The Leavers

On the drive to Ridgeborough, fighting jet lag, he’d entertained them with light observations about the differences between Fuzhou and New York, talking about traffic and smog, the menu at Pizza Hut, his Speak English Now students. How it didn’t snow there, it was that far south. He felt bad, offering Eddie and Tammy and Boss Cheng up for amusement, but it seemed easier than having the spotlight on Mama or himself.

Back in the house, he skipped out on church and took a nap, and when he woke up he took his guitar out of the closet. After months of not being played, the strings were still in tune. Moving between chords, his fingers and wrists loosening, he elicited color shifts he’d forgotten about: brown and aqua, ranges of mauve and pink, the squeakiest of greens. Shit, it felt great. Though he could have sworn there used to be these tiny cracks in the fingerboard that he had wanted to fix but never got around to. Or had he fixed them before he left and forgotten?

Peter knocked on the doorframe. “Reunited at last,” he said.

Daniel looked up. “Yeah, it’s been a while. Still works, though.”

“Do you notice anything different?” Peter pointed to the fingerboard. “I took it to the Music Department at Carlough and one of the professors recommended someone he knew, a guitar repairman. I thought it could use a little TLC.”

He helped Kay chop vegetables and peel potatoes for dinner. “I haven’t had potatoes in ages,” he said, as she poured canned pumpkin mix into a pie shell. She was wearing a lavender sweater he hadn’t seen before; Peter had a matching one in green. “We had rice, though. Lots and lots of rice.” Hearing himself in English still felt strange.

How easy it would be to say it: I learned so much when I was there—let me tell you about her. She had wanted me. But every time he started to say something, he stopped.

Kay passed him the pie shell and told him to put it in the oven. He set it down on the rack and closed the door. When he stood up, she was watching him, and he was afraid she would start talking about him going back to Carlough, or GA meetings.

“Was it hard?” she asked. “Being in China?”

He removed the oven mitt. “It took a while for my Chinese to come back, but once it did, it got a lot easier.”

“But still, it must have been pretty foreign for you.”

He didn’t know why, but he didn’t want to tell Kay about how he had always felt a little different there, even if he could speak the language. “Fuzhou’s a big city, though, real modern.”

“Your father and I were reading an article about how women in China are still second-class citizens. It makes sense, I suppose, with the cultural bias against girls.” Kay shook her head. “Polly, your birth mother? She must be very brave to have the kind of career she does.”

“It’s not really like that,” he said. Though she was brave, and in ways Kay didn’t know about. And sure, it could be hard for women in China, harder than it might be for women here. But it bothered him, talking about Mama like this, when she wasn’t here.

“It’s a shame, really, when you think of the ways these women might have flourished if they’d had access to the right opportunities and education. They could be doing so much better, so much more.”

“She’s doing great. A lot of women in China have college degrees.”

“Oh, I just had an idea. Maybe I’ll talk to someone at Carlough about starting a scholarship for a female Chinese student.”

She wasn’t listening to him. He recalled how she and Peter had insisted on English, his new name, the right education. How better and more hinged on their ideas of success, their plans. Mama, Chinese, the Bronx, Deming: they had never been enough. He shivered, and for a brief, horrible moment, he could see himself the way he realized they saw him—as someone who needed to be saved.

No. He felt queasy, terrified. He balled his hands into fists, pushed them into his pockets.

Kay leaned over the oven, checking the timer on the pie. “Do you want to make the whipped cream? You always loved doing that. Licking the bowl and all.” She took down the mixing bowl from the cabinet. “It’s good to have you back. I mean, I’m glad you had the opportunity to explore your roots, but I’m also glad you’ve come home. The house felt lonely without you here.”

The oven warmed the kitchen, filling it with the scent of baking, sugar and butter and cinnamon. In the living room Peter had lit a fire, and Daniel could hear the crackling flames, classical music on the stereo. His guitar was upstairs, restrung and repaired, his bed piled with favorite quilts. “It’s good to be here,” he said, and got the cream from the refrigerator.

He slept: for twelve hours, waking up at four in the morning, taking long naps in the late afternoon. At dawn he lay awake in bed, the room slowly sharpening, and remembered walking around Fuzhou with his mother, biking in the park with Yimei, his bumbling first days in the Min Hotel. All of it so peculiar and distant, like someone else’s life.

He spent the week watching television, barely changing out of his sweatpants or bothering to go outside. On New Year’s Eve, Kay and Peter were asleep by eleven, and Daniel fell asleep in front of the TV after watching the ball drop in Times Square, pop stars singing to crowds of drunken tourists. He woke up to an infomercial for acne medication.

His footsteps muffled by wool socks, he walked around the house in the dark. Even with his eyes closed, he knew he could put a hand out on a wall in any room and have it land exactly on the light switch, that he had to veer to the right of the bookshelf in the living room in order to not bump into the corner of the end table where Kay kept her magazines, that there were fourteen steps up to the second floor. Every floorboard, every square inch of the house remained with him. Yet there was so much that this house, that Peter and Kay, would never know. He stood against the kitchen wall, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, the sound of his own breathing. If he couldn’t feel at home in China, if he didn’t belong in Ridgeborough, then where did that leave him?

Three steps to the dining room, left turn, wall. His growth chart was still here, sketched against the doorjamb. There was a dent near the floorboard, made from a basketball he’d once bounced. Five steps to the china cabinet, its top drawer stuffed with envelopes and postage stamps, old checkbooks, a desiccated rubber band ball. He reached out a hand and closed his eyes. It was home, a home, but he knew he would have to leave here, too.

IT WAS A LONG ride to Harlem from where he had played the show in Brooklyn. Daniel and Michael lived uptown, not only because the rent was more affordable, but because it was closer to Columbia, where Michael stayed late, after his classes, to work in the lab. With the grant money he received, he’d been able to move out of Sunset Park.

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