The Leavers(117)

“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.

Daniel trudged up the stairs of the subway station, down the four blocks to his building, and up the five flights to the apartment. When he unlocked the door, he was glad to see the lights on, and that the place was warm and smelled like food. He unlaced his boots, took off his coat, and put his guitar on his bed.

There was no couch, TV, dining room, or kitchen table. They ate on the floor, using a blanket as a tablecloth. Each of the bedrooms was large enough for a twin bed and nothing else, with space on only one side of the bed to squeeze in and out, and there were no closets, so Daniel had put his box spring up on concrete blocks and stored his clothes in plastic bins underneath. Over the past three months he had replayed his memories of Fuzhou until they lost their potency, leaving only a sense of awe: I went there. I did that.

Michael’s door was open. Daniel knocked on the wall and said, “What’s up, brother?” in Fuzhounese.