The Leavers(17)

“Who are these people?” he asked the Chinese woman in Mandarin.

“These are your new foster parents,” she said in English. “Peter and Kay Wilkinson.”

Deming jumped up. Peter and Kay Wilkinson were tall, but he was fast. He made it halfway down the carpeted stairs before he felt hands on him. “Stop, Deming.” It was the Chinese woman. “The Americans will take good care of you. They have a big house and lots of money.”

“I already have a family.”

“Your old family isn’t here anymore. This is your new family. Relax. Everything will be okay.”

Peter and Kay Wilkinson squatted on the steps. “Deming,” Kay said. “We’re going to take care of you. It’s going to be okay.” She put her arms around him. Her shirt smelled like laundry and soap. His mother had been gone for half a year. And now Leon and Vivian were gone, too. Nobody wanted him.

Deming leaned against Kay and she stroked his hair. “There,” she said, victorious, and she laughed, a peal of delight, a flag unfurled in the sun. “It’ll be okay.”

He followed the Wilkinsons out of the house. On the drive upstate he fell asleep and missed his last glimpse of the city, woke up in a car parked in front of a large white house with a wraparound porch, tall trees looming. In the city it had been one of those steam-chamber August afternoons that felt like dying, but here, in the shade, it was cold.

Peter turned off the engine. “Welcome home.”





Four



One week later, tucked into a double bed sheathed with red flannel, Deming Guo awoke with the crumbs of dialect on his tongue, smudges and smears of dissolving syllables, nouns and verbs washed out to sea. One language had outseeped another; New York City had provided him with an arsenal of new words. He’d bled English vowels and watched his mother’s face fall.

He wrapped the blankets tighter around him, cold even in late August. The white clapboard house in Ridgeborough, New York, population 6,525, five hours northwest of the city, was nearly two hundred years old, Peter said, an antique. Five times the size of the Bronx apartment, seven times the size of the house on 3 Alley. Three big bedrooms: one for Kay and Peter, one for Deming, and the third for guests, a bed chubby with quilts and pillows in which nobody ever slept. Two bathrooms and two floors and a whole room for eating, another for studying and working on the computer.

A breeze snaked in through the oversized windows. The beanbags that lay across the bottoms of doors could not ward off this draft.

I am Daniel Wilkinson.

He shivered. He had never slept alone before, never had a room to himself, all this vast, empty space.

Deming heard a toot-toot of a whistle. Peter was in the doorframe, hands on hips. He liked to whistle tunelessly.

“Good morning, Daniel.”

It always took a second to realize they were talking to him. When school started, they said, it would be easier with an American name. Though it wasn’t official. His birth certificate, Kay explained, still said Deming Guo.

“Time to get up now. We’ll be leaving for church in an hour and a half.”

From downstairs wafted breakfasty odors, eggs and sausage in salty grease. Deming’s stomach rumbled.

In those early days he called them nothing, spoke to them without saying either Kay and Peter or Mom and Dad. When Kay leaned in for hugs Deming wiggled away, her hold too tight, the Wilkinsons smelling like cheese and flowers, bitter and sugary sweet. But other times he lingered. “We’re glad you’re here, Daniel,” she would say in English, then perform shapeless approximations of Mandarin words. She had learned some Chinese phrases, taken Mandarin classes and bought a Chinese–English dictionary, but her tones were so off-kilter that Deming couldn’t understand what she was saying.

“I don’t know who you are,” he’d respond in Fuzhounese.

When he spoke Chinese, Peter’s leg would bounce and Kay’s lips would press even thinner, as if they were being sucked into her body, her mouth consuming itself. “English,” Peter would warn, concerned that Deming wouldn’t be fluent enough for school, as if the English he spoke was tainted. His mother used to swat at his shoulders in a way that looked playful but felt serious when he spoke too much English and not enough Chinese; his weapon of choice had been the language that made her dependent on him. Whoever she was with now would have to translate.

The giant windows. The yard outside with its large, gnarled trees. No sidewalks on Oak Street. Hours could pass without a car going by, the absence of overt sound a trickle of gauzy peach. Deming would stand at the window and listen to the languid chirp of birds, the dim roar of a distant lawnmower. The air maintained a steady, nearly indiscernible buzz. Peach-brown gauze swept over his eyelashes.

In a corner of his new room was a pile-up of plastic games, action figures of muscular men with swords, sturdy fire trucks and police cars with miniature sirens, toys Peter and Kay said were his. (Playing cops didn’t interest him. There was nothing fun about screeching sirens.) On a shelf by his bed was a row of books, Condensed Classics for Children, paperback versions of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Last of the Mohicans, and Oliver Twist. The word condensed reminded him of the cans of milk his mother had bought as a treat, a drizzle of sugared glue atop his breakfast oatmeal. Like him, she had a sweet tooth, but didn’t give in to it often. Eduardo would offer her damp muffins encased in plastic wrap, the blueberries reminiscent of pigeon poop, but she would buy bananas instead. Occasionally there had been condensed milk, Tootsie Rolls, a package of Twizzlers.