Lisa Ko - The Leavers

Birth mother and putative father abandoned child six months ago and returned to China. Caregiver V. Zheng signed Surrender Form.

After interim care in Brooklyn, child was placed in foster care with the Wilkinsons due to K. Wilkinson’s indication of Mandarin-speaking skills.

Foster parents plan to petition for termination of mother’s parental rights on grounds of abandonment.

No current reunification plan with birth family.

Anticipated Permanency Planning Goal: Placement for Adoption

There were so many more e-mails and documents, bundles of legal papers and dense forms, but Deming couldn’t bear to read them, and Peter and Kay would be home any minute. He stuffed the papers back into the folder, then wedged the folder in the file cabinet and pushed the drawer shut.

Termination. Permanency . His mother had abandoned him. She’d returned to China. He wanted to puke. He closed the browser window. The laptop seemed grotesque, too big and new.

At dinner, he asked them if he was adopted.

“Well, right now we’re your foster parents,” Kay said. “That means that you’re living with us, like any kid lives with his family, because you need a safe place to stay. And we would like to have you stay with us for as long as you want. We would like to adopt you. Would you like that?”

Deming shrugged.

“It wouldn’t happen right away,” Peter said. “It might take a long time.”

“But what happened to my real family?” Deming asked.

“We are your real family,” Peter said.

Kay frowned. “Your mother wanted to take care of you, but she couldn’t.”

The table grew blurry, the food tasted dry. “So she left me.” After he heard Peter and Kay talking in their room the other night, he had been waiting for them to say something to him about his mother. But they kept acting like everything was fine.

“She loved you.” Kay refolded her napkin.

“And we love you, too.” Peter exchanged a worried look with Kay.

“I saw that,” Deming said.

“Saw what?” Peter asked.

“Never mind.”

Mama had perminated him. Vivian had lied to him about coming for him soon. His skin burned and the kitchen lights were so bright, the floorboards so wide and wooden. The mix on DWLK was a single song on loop, a mash up of abandoned and permanent . He felt faint, pulled back to the ammoniac odor of the hallways in P.S. 33, the blue-gray floors and dented metal lockers.

“Daniel, you look tired,” Kay said. “Are you okay? Do you want to rest upstairs?”

Deming put one hand on the table to balance himself. Kay pressed her fingers to his forehead. “Peter, he’s really warm. It must be the flu or something. It’s been going around at Carlough, half my students are out sick.”

Peter took another bite of his chicken. “Daniel, go upstairs and rest.”

“He can barely stand up,” Kay said. “You carry him.”

Peter put down his fork and knife. He stood and lifted Deming, one leg, then the other, and carried him up the stairs, grunting with the effort. Deming held his arms around Peter’s neck, his legs around Peter’s waist. Peter’s footsteps were slow and unsure, each step a quiet struggle.

ELEVEN IN THE MORNING and they had been on the road for almost five hours. Peter slammed his hands on the steering wheel when the car came to an abrupt stop on the FDR, idling behind a potato chip truck and a yellow cab. In the backseat Deming counted exits. None of the highways they had taken from Ridgeborough were familiar, and he skimmed billboards for the furniture one he and Roland especially loved, a store called Sofa King.

The Wilkinsons were on their first family road trip to New York City, to visit the Hennings family, who had a daughter’s Deming’s age. Kay said she’d be his friend. “This will be a good trip for your father,” Kay had told him, “he needs cheering up.” Valerie McClellan had been asked to take over as the chair of Carlough’s Department of Economics in the fall, after Will Panov retired. The day Peter found out, Deming had seen him wheeling the plastic garbage bin up from the curb, his face red. “God damn it!” he yelled when the bin’s wheels caught on a branch in the driveway.

Deming tried to remember that first drive upstate with Kay and Peter, eleven months ago, when they were still strangers. First he had looked out the window, trying to memorize the roads so he could make his way back. Then he fell asleep. Now they were no longer strangers, they were Kay and Peter, Mom and Dad, and this was the last day he would see them. He had gotten used to having adults speak to him loudly and slowly, as if he was deaf, and it was less terrifying being the only one; the terror had become normal. He no longer fantasized that his mother would come for him, but as they drove deeper into the city he stared at the looming high-rises with a catch in his throat. Slick pavement, ferocious honking, spewing fire hydrants, fetid mystery puddles, wet steam expelled through sidewalk gratings as if the Earth was panting, firm thwacks of rubber against concrete on handball courts. That precarious dip when you walked over a metal door atop a restaurant basement.

It was July. Peter and Kay had filed an adoption petition, and when the judge approved it, they would all go to court to sign the papers. Last month, they had bought Deming a yellow dirt bike and matching helmet, and he and Roland had been biking around town, exploring little streets on the outskirts of Ridgeborough, still gravel, still unpaved, with names like Bajor Lane and Meeker Road, streets he would never see again. Deming had perfected a wheelie on his bicycle. He and Roland had created a stage out of a tree stump and taken turns jumping off of it into a crowd of invisible fans.

He turned away from the window but when they drove past signs for the Cross Bronx Expressway, turned back. After Kay told him they were going to visit the Hennings, he had called his mother’s cell phone for the first time in over a month and got the same message. The call could not be completed. But he’d packed extra clothes.

The potato chip truck nudged up. “Finally,” Peter said. Deming watched the brown buildings fade behind them, breathed a small circle onto the glass and wiped the moisture away with his finger.

In front of a gray apartment building on East Twenty-First Street, the sounds and colors came back. The squawk of a lowering bus. The soundtracks of passing cars. House music, an old track with twisting keyboards and words about getting your back up off the wall, a song sung in Spanish with shiny horns and the fattest tuba bass. Bright pastel smudges rapidly filled the sky. It was hotter here than in Ridgeborough, and Deming turned in a slow, clockwise circle, stricken by the tinkling notes of a nearby ice cream truck, hesitant and plaintive, reminding him of the rainbow sherbet push-pops he would eat with Michael, the sweet liquid that made their tongues blue. He could hear Michael’s quaking laughter, Mama and Vivian snap-talking in Fuzhounese.

A woman on her cell phone bumped him as she walked by, and Deming rubbed his shoulder. “Excuse me,” a man said, pushing past. Kay shrank back.

A white man with a booming voice and a receding hairline bounded out the front door of the building. He and Peter slapped each other on the backs as if they were trying to dislodge food. Deming had never seen Peter with a friend before, and he liked it.

“This must be Daniel.” The man kissed Kay on the cheek and extended a hand for Deming. “Jim Hennings.”

“Mr. Hennings and I were at school together,” Peter said. “Freshman roommates.”

“Your father and I always made sure we studied all the time,” Jim said, and winked.

The doorman held open the lobby’s glass doors. Deming followed Kay into an elevator as Peter and Jim went to park the car.