The Leavers(33)

The waiter stopped at their table. “What would you like?” he asked in English.

Before Elaine could respond, Deming spoke in a rush of Fuzhounese. “She says she wants to order the red bean dessert, you got that?” He’d forgotten the pleasures of flinging vowels, the exhilarant expulsions. He knew his tones were pure 3 Alley.

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” the waiter said.

“Great, bring it on. These American cows want a couple of bowls.”

“You got it.”

Elaine put down her chopsticks. “He’s fluent in Mandarin!”

Deming hated Jim and Elaine’s outsized smiles and exaggerated speech, how they spoke to him and Angel like they were little kids, how Peter and Kay didn’t seem to notice. He had the sensation that he was being mocked, that they all saw him and Angel as objects of amusement.

“It’s not Mandarin,” he said. “It’s Fuzhounese.”

“You know, the local slang,” Peter said.

“Daniel,” said Kay. “Don’t talk like that to Mrs. Hennings.”

“But she’s wrong,” Deming said. “She’s stupid.”

“Daniel!” Peter said.

“But it’s not local slang. It’s a language called Fuzhounese.”

Jim laughed. “It’s all Chinese to us dumb-dumbs.”

“You don’t know,” Deming said. “You don’t even care!”

“I’m so sorry, Daniel,” Elaine said. “It’s my fault for getting it mixed up. I mistook it for Mandarin because I studied it in college.”

“Daniel, say sorry to Mrs. Hennings,” Kay said.

“Sorry.”

“He can be so sensitive,” Kay said to Elaine.

“It’s okay. Obviously, that was in prehistoric times, when I was young and in college,” Elaine said. “But I was an East Asian Studies major, so I should know better.”

“Oh,” Kay said, “remind me, I need to ask you to help me with my terrible Mandarin. Daniel laughs and laughs when I talk to him with my Chinese.”

“I do not!”

“Of course.” Elaine smiled at Kay. “We’ll talk later.”

“I studied international finance in college,” Jim said. “We’ve both always had such a strong fascination with Asia. So it made sense that we decided to get our little girl from there.”

“We didn’t get her,” Elaine said. “We were already bound by red thread.” She over enunciated the words. “You must know the story of the red thread, Daniel. It’s an ancient Asian story.”

“Never heard it.”

“The red thread story! It says that the people who are destined to be with one another are bound with invisible red thread. And that’s how Angel and Jim and I were all connected with red thread, and how we found each other in our forever family.”

“You don’t know the story?” Angel said.

“I said I’ve never heard it.” He couldn’t believe Peter and Kay were nodding along with Elaine and Jim. “Can I be excused for a minute?”

In the bathroom, he washed his hands with a grimy soap bar and looked in the cloudy mirror. He saw skin like Angel’s, eyes and nose like Angel’s, hair like Angel’s.

He could sneak out now. There was a subway station not too far away they had passed on the walk over, and in his pocket was a five-dollar bill, more than enough for train fare. He could sprint from Fordham and University, sneak into the lobby and rush upstairs, knock like crazy until the door opened. Whoever was there would screech when they saw him, they would all scream and scream. Vivian and Michael could still be there. Leon and his mother could have come home.

He slipped in with a family making its way to the exit, three generations of parents and children and a Yi Gong, matching their pace out the door and onto the sidewalk.

He heard Kay saying, “He’s upset, feeling left out.”

And Peter’s forced whisper, which Deming recognized from listening through the bedroom wall: “He’s used to getting all of our attention.”

They must have left the restaurant while he was in the bathroom. Peter spotted him first. “Daniel, there you are. Were you looking for us?”

Defeated, game over, he walked toward the Wilkinsons, let Kay steer him closer until he was sandwiched between her and Peter. “Elaine and Jim are still inside getting change,” she said.

Angel came outside, pointing at him. “You disappeared.”

There would be no Bronx, no having to call to explain. “I went to the bathroom.”

ANGEL AND DEMING SAT in Angel’s room as the adults drank wine in the living room.

“What happened to your bio mom?” she asked.

“She was going to go to Florida and I was going to move there with her. She might’ve gone to China.”

“Elaine and Jim said I was found in an orphanage in China. They paid money and got me and I got my Going Home Barbie and my forever family.”

Deming had noticed Going Home Barbie, a unsmiling beige doll with long blonde hair and empty blue eyes, encased in plastic on a shelf next to Angel’s bed. It held a doll baby out in front of her like it had a disease. The baby had a fringe of black hair and rectangular black eyes that he recognized as supposedly being Chinese, and the box had a drawing of a white house with a picket fence and a sign: WELCOME HOME!