The Expatriates (11 page)

When Tammy returned, she handled the divorce quickly and cleanly and then proceeded to get extremely fit. She ran like a maniac, did yoga almost daily, played tennis with even more vigor and enthusiasm, and lunched and dined with her friends frequently and publicly, as if she was showing the world that she would not be cowed by what had happened. She looked fantastic. Garth was no longer in Hong Kong, so people didn’t have to make the choice between them, which was convenient. She lived her life as normally as she could until one day, in the middle of a match, she got frustrated when an opponent contested one too many points, and she threw her racket down on the court, got her gear, and disappeared for the second time.

Later she surfaced in Lantau. Perhaps the ashram’s lessons had kicked in a little late, but they kicked in. Hong Kong was too small to ever disappear for long. Lantau was an island a ferry ride away, filled with expats who eschewed the materialistic, shiny world of the main island. It was grotty and small, and people kept beehives and made their own jam. And there she was, at IFC, on a trip to the mainland, as it were, smiling at Hilary and all but unrecognizable.

She was perfectly normal, asking how David was, saying that Melissa had just graduated from the University of Vermont and that Mark
was operating a food truck in Portland. She seemed happy and asked after other women who had been on the tennis team with them. Hilary just couldn’t get over how different she looked. They parted, professing intentions to e-mail, to call, to have lunch, both comfortable in the knowledge that none of those things would come to pass.

Hilary is a little bit older now, and she thinks that Tammy may have finally got it right. Who gives a damn? Just make yourself happy. She was a miserable person before all that happened, she really was, excluding people from committees and throwing cocktail parties to which a few people were never invited, and now she seemed happy. She didn’t seem to work but lived simply. But who knows. She might be miserable and spend her evenings plotting revenge, but to Hilary’s eye, she had made the best out of an impossible situation. Could you spend the rest of your life being angry? She supposed you could, but it was never good for you in the end. When everything you thought was yours was taken away, and the foundation of your life shifted so you have to start from zero, you might find out who you really are. You might come up against that dark, immovable wall of truth. And that is probably the most frightening thought of all.

Hilary shifts in her bed, takes a last gulp of her drink, looks over at the absent spot beside her, and thinks, where on earth is her husband?

T
HIS
IS
WHAT
she smells when she comes out of the bathroom from her shower: a thousand stale exhales, humid with alcohol and cigarette smoke. This is what she sees: the man in her bed, his bottom half covered by the sheet, snoring. She sits down in her chair, wrapped in her towel, wondering what to do next.

It happened so quickly. She went home from the hotel and showered and took a nap. When she woke, at ten, she wanted to go out for something to eat, and something had pulled her to Il Dolce, the mere utterance of the name several hours ago suggestion enough. Maybe something might happen. She was talking to Richard, the bartender, on her second glass of sauvignon blanc when he walked in, the man from the afternoon at the hotel bar. David. The night accelerated into strobe lights and chaos. From bar to restaurant to club, he shouted his life story at her: a wife, no child, an orphan (she couldn’t remember whether he was an orphan or there was one in his life), disappointment, no solace at home. Then to her house. Messy coupling, not finished, dizziness, spinning ceiling. She looks at the sleeping man: this new and different animal, older, married, complicated. Different from the pale, anomic twenty-somethings who usually inhabit that space.

Her phone buzzes. Her mother is texting her: “What r u doing?”

“Getting ready for work,” she writes back quickly. “Text later, already late.” It’s Saturday, but her mother doesn’t know her work schedule, or even what she does exactly. The best thing about texting is that it makes phone calls obsolete. She doesn’t need to worry about her
voice quavering or her eyes tearing up on Skype. She hasn’t had to talk to her mother in months—all communication is through texts.

Her mother doesn’t know about what happened, about the incident. Her mother doesn’t know, and her father is a bastard. She wishes she could tell her mother what happened. But she is afraid of making the fortune come true. By acknowledging what happened, by articulating it to the universe, sounds, words that can never be called back, it will become reality. She is indeed the unluckiest girl in the world. How will her mother react, to find that what she feared most has manifested itself? She can imagine the sharp intake of breath, the quick silence afterward while her mother tries to conceive of how she might best help her child. Because that’s what mothers do—they protect their children, no matter what. Mercy knows that in the matter of mothers, she has been blessed. Her mother, unhappy, still loves her daughter.

Of course, Mercy might be surprised. Her mother has always told her that Koreans are a hardy people, that what she and her family survived, with the war in Korea and then immigrating to a country where they didn’t speak the language, Mercy would never understand. “You think your life difficult,” she says. “You don’t know. In Korea, our lives so hard.” But this is not a high school misunderstanding or a lack of a job. There has been a disappearance, a crime, probably a death. There was
fault
.

Mercy hadn’t known those Reade kids very long, but they had liked her, and she had liked them. When she had gone out to where they lived, she had been amazed. They lived on the South Side, an area you got to by going through the Aberdeen tunnel, through a mountain basically. When you emerged, it was all sea and sky and rich suburb. She had passed by there before, on trips to Stanley or to Shek O Beach, but she had never gone into a high-rise with glossy marble floors and doormen and lobbies and gyms with gleaming new equipment. They had playrooms with colorful padded walls and what seemed like hundreds of toys, as well as a sparkling blue swimming
pool outside with fancy deck chairs. Mercy grew up in a tiny two-room apartment in Queens, and she still remembered the day in elementary school when she realized that sometimes a family lived in an entire house. That not everyone lived in a room with a hot plate and Korean blankets on the floor.

Still, the Reade children were lovely. Not spoiled or entitled at all. She had an easy rapport with them. Daisy looked up to her. (She was too young to know otherwise, the way you idolize your high school teachers when you’re young and sometimes, when you come back for reunions, you realize a few are drunks or so very sad.) Philip liked how she was amenable to everything he wanted to do, and G, well, G was just the most scrumptious boy, a little love of a child. She was never one of those people who adored kids—she had babysat at Korean church gatherings and viewed children as cattle to be herded, mostly—but G was so sweet, slipping his hand unexpectedly into hers a mere five minutes after she arrived at their house the first time. There was no guile or fear in him. He expected to be loved, because that was all he had ever known.

And now he is somewhere she cannot imagine. That is, if he is not dead in a ditch somewhere. The fact that it was both her and Margaret watching the kids gives her a little bit of comfort. Except that Margaret went to the bathroom, implicitly giving her all the responsibility in that situation. And she was watching all of them—really she was! G was out of sight for five seconds, maybe ten, when Margaret came out, wiping her hands on her pants and asking where her child was.

She tries not to think about that day, she really does. She doesn’t see how it will help her. It is, indisputably, her fault. That much is clear. But it’s also indisputably just shit bad luck. She remembers trying to disappear, not knowing where to go. She couldn’t help, couldn’t speak Korean, couldn’t do anything except be the villain. At the police station, each new officer arriving to speak with her had a rebuke on his face, not only for her crime but for the fact that she couldn’t speak
Korean—a useless girl. She was a disgrace to her country, and a careless girl who brought disaster to those around her. She answered all the questions for the report, and when it became clear that she could go home, she didn’t know what to do. Out of the question to return with the Reades—a more terrible situation she could not imagine. So she got a taxi to the hotel, getting there ahead of the Reades, stuffed all her clothes in her bag, and then asked the concierge for a recommendation for a cheap hotel. She was directed down the street to a
yogwan
, a local inn, where for fifty dollars she got a room not much bigger than the length of her and a bundle of thick, colorful blankets to be spread on the floor as a bed. Every Korean family had a set of these blankets, and after she spread them out, she lay there, cold, feeling a scratchy, unclean blanket over her, wondering what on earth she was going to do now. Every time she blinked, she prayed that she would wake up from the nightmare she was in, and every time she opened her eyes, the horror remained the same. The homeliness of the room seemed just right. A person like her should never enjoy anything nice again. The enormity of her guilt and her pain and the awfulness loomed so large it blocked out everything in her mind, so that all she could do was think about breathing another breath.

There was an old vacuum flask in the room, so she went downstairs and filled it from the hot water pot in the lobby, just to have something to do, just to feel something. She was grateful for the simple gesture the woman in the lobby made, helping her to work the lever. This is a person, she thought, who doesn’t know what I’ve just done. The woman’s nod and smile were like a salve to Mercy, who didn’t expect kindness from anyone ever again after what had happened. She sipped the hot water, felt its warmth trickle down her throat, shivered, and wondered if she’d ever feel warm again.

Somehow, at some point that night, she fell asleep. When she woke, she felt fine for a few seconds, and then the memory of the day before came roaring back. She washed up and tried to figure out what to do next. If she returned to Hong Kong, would it seem as if
she were running away, and a fugitive? She had to stay. She also had to let the Reades know where she was in case they needed something else from her. Finally, she went downstairs, borrowed paper from the desk clerk, and wrote a note saying that she was at the
yogwan
and for them to call her if they needed anything. Then she walked to the hotel and dropped it off at the front desk.

She never heard from them, and she spent three days waiting before she paid her bill and took the bus to the airport. She left them another note, saying she was leaving, and sat, dry-eyed, for the entire three-and-a-half-hour flight home. She still hadn’t cried. She hadn’t been able to eat for three days, drinking only the hot water from that flask, and she felt empty. She soon became used to that feeling.

That was about a year ago, give or take. She was never able to tell her mother, and her friends found out through reading about the incident in the paper and putting two and two together. They e-mailed or called and came to sit with her. Most were ham-handed, only muttering inanities like “That’s so intense” or “Wow” until she wanted to beat at them with her fists. A few thoughtful ones brought food so she could eat. From these friends, she felt only their acute sense of relief that such a thing had not happened to them, that they were only the cars cruising by and seeing the pileup on the highway. She imagined what they said to one another afterward, how they talked about her, until she couldn’t bear it and stopped answering people’s e-mails. Then she started combing through magazines and the Internet for stories like hers, and what happened to the person who didn’t
commit
the crime—that wasn’t her—but was somehow responsible for it happening. To wit: the drunk-driver man, the chimp owner. These shadowy persons, she came to find, were never there. They were erased from the story as if they had never existed. They were inconvenient and culpable, and no one wanted to hear about them.

So it’s come to this moment, when she’s sitting here in her chair, damp from the shower, looking at a man in her bed, a married man she first laid eyes on a mere twenty-four hours ago. And there’s this
feeling she has, this good, tingly feeling, that this is her first step out of this netherworld, that this might be forward motion. She doesn’t know how or why, but it’s the first good feeling she’s had in months, so she’s going to hold on to it.

The man on the bed stirs.

Let it not be like a bad movie, she prays, where the man groans and rubs his head and asks where he is and is ashamed and wants to leave and it’s so awkward.

Instead, he lies very still after his initial entry into consciousness, like a cornered animal, thinking what to do next while being watched by his predator. Then, wonderfully, magically, he sits up without embarrassment, naked, shaking off any vulnerability he might have had when he first woke, and looks straight at the young girl, sitting on the one other piece of furniture that can be squeezed into the room, arms wrapped around her legs, staring at him.

“Good morning,” he says genially. “What’s for breakfast?”

T
HE
FAME
. That had been unexpected. Fame, infamy, whatever you called it. The police had said that publicity was good, and so she had allowed herself to be photographed, she had agreed to news conferences, she had stood up and pleaded for her child to be returned to her, with a Korean translator by her side. She and Clarke had been on all the local and news channels, the local ones making much of the fact that she was a quarter Korean, although she had never felt more foreign, and that Clarke was a Yale graduate, because Koreans loved brand names. For a few days, every newspaper, every news broadcast, had mentioned their story, which was what they wanted, with the photo of G plastered everywhere. There had been articles bemoaning the breakdown of Korean society and the rise of crime and all that was wrong with the modern world.

The abduction had also made the news in Hong Kong, because of their Hong Kong residency. But later, when it had all quieted down, the unwelcome development was that she was now known in Hong Kong, recognized, when she went to the supermarket to buy bananas, or to town for a doctor’s appointment. People, mostly women, stared at her for a beat too long, or nudged each other surreptitiously when they saw her. She supposes it is a little bit like being a celebrity, when so many people know you and you don’t know them at all.

At dinner parties, mostly, people were prepped in advance, she assumes. This happened to Margaret, they were told, so best not to talk about certain subjects, like children, or traveling to Korea. But it was amazing what people said nonetheless. A woman she knew only
slightly tried to be provocative and knowledgeable and said it was great that the case got so much attention, and that it was probably because she and Clarke were so photogenic. Margaret stared at her and wondered why she always had to be the bigger person. She wanted to scream at the stupid cow and tell her to shut her fucking mouth forever, but she just nodded, and then she got up and walked away. Later the woman said to other people that it was understandable, of course, but Margaret Reade had become so uncommunicative that it was hard to get through. The number of people walking through life with sub-par emotional intelligence was incredible.

She knows what it’s like to be them, though, to have tragedy slip by your door so closely you can feel its chill. She
was
them before. A child drowned at a birthday party, a raging bacterial infection that could not be checked—tales told in whispers in case saying them too loudly would summon misfortune to your doorstep. These things happened, and people knew, and people went on living, because what choice did they have?

She has woken up early today, as she usually does, to a still house. The dinner party last night was fine, no one too obtrusive or obnoxious, but at one point she caught Clarke’s eye and they smiled at each other, chagrin-filled smiles, as if to say, here we are. She was seated next to Hilary’s husband, David, who was drunk at the beginning of the party and got progressively worse. He was drinking whiskey when everyone else was sipping wine. Hilary ignored him; everyone ignored him. Then he disappeared at the end of the night, saying he had an appointment. Poor Hilary. Margaret hadn’t known that Hilary’s marriage had gotten to that stage. Last she knew, they were thinking about having kids, and having some difficulty, but she hadn’t really heard anything more.

It’s good to go out sometimes, good to go out and interact with new, different people. Someone once told her that if you keep pretending it’s normal, it’ll become normal at some point and you won’t even notice when it happens. She’s still waiting.

But now they’ve come home and gone to bed, and now there goes the blare of her alarm clock. It’s been over a year since G disappeared, and Clarke had brought up the idea gingerly: what to do for winter break, do you think we should go away, the kids could really do with a holiday.

Tickets to the tropical Thai island of Phuket have been bought, a beachside hotel has been booked, a connecting door for the two rooms an absolute must. Because that’s what normal families do, she supplies in her mind. They go on vacation. Because it has been so long, because there is nothing left to do that she can think of, because she is worried about how much time Daisy spends in her room, because staying in a quiet town over Christmas seems terrifying, because her therapist says she needs to metabolize the grief and try to live life.

She goes downstairs and checks on the children. They are still sleeping, and their suitcases are lying open, mostly packed but still needing the last-minute things: the toothbrushes, the toiletry kits. She hovers over them, watching their breath coming in and out in small bursts, their small faces at peace. Philip still shares a room with G’s bed, empty for a year now.

She has packed her and Clarke’s bag already. Packing for hot places is easy: swimsuits, flip-flops, shorts, all taking up barely any space. Back in her bedroom, she adds sunscreen, a camera, to the bag. Clarke is starting to stir. She goes in to take a shower. The house starts to move: She hears Essie start the coffee machine, Philip going to the bathroom.

Margaret’s frighteningly efficient travel agent, Rosalie Chan, arranged this vacation. She is the type who, if she asked a question on e-mail and did not get a response within three hours, would keep e-mailing, asking if you had gotten her e-mail. She constantly scours her computer system for cheaper fares for her clients and books one type of ticket as a placeholder before exchanging it for a cheaper one, ad infinitum until the ticketing deadline. She is efficiency and diligence personified. Margaret, used to more desultory service types,
marvels at her energy. She met her only once, years ago, in her rickety office building in Central on Wyndham Street, and it was awkward and strange, and they mutually implicitly agreed to continue only on e-mail. They have a sort of magic rapport online and none in real life.

Rosalie had, of course, asked some unanswerable questions when Margaret told her to look into a Christmas break in the Philippines or Thailand. What room configuration? What activities? She had just found a business-class seat to Phuket that was just a hundred dollars more than coach; did she want it for herself and Clarke and they could put the kids in coach? Of course, when she sent the itinerary through, G was on it, because how could she have known? And Margaret, of course, didn’t take his name off—how much could she be expected to bear?—and when they get to the airport, there is his name, and the Cathay Pacific check-in attendant is asking where is G, and Clarke is staring at her but not saying anything because, of course, he understands.

What she can’t stand, also, is how many “of courses” there are in her life. The sympathetic women murmuring “of course” all the time. How do you tell your travel agent that you lost your child, literally lost him, more than a year ago, and that now you’re going on vacation? Of course, it’s impossible.

The check-in woman tries to say their seats are canceled because G is not there and they are on a special group ticket—another side effect of Rosalie’s superb efficiency in getting them the best tickets for the cheapest prices is that they are usually immutable in their classification and resistant to any sort of change in plans or attempts at spontaneity. Somewhat like Rosalie herself, Margaret has thought on more than one occasion. Clarke sorts it out by raising his voice and demanding to see the manager—typically American behavior, which is amplified in an unusually distasteful way in Asia. When he does this, when
she
does this, to be really honest with herself, the usually dormant 25 percent of herself that is Korean raises its head and asks why a big, rich white man is shouting at a poor, small Asian person.

Clarke waves at her to get the kids away so they don’t have to listen to their father angrily explain their situation to yet another person. The manager, a thin young man in his thirties, listens, bewildered, to the insane story he is being told.

They sit on the bench and wait for it to get sorted. Airports must get this all the time, she thinks. Like hotels or other clearing spaces, there must be tragedies and romances and happy endings every single day. Criminals on the lam, boys pursuing girls, families separated and reunited. The departure halls and detention rooms must be filled with tragic stories, the arrivals lounge with unbelievable happiness.

The boarding passes get issued finally, and they go through immigration, but Clarke is still fuming. In all fairness, he probably is angry at her but had to take it out on the airline clerk because he can’t yell at Margaret. Later in the lounge, where they go because Clarke travels so much he’s a VIP, he sits next to her and says, “Margaret, I understand why you did it, but come on! That was so much worse than it needed to be. Daisy and Philip are upset now.”

And they are. Daisy’s reading on her Kindle, and Philip is playing his DS, but their faces are tight and withdrawn.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Because that’s all she can say. She can’t say it won’t happen again or anything that will help the situation. She can just express her feelings of empathy for what her husband is feeling. Clarke sighs and heads over to the noodle bar to get a bowl for a late breakfast.

After the short flight, they are greeted in arrivals by a smiling young man holding a wooden sign with their name in one hand and a tray of cold, damp towels in another. Escorted to the car and offered water, they settle in and set off for the hotel. They have been to Phuket once before. It was their first vacation after they moved to Hong Kong three years ago. Margaret once heard a woman deride the island as the “expat starter vacation.” They stayed at an American chain hotel on the beach. This time, they are staying at a French chain hotel on the beach. She didn’t want to go to the same hotel.

“There is no way forward in these countries,” Clarke says, looking at all the young men sitting outside. “What are they going to do with their lives?” Margaret looks at the people talking, drinking beer, some animated, some resigned, and thinks, This is life. These people are living. They are not waiting. But, of course, some of them must be. Just as they cannot see her and what she is doing, how she is not living.

She shakes it off.

In a bright voice, she says, “No matter how many times it happens, I can’t believe that we can be in one place in the morning and then in another country in a few hours. And they speak a different language and eat different food. Isn’t it amazing, guys?”

Daisy nods, still reading her Kindle. Philip is looking out at the streets.

“Do you think we can surf?” he asks his father. “I want to try surfing.”

“Sure,” Clarke says. “I’ll try it with you.”

“What do you want to do, Daisy girl?” Her mother ruffles her hair.

“Maybe snorkeling?”

“Let’s see.”

They arrive at an enormous thatched-roof lobby, then are brought into a reception area overlooking a wide reflecting pool filled with lotus flowers. They can hear the sea and smell the humid tropical air. They are seated on red Thai silk sofas and given a fruity drink and more hand towels while Clarke registers at the front desk. The first time they did this, Philip put his feet up and said with satisfaction, “This is the life!” and they laughed, and then G did it and they laughed again. Clarke looked on with pride, seeing the life he had provided for his family: Thailand! And in such style! Margaret thinks, she will not do this for the whole trip. She will not think of the last time they were here and when G was here.

They go to their rooms and get their luggage, unpack, and change.

This is when she really feels like she’s on vacation: when she changes into a sundress and applies sunscreen to her kids’ faces. It’s so visceral:
the smell of coconut sunblock and the feel of the white lotion, the light cotton of your dress on your pale body.

She unpacks the children’s clothes and puts them away, finds their toothbrushes, stands them up in a cup in the bathroom.

Is the change from three to two that different? There’s that funny equation that people talk about when they’re having children. The first is the hardest. The second is hard because it impacts the first so much. Then some say you don’t even notice the third. Others say you’re going from man-to-man to zone defense, that funny football analogy. But what is the reverse? Going from three to two means it’s simpler in terms of management. Two parents, two kids. Two girls, two boys. Simple. With a ghost in between.

They leave their room and walk down to the pool. The paths are wide and paved, and they pass housekeeping golf carts and smiling employees who greet them in the traditional Thai way, palms pressed together as if in prayer, murmuring, “
Sawadee ka
.” Large palm trees sway overhead, providing shade. There’s that disorientation that happens the first day in any resort—not knowing how to get from your room to the breakfast restaurant, to the pool, to the health club. By the end of the vacation, everyone is at home, familiar with the layout, just before they have to leave.

By the pool, they acquire loungers, towels, cold drinks. Margaret sits under an umbrella someone has set up perfectly so she is in the shade, sipping an iced tea, with a hat and dark sunglasses, the very picture of relaxation. But this is what she is actually doing, if anyone looks carefully: She is closing her eyes, trying to conjure up a picture of G. It is so difficult. She is getting panicked, heart racing, that his picture won’t pop up when summoned. It is so hard now to get a visual of him. She has a picture of him in her bag, but she doesn’t want to cheat. So she lies there, eyes fluttering, finding it harder and harder to breathe, feeling this sick sense that she is losing him all over again.

How can she not picture her child on command? So then she tries to picture Clarke and Daisy, and Philip. She is relieved to find they
don’t spring instantly into focus either. So then she tries to think of a photograph, and then she can imagine all their faces. So this is how it starts. You remember the child. Then you remember the photograph. What comes next? These generations of memories. They fade.