Lisa Ko - The Leavers

The night before you left, I stayed up and memorized your face. We fell asleep curled together. In the morning, my eyes pink and crusty from crying, I gave you to Didi’s sister. You stayed asleep. Didi walked with you and her sister to the airport bus on East Broadway, but I didn’t go with them. I couldn’t bear to watch you carried off in another woman’s arms and trust that you’d be okay, that I would see you again.

After you left I lay with my face against the spot on the pillow where you had slept. The spot, which had been so warm only minutes ago, was now cold.

Ming tapped my shoulder. “Polly. Hey.” She shook my arm. “You did the right thing.”

I didn’t believe it, at the time.

In the end, he hadn’t expected it to be this easy. Leon answered on the second ring, and hearing his voice felt like being petted by a pair of giant hands. “Deming! You sound like a grown-up! I was waiting for your call. Vivian said she was going to see you.”

Daniel was the only one home at Roland’s apartment at ten o’clock on a Friday night, bloated from the food he’d eaten earlier at Vivian’s. In Fuzhou, it was Saturday morning, thirteen hours in the future.

“Did Vivian tell you she gave me away to a foster family? To get adopted?” He had looked up how to say the words in Chinese.

“Not until much later, when I’d been in China for a long time.”

“Because she knew it was wrong.”

There was a pause on Leon’s end of the line. Daniel scratched the inside of his arm and listened to the anxious hiss of the radiator.

“I wish we could have stayed together,” Leon said.

“I wish you hadn’t left.” He didn’t call Leon Yi Ba. Leon said he had a daughter now, and it might creep him out to hear the word from Daniel.

Leon coughed. “I have your mother’s phone number. At least it was hers seven years ago. That’s when I last heard from her.”

So the permanency hearing report had been right. She’d gone to China. “You saw her?”

“She was about to get married then, was working in an English school.”

English? Married? “What do you mean, you saw her?”

“I didn’t see her,” Leon said, “we only spoke on the phone.”

“Did she go to Florida?”

“She didn’t really say. But I know she would have never left you on purpose.”

“Did you tell her I was adopted?”

“I did.”

Daniel lay on the floor, saw a ball of dust under the couch, a sock he’d been searching for. Ever since he spoke to Michael, he had constructed a new storyline — Deming and Mama torn apart by Vivian’s evil machinations, victims of a family tragedy. Leon was saying his mother hadn’t left him on purpose, but she hadn’t gotten in touch with him either. She hadn’t looked for him, yet she had looked for Leon?

“Come visit,” Leon said, “I’ll take you out for real Chinese food, none of that pretend shit they have in New York. By the way, your Chinese sucks. What happened, you forgot how to talk?”

“I’m just out of practice,” Daniel said. “After you all left.”

He didn’t call the number Leon had given him right away. He didn’t want to call and have her not want to talk to him.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, DANIEL ironed his one good shirt on the kitchen counter, pressed the hems and flattened the collars. He didn’t have any pants other than jeans, but he put on his dark gray pair instead of the blue. His hiking boots would have to do. He put the Carlough College forms in his pocket, the statement of purpose he’d printed on Roland’s printer.

For Jim Hennings’ birthday, Elaine and Angel had rented out an Italian restaurant in the West Village, a neighborhood Daniel always got lost in, the streets west of the subway station switching from orderly numbered blocks to ones with old-fashioned names — Perry, Jane, Horatio. There were no chain stores in this section of the Village, only restaurants and boutiques with small signs in restrained fonts, and compared to Chinatown, the streets were nearly empty at five thirty on a March afternoon. As Daniel backtracked after taking a wrong turn, he passed a man walking a tiny white dog, both of them bent sideways against the wind, and a woman in an enormous dark coat, moving her walker, clunk by clunk, up the sidewalk. He wondered where his mother lived now, if she was still in the house on 3 Alley. The fire escapes here were painted matte black, a contrast to the glass high-rises downtown, and none of the buildings were over five stories tall. Inside these large front windows were chandeliers and tall bookshelves, kitchens with round wooden tables and hanging plants, and in one apartment, a room with nothing but a grand piano. Even the buildings’ brick exteriors looked like they’d been given a scrubdown, preserved and buffed to a shine. Neither this nor the new luxury buildings downtown appealed to Daniel. They both seemed calculated, disingenuous.

The closer he got the slower he walked, until he was standing outside the restaurant looking at a handwritten sign that said CLOSED: PRIVATE PARTY, the bottoms of the letters nudging in toward one another like he’d seen girls posing for photos, with pigeon-toed feet. Angel hadn’t responded to his text message. He opened the door. The restaurant wasn’t large, and the room felt crowded. He took one of the glasses of champagne lined up on a cream-colored cloth and saw Kay and Peter talking to Jim and Elaine. They were more casually dressed than the other guests, in slightly more formal versions of their usual outfits, a sports jacket instead of a cardigan for Peter, a skirt for Kay in place of corduroys. They waved at him, and Daniel thumped over in his hiking boots, feeling a surge of fondness for them.

He hugged them hello. That they didn’t seem angry was a good sign. Angel hadn’t yet told them about the money he’d borrowed. He hadn’t seen Elaine and Jim for years, and Jim had gone bald, Elaine’s long, curly hair all gray. Daniel shook Jim’s hand and wished him a happy birthday, and Elaine kissed Daniel on the cheek, jewelry clinking under her pashmina scarf. “You stranger, you’ve been in New York all this time and haven’t let us know. We’ll have to have you over for dinner as soon as possible.”

“Angel is by the appetizer table.” Jim pointed across the room. An Asian guy with a shaved head and thick eyebrows, handsome in a rugby player kind of way, had his arm around Angel, and she was laughing. This guy was too big, too handsome. His suit jacket stretched across his wide shoulders, and Angel’s light blue dress had short sleeves and a matching belt. She was undersized, still, hair cut briskly below her shoulders. The guy looked like he could be Chinese, or Korean, but Daniel had never been good about guessing these things. “That’s Charles, her boyfriend,” Jim said, and Kay looked at Daniel.

“He’s a senior, in the same program as her,” Elaine said. “We met him for the first time over winter break.”

“Good head on his shoulders,” said Jim. “Very polite, well spoken.”

He thought about the guys Angel had spoken about. There’d been an ex-boyfriend who was now one of her best friends; a co-worker she had a crush on.

“Angel,” Elaine called. “Look who’s here.”

Angel saw Daniel and said something to Charles, who scowled.

“Angel,” Jim called.

She crossed the room with Charles’s hand in hers. When Daniel hugged her, she flinched. “Hey,” he said. “Good to see you.”

“This is my boyfriend, Charles,” she said, looking over Daniel’s head.

Daniel shook the guy’s hand, which felt like shaking air. His suit looked expensive. “Nice to meet you. How long have you guys been together?” He heard a swell of voices behind him. Jim and Elaine greeted another couple and got pulled away in the crowd.