pkwilkinson is calling, the window announced. Another window appeared with an accompanying message: daniel are you there?
The window pulsed and glowed. He crossed the room and shut the door, muffling the party, then sat on the bed and clicked. Kay and Peter’s faces appeared, squinting into their computer screen. They were in the study in Ridgeborough. He recognized the bookshelves, the blue wallpaper, the framed diplomas and awards.
“Daniel?” Kay said.
“Where are you?” Peter asked.
“In Fuzhou. China.”
They were talking over each other. There was a split-second delay, so Daniel saw their mouths moving before he heard their voices, and their motions lagged a little, pixilated smears of color trailing their faces. He heard Kay say, “China?” and Peter say, “Happy birthday.”
Daniel shouted into the screen. His English sounded knotty, peculiar. “I’m staying with my mom—my birth mom. I’m fine, I’m working. Teaching English. I haven’t been gambling. My Chinese is great now, I mean, it’s back.”
Kay’s face was on the verge of crumpling. “We wanted to wish our son a happy birthday,” she said.
He felt his eyes well up.
“What time is it over there?” Peter asked.
“Eight at night.” Daniel could hear the music from the living room. He wanted to stay and talk, but he didn’t want to miss out. “They’re throwing me a party here. How are you guys doing?”
Kay said she had run into Cody at the Food Lion the other day. Peter said he had watched a Tom Petty concert from 1980 on YouTube. Daniel told them he was the favorite teacher at World Top English.
“You may have found your calling,” Peter said.
“Are you going to come home? To America?” Kay asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You know you’re always welcome here,” Kay said.
“Christmas is coming up,” Peter said.
He swallowed. “I’ll have to see.”
He heard footsteps outside. “Deming?” his mother called from the hallway. “Where are you?”
“Just a minute,” he said in Fuzhounese. But the door opened and light and voices spilled into the room, and it was too late to cut the call short. He turned and saw his mother in the doorway.
“The cake is ready,” she said. As Peter and Kay watched, she picked up the visa form, which had fallen on the bed. “You still haven’t filled this out?”
She looked over him, at his computer, and Daniel could see her face on the small screen that reflected what Peter and Kay saw on theirs. His face, and her face, next to each other, looking into the camera together. He saw Peter’s expression move from confusion to recognition. Kay’s mouth hesitated for a moment before she caught herself and smiled.
“Kay and Peter? This is my mother, Polly.”
“Hello,” his mother said in English.
“It is very nice to meet you, Polly,” Kay said, pressing her lips together. He thought he detected a slowness in her words that wasn’t usually there. The three of them studied one another as Daniel tried to think of the right thing to say.
“You do look alike,” Peter said. “I can see it.”
“Thank you for taking care of Daniel,” Kay said. “He must be having the time of his life in China.”
His mother nodded, staring at the screen, and Daniel noticed her teeth clench. He wanted to protect her, but from what? When she had told him about Ardsleyville, he’d remembered what Leon had said: that there was something broken in her.
He wasn’t sure if she didn’t understand Kay and Peter, or if she didn’t have the English words to respond, or if she didn’t know what to say, but he wanted her to say something, anything, for her to be as loud and demanding and opinionated as she usually was. He hated that he could see her the way Peter and Kay must be seeing her, a mute Chinese woman with a heavy accent. Their tense smiles were making him angry.
“I should get back to the party,” he said in English.
“Okay,” Kay said. “We’ll talk to you soon, Daniel.”
“And maybe we’ll see you at Christmas,” Peter said. “Maybe we can help pay for a plane ticket.”
His mother leaned over, blocking his face on the screen, and said, in English, “His name is Deming, not Daniel.” Daniel nearly laughed out loud; he bit the inside of his lip. Then Kay’s smile dropped, and he felt the need to apologize to her and Peter. Or should he apologize to his mother instead?
He said good-bye and logged out of the program. In the living room, his friends were waiting with a cake, and his mother lit the candles and he blew out the flames, then looked up to see Leon and Yong, Eddie and Tammy, Shuang and Yimei. The sound of their clapping was a shimmering yellow, and the sound of his mother saying his name—Deming!—the warmest gold.
HE COLLECTED PLATES AND spoons, empty bottles of Tsingtao; tied up the trash bags; vacuumed crumbs from the rug; swept the kitchen floor. If he kept busy he could ward off the possibility of his mother asking him about Peter and Kay.
He didn’t want to go Carlough. He didn’t want to present papers at the Conference for English Educators. Peter and Kay had supported him, in their own way, so why did he feel angry with them? But he couldn’t let his mother down either, because while he had been playing video games with Roland and listening to Hendrix, she had been in a prison camp. She still had nightmares. At the very least, he didn’t want to make her feel bad.
Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days. Like Vivian’s belief that she had helped him, his mother insisting she had looked for him, that she could forget about him because he was okay. In the hotel room in Beijing, he had wanted to hurt her when he told the truth about Vivian paying off her debt, so then he had gifted her with a lie: that he never called Kay “Mom.”
“I saw this in your room.” She came into the kitchen in her pajamas, holding the visa form. “You must have forgotten to fill it out.”
“Leave it on the table,” he said, scrubbing at a stain on the counter. “I’ll take care of it later. Wasn’t it funny when Eddie and my students sung that happy birthday song and wrote new lyrics so it had my name? I didn’t know Eddie had such a good voice, or that Tammy was such a good dancer.”
“Stop scrubbing. I’ll clean up later.”
“We drank so much beer! No wonder the neighbors were telling us to keep it quiet.”
“Sit down. Let me do it.”
“You threw me a party.”