The Leavers

He saw a family heading onto a crooked side street, nearly hidden in the high-rises, and followed them along a stone wall plastered with signs exhorting the importance of washing your hands after you sneeze. Stepping over puddles with an oily sheen in the center, he walked into a courtyard. The noise from Wuyi Square had disappeared, and the buildings reminded him of the houses on 3 Alley, two-story homes with brick walls and hanging laundry. Children played as old women sat on plastic stools and fanned themselves with newspapers, talking about how so-and-so’s daughter was marrying so-and-so’s son. Inside the houses he saw families cooking and eating dinner. A lump formed in his throat.

He found a noodle stall tucked between two of the houses and ordered a bowl of vermicelli noodles in pork broth with vegetables, glad nobody commented on his Fuzhounese. The food appeared and he scarfed it down, drank cups of watery tea until his headache subsided. On his way back to the hotel he got lost, went the long way around a construction site of eerie half-demolished structures, and by the time he found Wuyi Square, it was dark.

No new messages for him in the hotel room. Daniel took a long shower, filling the bathroom with steam clouds. He called his mother again, left her another message, then lay down. He woke at seven in the morning with the light streaming through the open curtains. She still hadn’t called him. A heavy stinging grew behind his eyes. He had made it here, but she didn’t want to see him, and he had no one to go home to.

Two mornings ago, he had left Ridgeborough with nine hundred and sixty bucks in his bank account. During a lull in the middle-of-the-night drama with Kay and Peter, he quietly cashed out of the game, charged a ticket to Fuzhou leaving from the Syracuse airport the following afternoon, and deleted the poker account. On the corner of Oak Street at seven in the morning, he called Cody.

“Can you do me a huge favor?” he’d said. “I need a ride to the airport.” Cody arrived in his Jeep with a good-bye present, a baggie of Vicodin from his recent wisdom teeth removal, for Daniel to take on the flight. When Daniel checked in at the airport and cleared security six hours early, he sat at the empty gate and realized he was shaking. In the end, he hadn’t been able to do what Peter and Kay wanted. Three more semesters of classes, followed by graduate school. Staying upstate. He hadn’t been able to do what Roland wanted either, play the music Roland wanted him to play. If he could just talk to his mother in person, maybe he could figure out who he should be.

Now, in the hotel, he wished he had her address. All he knew was what she’d told him on the phone, that she lived in a neighborhood called West Lake and worked in a school that taught English. He called and left her another message, took the elevator down to the lobby. “Can you look up an address for me?” he asked the clerk. “A Polly Guo. Or Peilan Guo. She lives in West Lake.” She might have changed her last name when she got married, but he didn’t know her husband’s name, only that he owned a textile factory.

The only phone book the hotel had was five years old. The clerk flipped through the pages. “Guo . . . Guo.” She ran her index finger down the pages. “I don’t see a Polly or Peilan. Here’s a Peng, Pan . . . There are Guos with a P sound for first name, but the addresses are nowhere near West Lake Park.”

“Do you know of any English schools nearby?”

“You want to learn English?” the clerk said.

“Um—sure.”

“My friend goes to an English school near the highway. I can ask her for you.”

“Is that in West Lake?”

The clerk opened a drawer and took out a bus map. “Look, we’re over here.” She pointed to a spot. “West Lake Park is up here.” She traced a line across the city, her finger stopping on a square of green. “You can take this bus, the stop is two blocks away.”

Daniel asked if there was any way he could check the Internet. He could try looking up English schools, use an online translator to convert the Chinese words into English, call around and see if any of them had a Polly or Peilan working there. The clerk said there was an Internet café not too far away, but it wouldn’t be open for another hour or two. “Do you want breakfast?” She gestured to the far corner of the lobby, where there was a group of tables behind a partition, and said breakfast was included in the price of the room.

At the tables were men and women in matching green shirts. Daniel took a seat next to a guy with a stringy goatee, across from a couple talking in Mandarin. A hotel employee came over and asked what room he was staying in, checked a notepad and deposited a tray with a bowl of watery congee, small plates of salted peanuts and pickled vegetables, and a box of soymilk with a tiny straw. Daniel peeled away the plastic wrap on top of the congee and ate a spoonful. It tasted like boiled cardboard.

Nobody else at the table had finished their food. “Are you part of a school?” he asked.

“We’re on tour,” said the woman across the table. “We’re doing ten cities in fifteen days.”

The guy with the goatee looked at Daniel’s congee. “Don’t eat that bowl of hemorrhoids. There’s a bakery down the road. We’re going there after this.”

Daniel laughed. “This congee tastes like ass.” He loved cursing in Chinese, the breadth of options unavailable in English. He had trouble remembering the words for map and computer, but curses, those he knew by heart.

He pushed his tray away and got up. In his preoccupation with finding his mother, he’d forgotten to call someone. “Have a good tour,” he said. He went upstairs and called the second most foul-mouthed person he knew, second to only his mother.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING in that crap hotel?” Leon shouted on the phone.

Following Leon’s directions, he took a bus to a neighborhood on the other side of the highway, walking through streets less populated than the ones in Wuyi Square. Leon lived in a block-shaped building with concrete siding, five doors across each of the four stories, metal railings along the edge of the walkways, one big rectangular grid. Daniel walked through the gravel lot and up the stairs. The walkways were crowded with bicycles, plastic coolers, beach balls, and flowerpots. In front of one apartment was a giant stuffed teddy bear with bright blue fur, crammed into a child-sized lawn chair.

He rang the bell for apartment number nine. A pink tricycle was locked to the railing opposite the door, decorated with stickers of cartoon characters. He heard footsteps, the sound of a latch lifting.

“You’re here!” Leon’s hair was choppy and grayer, his chest and shoulders thinner, but his grin was the same.

“Hi, Leon,” Daniel said, unable to suppress his own smile.

Houseplants hung from the ceilings, on shelves and tables and windowsills, their long green tresses stretching lines down the walls. Daniel followed Leon through the main room to the kitchen, where a woman was reading a newspaper at the kitchen table.

“This is my wife, Shuang,” Leon said.

“Hello, Deming,” Shuang said. “I’m glad to finally meet you.”

A little girl was at the table, too, with Leon’s wide mouth and Shuang’s narrow face. Her legs swung in opposite directions, alternately tapping the metal chair legs in two-four time. She was bent over a coloring book, ponytail swinging as she gripped her blue crayon with concentration.

“Yimei,” Leon said to the girl. “Say hello to your cousin, Deming.”

She looked up. “You’re my cousin?”

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