The Leavers(71)

Leon tossed the ball. You caught it and lobbed it back. How did I get here? A flock of birds flapped over the trees, but the sun was shining so hard, it hurt to see.

SECOND GRADE TURNED INTO third grade, third grade into fourth, and your English grew from timid to fluent, you and Michael learning how to keep secrets from Vivian and me. At P.S. 33, the kids were Cambodian, Mexican, Filipino, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Vietnamese, Guyanese, Dominican, Haitian, Ecuadorian. They were all from other places, or at least their parents were.

Michael was skinny on the bottom but wider up top, shaped like a bobble-headed toy, with an array of similarly undersized friends who also became your friends, Hung and Sopheap and Elroy. The year you were in fourth grade, you and Michael talked about something called Power Rangers as if they were actual people in the neighborhood.

“Who is this Timmy? A kid from school?”

You and Michael writhed on the couch, slapping your thighs, clapping your hands. “Tommy, not Timmy! He’s not a kid. He’s the Black Dino Ranger.”

“Black . . . die?”

“What?” Vivian said. “Who’s dying?”

You and Michael shrieked. “Dino, not die! Dino, dino, dino!”

When I watched you and Michael play catch in the park, I was proud because you could throw the ball harder, faster. Still, while you were stronger and more fearless, Michael was the A-student, and you were bad at school, like I’d been—I could memorize lyrics to pop songs and figure out the precise mix of colors to make a certain shade, but never the multiplication table—and neither Leon nor Vivian were scholars, which made Michael’s grades a fluke, random enough it might as well be you who was the good student, you the one who said things like “when I go to college.” I knew it was unfair to compare you two when Michael had never lived anywhere except New York, but when he chose to read a library book as you sat in front of the television—and yes, I was likely right there next to you—watching a rerun of a rerun you’d already seen four times, claiming to have lost your homework yet again, I felt exposed for my own lack of interest in books, unless they were the books on art and painting Coco brought to the salon; those I liked to read. You’d been slow to learn English. Your sweat had a cabbage-y odor that I was convinced was Haifeng’s genetic bequest. You always took the biggest piece of candy, gorging yourself before others took a bite, banged chicken wings on your plate and pretended you were playing the drums. Chunky and padded from the food you ate, your shirts rode up around your waist, and you teetered on fat, outgrowing new pants overnight. As if I had money to buy new clothes all the time! I worried it was my fault when you acted impolite or selfish, that it reflected a deficiency in myself.

Hana had left Hello Gorgeous to run a dry cleaning business with her husband and brother, but I remembered how her two children were going to high schools in the city, ones they had to pass a test to get into.

“You’re too hard on him,” Leon said. “He’s not doing so bad.”

I had been in New York for ten years and often reminisced about those early months on Rutgers Street, a time so desultory I would wake up in my sleeping bag each morning startled by where I was and what I had done. Back then, the passing of each day had felt inconsolable, as if there would be no end to the uncertainty—the baby, the job, the debt—but I revisited that first year in New York more than any other time in my history, loved to flip it around, marveling at my youth, how scary and exciting it had been, how so much had changed since then. Even the time I took you to the factory seemed safe enough to remember, though I always backed off when I pictured what things would have been like if I hadn’t returned to the bench where I had left you.

There was this one Sunday, about a year before we were separated again, that we rode the subway to a point you picked out on the map. It had been a long time since we had done this. We ended up downtown, at the tip of Manhattan, walking on a winding pathway that overlooked the water. I missed it, the water.

“We used to come to this park when you were a baby.”

“I don’t remember,” you said.

You were looking more like me, the same eyes and mouth and nose, the broad shoulders and bony legs, though when I saw your face in profile, I’d see how much you could also resemble Haifeng with the point of your chin and your bushy eyebrows. Then you would turn another way and look like me again.

We sat on a bench and put our feet up on the railing. The water sparkled. I pointed into the distance, to a large boat moving away from the city.

“I have a new nickname at school,” you said. “Number Two Special.”

“What does that mean?” I felt self-conscious, like when I took you and Michael to that carnival and you made fun of me when I mistook the English word octopus, the name of a ride that spun you around in circles, for lion.

“It’s a joke. You know, from a Chinese takeout menu? That’s how they order the dishes. Number one special, number two special. Get it?”

I watched the boat until it became a white speck, fading into the skyline. “You don’t work in a takeout restaurant.”

“Yeah, but I’m Chinese.”

“You better tell them not to call you that.”

“It’s a joke, Mama.”

I TOOK OUT ANOTHER loan to cover fees for nail art training. Intricate designs became my specialty. I could draw palm trees, diamonds, and checkerboard patterns, even a recognizable depiction of a person’s face on a thumbnail, though I didn’t know why people wanted that. On a good week, I made more in tips alone than I had earned working at the factory. Rocky called me a customer favorite, and everyone said I had a steady hand, an eye for the best color combinations.