Lisa Ko: The Leavers

Two transfers later and the purple line was running above ground, and Deming and his mother looked out the window at signs in languages they didn’t recognize. “This one’s for socks,” he said, pretending to read, “that one’s for dogs.” Near the end of the line the signs switched to Chinese, and his mother read each one out to him in a funny voice, deep and low, like a radio announcer. “Going Out of Business!” “Immigration Troubles?” “We Cure Bunions!” He liked her like this; he could trust that she was his. He kicked his legs in the air as she slapped her thighs in a giddy beat.

They had traveled to Queens, from one Chinese neighborhood to another, and when they emerged from the subway the buildings were lower and the streets wider, but the crowds and the languages were similar, and despite the cold air Deming could smell familiar aromas of vegetables and fish. It was a frigid, hard bite of a winter afternoon. Stopping at a corner, she introduced a new game. “There could be a Mama and Deming who live here, too, another version of us.” Like a best friend but better; like a brother, a cleaved self. They chose the building this Mama and Deming would live in, a short one with a flat front like theirs on Rutgers Street, and watched mothers and children walk along the sidewalk until they found a boy Deming’s age and a woman his mother’s height, her hair also cut so it settled in wisps against her chin. Like his mother, she wore a navy blue coat, and could be mistaken for her son’s older sister.

“Can’t we ask them to come over?”

“We shouldn’t disturb them, they’re busy. But let’s watch them, okay?”

She steered him into a bakery and he begged for an egg tart. In those days you could buy three for a dollar, but she refused, said it was a waste of money, and they sat at a table without buying anything, examining their doppelgängers through the window. The boy leaned up to his mother and she bent down to talk to him as they crossed the street. In the boy’s palm was a glazed, puffy object. A flaky yellow pastry.

“Can I have an egg tart? Please?”

“No, Deming.”

He pouted. Sometimes Yi Gong had let him guzzle Cokes for breakfast, but she never bought him anything.

“I want to meet them.” He stomped his boot on the floor. Again she said no. He tore down the sidewalk after them. “Wait!” he yelled.

They turned around; they knew Fuzhounese. The Other Mama was older and skinnier, and the Other Deming was eight or nine and not five or six, square-faced and squinty-eyed like the kind of boy who might light bugs on fire for kicks. A fat crumb of pastry dangled from his bottom lip. In the moment before his mother yanked him away, Deming met the Other Deming’s eyes and the Other Deming said, in English, “ Hi? ” Then they walked off, fading into a sea of winter coats.

“They’re gone,” Deming said. “They left.” Frightened, he longed for Yi Gong. “Are you going to leave me again?”

“Never.” His mother took his hand and swung it up and down. “I promise I’ll never leave you.”

But one day, she did.

BY JULY, DEMING’S MOTHER had been gone for five months. Ever since the February day she disappeared, he had been waiting for a sign that she’d be back, even a sign that she was gone forever.

The summer was one big dead-end sign. The city had been too hot for weeks, the sofa’s upholstery sweaty against Deming’s thighs during the long, overheated afternoons. He and Michael batted their faces against the rattling plastic fan and sang la-le-la-le-la, the vibrations taking their words and spitting them out in a watery brown croak. They melted ice cubes in glasses and sucked on them, dug into cushions to search for forgotten change for Mister Softee runs, the ice cream always a letdown, soggy orange sugar that soaked into its cardboard shell before Deming even got his tongue in.

The rest of the school year had been a derailing. Principal Scott said Deming could go on to sixth grade if he went to summer school and made up the subjects he had failed, but Deming didn’t feel like going.

“If you don’t go, you’ll be left back,” Michael said.

They sat on a metal railing, a row of benches below. Even Crotona Pool, which they’d gone to last summer with their friends, had lost its appeal.

“Fuck this summer,” Deming said, tasting the pleasing heft of the words. “Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, too.” Michael’s consonants were resonant with spit. “Don’t you want to graduate high school?”

That was not my plan, Deming heard his mother saying. Fuck a plan. He contemplated the drop-off to the street. An odor of rot mingled with more familiar scents, flatulent exhaust and sweet garbage, searing pavement and grass. Pot smoke and perfume. Somewhere, a barbecue.

“Dare you to jump down,” he said.

Michael laughed without making a sound. “It’s not far. I’ll make you jump.”

Deming sat with his knees bunched up, jabbing his chin into the air like Leon did when he knew you were full of shit. “No one’s making me do anything.”

“We’ll all be in sixth grade and you’ll be stuck in fifth.”

“Shut up.” Deming slid off the railing. On W. 184th, Michael trotting alongside him, they passed Sopheap’s building, the same as all the others on the block, squat and brown or taller and gray, the windows full of other families, the sidewalks noisy with other kids. They paused and observed the window where the same plastic blinds hung, the ones they had seen so many times from the inside of Sopheap’s apartment. But that summer it seemed like their friends had never existed, that they, like Deming’s mother, had vanished with no guarantee of return.

Elroy was visiting his aunt in Maryland, Hung was at a relative’s upstate, and Sopheap, that traitor, had promised he’d be home all summer but had decamped at first opportunity to outermost Queens, where his cousin allegedly had a large-screen television and lived in a building full of hot chicks. Last time Michael and Deming had seen Sopheap, four days or six weeks ago or whenever it was, Sopheap had described the peek-a-boo bra strap exposed on the shoulder of the hottest chick, how close she had sat to him while they watched TV. She smelled, he said, of bubble gum and pepperoni pizza, and Michael and Deming had hooted and said Sopheap was full of crap, how come he never invited them to outermost Queens. Instead of hot chicks Sopheap might be spending the days with his grandma, who had moley arms and a long yellow tooth that caused her to fling saliva as she barked away at the boys in Khmer, slapping her slippers against their shoulder blades to get them to sit up straight.

Everything was suspect. Had Sopheap’s family ever lived there in the first place? Would Elroy and Hung even show up for school at the end of the summer? What happened to his mother? Nothing, no one, was certain anymore.

Michael and Deming stood in the space beneath the overhead tracks and hurled curse words into the subway’s rattle. A car bumped past blaring a bass line in rich, glossy maroons, and a slow ache spread in the center of Deming’s chest. Before his mother disappeared, he and Michael had been united in the secrets they kept from their moms, like filching a can of beer from Leon’s twelve-pack. Michael had grimaced and belched as they drank, and Deming had knocked back more. They had giggled, teetered. Another time, they stole a pair of panties out of a cart at the laundromat across the street from Elroy’s building, and in Elroy’s room ran their hands over the tiny cotton panel where an actual girl’s actual crotch had actually nestled. Held it to their noses, sniffing exaggeratedly, saddened yet relieved when they smelled only detergent. Hung laid the panties on the bed and the boys stared at the scrap of pinkish fabric until Elroy plucked them up and smuggled them into his closet. “I’ll keep them here,” he said, “for safekeeping.” Deming said they might not even belong to a hot girl but to the woman who sat in front of Elroy’s building and rubbed her fingers into her ponytail after scratching her hairy armpits. The other boys yelped in horror, Michael’s shriek the loudest and highest.