The Leavers(12)

Two transfers later and the purple line was running above ground, and Deming and his mother looked out the window at signs in languages they didn’t recognize. “This one’s for socks,” he said, pretending to read, “that one’s for dogs.” Near the end of the line the signs switched to Chinese, and his mother read each one out to him in a funny voice, deep and low, like a radio announcer. “Going Out of Business!” “Immigration Troubles?” “We Cure Bunions!” He liked her like this; he could trust that she was his. He kicked his legs in the air as she slapped her thighs in a giddy beat.

They had traveled to Queens, from one Chinese neighborhood to another, and when they emerged from the subway the buildings were lower and the streets wider, but the crowds and the languages were similar, and despite the cold air Deming could smell familiar aromas of vegetables and fish. It was a frigid, hard bite of a winter afternoon. Stopping at a corner, she introduced a new game. “There could be a Mama and Deming who live here, too, another version of us.” Like a best friend but better; like a brother, a cleaved self. They chose the building this Mama and Deming would live in, a short one with a flat front like theirs on Rutgers Street, and watched mothers and children walk along the sidewalk until they found a boy Deming’s age and a woman his mother’s height, her hair also cut so it settled in wisps against her chin. Like his mother, she wore a navy blue coat, and could be mistaken for her son’s older sister.

“Can’t we ask them to come over?”

“We shouldn’t disturb them, they’re busy. But let’s watch them, okay?”

She steered him into a bakery and he begged for an egg tart. In those days you could buy three for a dollar, but she refused, said it was a waste of money, and they sat at a table without buying anything, examining their doppelg?ngers through the window. The boy leaned up to his mother and she bent down to talk to him as they crossed the street. In the boy’s palm was a glazed, puffy object. A flaky yellow pastry.

“Can I have an egg tart? Please?”

“No, Deming.”

He pouted. Sometimes Yi Gong had let him guzzle Cokes for breakfast, but she never bought him anything.

“I want to meet them.” He stomped his boot on the floor. Again she said no. He tore down the sidewalk after them. “Wait!” he yelled.

They turned around; they knew Fuzhounese. The Other Mama was older and skinnier, and the Other Deming was eight or nine and not five or six, square-faced and squinty-eyed like the kind of boy who might light bugs on fire for kicks. A fat crumb of pastry dangled from his bottom lip. In the moment before his mother yanked him away, Deming met the Other Deming’s eyes and the Other Deming said, in English, “Hi?” Then they walked off, fading into a sea of winter coats.

“They’re gone,” Deming said. “They left.” Frightened, he longed for Yi Gong. “Are you going to leave me again?”

“Never.” His mother took his hand and swung it up and down. “I promise I’ll never leave you.”

But one day, she did.

BY JULY, DEMING’S MOTHER had been gone for five months. Ever since the February day she disappeared, he had been waiting for a sign that she’d be back, even a sign that she was gone forever.

The summer was one big dead-end sign. The city had been too hot for weeks, the sofa’s upholstery sweaty against Deming’s thighs during the long, overheated afternoons. He and Michael batted their faces against the rattling plastic fan and sang la-le-la-le-la, the vibrations taking their words and spitting them out in a watery brown croak. They melted ice cubes in glasses and sucked on them, dug into cushions to search for forgotten change for Mister Softee runs, the ice cream always a letdown, soggy orange sugar that soaked into its cardboard shell before Deming even got his tongue in.

The rest of the school year had been a derailing. Principal Scott said Deming could go on to sixth grade if he went to summer school and made up the subjects he had failed, but Deming didn’t feel like going.

“If you don’t go, you’ll be left back,” Michael said.

They sat on a metal railing, a row of benches below. Even Crotona Pool, which they’d gone to last summer with their friends, had lost its appeal.

“Fuck this summer,” Deming said, tasting the pleasing heft of the words. “Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, too.” Michael’s consonants were resonant with spit. “Don’t you want to graduate high school?”

That was not my plan, Deming heard his mother saying. Fuck a plan. He contemplated the drop-off to the street. An odor of rot mingled with more familiar scents, flatulent exhaust and sweet garbage, searing pavement and grass. Pot smoke and perfume. Somewhere, a barbecue.

“Dare you to jump down,” he said.

Michael laughed without making a sound. “It’s not far. I’ll make you jump.”

Deming sat with his knees bunched up, jabbing his chin into the air like Leon did when he knew you were full of shit. “No one’s making me do anything.”

“We’ll all be in sixth grade and you’ll be stuck in fifth.”

“Shut up.” Deming slid off the railing. On W. 184th, Michael trotting alongside him, they passed Sopheap’s building, the same as all the others on the block, squat and brown or taller and gray, the windows full of other families, the sidewalks noisy with other kids. They paused and observed the window where the same plastic blinds hung, the ones they had seen so many times from the inside of Sopheap’s apartment. But that summer it seemed like their friends had never existed, that they, like Deming’s mother, had vanished with no guarantee of return.