The Leavers(35)

Polish? The door shut, the locks clicked.

“I’m sorry,” Angel whispered.

Deming walked downstairs to the waiting cab and crawled in, Angel beside him.

“Twenty-first and Madison,” Angel told the driver. “Can you turn the music down?”



The Leavers |





Five



Ten winters passed. On Rutgers Street in Chinatown, where Mama and Deming had lived pre-Bronx, there was a new high-rise on the corner, a white couple talking to a doorman in uniform, but farther down the block seemed unchanged, the same buildings with their reddish brown exteriors, fire escapes, and hanging laundry. The old apartment at 27 Rutgers had been smaller than Roland’s place, but home to Mama, Deming, and their six roommates.

Daniel Wilkinson was two and a half feet taller, one hundred-fifty pounds heavier than Deming Guo had once been, with better English and shittier Chinese. Ridgeborough had made Daniel an expert at juggling selves; he used to see Deming and think himself into Daniel, a slideshow perpetually alternating between the same two slides. He wanted Deming to walk out of the building, for the two of them to do that little dance people did when they tried to pass one another on the sidewalk but kept moving in the same direction, over-anticipating the other’s next move.

Deming wouldn’t have the scar on his right forearm that Daniel had gotten from skateboarding with Roland in eighth grade. While Deming was growing up in Chinatown and the Bronx, was Daniel hibernating, asleep in Planet Ridgeborough? Or had they grown up together, only parting ways after the city? Daniel had lay dormant in Deming until adolescence, and now Deming was a hairball tumor jammed deep in Daniel’s gut. Or Deming had never left Rutgers Street; he’d been here all along.

The front door of 27 Rutgers squeaked open, and a woman with a bouquet of grocery bags walked out. Worried he might seem like a creep, Daniel took out his phone and pretended to text. He knew it wouldn’t be Deming, couldn’t be Deming, yet he felt wasted with disappointment.

Under the Manhattan Bridge, the sounds around him coalesced. The fruit and vegetable vendors here were speaking Fuzhounese, and he knew what they were saying, the words not nonsense sounds but sentences with shape and meaning. The words plowed in, discovered a former residence, and resolved to stay. He repeated them until he was confident they’d be the right ones, then moved toward the vendors.

“Hey, you,” called a man weighing vegetables in a saggy blue coat, knit hat, and jeans. He had tobacco-stained teeth, a gray beard, and one gold crown. “What do you want?” he said in Fuzhounese.

“Hello,” Daniel said.

“Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“You Chinese?”

“Of course I’m Chinese.”

He fumbled for his wallet. The word for watermelon had swum up and emerged, and he concentrated until the rest of the sentence returned. “Give me a watermelon. They’re fresh right? Good watermelon, right?” He recalled enough to haggle, bumping the guy’s price down twenty-five cents, and it felt like he’d been born again.

The man said, “Go lower than that and my family will starve, thanks to you,” but there was laughter behind his scowl.

Daniel accepted the watermelon, triumphant. He pointed to a pile of greens. “And those. Half a pound. Broccoli.”

He carried the groceries to Roland’s apartment. It was one o’clock on a Tuesday, the winter sunlight so bright he had to squint; he had no plans for the rest of the afternoon. For years, he hadn’t allowed himself to think of those days after Mama never came home, after Leon left and Vivian left him with strangers, and now he imagined his mother waiting for him on Canal Street with a cigarette, remembered her duck walk as she made her way across the ice, the firmness of her hand in his. He’d be taller than her now, but there would be safety in her hand. Once, when he and Angel had been talking about their birth families, she had asked if he still wanted to find his mother, and he said no, not anymore. It was enough for him to accept that she was gone. But he’d never had the chance to ask her why she returned to China—she hated Minjiang—or to understand why he ended up in Ridgeborough.

He stopped on a corner, took out his phone, and responded to the e-mail Michael had sent months ago, hitting send before he could change his mind:

you’ve got the right guy. what’s up?

In Roland’s kitchen, he steamed the broccoli and cut slices of watermelon. It beat eating another deconstructed burrito at Tres Locos, and was cheaper than eating out. His current credit card balance was $2,079.23, with eighteen-percent interest, and that wasn’t counting the ten thousand he owed Angel. Seeing the bill every month from the credit card company made him so anxious, he created an auto-withdrawal from his bank account for the minimum payment—last month it was twenty-two bucks. He hadn’t talked to Angel for months, but now he would have to see her on Saturday, at her father’s birthday party, along with Peter and Kay.

In high school, he’d played Texas Hold’em with other guys at parties and had a talent for noticing their tells while hiding his own, the years with Peter and Kay making him an excellent keeper of secrets. Sophomore year at Potsdam, he heard about online poker, and when he was procrastinating writing papers, he would play a few games, nothing big. Over the summer, living in Ridgeborough with a job painting new five-bedroom houses on the edge of town, he learned he had a knack for deciphering patterns online: the players who folded often and only bet when they had good hands, the action ones who bet foolishly and gambled too much. Back at school the following fall, he’d met a guy named Kyle who was winning real money, a thousand in one night, and Daniel started playing more, six, even ten hours a day, one sit-and-go tournament after another, winner takes all. Late one night he emerged from his dorm room to use the bathroom, hearing the sounds of chips and shuffling cards as he refilled his water bottle in the sink, then scurried back down the hall and resumed playing again, clicking to bet and raise and fold, betting thrice the big blind before the flop and watching his money tick higher. The hours blurred until he heard slamming doors and voices, his body cramped and sore. He’d played into the next day, or the day after. At some point, the overhead light had become painfully bright, and sunlight started falling across the keyboard. He drank Red Bulls, pissed into the empty cans. He bet the pot on a full house and realized he’d been panting out loud. The next day, he heard people shouting his name from a very far distance, and opened the door to see his hallmates there, checking to see if he was still alive. Cards moving across their faces.