Lisa Ko - The Leavers

“When’s the application due?”

“In two weeks. Wish me luck.”

Their eyes met for a moment. Daniel wanted to observe Michael for as long as he needed, attempting to reconcile the guy across the table with the skinny kid who had tagged alongside him in the Bronx. For five years, they had shared a bed. “How’s your mom doing?”

“She’s good, real good. She married my stepfather, Timothy, a few years ago, and we moved to his place in Brooklyn, in Sunset Park. I’m still there, commuting to school, but I’m hoping to move out soon.” Michael passed his phone over, displaying a picture of a family in a grassy yard, Vivian and Timothy with their arms around Michael. “This is from last summer.” Timothy had a small potbelly and a receding hairline. Vivian’s hair was short and permed curly.

Daniel peeked at the photo and passed the phone back. “You still in touch with Leon?”

“Uncle Leon? Yeah, yeah, he’s still in Fuzhou. He got married and has a daughter now. He works for a manufacturing company. We’ve talked a few times but he’s not much of a phone person. But he’s doing good.” Michael played with the strap on his watch. It was a chunky, silver watch, something a middle-aged man might wear. “We didn’t stay in that apartment too long after you left. We moved in with this family in Chinatown. Then we moved to Queens and my mom got this job in the building where Timothy worked.”

“Oh.” Some small part of Daniel had been hoping Leon and his mother had found each other and had been living together, and for some perfectly logical reason, though he couldn’t figure out what that might be, they had been unable to get in touch with him.

“So I found these papers over Christmas break when I was helping my mom clean out boxes in our apartment,” Michael said. “There was this form she signed, voluntarily transferring you to the care of social services. It said the placement would be for an indefinite period of time.”

Daniel said nothing, remembering the papers he’d seen in Peter and Kay’s desk, the report from the permanency hearing. Hadn’t it said something about Vivian signing a surrender form? He didn’t remember anything about it being from an indefinite period.

“I know, I know, it’s screwed up,” Michael said. “And there was this other form, that said she’d gone to court for a hearing, a few weeks after you left. She approved a foster placement with Peter and Kay Wilkinson.”

On the Starbucks speakers, a woman was braying along to a strumming ukulele. Daniel was plummeting from the final board of a video game down to level one after accidentally missing the most elementary of jumps. Vivian and Leon had never planned on coming back for him. The thought of Vivian going to court after dropping him off with that Chinese couple, signing him over to the Wilkinsons without his knowledge, made him nauseous.

“I’m sorry. I wanted you to know.” Michael shook his head. “I thought about you and your mom all the time. She was a cool mom. One time, I don’t know where you were, but she took me to Burger King because she was craving fries, and she bought me fries, too, and on our way home we passed this empty lot full of pigeons and she said, super seriously, ‘Michael, in China we’d eat those bitches. But steamed, because their meat is tough.’ She was real funny, you know?”

“I know she was. How did you even find me?”

“I googled Peter and Kay Wilkinson and found a website with an article Kay Wilkinson wrote and it said in her bio that she had a son named Daniel. I found a profile picture of a Chinese-looking Daniel Wilkinson that looked like it could be you. It mentioned SUNY Potsdam, so I looked that up and figured out your e-mail address.”

“Shit. I’m glad you did.”

“I’m glad you wrote me back. When I found those papers, I thought you could’ve ended up with a bad family, anything could have happened to you.” Michael looked away. “That morning, that last time I saw you? I would’ve tried to stop my mom if I knew where she was going. You guys went out and when she got home, you weren’t with her. I was scared.”

After he and Angel took the cab to the Bronx and saw the family who wasn’t his, Daniel had gone home to Ridgeborough and cried at night for weeks. Four months later, he and Peter and Kay had gone to court and a judge had approved his adoption. They’d signed papers. The judge congratulated them on becoming a forever family. He received a new birth certificate, listing Peter and Kay as his birth parents, and his name as Daniel Wilkinson.

“What did your mom tell you?” he asked Michael.

“Back then? She said she found another family for you to live with and take care of you. At first, she said it was only going to be for a little while. I was pissed, freaked out. Especially since it wasn’t for a little while, you know? It never seemed right. But I couldn’t do anything, I didn’t know how to find you. So over Christmas, after I found the forms, I asked her and she didn’t want to talk about it, but I kept bugging her, and finally she said she’d done it because she had no choice. We were broke. She said she did the best thing for you.”

“The best thing.” Daniel concentrated on reading the list of drink specials over the cash register. VEN-TI LA-TTE. The words seemed strange, like they weren’t English. The smell of coffee and artificial sugar was overpowering and cloying. “Does Leon know I was adopted?”

“I’m assuming my mother told him, but I can’t say for sure.”

Daniel rested his face in his hands, pressing down on the spot between his eyebrows. Indefinite placement, he thought. “I can’t believe this.”

“You were like my brother, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“I tried googling you before but there were never any results for Deming Guo.”

“Well, that’s no longer me.”

“Your parents — I mean, Peter and Kay Wilkinson. Were they good parents?”

“Sure. But I lost my whole family.”

“You never heard from your mother?”

“No. And I guess you never did either.”

Michael shook his head. “But my mom wants to see you.”

“What?”

“She wants to have you over for dinner.”

Michael watched Daniel’s face, awaiting Daniel’s response. Like he used to when he was a kid, ready to pack up and run away to Florida without hesitation.

“Are you serious?” Daniel said. “No fucking way.”

FRIDAY NIGHT, DANIEL TOOK the subway out to Sunset Park, Brooklyn Chinatown, and as he walked down Eighth Avenue he recognized the neighborhood as where the Chinese couple had lived, where Peter and Kay had come to get him. He didn’t know how he would get through this dinner without saying something terrible to Vivian, but the chance to say anything to her pushed him on.

They lived on one of the numbered streets off Eighth Avenue, in the bottom half of a two-family home, a two-bedroom apartment with a large front window that looked out onto the street. The house smelled like rice and pork and garlic. He removed his shoes and jacket, returned Michael’s hug, and saw Vivian padding toward them in fuzzy purple slippers, plumper than she’d been ten years ago. He didn’t remember her teeth being so bright before.

“Deming! You look the same,” she said in Fuzhounese. “Big and tall and healthy. Exactly like your mother.”

How could she mention his mother after what she had done? “Hi, Vivian.”

“Do you still like pork?”

“Of course.”

“I made pork and fish.” Vivian pointed to the kitchen. “We’ll eat soon.”

Michael and Daniel sat on a dark brown couch facing a wide-screen television and a shelf with glass figurines of unicorns. “Remember that couch we had?” Daniel asked.