The Leavers(67)

As you filled out into a new person, so did I, and I tucked the years without you away as another triumph, another thing I’d survived; saved Leon’s voice mails and replayed them on breaks, his messages brief and to-the-point, each word I coaxed out of him a victory or a challenge. Leaving for work soon. Call me tomorrow. I’ll be home by eight. The same went for you. Victory when you ran to join your classmates before school and brought home drawings, when we took the train and I watched you call off the stops. At the playground, you were the first kid in your class to do a flip on the metal bars, the one who made the highest, most daring leaps between benches.

Didi called you Little Piglet, listened when you told the same stories for the five-hundredth time, indulged you in your favorite game, the excruciating one where you’d snatch your hand away whenever I tried to high-five it. “Fooled you!” you’d say. “Watch me again!” If I yawned or looked away, even for a moment, you would screech, “Keep your eyes open, Mama, you have to keep them open!” But Didi could sit with you forever, unflagging in her response each time you took your hand away. “Wow!” she’d cry. “Little Piglet, you sure fooled me. Okay, let’s try again, I’ll high five you—oh, wow, you tricked me again!” As I watched you and her, I would hear Yi Ba saying I was selfish and spoiled. Perhaps there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an infinite amount of patience for children’s games. Remorse, dormant and persistent, flapped up. I’d abandoned my father; I hadn’t mourned him enough.

Leon came to Chinatown from the Bronx, took us out to lunch on a street near the Manhattan Bridge. The cook knew him from his ship loading days back home, and the customers hunched over round metal tables that faced windows beaded with salty broth, steam eking onto the sidewalk. Three noodle shops on one short block, sweating and striving beneath the bridge’s tail, each shop with its own specialty, beef broth, chicken broth, pork broth, lamb. Here there was only one dish, noodle soup with lamb.

“Sst,” Leon said, and a man in an apron stood up from behind the counter, dough stretched between his arms. Leon held up three fingers and pulled out stools. Spilled soup splashed our toes. The waitress set our bowls down with plastic cups of tea, wiping the liquid on the table with a dishcloth, and we slurped, sucking soft chunks of meat between our teeth. Chewy and thick, the noodles were perfect; the soup tasted like a favorite memory. Your face shone with pleasure. Leon burped and put down money for the meal.

“Where are we going now?” you asked.

Leon looked at his phone and calculated the time left before his shift. “You like boats?”

“Yi Gong used to have a boat,” you said. “Are we going fishing? Yi Gong used to fish.”

“You don’t want to eat the fish in this river,” Leon said. “The fish here comes out with two heads.”

The snow was melting, its surviving remnants peppered with dirt beneath icy top crusts. “To the bottom of Manhattan,” Leon shouted. It was the Staten Island Ferry, a bright orange boat braying a hippopotamus honk. We stood on the deck as it shambled through the water, me with my arms around you, Leon with his arms around me.

Leon had been in America for nine years and his English still sucked. But the fees had been lower when he came over, so he had already paid off his debt. I kept asking myself if I should go for a guy who could get me a green card, or find one who liked to read newspapers and could help improve my English. It drove me crazy that Leon spat on the sidewalk, pushed onto subways as people were trying to get off, cut lines for cash registers like he was still in Fuzhou. But the way he strung his curses together in dialect, quick like running water, his striking familiarity, made me laugh and join in. He listened to me complain about work, and even if he didn’t have a lot of money, he bought me food, spent time with you. I saw how happy he made you. We walked around Central Park, Battery Park, Madison Square, and he liked seeing trees and water, had also grown up around fishermen and farmers. Yi Ba would’ve liked him; he’d never be mistaken for soft. And look at the man. Who else—besides you—had made me feel wanted, singular, different?

On the boat, Leon whispered so only I could hear. “What if you lived with me, Little Star? You and Deming?”

I wanted to remember this moment even as it was happening, to imagine it as already gone.

SPRING WAS NUDGING IN, the streets fuller, noisier, the city flung open with new colors and lights. We walked, hand in hand, after I picked you up from school.

“Can I have a plane?” you asked. “There’s a plane I saw, in a book.”

“You took a plane here, to New York. Did you like it?”

“I was sleeping.”

“One day, you’ll take another one.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Around the world.”

The bakery had lime green lamps shaped like helmets. We ordered bubble tea in fluorescent colors and pierced the tops of our cups with oversized straws. “Drink your tea,” I said. “Don’t blow bubbles.”

You made a farting sound with your lips. “I like tea.”

“Do you like New York?”

You sucked up more tea and eyed me across the table as you blew a soft, loose bubble. “Yes.”

“What do you like about it?”

“Subway.”

“Do you miss China?”