The Leavers(85)

Nate and Roland saw Daniel and exchanged a look. The song stopped.

“What’s going on?” Daniel said. “We’re getting a second guitarist?”

“You’re out and I’m in,” Nate said. “That’s what’s going on.”

Roland walked over and said, his voice lowered, “I can’t have a band with someone who isn’t reliable.”

“I’m going to play the show tomorrow.”

Roland shook his head. “You’ll change your mind again.”

“I won’t, I swear. I’m not going to Carlough.”

“Too late,” Nate sang in a falsetto.

Roland glared at Nate, then walked Daniel out the door and started to close it. “Sorry.”

IT TOOK LESS THAN ten minutes to scoop up his things from Roland’s living room and shove them into his backpack. He left the Strat behind and grabbed his acoustic, walked up Lafayette, past the poker club, and turned onto Broadway. He put on his headphones and inched the volume up, let the music make the world louder, a glorious reverb of lights popping on like candy-coated solar flares as he listened to Bowie and Freddie Mercury’s voices bursting out in “Under Pressure”:

why can’t we give love

givelovegivelovegivelove

Without music, the world was flattened, washed out, too obvious. Daniel cranked the volume up even more, until he was awash in colors and sound and there were only lights and possibility and flying, the way it was when the guitar was translating his brain. He walked through Union Square, through the Flatiron, past people eating outside restaurants, a group of skateboarding teenagers, tourists clutching subway maps, laughing couples. Herald Square, chain stores; Times Square, more tourists. At Columbus Circle he sank onto a bench and put his guitar case down. He’d blown it.

He spent the night sipping watery coffee in a diner booth, typing angry texts to Roland and deleting them before sending. He sent a text to Angel, saying hi, hope you’re well—he texted her every few days, but she never wrote back. Port Authority wasn’t far away; he could buy a bus ticket and be in Ridgeborough in a couple hours. But Roland’s accusations had stuck with him. He didn’t know what he wanted, and he didn’t know how to figure it out.

In the morning, he took the N train out to Sunset Park, had a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese spot, killed a few more hours in a café, then headed to the only people he knew in the city who might let him stay with them.

Vivian was on her porch, watering a planter of yellow and red flowers. “Deming?” She eyed his bag and guitar case.

“Hi, Vivian.” Her eyes were shadowed by a lime green visor with VIRGINIA BEACH printed across the top, and Daniel couldn’t read her expression. “Is Michael here?”

“He’s at school right now,” Vivian said in Fuzhounese. “He’ll be back later. You want to come in?”

“I need somewhere to stay. For today, tonight.”

“Okay. Put your bag in the living room.”

This was how he ended up cooking with Vivian. Timothy and Michael would both be home by dinner, she said. Daniel looked at the clock on the wall. It was just past two. Dinner was a long time away.

He chopped garlic and ginger on a cutting board, seated at a wooden table, as Vivian browned chunks of beef. On the table was a stack of mail, fliers for local businesses, printed in English and Chinese, the one on top advertising an immigration lawyer with an office on Eighth Avenue, the accompanying photo of a woman with aggressively airbrushed teeth. This was what his life would’ve been if he had remained Deming Guo, if his mother and Leon had stayed together. They would all be having regular family dinners with Vivian and Timothy.

“Leon said he spoke to you,” Vivian said, as the meat sizzled. “He said he was happy to hear from you.”

“He gave me my mother’s phone number.” When Vivian didn’t say anything discouraging about his Chinese, he decided to press on, taking the time to remember and choose the right words. “I called her. I spoke to her.”

He told Vivian about how his mother had remarried but hadn’t told her husband about him. “I still don’t know where she went after she left New York, if she went to Florida.”

Vivian flipped the pieces of meat with a pair of metal tongs, then removed them onto a plate lined with a paper towel. “I don’t think so. Here, give me those.”

Daniel gave her the cutting board and she slid the garlic and ginger into the pot with the edge of the knife and stirred them with a wooden spoon. The room grew fragrant. “But why did she end up in China, then?”

“I don’t know, but she wouldn’t have left without you. You were all she could talk about, all the time.” She returned the cutting board to him, now piled with carrots. “Chop these into small pieces.” She put the beef back into the pot, filled it with water, clapped a lid on top. “We would talk about the plans we had for you and Michael. She’d be smoking—” Vivian mimed taking a cigarette from her lips and holding it out with her elbow, gaze to the side, like his mother used to do. “Always smoking, and she had that big old voice. And we’d have these giant mugs of tea in front of us in that little kitchen. We’d say Michael was going to become a doctor and you were going to work on TV.”

“TV?”

“She saw you working with the sound on TV or movies. Because you liked music. And TV. We weren’t so wrong, were we?”