Lisa Ko - The Leavers

“I don’t mean to be trouble. I’ve already paid for the hotel room.”

“Are you kidding me? It’s not every day Number One Son comes to visit from America,” Leon said. “You stay as long as you want.”

Daniel’s face flushed. “Don’t be such a bad host,” Shuang said. “Offer our guest something to drink.”

Leon opened the refrigerator, took out two bottles of Tsingtao, and gave one to Daniel. “Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the apartment.”

It felt strange, drinking around Leon, but Daniel was grateful for the beer. Leon led him out of the kitchen and into a hallway with three doors. “The bathroom’s here.” He pointed to the left. The other two rooms were the bedrooms, the smaller one Yimei’s, decals of cartoon animals on the wall, bedsheets printed with yellow ducklings. The back bedroom, where Leon and Shuang slept, had a window that opened up onto a small balcony the size of a fire escape. Leon lifted the screen and Daniel stepped out after him. The balcony’s view looked onto a Dumpster surrounded by empty plastic bottles and bloated trash bags, a whiff of garbage in the air. In the distance you could see the outlines of mountains.

A planter with fuchsia flowers hung from a hook on the railing. “Shuang’s good with plants,” Leon said. “She works in the new Walmart. Gardening section. You like the apartment?”

Pastel sounds drifted from the windows of other apartments. A running faucet, clanging pots and pans, a baby crying, a radio announcer.

“It’s nice,” Daniel said. “How long have you lived here?”

“Two years. The construction isn’t flimsy, we’re on solid ground. I researched the foundation. My cousin knew a guy who worked for the landlord. My cousin owns the company I work for. We do import-export, I work in shipping. Better than cutting meat.” Leon put his bottle down. “Now tell me. You didn’t come all the way to Fuzhou to pay me a visit?”

“I was planning to see you.”

Leon laughed and Daniel blinked fast, tried to focus on the outlines of the mountains.

THAT NIGHT, HE FELL asleep in Yimei’s room in the shadows of the animal decals — a donkey, elephant, cow, and lion — and when he woke up he heard the sound of the television. He looked at his phone. It was ten in the morning. If his mother called him at the hotel, he wouldn’t be there to get her call.

In the front room of the apartment, Leon was eating toast.

“I need to get to the hotel,” Daniel said. “My mother might’ve called me there, and I should check my messages.” He had paid for his room through tonight, hadn’t officially checked out.

“You want toast?” Leon held up his slice of bread.

“You don’t work today?”

“Taking today off.”

Daniel put his shoes on. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

“No, we’re going to West Lake.”

Daniel walked to the window and lifted the blinds. He could hear birds outside. “Why?”

“We’re going to find your mother. What, you want to sit on your ass all day waiting for her to call you?”

“I should go to the hotel,” Daniel said.

“We can call the hotel from here and ask if you have a message. After that, we’ll go to West Lake.”

“But we don’t know where she lives.”

“You said she told you she lived there. That’s enough for me.”

“We’re going to walk around and call her name until she comes running out of a building?”

“Don’t be silly.”

Daniel played with the leaf of one of Shuang’s plants. “We could find her and she could slam the door in my face.” Imagining it, having the final, definitive answer to so many years of not knowing, made him slump.

“Come on, if you show up at her door she’s not going to do that. You’re her son.”

THERE WERE NO POTHOLES on the streets near West Lake Park, and fewer pedestrians, and with its large trees and single-story storefronts, the neighborhood resembled a wealthy American suburb. The bus passed the entrance to a park and a row of high-rise apartment buildings, and Leon signaled for the driver to stop. “You said she told you she lives in an apartment with a balcony,” Leon said. “These are all the apartment buildings. They overlook the park.”

“There must be hundreds of apartments.”

“They have directories. We’ll go up and read them and see if your mother’s name is there. Or we can ask the guards. These rich people, they always have guards.”

It felt treacherous, referring to his mother as rich people . The first building they saw with balconies had a security guard outside the gate. When Leon asked if a Polly or Peilan lived there, the guard said he couldn’t give out private information about tenants.

They walked around a bend in the road. A bus whizzed past, honking. The second building with a balcony had two guards and no gate. “There’s no one named Polly or Peilan here,” the younger one said.

The third building they found had no guards, but a tall gate and no directory in sight. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh buildings had neither guards nor directories.

When Daniel was Deming, he had thought his mother was invincible. She was louder, funnier, faster, and smarter than other adults, and he could never keep secrets from her, about his grades or if he’d been having regular dumps or if those were his crumbs that had spilled on the floor. She wasn’t particularly strict, or cruel, but she was sharp, one step ahead. She was competent, she worked hard, and no matter how tired she was, there was always concern or vigilance left over for him. Yet at some point, this had changed.

To their left was a railing, and below was the park. Daniel stopped. “She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

Leon stopped, too. “Your mother, she’s complicated.”

Daniel wished he knew how to say understatement in Chinese.

“You meant more to her than anything. Whatever’s making her scared to talk to you, it doesn’t erase that.”

“She never even told her husband about me.”

“Is that so.”

They stood against the railing, watching cars pass. It was past noon. The sun was searing and Daniel wished he had sunglasses. He’d left his in Ridgeborough.

They began to walk again, more slowly. “When I saw her, after she got back,” Leon said, “there was something broken in her. She didn’t want anyone to know.”

“You saw her? You said you only spoke to her on the phone.”

“We did see each other. It was when Yimei was a baby.”

“But you told me—”

“Don’t blame Vivian or your mother. Blame me. I left on my own. If only we could do it over again, Deming, we could still be there, on that ugly couch your mother hated.”

“We’d have bought a new one by now.” A black SUV with tinted windows barreled down the hill. “Did you know I went back to the apartment about a year after you left? A new family was living there.”

“Sometimes,” Leon said, “when Shuang and I are tucking Yimei into bed, I think, this is the way it turned out. This is my life, the woman who wanted to marry me, the child we had. How could I give this up now?”

Daniel thought of playing a show, coming to and hearing the cheers of the crowd. “I think the same thing sometimes.”

“So maybe she thinks the same thing, too,” Leon said.

Daniel saw two apartment buildings across the street, half hidden by a clump of bushes. His mother, with her new life — it wasn’t the same thing. He needed to tell her she couldn’t just walk out on him, pretend he didn’t exist. “I still want to find her.”

HOURS LATER, THEY HAD gone to all the visible buildings in the neighborhood with balconies and the heat had become sweltering. They chugged bottles of water they’d bought at a convenience store, where Daniel had seen a woman his mother’s age and had a flash of hope it would be her, though the woman looked nothing like her. They reminisced about New York, and Daniel told Leon about Ridgeborough, how he was taking a break from school.