The Leavers(43)

Your adoptive family probably lived near Central Park in one of those big-ass brick buildings with a gold-plated name on the outside and a doorman in a uniform.

When the episode ended, the heroine and her lover hiding from the king’s army, Yong and I went to bed. We had a large, firm mattress. Thick, soft sheets. “Long day,” he said, laying next to me. As soon as he fell asleep, I’d go out to the balcony and call you.

“Yes, it’ll be nice to get a good night’s rest.”

There was very little sound in our apartment, only the refrigerator hum and other vague whirrings that powered the constant pleasantry of the place, keeping our life steady and moderate. I looked at our high ceilings and clean walls, on which I’d hung framed prints of paintings, abstract shapes in vivid blues and greens. I loved the home we’d made together, the way we left secret notes for each other—this morning I found one that said Potatoes for dinner tonight inside my bag, an inside joke referring to the shape of Zhao’s head. I loved our wooden floors, the large windows that overlooked the city. On a clear day, you could even see a wedge of ocean. The first time I saw the water from Yong’s balcony I knew I had to live here.

What a relief it had been to find him, to have someone to come home to, letting the everyday concerns take over: lesson planning at World Top English and where to go to dinner, filling myself up with tasks and conversation and possessions until there was no longer space to think about you. This was what could happen in a city like this. A woman could come from nowhere and become a new person. A woman could be arranged like a bouquet of fake flowers, bent this way and that, scrutinized from a distance, rearranged.

It was too much of a lie to reveal to Yong now, that I had a twenty-one-year-old son I’d somehow never mentioned before. You couldn’t omit your own child from the story of your life, like it was no big deal. Yong disapproved of Lujin and Zhao putting their daughter in boarding school, and compared to that, what I’d done was unforgivable. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to remember. If I called you, and if Yong found out I had lied about having a child, he would be so angry, and then he would leave me, and I would have to give up being myself.

I was tired. I took out my pill bottle, removed a pill. Without it I’d be dreaming of brown blankets and dogs, you waving to me from inside a subway train that leaves the station as soon as I get to the platform. But the pill would push me down and swiftly under, to safety, and every morning I woke up dreamless, the hours between getting into bed and hearing the alarm clock—an urgent beeping from the shore as I struggled to swim to the surface—a dense void, eleven at night and six thirty in the morning only seconds apart.

Yong wrapped his arms and legs around mine. We lay there together, like we had every night for the past seven years. I put my head on his chest. You and Michael would be laughing, Vivian and I talking at the table.

“I know it’s a mess, but it’ll be done soon,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The kitchen.” His eyes perked. “I spoke to the contractors about the cabinets. They’re going to special order them.”

“Okay. Wonderful. Thank you.”

He kissed me. “Good night.”

I tugged my sleep mask down. Yong could fall asleep in broad daylight, but I insisted on heavy curtains in the bedroom. Sometimes his ability to sleep soundly felt like a personal offense.

I listened to his breathing, deep and regular, as the pill began to take me under. I was too tired to talk now; I’d wait and call you another day. “Good night,” I said. But Yong didn’t say anything, he was already asleep, and it was only my own voice I heard, talking to myself in that dark, quiet room.





Seven



The house on 3 Alley had been as silent as our bedroom by West Lake. My father used to say women yapped too much, that some women would be better off not talking at all. So I’d grown up eating my words, and it wasn’t until later that I realized how many had gotten backed up inside me. In the factory dorm, sentences spilled out of me like a broken faucet, and when I moved even farther away and saw children splashing into rivers spurting from fire hydrants, water pouring into the streets like it was endless, I would see my younger self in that hydrant, but tugged open, a hungry stream.

If you knew more about me, Deming, maybe you wouldn’t blame me so much, maybe you would understand me more. I can only be as honest as I know how to be, even if it might not be what you want to hear.

My mother died when I was six months old. Cancer. I didn’t remember her, never had a picture of her, nothing. In the two-room house where I lived with your grandfather, there were only two things that had belonged to her: a blue jacket and a gray comb. When Yi Ba was out on the river I would run the comb through my hair and put on the jacket, a cloth coat that smelled weakly of leaves and scalp, the threads unraveling more each time I wore it, until one day the bottom button, dark blue, four tiny holes, tumbled right off. I found it trying to escape the room but clamped my fingers down and kept it safe inside the bag where I stored the comb.

“Was she smart?” I asked Yi Ba. “Was she pretty? What was her favorite fish?”

He’d go, “Sure, sure.”

I decided my mother had been a short woman with wavy hair, because I was short and my hair was a little wavy. There was this mother in the village who had a voice like a chiming bell—“Come here, Bao Bao,” she’d say at the produce market, “don’t play in the dirt”—and whenever I was sad about not having a mother, which wasn’t that often, I’d replay this chiming voice, pretend the woman was saying my name (Peilan, I was Peilan then) instead of Bao Bao’s.