Lisa Ko - The Leavers

“ 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. Afternoons, 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.

Deming leaned against Kay and she stroked his hair. “There,” she said, victorious, and she laughed, a peal of delight, a flag unfurled in the sun. “It’ll be okay.”

He followed the Wilkinsons out of the house. On the drive upstate he fell asleep and missed his last glimpse of the city, woke up in a car parked in front of a large white house with a wraparound porch, tall trees looming. In the city it had been one of those steam-chamber August afternoons that felt like dying, but here, in the shade, it was cold.

Peter turned off the engine. “Welcome home.”

One week later, tucked into a double bed sheathed with red flannel, Deming Guo awoke with the crumbs of dialect on his tongue, smudges and smears of dissolving syllables, nouns and verbs washed out to sea. One language had outseeped another; New York City had provided him with an arsenal of new words. He’d bled English vowels and watched his mother’s face fall.

He wrapped the blankets tighter around him, cold even in late August. The white clapboard house in Ridgeborough, New York, population 6,525, five hours northwest of the city, was nearly two hundred years old, Peter said, an antique. Five times the size of the Bronx apartment, seven times the size of the house on 3 Alley. Three big bedrooms: one for Kay and Peter, one for Deming, and the third for guests, a bed chubby with quilts and pillows in which nobody ever slept. Two bathrooms and two floors and a whole room for eating, another for studying and working on the computer.

A breeze snaked in through the oversized windows. The beanbags that lay across the bottoms of doors could not ward off this draft.

I am Daniel Wilkinson.

He shivered. He had never slept alone before, never had a room to himself, all this vast, empty space.

Deming heard a toot-toot of a whistle. Peter was in the doorframe, hands on hips. He liked to whistle tunelessly.

“Good morning, Daniel.”

It always took a second to realize they were talking to him. When school started, they said, it would be easier with an American name. Though it wasn’t official. His birth certificate, Kay explained, still said Deming Guo.

“Time to get up now. We’ll be leaving for church in an hour and a half.”

From downstairs wafted breakfasty odors, eggs and sausage in salty grease. Deming’s stomach rumbled.

In those early days he called them nothing, spoke to them without saying either Kay and Peter or Mom and Dad. When Kay leaned in for hugs Deming wiggled away, her hold too tight, the Wilkinsons smelling like cheese and flowers, bitter and sugary sweet. But other times he lingered. “We’re glad you’re here, Daniel,” she would say in English, then perform shapeless approximations of Mandarin words. She had learned some Chinese phrases, taken Mandarin classes and bought a Chinese — English dictionary, but her tones were so off-kilter that Deming couldn’t understand what she was saying.