The Leavers(114)

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.”

“Because I wanted to. You don’t have to repay me.”

She took an orange from one of the plates of leftovers and brought it to the kitchen table. He put the sponge down and watched her peel it, rubbing the rind away with her fingernail, separating the wedges onto a plate, half for her, half for him. He stood over her shoulder and hugged her from behind. Surprised, she held his arms in her hands. Over the years, he had thought about what his life would have been like if Mama and Leon hadn’t left, if Vivian hadn’t taken him to the foster care agency. It was like watching water spread across dry pavement, lines going in all directions. Peter and Kay might have adopted another boy. He could be living in Sunset Park, or in the Bronx or Florida or some other place he’d never heard of. He had imagined his doppelg?ngers living the lives he hadn’t, in different apartments and houses and cities and towns, with different sets of parents, different languages, but today he could only see himself where he was right now, the particular set of circumstances that had trickled down to this particular life, that would keep trickling in new directions.

He sat down. His mother passed him the visa form and a pen. “I’m going to send it out tomorrow.”

He took an orange slice. All this time, he’d been waiting for his real life to begin: Once he was accepted by Roland’s friends and the band made it big. Once he found his mother. Then, things would change. But his life had been happening all along, in the jolt of the orange juice on his tongue or how he dreamt in two languages, how his students’ faces looked when they figured out the meaning of a new word, the wisp of smoke as he blew out his birthday candles. The surge and turn and crunch of a perfect melody.

“You’re going to New York for Christmas?” his mother said. “To your adoptive family?”

“No, of course not.”

“They call you all the time?”

“I haven’t spoken to them since I came here. This was the first time.”

“They want you to come home, though.”

He was like Tammy, unable to meet his mother’s eyes.

“This is my home.”

“So you’re going to stay? With me?”

It was a funny thing, forgiveness. You could spend years being angry with someone and then realize you no longer felt the same, that your usual mode of thinking had slipped away when you weren’t noticing. He could see, in the flash of worry in his mother’s face as she waited for his reply, like he had heard in Kay and Peter’s shaking voices when they said good-bye to him earlier, that in the past few months, his fear of being unwanted had dissipated. Because Mama—and Kay, and Peter—were trying to convince him that they were deserving of his love, not the other way around.

He ate the bite of orange, took the visa form and uncapped the pen, scanning the paper for where he was supposed to sign.





PART FOUR

The Leavers





Twenty



In the spring, four months after you left, I left, too. Not just Fuzhou, but my life—Yong, my job, our apartment, everyone I knew. I decided to move to Hong Kong. While you were staying with me I had pretended we had never been apart, that Ardsleyville had never happened. But when you left Fuzhou, I understood that I could also leave, and maybe it wasn’t too late.

It was a short flight to Hong Kong, less than two hours, and by the time I had gotten used to being up in the air, the flight attendants were already preparing to land. At the airport I rolled my suitcase, a small one containing all I had packed, through Immigration, then onto a train that took me into the center of the city. I exited onto a street outside a mall, where the cars drove on the left side of the road, not the right. It took me several tries to cross. Even at night, there were still crowds out, people talking in Cantonese, signs flashing in Chinese and English. I had the address of the one-room apartment I’d rented, sight unseen; and tomorrow morning I would start my new job at a school in Kowloon.