He heard Kay saying, “He’s upset, feeling left out.”
And Peter’s forced whisper, which Deming recognized from listening through the bedroom wall: “He’s used to getting all of our attention.”
They must have left the restaurant while he was in the bathroom. Peter spotted him first. “Daniel, there you are. Were you looking for us?”
Defeated, game over, he walked toward the Wilkinsons, let Kay steer him closer until he was sandwiched between her and Peter. “Elaine and Jim are still inside getting change,” she said.
Angel came outside, pointing at him. “You disappeared.”
There would be no Bronx, no having to call to explain. “I went to the bathroom.”
ANGEL AND DEMING SAT in Angel’s room as the adults drank wine in the living room.
“What happened to your bio mom?” she asked.
“She was going to go to Florida and I was going to move there with her. She might’ve gone to China.”
“Elaine and Jim said I was found in an orphanage in China. They paid money and got me and I got my Going Home Barbie and my forever family.”
Deming had noticed Going Home Barbie, a unsmiling beige doll with long blonde hair and empty blue eyes, encased in plastic on a shelf next to Angel’s bed. It held a doll baby out in front of her like it had a disease. The baby had a fringe of black hair and rectangular black eyes that he recognized as supposedly being Chinese, and the box had a drawing of a white house with a picket fence and a sign: WELCOME HOME!
“It’s a collectible. My friend Lily doesn’t have one because her parents stayed at a different hotel when they went to China. Her mom was so mad.”
Deming nudged a stuffed tiger with his toe. “Do you really believe in that? The red thread, all that?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“Yeah?” Angel deliberated.
“Bull-shit.” He squirmed under Going Home Barbie’s deadened gaze.
“Are you hot? I can ask Elaine to make the air conditioning higher.”
“My real mother might be in the Bronx.”
“You mean she’s there now?”
“My Yi Ba might be. Or my aunt, my brother—cousin.”
“Let’s go.”
“How?”
“I know how.”
He reached into his pocket. “I have five bucks.”
“Wait.” Angel kicked her way across the room and Deming watched her carefully. If she was going to tell on him, go fetch Peter and Kay, he was prepared to take her down. It wouldn’t be hard; he was bigger than she was. He bounced up on his ankles, ready, as she rummaged through her closet and pulled out a pair of pink stockings. “Daniel,” she said. “Look.” Inside the stockings was a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Deming sat back on his heels, laughing. “I steal them from Jim,” Angel said. “He doesn’t care.”
THERE WAS NO GUEST room or study in the Hennings’ apartment, so Kay and Peter had to cram onto an air mattress in Angel’s room, while Angel and Deming camped out on the living room floor, waiting until Gotcha Day hangovers defeated Elaine and Jim and the early morning rise overcame Kay and Peter. When snoring could be heard from both bedrooms, they stuffed towels into child-sized shapes under their sheets and made their move. Angel pressed the code to disarm the alarm system, keys in her pink plastic purse, Deming close behind her, backpack in hand. He resisted the urge to whisper good-bye to Peter and Kay. They skipped the elevator and took the stairs down ten flights, dashing out the service exit. On the corner Angel hailed a cab. Deming had assumed they would take the subway but Angel said no, she had it covered.
“We’re going to the Bronx,” Angel told the driver. “Our parents gave us money.”
“University and W. 190th,” Deming said. “My family is there.” As he said it he felt a cold lump inside him, growing. This call cannot be completed, the lump whispered. But she wouldn’t have abandoned him. The cab driver fiddled with the radio. “Can you turn the music up?” Deming asked, and the car filled with drums. Deming repeated Mama, Mama, Mama, and directed the driver as they pulled off the highway and entered the Bronx, and there it was, the glowing insistence of the Kennedy Fried Chicken sign, the shadows of subway tracks and the aching rise of the sidewalks up the bend in the block. The sneaker shop, the liquor store, the bodega. It all looked exactly the same. These past eleven months, everything had gone on without him. Forget Peter and Kay, forget Roland and Ridgeborough. He was home.
“Want me to wait?” the cab driver asked, but Deming was already out the door.
“Wait five minutes.” Angel unzipped her purse and passed the driver two of Jim’s twenties.
Deming couldn’t slow down for a second. Up the sidewalk to the dog-piss patch of weeds, through the courtyard, that masking-taped crack in a bottom window. He pulled on the front door and it opened. Angel was following him, up the first flight of stairs, linoleum groaning under their feet, up the second, faster, past chattering television sets, closer now, and as they jumped to the final landing, he saw it there.
A welcome mat. A green-tufted welcome mat resembling ill grass. The cold lump had been right. Leon and Mama never had a welcome mat.
“Is it here? Here?” Angel bounced in excitement, anticipating the grand reunion. “Come on,” she said, and he stepped on the mat that he knew wasn’t hers and knocked. The same layers of brown paint, the same dents. He knocked again.
“Hello?” he said.
Under the door, behind the mat, appeared a slit of light. He heard footsteps and murmuring, and even if he knew it was hopeless, he pictured his mother standing in that light, Leon and Vivian and Michael behind her.
He shifted his backpack. The door opened.
“Yeah?” A short woman with wrinkled skin peered out through a gap, the chain still on.
Angel gasped.
“I’m Deming,” he said.
“Yeah? So?” The door began to ease shut.
“I used to live here. My family—do you know where they went?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said.
A younger man with a goatee came up behind her. “Ma, who is it?” The woman answered in Spanish. The man replaced his mother behind the chain. “What’s going on?”
Deming swallowed hard. “I’m looking for my family. They used to live here. Did you know them?”
“Nah, this place was empty when we moved in.”
“When’d you move in?”
“September. You okay?” The man was closing the door. “All right, kid. It’s late.”
“What about Tommie?” Deming said. “He still around?”
The door opened an inch wider. “Yeah, Tommie got married. Polish girl.”
Polish? The door shut, the locks clicked.
“I’m sorry,” Angel whispered.
Deming walked downstairs to the waiting cab and crawled in, Angel beside him.
“Twenty-first and Madison,” Angel told the driver. “Can you turn the music down?”
The Leavers |
Five