Lisa Ko: The Leavers

“Polly’s not here? No one’s made dinner?”

“We had ham,” Michael said.

“That’s not dinner. Deming, your mother was supposed to get food on the way home.”

“She’s at work,” Deming said.

Vivian opened the refrigerator and shut it. “Fine. I’m taking a shower.”

When Leon returned it was eight o’clock. “Your mother’s supposed to be home already. Guess that new boss made her stay late.” He bought frozen pizzas for dinner, and the sausage balls resembled boils but were oily and delicious. Deming ate three slices. Mama never got bodega pizza.

Leon’s cell phone rang. He took the call in the hallway, and Deming put away the dishes and waited for him to return. “Was that Mama? Can I talk to her?”

“It was her friend Didi.” Leon squeezed his phone in his hand like he was wringing a wet towel.

“Where’s Mama? Are we going to Florida?”

“Away for a few days. Visiting friends.”

“What friends?”

“You don’t know them.”

“Where do they live?”

“It’s late. You should get to sleep.”

Michael was sitting on their bed. “Where’s your mom?” With his glasses off he looked older and thinner, his stare wide, unfocused.

“Leon says she’s away for a few days.” As Deming got under the blankets he couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right.

A WEEK PASSED AND he went to school once. When his mother and Leon had gone to Atlantic City for a night, she had called and reminded him to go to sleep on time, but now he stayed up late, ate M&M’s for breakfast, played hooky with his friend Hung, whose father had died the month before. They watched DVDs in Hung’s apartment on Valentine Avenue for so long they fell asleep and woke up and fell asleep again, cranking the volume until the car chases and gunfire soothed the cold horror skittering inside him. Where was Mama? She had no friends to visit. There was nobody to lie to for the following day’s detention, to hound him about having a plan. Vivian never checked homework; Michael always did his.

Saturday, again. The tube of hand lotion was inside the bathroom cabinet next to her toothbrush. Tucked into the bristles was a green speck, vegetable matter she had brushed from a molar. Deming uncapped the lotion, pushed out a glob. A familiar fragrance, antiseptic and floral, socked him in the sinuses, and he rinsed his hands with soap and hot water until the smell faded. He found one of her socks at the foot of the bed and its partner across the room, lodged against the dresser, and bundled them into the ball shape she preferred. He sat in a corner of the bedroom with a box of her things. Blue jeans; a plastic cat for decorating a cell phone antenna, still sealed in its packaging; a yellow sweater she never wore, tiny hard balls of yarn dotting its sleeves. There was a blue button, solid and round, which he stuck in his pocket.

Her sneakers, her toothbrush, the purple mug with the chipped rim that she drank tea from: still in the apartment, though not her keys, not her wallet or handbag. Deming opened the closet. Her coat and winter hat and boots were gone — she had worn them to work that Thursday — but the rest of her clothes still there. He shut the door. She hadn’t packed. Maybe she’d been the victim of a crime, like on CSI, and maybe she was dead.

Michael drank water from the purple mug and Deming wanted to smack it out of his hands. He didn’t want her to be dead, never ever, but it seemed preferable, in a fucked-up way, to having her leave without a good-bye. The last words he said to her had been, “When are we moving?” If he hadn’t gotten detention — if he had left school at the usual time — if he hadn’t resisted Florida — if he’d intercepted the fight she had with Leon — she would still be here. Like a detective inspecting the same five seconds of surveillance video, he replayed last Wednesday afternoon, walking the blocks from school to home. Again and again Deming and Mama crossed Fordham Road, waited at the light, slipped on the ice, hugged, Mrs. Johnson forever watching. He zoomed in on the frames, slow-motioned their walk up University, then reversed it so they goose-stepped downhill, cars and buses groaning backwards. He picked apart the words she said, hunting for clues, the way his English teachers made them read poems and spend twenty minutes talking about a sentence, the meaning behind the meaning. The meaning behind her telling him about her life. The meaning of Florida. The meaning of her not coming home.

He heard a key in the door and hoped it was her, going, “What, you thought I left you? Who do you take me for, Kid, Homecoming ?” They had watched the TV movie where a mom left her kids at the mall and never came back, and he’d been more entranced by the mall, its sprawling, suburban emptiness. If she came home, he wouldn’t play with his food or speak English so fast she couldn’t keep up. He would do his homework, wash the dishes, let her kick his ass at Whac-A-Mole like she’d done at the church carnival in Belmont last summer, where Michael had barfed up cotton candy after riding the Octopus.

But it wasn’t his mother in the door, only Vivian, shaking slush from her shoes. He ran to her and shouted, “You need to find her, she’s in danger.”

Vivian put an arm around him, her face round and wide like Leon’s. “She’s not in danger.” She was warm and familiar but not the right mother, and instead of nail polish and hand lotion she smelled of sweat and lemon disinfectant.

“Is she in Florida?”

Vivian bit her lip. “We don’t know for sure. We’re trying to find out. I’m sure she’s okay.”

SNOW MELTED. PINK BUDS appeared on the trees. One night Leon and Vivian spoke in the kitchen but when Deming walked in, they stopped and looked at each other. That week, Deming and Michael packed away their winter coats and took out their T-shirts. Deming saw his mother’s spring jacket in the closet, the one she called her Christmas coat because the green was the color of pine needles, and turned away fast. He apologized to Travis Bhopa in hope that it would set things right, that by sacrificing his pride it would guarantee her safety. “Are you crazy?” Hung said, and Michael looked like Deming had tripped him instead. Travis grunted, “Whatever.” She stayed gone. The worse he felt, the more it would make her return. He decided to not eat for a day, which wasn’t hard as Vivian and Leon were always out and dinner was a bag of potato chips, a cup of instant ramen. Bodega pizza four times a week. Now she would have to come home. He fell asleep in school, lightheaded from skipping breakfast. She would take him out for enchiladas but be glad he lost weight because she wouldn’t have to buy him new clothes. She stayed gone. If he cracked an A in Geometry, she would come back. He pulled a B-minus on a quiz and doubled down for the next one — B-plus. She stayed gone. Vivian was right. She’d left for Florida and left him, too.

A decade later, Daniel Wilkinson stood in a corner, hoping no one would notice his shoes. They were insulated hiking boots, clunkers with forest green accents, necessary armor for upstate winters but aesthetic insult in the city. With his Gore-Tex coat, wool hat, and puffy gloves stashed in a back room with his guitar — a butterscotch Strat he’d bought off of Craigslist — his jeans and black T-shirt didn’t seem too blatantly suburban, yet the other guys’ feet were clad in stark white sneakers or dark leather boots, and the old fear bucked up that he’d be exposed, called out, exiled. You’re a fake. What’s your real name? Where are you really from?

He dug his hands in his pockets and rubbed the fabric between his thumbs and index fingers. How did you sew the inside of a pocket, anyway? He saw a roomful of sewing machines, women guiding denim beneath darting needles, and thought of his mother.