The Expatriates (17 page)

M
ERCY
AND
D
AVID
are at the beach on a cool, temperate day. They took a taxi to Repulse Bay, a popular tourist beach on the south side of the island. They have walked the concrete promenade to Deep Water Bay and back, smelled the potent combination of seawater and dog urine, watched the joggers and the dog-walking helpers. Now they settle on the sand, a few feet from a lifeguard station.

Behind them, hordes of mainland-Chinese tourists swarm the few shops, the dilapidated temple at the end of the beach. Guides holding flags raise them aloft to herd their charges.

“Awful,” David says, speaking of the crowds.

“It’s changed a lot,” Mercy says. “There didn’t used to be so many.”

Silence, but not uncomfortable.

“The beach is man-made, you know,” Mercy says, having gleaned this fact from some guidebook when she was writing a piece on Hong Kong beaches for the magazine. “And they widened it a while ago because it was so crowded.”

He scoops up some sand, pebbly and coarse. “It’s pretty terrible sand,” he says. “They could have brought in better.”

She peeks at him from under her cowboy hat, worn to give her a jaunty, devil-may-care attitude. They are sitting on a woven straw mat, the kind that folds up into its own bag. She has brought a six-pack of beer and some potato chips in a supermarket bag, and when he asks for water, she doesn’t have any. She looks around and sees that the other people have coolers and Tupperware containers full of food, and she feels inadequate. Or maybe just young. He doesn’t seem to mind,
just pops open a beer and lies down on the uncomfortable mat, propping his head up with the towels they have brought.

He’s still somewhat of a mystery, David, all sharp edges, and she hasn’t had the courage to unravel him any further.

The sun is bright, though, today. It’s a crisp March morning, and she can feel the winter slipping away.

“Weather’s great,” she says, just to say something. He nods under his baseball cap, his fingers lying on top of the beer can.

She gets up to walk along the shoreline. It’s a man-made beach, but there is still life. She sees small fish darting around in the waves, spots a bleached-out crab shell. She thinks of making seafood stock, how you boil the shells of shrimp and crab until the liquid becomes something briny and flavorful, and looks out at the roiling cauldron of the ocean, housing all that life. So she goes back to David, who may or may not be asleep, and taps his shoulder.

“I’m pregnant,” she says.

She found out earlier in the week, lying in bed, waiting to drift off into a nap, when the thought clanged into her head, causing her eyelids to spring wide open.

She hasn’t had her period in a while.

She sat up, all drowsiness gone, and raced to her phone, where she pulled up the calendar and did a quick calculation. Five and a half weeks.

She sat down on the bed. She was usually pretty regular, but she has never really noticed when her period comes and goes. She wasn’t on the pill. David used a condom most times, except when he didn’t. He had trouble getting his wife pregnant, or she wasn’t able to get pregnant, so he never really thought about it, he said. Life is shaggy, unpredictable, and who has time to be a hundred percent safe all the time? Certainly not Mercy.

She took the elevator down and walked to the nearest Mannings, where she perused the aisle where they sold ovulation kits, pregnancy
tests, and condoms all together, in some frenzy of family planning and unplanning. With the test in a small bag, she walked home, wondering how the next fifteen minutes were going to change or not change her life. She wasn’t scared.

When the line showed up, she took a deep breath and looked in the mirror. She held the test next to her head and looked at the mirror image. Her face, flattened against the glass. Here I am, she thought, a pregnant girl. Do I look like a commercial? Should I be radiating happiness or worry? What is this image?

Following the test, she thought, abortion, but after that, nothing followed. She had always abstractly thought of abortion as a right, as a reflexive action, but now, with the idea that there was a baby, her baby, inside her, she felt unexpectedly protective. A tadpole, a little bunch of squiggling cells that would become the chubby-cheeked cherub in the baby formula ads that she suddenly notices plastered all over double-decker buses and billboards around Hong Kong. She has a baby inside her.

Being pregnant feels like another irrevocable step toward becoming an adult, like the first time she got her period and tried tampons and when she went out, she looked around at school and wondered how many girls had tampons inside them. Now she looks at all the pregnant women and is amazed that she is one of them.

It’s been three days, and she’s been sitting on this information, not knowing what to do with it.

She looks at David, who looks as shell-shocked as one might imagine.

His nose is already turning red in the sun. He is fair, she thinks. Our baby will be a mix of my Korean skin and his fair English skin, or is he Irish or German? She doesn’t even know.

“Wow,” he says. “Just . . . wow.”

She doesn’t know what else to demand or expect, so she just pops open a beer and takes a sip before she remembers she’s pregnant. He doesn’t tell her not to drink. She wonders what sort of sign that is.

They sit, and he doesn’t say anything else for a long time. She
doesn’t drink any more beer, just puts the can down in the sand. She’s afraid to look at him, to say anything, not wanting to cede any ground or give him any indication of where she’s at. He should give her that, she thinks. He owes her that. He should give her a hint of what he’s thinking.

Finally he says, “That’s quite a big load to drop on me.”

“Well, I’ve been carrying it around for a few days, and I didn’t know how else to tell you.” She suppresses the urge to apologize.

“As you know,” he starts. “As you know . . . I was trying to have a baby, with my wife, for a long time.”

“Yes,” she says.

“And we were never successful. And I got tested, and they said I had low, you know, fertility, with the sperm and all, which was just one of the issues, because Hilary had her issues too . . .” He looks abashed when he speaks his wife’s name. “Which is why I never took that many precautions when we . . .” He trails off again. “Anyway, it’s clearly not impossible.”

“Clearly,” she says.

He looks at her, surprised. Maybe that came out a little more abruptly than she meant it to.

“Be a good guy,” she says.

“What does that mean?” he asks.

“Just be a good guy.”
Don’t be an asshole. Don’t be like everyone else
.

He raises his eyebrows. “I want to be a good guy,” he says. “So I’ll just say, we will figure it out together. And I will be respectful of whatever you want to do. But you also have to give me a little time to figure out what I feel about this. It’s a lot.”

“I know,” she says.

“Do you want to stay?” he asks.

“I guess not,” she says.

As they gather up their things, she wonders at how she can ruin even the smallest excursion. Maybe she should have waited until they had relaxed, enjoyed the beautiful day. Instead, she blurted it
out in the first fifteen minutes. Other people must have better ways to deal with things like this, better ways to lead their lives. She can sense, in a murky, shapeless way, how small decisions lead to big effects. If she were able to manage the small things better, her life would be better. But she is powerless to change the way she interacts with the world. Things just happen the way they do to Mercy.

They flag down a taxi from the beach, and he drops her off at her building after a halfhearted offer to have her come over, which even she is too proud to accept. He leans over and kisses her on the cheek. “Take care,” he says. “I’ll call you, okay?”

She nods and slides out. She comes into her apartment lobby to see her mother, sitting on a plastic stool, looking tired, a big ugly suitcase next to her.

“Mercy!” her mother says.

“Mom?” she says.

Her mother is here. Holy shit.

T
HEY
’
RE
HAVING
BREAKFAST
when Clarke tells her he wants to invite David to his birthday party. The birthday party that is no longer a surprise, since she casually mentioned it to him by mistake a few weeks ago, something about the Careys being in Thailand on the date and not being able to come to the party. He blinked, said, “Great.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oops.”

Now he wants to invite David Starr. He tells her this while buttering his toast.

“I don’t want to,” she says.

“Is it my party or yours?” he says lightly. He can be surprisingly obstinate about some things.

“It’s your birthday, but it’s my party,” she says, smiling, still, a little bit.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he says.

“He did a terrible thing to my friend!” she tries to explain.

“Oh, are you and Hilary friends now?”

“You have to choose sides, you know.”

“Actually, you don’t. And actually, we don’t know what happened. And it would be awkward if I didn’t invite him. We have a lot of mutual friends, and we do some work together.”

Margaret watches her handsome husband wipe his mouth with a napkin.

“I know what happened,” she says.

“Let’s talk about it later,” he says, giving her a kiss on his way out the door.

Priscilla has worked her magic, chosen a caterer, talked about
lighting, flowers, music, specialty cocktails. It’s going to be big. Over a hundred people, more like a wedding. Names she got from Clarke’s secretary and had Margaret vet, because Margaret hadn’t been able to generate anything by herself.

Later, when Margaret checks her phone, it won’t swipe open. It works only every fifth or sixth time, and then not at all, presenting her with a black screen no matter what she does. Being without a phone makes her feel as if she doesn’t have an arm, so she decides to go to the store to get it fixed.

But every single day is filled with little traps. She decides to switch handbags, from a black one to a brown one she hasn’t used in a while, when she discovers a little red plastic dinosaur in the side pocket. And an old dusty lollipop. They were treats from the doctor when they went to get G’s shots the year before. A punch to the heart. She sits there on the floor of her bedroom, again, with the contents of her bag strewn around her, and clutches this cheap plastic dinosaur and the lollipop and tries to recalibrate her life so she can live it for the next five minutes. Then blinks, gets up.

She goes downstairs, where the newspaper is waiting. She reads it with another cup of tea. Today in the Mainland News column, a story of a boy who was kidnapped as a child and then found his way home through Google Maps. A picture of him with his newly found parents, with awkward positions and tentative smiles. Now in his twenties, he had been adopted by a family who loved him, but he always remembered the landmarks in his old village, and he tracked down his family. In China, this must happen every day, children going missing, being kidnapped, abducted. In a country of a billion, what is a child a day?

She wonders if his parents will be a disappointment. If he will love them, or if he is too ensconced in his new life to have room for them. She went to a lunch for an organization dedicated to the rehabilitation of sex workers in India a few years ago and was told that many girls go back to sex work after being freed, because it is the world they
know and all their friends are there. It’s too hard to go out and forge a new life and easy to fall back on the old one. This organization is trying to help them stay out of their old trade by teaching them a new one: making bras and panties. They showed photos of brightly colored underwear and the young girls who made them, and Margaret couldn’t help but wonder if there was any other clothing they could have made, something not so suggestive, like hats, or socks, or scarves.

She closes the newspaper. The house is quiet, with Essie dusting or mopping or whatever she does to keep the house immaculate. Oh, yes, she was going to go get her phone fixed before being derailed by the handbag. She drives to the mall and goes to the phone store, where they sell her a new phone and try to persuade her to add another line to her account.

“No,” she tells Jingo Wong (another odd name!). Does he know his name alludes to extreme patriotism? “No, thank you.”

He swipes on his own phone, but not before she sees a photo of him with his girlfriend. They are wearing matching furry white hats. A glimpse into another person’s life—and all the attendant love and heartache therein.

“If you get the new number, you get the cheaper price for the phone,” he tells her helpfully. “Can start the new contract.”

But she can never even think about altering anything about her cell phone account. She remembers teaching her children her telephone number. “Six two eight eight . . . ,” G would say, as if it were a magic incantation, so pleased with himself. She imagines him chanting the number now, in a small, windowless box, remembering it for when he can call it, for when he is older and can do something about his situation. She told him about country codes, but how much can a child be expected to know? Still, she cannot ever give up this phone number.

She worries sometimes that her inability to move on is just narcissism, that she cannot imagine her child not needing her. Everyone always talks about the resilience of children, how they adjust to new lives, how they survive, and she sees this sometimes, has seen it, in small
moments: when Daisy was lost for a few minutes when she was five, and how she hadn’t cried out, how she had slipped her hand into another woman’s, believing she would take care of her; or how they settle into new situations so quickly and don’t look back once their parents are out of sight. This is how you can tell the survivors, she supposes. But while she wishes G is happy, she cannot imagine such a thing.

She thinks about what she would say to him if he came back. She knows that the children who come back talk about how they are afraid their parents don’t want them anymore, that they are defiled, or that what they had to do to survive will be held against them.

“I love you,” she would say. “I love you no matter what happened, what you said, what you did, what you thought. I understand. I understand. Mommy loves you no matter what.”

Her eyes fill whenever she thinks these thoughts, and she feels secretly ashamed, as she is being indulgent or maudlin, definitely, or again, narcissistic somehow.

Jingo comes back from ringing up the sale on her new phone. She thanks him and leaves.

The mall fills up with office workers looking for lunch. She is hungry but leaves the mall so she can go to her favorite Vietnamese place on Stanley Street for pho. Margaret lines up with everyone else and is given a number. Soon she is led to a table already occupied by three other people. She sits down, points to what she wants on the menu, and waits.

Around her, people chatter away in Cantonese. This is a local place, and she is the only nonlocal. The food is good and cheap, and she loves coming here. When the pho comes, she dumps in the tiny red peppers and the sprouts, inhales the pungent steam of the broth. She eats quickly, sweat beading on her temples as the peppers fire up in her sinuses and her mouth starts to burn. Simple things: taste, smell, heat. She takes a sip of water, sits back, her hunger sated. She is sitting with a twenty-something man and two women, who must work together. They chat animatedly, dropping in an English word
here and there, taking no notice of her. It feels good to be totally anonymous. She pays the bill and leaves.

It’s time to go home, to be there for when Daisy and Philip return from school. As they come in the door, shedding their backpacks and scuffed sneakers, she hugs them, gets them a snack, and watches them drink milk and eat, her babies.

Daisy gets up and surreptitiously signals to her mother to follow.

“Mom,” she says, “I think I got it.”

“What?” Margaret says. “Got what?”

Daisy huffs with frustration. “You know, the thing. Remember the tea?”

Oh. Margaret vaguely remembers going to a tea for mothers and daughters the previous spring, at which adolescence and sexuality were discussed. She had still been reeling and barely functional, but she had gone for Daisy, so she could be there with her mother.

“You mean your period?”

“Yes! I have this kind of brown stuff coming out.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she says. “Does your stomach hurt at all? Like cramps?”

“A little last night, but I didn’t know why.”

Margaret pulls her into her bathroom. “Here.” She reaches down to the drawer and gets out pads and liners. “Why don’t you start with these? You can let me know if you want to try tampons, but try these first.”

Daisy takes the packages and, looking uncomfortable but relieved, hugs her mom.

“Thanks, Mom,” she says.

“Go experiment with them,” Margaret tells her.

Her daughter leaves.

Margaret remembers when she was fully engaged with everything, before everything happened. Moms talked about everything and gave one another advice on what to do, what stage was coming up for their kids. She realizes now she has no idea what is going on with sixth-grade girls, what other things are going on.

When Margaret first got her period, she remembers, her mother showed her the pads and told her to rip the outside part off, wrap it in tissue, and then flush the cotton down the toilet. She did that for a while before she realized that no one else did. These are all our little mysteries, she thinks.

Her phone buzzes on the counter. Her messages are coming in now on her new phone. There’s an e-mail from Mr. Park of the Seoul police.

“Please call,” he writes. “I need some information from you. There is new development.”

Her heart stops.