,” Deming whispered.

  “We can ask my mom maybe.”

  “She won’t let you go if you ask her.” Michael looked so serious, so trusting. He couldn’t ask Michael to leave Vivian. Then they would both be without mothers. “Let’s go home.”

  “What about Florida?”

  “Another time.”

  They turned back. “I’m hungry,” Michael said. Inside the bodega, Deming lingered in the aisles, fingering a candy bar, but Eduardo’s bushy white beard kept catching his eye.

  “Whoo,” Eduardo whistled from behind the cash register. A giant metal fan batted warm air around. “This stinking heat.”

  “It’s a heat wave,” Michael said.

  “How’s your mama doing? She all right?”

  “She’s great,” Deming said. “And we’re late for dinner.”

  They walked out with nothing. By the time they got to their building, his arm ached. He asked Michael, “You seen Tommie lately?”

  “Not for a while.”

  They paused outside Tommie’s door. Deming wanted to kick it, but it didn’t sound like anyone was inside. “Where’s Pennsylvania, anyway?”

  “Real far.”

  Deming could see the relief in Michael’s face when they got home. He brought the bag of clothes to the bedroom, unpacked as quietly as he could, and heard Michael saying, “We went for a walk, Mom.”

  Mom. Deming fell asleep on the couch, woke to drool caked on the side of his face. Much later, after Leon came home, the sky cracked open and it rained, drops splattering against fire escapes, running down rooftops, giving the air conditioners a free bath. A slow, humid breeze trickled into the bedroom, Michael’s limbs flailing in a distant dream. Deming watched Leon sleep, the rise and fall of Leon’s chest, pressing his arm against Leon’s back. He needed Leon to stay.

  But they were safe, for now, humbled and seething. They were two men without her.

  LEON SAID IT WAS no big deal: that his woman had split and nobody knew where she was. He made a little laugh, a joke—She left me! Isn’t that crazy?—but Deming saw how the skin on his neck was droopy and crinkled, deep brown circles blooming under his eyes like a wet cup on a paper plate. “I’ll get another woman, you hear?” Leon said, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark.

  The summer dragged on. Deming heard Leon and Vivian talking, hid in the other room so they wouldn’t know he was listening: At work, a falling hog had smacked Leon and he skidded on the slick floor, coming to on his back. Got probation. He sliced the wrong veins, let an animal drift on by like a graceful ocean liner, large crooked knife slashes against the meatgrain. He was given the second of three strikes, his hours docked. The landlord had already given two extensions for late rent; the loan shark’s men were less understanding.

  Mama’s co-worker Didi—Leon’s buddy Quan’s wife—had called screaming about the nail salon, how the boss had been involved in something shady. “Do you think she went to Florida?” Vivian said. But Didi had tracked down the number of the restaurant, and when Leon called, the owners said Mama never showed up.

  Didi had called the police, Immigration, and they said there was no record of her. So Mama was okay, not in danger like Deming had feared, just took off on her own. Leon told Vivian he’d gone to a lawyer, one Quan had found, whom Quan had to help translate. Back home Quan would be a freak, an American-born Vietnamese Chinese who could only speak a drop of Chinese, but here Quan was a big shot, because of his English, and here Leon was a nobody, because of his Chinese. It drove Leon crazy that he need
ed Quan, a little guy with a big voice who spiked his hair into mini spears.

  Leon had wanted to belt the lawyer when he asked, “Did she know anyone? Any other men? You might think you know a woman and you don’t.” When Quan translated, Leon said, “Tell him to go suck his own cock.”

  Vivian said they couldn’t keep bothering the police, not without papers. All they could do was wait to hear from her. Deming heard Leon say how he was wiring the loan shark Mama’s payments, almost double what she’d been able to afford. At dinner, he snapped at Deming. “Playing with your food again, no respect.” But the next day, he took Deming out for donuts at the Vietnamese coffee shop, offered up maple-glazed, powdered-sugar, Boston cream. “I spent three months on the boat coming over from Fujian,” he said. “Washed with sea water. Slept on soggy cardboard. Think about your bed. Think about your bathroom. You can sleep.” Deming concentrated on his donut. The cream oozing out—where was the Boston?—like something obscene. On the boat, Leon said, the enforcers had nearly beaten a man to death for stealing a packet of instant ramen from the captain’s quarters. One man had tried to stop the crew from doing something bad to a woman, and the enforcers kicked him in the face and threw him into the ocean. Leon could still hear that woman’s screams.

  Deming licked cream off his fingers. “Mama came on a plane, not a boat.”

  That night, Leon didn’t come home until morning. Deming couldn’t sleep, waking up every few hours to find the other side of the mattress still empty. When he heard Leon’s voice in the hallway, he got up.

  “Yi Ba, where were you?”

  “Get out of the way. I need to go to bed.”

  “You smell like a bar,” Vivian said. “Must be nice to stay out all night doing whatever you want. Wish I could do that.”

  “Go out all you want,” Leon said. “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care? Who cooks the meals? Who cleans up your garbage? Who washes your clothes? Who takes care of your Polly’s son while you stay out all night drinking and pissing money away?” Vivian picked up a pair of Leon’s underwear and threw it at him. “Wash your own panties! Find another girl to take care of this child!”

  “Will you be quiet?”

  Vivian slammed the bathroom door and opened it so she could slam it again. Leon pushed past Deming and fell onto the bed, landing on Mama’s pillow.

  TEN DAYS LATER, LEON was gone. Left in the middle of the night. Vivian said he had gone to China.

  Michael started to cry. “Is he coming back?”

  “Not for a while. He found a job there, in our cousin’s business. Lots of people going back these days.”

  “We’re not going, too, are we?” Michael asked, and Vivian shook her head.

  It was like the time he fell off a swing and the wind got knocked out of him: boom. Deming wanted to cry, but held it in, kept his face as still as possible. There was a rock inside him, a boulder.

  “He would have said good-bye,” Vivian said, “but you and Deming were sleeping.”

  Deming knew this was bullshit. Leon had left because he was a coward. He hadn’t said good-bye because he knew he shouldn’t have left, and he had left because he felt bad. As Deming watched Vivian comfort Michael, a wall hardened around him.

  THREE WEEKS LATER, VIVIAN announced that she and Deming were going out, the two of them. They were going to buy new clothes for school.

  “Why can’t I come, too?” Michael said. “I want new clothes.”

  Ever since Leon had left, Michael and Deming no longer bothered to walk past Sopheap’s apartment or try to find change for Mister Softee. They stayed inside, despite the heat. In the shower, Deming balled his fists up and hit his thighs. He had to pretend things were normal.

  “This is Deming and me time,” Vivian said. “We never spend time together, right, Deming?”

  “Michael should come, too.”

  “I’m coming, Mom.”

  Vivian told Michael to stay inside the apartment. “I’ll be back soon.”

  “No, don’t leave.”

  “Put the deadbolt on right away. I’ll make you a nice dinner tonight.”

  Michael was crying again. “Please don’t leave.”

  “I’ll be back very soon.”

  “I’ll? What about Deming?”

  “We’ll be back.”

  Michael stopped crying. Vivian and Deming waited in the hallway, Vivian holding a plastic bag, until they heard the lock click shut. Deming heard a loud sniffle from inside the apartment and wanted to go back in, but Vivian was already walking toward the staircase.

  They got on the Bx12 bus, taking a pair of seats near the front. Deming wondered which stores they would go to.

  “Face it,” Vivian finally said. “Your mother isn’t coming back, and you need a good family. I can’t provide for both you and Michael right now. I’m sorry, Deming. I don’t have the money. I’m going to have to move to a smaller apartment, get roommates. I’m getting people to look after you until Leon makes enough in China so he can come back to New York. You’ll be okay, and when Leon returns, we’ll see each other again.”

  The wall tightened. He could barely breathe. “When?”

  “Soon,” Vivian said.

  “How soon?”

  Vivian didn’t answer.

  “I’ll get a job! I’ll be twelve in November.”

  They got off on the Grand Concourse and entered an office building. He sat in a chair near the door as Vivian spoke to a woman in awkward English, her voice much softer than usual. He heard her say, “I have his birth certificate.”

  The woman came over to him. She was tall and Black; her glasses had gold frames. “Deming? Why don’t you wait in here while I talk to your aunt.” She led him into a smaller office, with a folding table and ceiling fan, gave him crayons and a stack of coloring books, then reached into a drawer and handed him a box of apple juice and a bag of chips. “Here’s a snack. You can draw if you want.” The woman’s smile was small but kind. “I’ll be back.”

  Deming opened a coloring book. It was for younger kids, with large outlines of animals, and most of the pages were already filled in. The crayons were all snapped in two. He scratched large X’s over the faces of the animals and told himself Vivian would have the address of wherever he was going, that she and Michael would come get him in a few days. Maybe he’d get to go somewhere exciting, with video games.

  When the juice and chips were long gone, the woman came back, holding the plastic bag Vivian had been carrying. “You’re going to come with me now. We have a place for you to stay tonight, in Brooklyn.”

  He rode with the woman in a van, sitting up front, the bag on his lap. Inside were his clothes and toothbrush. They drove on a highway and across a bridge, and the woman asked him about school and his friends. She gave him another juice box and asked about his mother. He said he hadn’t seen her since February.

  They drove to a neighborhood where the people were Chinese, and there were Chinese stores and restaurants, but it wasn’t Manhattan Chinatown. There were more trees here, houses with aluminum siding, children riding bikes on the sidewalks.

  The woman parked the van on a side street. They got out, walked to a three-story house, and rang a bell. A man and a woman answered the door, both Chinese and with graying hair. The four of them walked upstairs to an apartment, and the Black woman spoke to the Chinese woman in the kitchen but Deming couldn’t hear their words, while the man sat with him on a couch in the cool front room, saying “Relax, be good” until Deming fell asleep on the cushions, drained from the heat and the car ride. When he woke up, the Black woman was gone.

  “How long will I stay here?” he asked the man.

  “A while,” the man said.

  They fed him vegetables and beef stew, big bowlfuls of it. He asked if he could call Michael, and they said not now, later. They turned up the air conditioner and let him sleep and watch TV.

  Days passed. Deming lost track of time. He slept on the couch and watched TV. Aft
ernoons, alone in the apartment, he roamed the small rooms, opening empty drawers and cabinets, eating Chef Boyardee that he heated in the microwave. The couple’s bedroom remained locked. There was no telephone. He wanted to go outside, but the front door was locked, too.

  One morning, when the doorbell rang, it wasn’t Vivian and Michael but a white man and woman, who spoke to the Chinese woman in English. The white woman said Deming’s name first. “Dee-ming, Dee-ming.” She drew the vowels out so the word was unrecognizable. The Chinese woman said “Deming” and he sat up, still sleepy. The white woman tried again, closer this time.

  They approached on tiptoe. “Hello, Deming.” The man’s voice was reedy, gently nasal. His hair was floppy with light yellow strands, and his eyes were a diluted blue, surrounded by lines. The white woman’s hair was short, blonde with chunks of brown. Her cheeks were a pale pink.

  “Hello, Deming,” she said. They sat on either side of him. The woman’s arms touched his. The man’s legs pressed against his. He had only been so close to white people on the subway before.

  “Who are these people?” he asked the Chinese woman in Mandarin.

  “These are your new foster parents,” she said in English. “Peter and Kay Wilkinson.”

  Deming jumped up. Peter and Kay Wilkinson were tall, but he was fast. He made it halfway down the carpeted stairs before he felt hands on him. “Stop, Deming.” It was the Chinese woman. “The Americans will take good care of you. They have a big house and lots of money.”

  “I already have a family.”

  “Your old family isn’t here anymore. This is your new family. Relax. Everything will be okay.”

  Peter and Kay Wilkinson squatted on the steps. “Deming,” Kay said. “We’re going to take care of you. It’s going to be okay.” She put her arms around him. Her shirt smelled like laundry and soap. His mother had been gone for half a year. And now Leon and Vivian were gone, too. Nobody wanted him.