“Time to get up now. We’ll be leaving for church in an hour and a half.”
From downstairs wafted breakfasty odors, eggs and sausage in salty grease. Deming’s stomach rumbled.
In those early days he called them nothing, spoke to them without saying either Kay and Peter or Mom and Dad. When Kay leaned in for hugs Deming wiggled away, her hold too tight, the Wilkinsons smelling like cheese and flowers, bitter and sugary sweet. But other times he lingered. “We’re glad you’re here, Daniel,” she would say in English, then perform shapeless approximations of Mandarin words. She had learned some Chinese phrases, taken Mandarin classes and bought a Chinese–English dictionary, but her tones were so off-kilter that Deming couldn’t understand what she was saying.
“I don’t know who you are,” he’d respond in Fuzhounese.
When he spoke Chinese, Peter’s leg would bounce and Kay’s lips would press even thinner, as if they were being sucked into her body, her mouth consuming itself. “English,” Peter would warn, concerned that Deming wouldn’t be fluent enough for school, as if the English he spoke was tainted. His mother used to swat at his shoulders in a way that looked playful but felt serious when he spoke too much English and not enough Chinese; his weapon of choice had been the language that made her dependent on him. Whoever she was with now would have to translate.
The giant windows. The yard outside with its large, gnarled trees. No sidewalks on Oak Street. Hours could pass without a car going by, the absence of overt sound a trickle of gauzy peach. Deming would stand at the window and listen to the languid chirp of birds, the dim roar of a distant lawnmower. The air maintained a steady, nearly indiscernible buzz. Peach-brown gauze swept over his eyelashes.
In a corner of his new room was a pile-up of plastic games, action figures of muscular men with swords, sturdy fire trucks and police cars with miniature sirens, toys Peter and Kay said were his. (Playing cops didn’t interest him. There was nothing fun about screeching sirens.) On a shelf by his bed was a row of books, Condensed Classics for Children, paperback versions of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Last of the Mohicans, and Oliver Twist. The word condensed reminded him of the cans of milk his mother had bought as a treat, a drizzle of sugared glue atop his breakfast oatmeal. Like him, she had a sweet tooth, but didn’t give in to it often. Eduardo would offer her damp muffins encased in plastic wrap, the blueberries reminiscent of pigeon poop, but she would buy bananas instead. Occasionally there had been condensed milk, Tootsie Rolls, a package of Twizzlers.
Full of omelet, Deming fidgeted in the pews of St. Ann’s. The collared striped shirt, a hand-me-down from a nephew of Kay’s, made his neck itch. Stand, sit, pray. The priest droned on and Deming gripped the blue button from his mother’s box. He had found it inside a pair of shorts Vivian had packed. Now he slept with it under his pillow.
He rubbed the button’s hard upper lip, the rounded center, and remembered the subway as it shot out of the underground at 125th Street and his mother with her arms around him, saying “Look!” He dreamt of dashing up University with Michael, where the street curved and the buildings slapped hands with the sky, legs swinging, backpacks bouncing, sharing a bag of Funyuns with Elroy and Hung, shoving Sopheap around in the park. The pizzeria, the donut spot, the Chinese takeout, the shop selling rows of stiff blue jeans and dresses for $4.99. In the city, far, far away from St. Ann’s Church and the town so small you could spit on a map and rub it away, there had always been the warm press of bodies, Vivian ladling bowls of soup, the chatter of the television, chugging soda, burping contests with Michael, his mother talking on her cell phone. Sharing a bed, it had been warm enough to not need flannel blankets or wool socks.
He tried to tuck away the Bronx in scraps and shards. Once he had read in a book, an ancient science textbook still being passed off as useable at P.S. 33—one day, man will walk on the moon, it said, more than a quarter century after the fact—that people could have tumors inside them for years, harmless cysts, and these cysts could grow teeth and hair, even fingernails. A person could carry this alien being and never know. A monster twin. A hairball double. So many things could be growing inside him, inside every person. He carried Mama and Leon, Michael and Vivian, the city. Reduced to a series of hairs, a ball of fingernail clippings and one stray tooth. A collection of secret tumors.
Deming kicked the pew. A little girl in the next row turned around and looked at his face until her mother elbowed her.
The minister mumbled a prayer. Deming had never been to church before, so he did what everyone else was doing. He stood. He sat. He recited lines from the heavy book and stifled a yawn. Thank you God, amen. He tried to ignore the people around him as he walked with the Wilkinsons to their car.
RIDGEBOROUGH MIDDLE SCHOOL WAS two blocks from downtown Ridgeborough, which consisted of one main street and a park with a big American flag. Deming sat in the front seat of Kay’s silver Prius on the drive down Oak Street, then Hillside Road, across the railroad tracks and into the west side of town, where the houses were closer together and the yards were smaller.
“Daniel might be better served if he does the fifth grade over again instead of going into the sixth. Across the board, his grades were very poor.” Principal Chester, a man with tufts of white nose hairs that protruded from his nostrils like grassy tusks, pointed to papers on his desk. “It seems that this school, this Bronx school, also recommended him for special study.”
“I did summer school,” Deming said.
“We’ll need the records for that, then.” Principal Chester looked through the papers. “They didn’t have the same classes we do here. What kind of math and science did you take at your old school, young man?”
He wondered how Principal Chester could breathe through the nose hairs, and wished Michael and his friends were here so they could joke about them. “Just math.”
“Geometry? And what about language arts, what did you study at your old school?” He looked at Kay. “Where is he from? Originally?”
“I already told you,” Kay said. “New York City.”
“But originally?”
“His mother, I guess, was Chinese.”
“China. Interesting. And you and your husband are his adoptive parents?”
“Foster,” Kay said.
Principal Chester shuffled papers. “His English may need a little brushing up on, but I’m afraid we don’t have enough foreign students in this school district to warrant an English as a Second Language class.”
“His English is perfectly fine. He was born here.”