The Leavers(108)

“One moment,” he said. “Let me check.” I waited. Then the man got back on the phone and said, “Your debt has been paid. Your balance is now zero.”

I bit my fingers. Leon must have wired my payments, month after month, when I was in Ardsleyville.

I bought an international calling card and dialed Leon’s number, the one I thought I remembered. The phone rang twice and disconnected, no answer, no voice mail. I tried again and again and again and again. I stayed in the phone booth, attempting different combinations of phone numbers, all the numerical combinations that could possibly be Leon’s, but none of them was the right one. I even dialed my old cell, a number I did remember, which was answered by a teenage girl. I had never memorized the numbers for Didi or Hello Gorgeous. With each dead-end phone call, my optimism receded, until I was crying into the sleeve of Mrs. Li’s sweat suit. You were lost; my family was lost. Fourteen months had disappeared, and I didn’t even have a place to live.

It was hunger that finally drove me out of the phone booth and into a nearby food stall, where I ate until the shakiness retreated and my despair hardened into ambition. Mrs. Li had mentioned a nail salon, one of the first in Wuyi Square, and I found the address and introduced myself to the owner, a woman whose French manicure was flaking at the tips. “I worked in New York,” I told her. “Give me ten minutes and I can draw your face on your thumbnail.” By nightfall I had a job and a rented bed in a building full of Sichuanese workers.





Eighteen



A door slammed down the hotel hallway, followed by the sounds of footsteps. I stopped, mid-sentence, and heard two women talking, their voices fading as they walked toward the elevator, and felt like I had woken up from a trance. You’d asked me to tell you the truth, and now that I had, you looked like you wished I hadn’t.

“You couldn’t call me because I was already in Ridgeborough,” you said.

“I know that now. But back then, I was so worried.”

“But you found Leon. You even saw him. Didn’t he tell you I was adopted?”

I tried to figure out what I should say.

“You knew, and didn’t do anything?”

“I didn’t find him,” I said. “He found me.”

EVERY WEEK, ON MY one day off, I looked for Leon’s family. If I found them, they could put me in touch with him, and he would put me in touch with you. I had to keep believing this. So I took a minibus to Leon’s village and went to the homes of all the Zhengs in the phone book. Imagine how long that took. But nobody knew who he was.

To get to the district government office, I had to take two city buses followed by a minibus and then walk through a wasteland of parking lots. Then I waited outside a squat building in the humidity, sweating through my one clean outfit. The door was always closed, the blinds pulled tight. The silence was eerie and there was no shade, only sunlight on bare asphalt. Finally, the door would open and an official would walk out.

“Excuse me,” I would say, as they walked past me. I’d wait until they got back from their breaks. It could be five minutes, or two hours, and I had to intercept them fast, before they disappeared into the building. I learned to bring a bag of peanuts for lunch and a bottle of water, to speak politely yet forcefully, smiling to evoke both urgency and empathy. “I’m looking for the family of Leon Zheng. I’m his wife. We got separated. I need to find his family.”

After the first few visits the officials recognized me, and they’d flinch when they saw me waiting, avoiding my eyes. “Miss Guo,” one man said, “I told you last week that family registration records were classified. Unless you found your marriage certificate . . . ”

“I’ll come back again. I’ll call tomorrow.”

I went each week and called every day until a man said if I didn’t stop asking, they would arrest me.

For months, I only spoke if I had to, avoiding the other women at the boardinghouse, who treated me with suspicion and spoke to one another in Sichuanese. I had two outfits and washed each one in the sink at night after wearing it, hung it to dry on a rack I’d constructed out of dowels and rubber bands. I worked as much as I could, until I was too tired to be overrun by guilt, fury, and crushing sadness. Sometimes, painting a woman’s nails, I’d suddenly want to scream, and on breaks I’d go into the bathroom stall and do exactly that, stuffing my fingers into my mouth so no one could hear. The weeks melted by. Days off were the worst, because there’d be no work to distract me, and my mind was fresh enough to cough up memories of you and Leon and Ardsleyville. The hours spent waiting outside the government office were an opportunity to berate myself until I wished a bus would swerve off the street and flatten me. I started working seven days a week. I did a double take in the bathroom mirror when I saw the mournful, wounded expression on my face—like I’d been permanently punched—but it also seemed a fitting punishment.

One afternoon, after I had been in China for about six months, I was painting some lady’s toenails when I noticed a strange man in the salon. I returned to the toenails, but could sense him walking closer, and when I looked up I saw the gap between his front teeth and let a blob of polish fall on my knee.

“Little Star?” he said.

I finished the pedicure as fast as I could, asked a co-worker to take my next customer and led Leon outside and down the block. He said that one of the Zhengs in his home village, a man I’d left the salon’s address with, had run into him in Mawei.