Lisa Ko: The Leavers

“What about your own music? You don’t even care?”

Roland shrugged. “Art evolves.”

“Oh, give me a fucking break.”

“We don’t have to.” Roland hit pause. “But we should.”

“It’s not like Hutch is going to book us after last night anyway.”

“Nah, I talked to him. And Javier’s playing a show in a few weeks, nothing big, but we can have one of the opening slots.”

“With the new sound. That Hutch likes.”

“Yeah, of course.”

Still, Daniel was closer to it than ever before. The oldest burrito wrapper at Tres Locos, a red-haired white guy named Evan who dropped frequent mentions about how New York had been so much cooler and more dangerous in the nineties, was thirty-six and still trying to get his band off the ground. Daniel had gone to see Evan open for four other acts on a Tuesday night, and the guy could barely sing. At work today, when Daniel mentioned he’d played the loft party, omitting the part where he had run away, Evan had said, “Get the hell out of here” and plopped down a spoonful of pintos with such force, bean juice had splattered his chest. If Psychic Hearts played Jupiter, he would be sure to invite Evan. In high school, Roland used to tell the other kids, “You have to see Daniel play,” and if they did a show and no one said anything Daniel would fall into a funk, consider tossing his guitar in the trash. But when people called him amazing he basked in it, couldn’t sleep, reviewing the compliments over and over in his mind.

He wanted to be complimented again, to be called amazing. “Okay,” he said. “The new sound.”

“We should record at Thad’s studio, the one that does cassette demos. This summer, after we have a few more songs. Or even before.” Roland had ferried a crate of his parents’ old eighties tapes down from Ridgeborough, the ones he and Daniel had once studied like they’d been unearthed from a Paleolithic cave and were now as bewilderingly valuable as the rarest, most pristine vinyl. Daniel had to admit there was an oddly comforting quality about tape’s crusty, decaying sound, a sincerity, a depth that digital couldn’t reach.

“Sure,” he said. This summer, he would be going to classes at Carlough, living in his old room in Ridgeborough. He wouldn’t be playing music at all.

“Where’d your parents go, to a hotel?”

“They went home.” By now they would be back in that big, cold house, reading in bed. He fiddled with his sweatshirt. “Oh, I got a strange e-mail a while back. From this guy I’d grown up with, when I lived with my mother — my birth mom. Before I came to Ridgeborough.”

“What did it say?”

“He said he had something to tell me about my mom. I didn’t write him back, but I’m a little curious.”

Daniel knew what Roland’s response would be before he even said it.

“Don’t do it. You’ll regret it.” On the topic of parental ghosts, Roland was dependable, unwavering. His own father had died when Roland was too young to remember, and he’d never shown interest in learning more. Daniel craved Roland’s decisiveness for himself. He had always wished he could be so sure.

HE PICKED UP THE Carlough application forms and put them back down. He returned to his guitar, played the refrain that had been bouncing around earlier, reshaped it, scribbled a few lines, then pictured Kay’s face, teary, as he told her he had found out what happened to his real mom. The song slipped away. Thinking of his mother brought a low, persistent ache in a spot he could never get to. He put his guitar away and picked up his laptop. Just a quick search; Peter and Kay would never know. In junior high, he had done these searches every few months, until the urge to know more had fallen away. He had stopped searching after realizing he was averting his gaze while scrolling through the results, relieved to never find the right one. Not knowing more excused him from having to change the life he had gotten accustomed to, and it had been years since he had searched for Michael Chen — Michael’s name had always been too popular, with nearly half a million results — or Polly Guo, or Guo Peilan, in English or even in Chinese characters, which never brought up anything matching his mother. He had never found the right Leon or Vivian Zheng.

But tonight he typed in “Michael Chen” and “Columbia” and pulled up a website for a university biology lab, scrolled down the page and saw Michael’s name and a headshot of a lanky guy, smug and happy in a dark shirt. Michael’s face was longer and he didn’t wear glasses anymore, but Daniel could see the kid version there, the wide-eyed ten-year-old who would go anywhere with him, the closest thing he’d ever had to a brother. Someone who had known Deming.

He shut the laptop screen as if it were on fire. If Michael had information about his mother, it wouldn’t change the fact that she had left him. Roland was right. There was no need to stir up bad memories.

He paced the living room, the kitchen, toyed with the box for the microphone, imagined Roland onstage at Jupiter as he sat in a college lecture hall. He couldn’t make Roland and Peter and Kay happy at the same time, but he might as well try.

She promised she’d never leave him again on the day they found their doppelgängers. Back then, six-year-old Deming and his mother were still strangers to each other, but formed a satisfying pair. The same wide noses and curly smiles, big dark pupils underlined with slivers of white, a bit of lazy in their gaze. Her hand was foreign in his; he was used to his grandfather’s warmer grip and more deliberate walk. His mother was too fast, too loud, like the American city he’d been dumped back into, and Deming missed the village, its muted gradients of grass and water, greens and blues, burgundies and grays. New York City was shiny, sharp, with riots of colors, and everywhere the indecipherable clatter of English. His eyes ached. His mouth filled with noise. The air was so cold it hurt to inhale, and the sky was crammed with buildings.

He’d sought comfort in something familiar. He heard melodies in everything, and with them saw colors, his body gravitating to rhythm the way a plant arched up to the light. Crossing Bowery he felt the soothing repetition of his feet hitting the sidewalk, his left hand connected to his mother’s right, his two steps to her every one. She launched into the crosswalk. It was her one day off in two weeks. Deming examined the sidewalk droppings, cigarette butts and smeary napkins and, exposed between chunks of ice, so much gum. Who chewed these gray-pink wads? He had never chewed gum and neither had his mother, to his knowledge, or any of her six roommates in their apartment on Rutgers Street. This was before they moved in with Leon, before the University Avenue apartment in the Bronx.

They stood before the subway map with its long, noodley lines. “So what color should we do today?” she asked. Deming studied the words he couldn’t read, the places he’d yet to go, and pointed to purple.

He’d been born here, in Manhattan Chinatown, but his mother had sent him to live with his grandfather when he was a year old, in the village where she had grown up, and it was Yi Gong who starred in Deming’s earliest memories, who called him Little Fatty and taught him how to paddle a boat, collect a chicken egg, and gut a fish with the tip of a rusty knife. There were other children like him in Minjiang, American-born, cared for by grandparents, with parents they only knew from the telephone. “I’ll send for you,” the voice would say, but why would he want to go live with a voice, leave what he knew for a person he didn’t remember? All he had was a picture, where he was a scowling baby and his mother’s face was obscured by a shadow. Each morning he awoke to cht cht cht, Yi Gong sweeping the front of their house on 3 Alley, Yi Gong’s wheezing, silver smoke rings dissolving skyward, until the morning Yi Gong didn’t wake up and then Deming was on a plane next to an uncle he would never see again, and a woman was hugging him in a cold apartment full of bunk beds, her face only familiar because it resembled his. He wanted to go home and she told him the bunk bed was home. He didn’t want to listen, but she was all he had. That was two weeks ago. Now he sat in a classroom every day at a school on Henry Street, not understanding anything his teachers said, while his mother sewed shirts at a factory.