The Expatriates

Hilary

IN THE SPRING, the odors come. The outdoor tiles are wet in the morning with accumulated moisture, and when you sniff, there is a sharp, moldy tinge to the air. It means the heat is coming. The early hours are cool and wet; the sun burns through by midday, and you can practically see the steam rising from the sidewalks. And through it all, a pungent, damp smell of rich, rotting soil, the plants growing at a furious rate, the insects cricking and mating loudly, the very atoms in the air whizzing about, suffused with new heat energy after being dormant all winter.

Hilary had thought she had spring down to a science. On a certain day in March or April, she would sniff the air, feel the towels in the bathroom, then say the words: “Spring prep.” Puri would know to bring out the dehumidifier units, pack the woolens in crinkly tissue and cedar, and switch the HVAC units to cool, a procedure that takes all day and is not easily reversible. The assault against the elements begins.

But this year, there are moths — dozens, maybe hundreds of them, a new and disturbing development that Hilary has never experienced before. “They might as well be locusts,” she tells Olivia over the phone. “That would just make this year perfect. My annus horribilis.”

The first one rolls out of one of her sweaters as she is pulling it out on an unseasonably cool day, causing her to shriek loudly, although no one else is in the room with her. It is large and very much dead, with a body that is fat and inelegant, so unlike a butterfly’s. She panics. So much cashmere, so much wool at stake! But as she pulls them out, Puri’s meticulous work undone in a matter of minutes, her sweaters are, oddly, unscathed. It reminds her of that scene in The Great Gatsby where Daisy is covered in Jay’s shirts and she starts weeping because they are so beautiful. Instead, Hilary sits in her humidity-controlled walk-in closet, surrounded by expensive knits, and wishes she felt like crying instead of the constant dry pricking behind her eyeballs that feels like torture.

Soon she grows used to the moths, or as used to them as she ever will. They just blunder around, blind in their mindless fecundity, reproducing like mad, feeding on what, she doesn’t know. She finds them on the carpets, in the bathrooms, in the kitchen cupboards. Puri sweeps them up without emotion and deposits them in the trash can in the kitchen, so when Hilary goes to throw away her used coffee filter or an empty carton of juice, she steps on the pedal and is given a small heart attack when the lid opens and she sees the layer of dead insects on the bottom.

She has, of course, called the exterminators, but unless she is willing to move out for a week, all they can do is recommend mothballs and giant planks of cedar, which she buys from them in great quantities, and now her house smells like a chemical factory and she has a headache when she wakes up every morning.

This is the salient fact: She is alone. She is alone in a king-size bed in an enormous house, with no husband and no children and, instead, a domestic helper and a driver.

David is still off on what she likes to think of as his petit midlife crisis, although there’s nothing petit about it. It’s been more than three months. Why she thinks of it as petit or grand mal, with the attendant link to seizures, she doesn’t know, but whenever it balloons up in her consciousness, which it does actually less and less frequently these days, it comes in those words, sometimes italicized: petit midlife crisis. Will it evolve into grand mal? Will this be permanent, will their lives be forever changed? Would she be willing to take him back?

More important, does she get to have her own midlife crisis? she wonders. When does she get to go completely off the rails? But the thing is, he’s beaten her to the punch. If she does it now, who will be the one left behind, to witness, to suffer? There’s no one — a tree falling in the woods with no sound. For this, for making it impossible for her to do what he has done, she hates him.

And yet, all this has brought David into sharp relief, made him into a real person, full of jagged edges and surprises. She had thought of him as someone or, if she’s honest, something, a husband, who would always be there, and the fact that he has changed what she had thought of as an immutable fact brings her, sometimes, an ineffable, odd and painful pleasure. Good for you, she thinks, before it cuts into her again, the knowledge that her life is changed in some irreversible way. You were the brave one, she thinks, the one to make the bold, life-changing move. You rejected the life we had, the tepid approximation of happiness. You thought you deserved more. You did something. She is envious of that.

Her mother was a surprise. She took the news with aplomb, did exactly the right things. She didn’t try to comfort her with anodyne words or hug her or tell her everything would be all right. Instead, she moved forward with a brisk practicality that was perfect.

They went ahead to Bangkok, without David, and they decided to share a room and upgrade to the Joseph Conrad Suite in the old wing of the Oriental. They had stiff drinks by the Chao Phraya River, watching the fat catfish surface, looking for bread crumbs. They meandered through Chatuchak Market and bought rattan baskets and brass tableware, fingered dusty ruby beads, and otherwise pretended that life was normal. Hilary managed to breathe through it, survive the trip, and come back to a cold, empty house. Her mother left the day after they returned to Hong Kong, although she had offered to stay longer. Hilary knows that leaving her father for long periods of time makes her mother nervous. She pities her mother now, having to take care of her husband, worry about her daughter, worry about the fact that she might never have grandchildren.

Her mother asked, gingerly. She usually never did, but one late night, as they nursed coffees after Thai food, she asked how that all was going.

“I mean, I know, now, it might be different. But what was the status before all this nonsense?”

Hilary had thought that trying to have children would kill her, but this new wound, on top of the old one, was so painful she squinted as she tried to explain to her mother.

“We have been trying, and also, you know, with Julian, who you know about.”

“You have to do right by Julian,” her mother said. “But the situation is obviously different now.” She was never a supporter of the entire exercise to begin with, and now it lay in tatters. When Hilary asked if she wanted to meet Julian, she shook her head. “Only when you decide everything.”

“I know.” Hilary didn’t know how she was going to begin to explain it to Julian and the administrators. Obviously, she wouldn’t, for a while, and he would continue coming.

“You still don’t want to do fertility?” her mom asked. “You know, just if you want to have a baby, regardless of what happens with David. Melissa Bissinger’s daughter has these beautiful twin girls, and we know the doctor in San Francisco.”

“No,” Hilary said. “I don’t know why I don’t, didn’t, want to. I just feel like it should happen on its own.”

Her mother looked askance at her. “And it didn’t.” A pause. “And it’s not.” They both don’t know which tense to use.

“I know.”

“And you’re thirty-eight now.”

“I know.”

Her mother stirred her coffee.

“It’s funny, you know, Hilary. Life happens, and sometimes it happens so slowly that you have the time to get used to it. That’s the mercy of it. You may wake up one day and be older and be fine with not having children. There’s no reason why you absolutely have to have them.”

“Thank you, Mother,” she said, with no inflection, although she had not meant to sound ungrateful. It was so hard to speak when you didn’t know what you were trying to convey, let alone what you were feeling.

“You were and are one of the great joys of my life,” her mother said.

Hilary flushed. In the annals of her reserved family, this was tantamount to her mother throwing off her clothes and shouting her love for her child on the streets.

“Thank you, Mother,” she said again.

And that was how that holiday went.

She has been seeing more and more of Julian, going to visit him as much as she can. She is lucky. The woman in charge of his group home is kind, wishes for him to be adopted, so turns the other way when Hilary shows up again and again. Hilary knows not to push it too much, but she is growing attached, longing to see his face, hear his accented English. Sometimes she goes like a stalker just to watch him get off the bus, carouse with his friends in Cantonese. Boys are like puppies, she realizes, climbing on one another, poking, scrambling around one another.

He is here today, and after his lesson, she asks him if he’d like to go out for ice cream, even though it’s a cold spring day. They get in the car, and she tells Sam to go to Times Square, the vast mall in Causeway Bay. There’s an ice cream shop there.

Once they arrive, and she’s walking through, holding Julian’s hand, she realizes she’s made a mistake.

There is so much stuff. There is so much to look at, so much to buy — all the accouterments of a privileged life. There’s a luxury-handbag store with purses that cost a year’s pay for Puri; there are sneaker stores with hundreds of styles, electronics shops with phones and iPods and computers. Julian is seven, old enough to covet. He stares, wide-eyed, at all he doesn’t have.

They order ice cream. He just wants chocolate, shies away from all the bewildering choices, and has to be pressed to order toppings or to get two flavors. Hilary has seen three-year-olds order complicated mixed concoctions — half bubble gum, half mint chip, with marshmallows and rainbow sprinkles — with the confidence that comes from being loved and cossetted, their desires listened to and often granted. Watching Julian eat his chocolate ice cream with the rainbow sprinkles she insisted on, she feels awful for him. She must, she must, make a decision, even without David.

He is quiet, as always, and she talks to him in a constant, soothing torrent of inanities: “Piano is so great for you, you have such an ear, are you enjoying the ice cream?” He listens, is aware, but doesn’t try to respond.

Later, when she drops him off at his group home, he is clutching a bag with a new pair of sneakers, which she is sure will bring her a reprimand from Miss Chiu, the woman in charge, about how she should not buy Julian gifts, that they are confusing to him and unfair to the other children. But this fifty-dollar bribe, this small token, how can she not give this offering up to the universe, if not to absolve her, then to lessen her burden of guilt?

Mercy

“THAT WASN’T FLYING. That was falling with style.”

The phrase is knocking around her head, surfacing at odd moments in the day: when she’s making her bed in the morning, waiting in line for a coffee. It’s a line from Toy Story, the movie, when Woody is denigrating Buzz Lightyear. She caught it on a lazy Sunday at home a week ago.

She doesn’t know why that phrase keeps coming up, but it has some resonance. Because she’s feeling kind of good. She feels good, and she keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Is she flying, or is she falling?

David comes by once or twice a week, on weekends, when he’s off work and has some time. She doesn’t think there’s anyone else. He seems to work an awful lot, and when he does go out, it seems to be with colleagues and mostly men.

He’ll text, the buzzer will ring, and she’ll let him up. He comes with a bottle of wine, and they’ll spend time at her place before going out and walking along Hollywood Road until they get to a restaurant. They’ll sit and have a meal, the two of them, looking out at the passersby.

And when they do, she can’t help it, she thinks: Everyone out there thinks I’m normal. They think we’re a couple. They think that this is all mine. It is thrilling and dangerous, and she allows herself to think it in small doses of outrageous happiness.

She wonders if she was just the girl in the bar, the girl to start the ball rolling. If she could have been just any girl. She knows enough — barely — not to ask, but it is consuming her a little bit, as it would. She wants this to work, doesn’t want to self-sabotage, but she is who she is, right? Who would she be, what would the world be, if Mercy Cho didn’t screw things up by saying and doing the wrong thing?

If some other girl had been sitting there, in the lobby lounge of the Conrad hotel, on that December Thursday, would she be sitting here with David now?

But there is this now, this little window, where things are suspended in a magical way, where she is not the mess that everyone thinks she is and she has a life and a boyfriend. And when she’s with him, she’s okay! She’s funny and charming and not a nightmare. She feels as if she is juggling all of this, her new selves, and waiting for it all to fall apart.

“How are you supporting yourself?” he asks tonight as they’re finishing off a piece of mud pie. She is magically able to eat again, not feeding the emptiness inside her by fasting. She must have gained five pounds already. This morning, she had a cheeseburger for breakfast.

“I get jobs here and there,” she says. “I do a lot of different things.”

“Do you need any money?” he asks. It is so unexpectedly kind her eyes fill with tears. It has been so long since anyone has cared enough about her to ask something like this, and to have an older, mature person consider what she might need, as opposed to her throng of twenty-something self-absorbed friends, is disconcerting and an awful kind of pleasure.

He is living at a fancy furnished apartment in a hotel, where you can rent by the month. She hasn’t been invited over yet — a fact that seems to get larger and larger in her mind every time they see each other. It’s as if they exist inside a bubble, and she is afraid to pop the bubble, so she treads lightly.

Tonight they finish another bottle of wine, on top of the one they had at her place, and are feeling drunk and sedated. They drink wine, not cocktails, and so the way she’s drunk has changed, for the better. No longer are there large segments of the evening that are blank, where she remembers only flashes of frenetic laughing, screaming, running; now it’s a smooth, continuous slip into a shifted reality, rather enjoyable and very grown-up.

So she never asks about his wife. She never asks about other women. She never talks about anything she thinks will break the bubble. Inside this bubble, everything is okay. Inside this bubble, she is a whole person. And for right now, that’s enough.

Margaret

WELL-MEANING WOMEN throng the room. They are in yet another hotel function room learning about and supporting yet another good cause. Building schools in Cambodia, supporting the Philharmonic, recycling food from local restaurants to feed the hungry. A school mom whose daughter is friends with Daisy bought a table, and, having refused her last three invitations, Margaret thought she couldn’t refuse again. Taking a shower, putting on makeup, finding high heels, she thought, Here I am, going out into the world. She took a breath before entering the loud, echoey ballroom. But you have to start somewhere.

When she first arrived in Hong Kong, she went through that rite of tribe forming, the social ritual she hadn’t engaged in since high school or college. It was different from moving to a place where everyone already knew one another and you were the new person. It was more like college, because expats were always arriving and leaving in waves. A new crop, a new class — you met one another at coffees and gym classes and school meetings, and you sized one another up. The signifiers were so important: Are you wearing Dansko clogs or Jimmy Choo mules, are you a salon blonde or do you leave your hair in a ponytail, do you live in jeans or gym clothes or are you always in a suit? Do you want to talk about nannies or Rwanda? For the Chinese women, it was, Are you local, mainland, Taiwanese, or first-generation ABC? For the Americans, it was, Are you East Coast, West Coast, city, suburb, boonies? Are you finance, corporate, small business, or artist? Are you a teacher, or are you an entrepreneur? Do you belong to the Country Club, the American Club, the Cricket? Are you an expat without a club? Against clubs? People found their own kind and broke off into their own communities.

During a long reception hour, in which she hangs back against a wall and wonders why she arrives so accursedly promptly to everything and why she didn’t come when the lunch was starting instead of the reception — she is rusty at gaming these things — she watches all the chattering women gesturing with one hand and sipping sparkling water with the other. Finally a waiter comes through the room ringing a bell, indicating that they should go in. Margaret finds her way to her table, where she is seated next to Mindy, who is such a Mindy that Margaret wonders at the power of a name. Mindy has just arrived from North Carolina, where her husband worked at a furniture company. Now all the manufacturing has gone to China, and he has come to oversee production.

“It was that or find another job. His whole family has worked at the same company for generations. Of course, he’s in China all the time,” she says. “Chaana” is how she says it, with her gentle southern twang. “A lot of the time he spends five days there and is only back on the weekend. He oversees the factory to make sure they’re doing things right and there are no child-labor issues.” She says this with the wonder of a blond girl who has spent her entire life in the same one hundred square miles of North Carolina and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the world, with a Filipina housekeeper and shops on the street that sell vats of furry, dried deer penises.

“It’s hard,” Margaret says. “The thing is that everyone here is in the same boat, so the women become one another’s family.”

“You know what I miss? Good iced coffee!” Mindy confides. “The coffee here is terrible. Even the Starbucks tastes totally different.”

“It’s the water, plus the milk is not as good here,” Margaret says. “You know what I miss most? I miss Target. And how crazy is it that it’s all made in China, shipped to the United States, we buy it and bring it back? That carbon footprint is insane!” Mindy’s eyes light up. This exchange, this expat back-and-forth, so familiar to Margaret, is not unsoothing to her. She’s done it so often that she’s on autopilot.

Mindy smiles at her, relieved to find someone saying all the things she needs to hear, and Margaret wonders how to signal that they are going to share this time at lunch and have a perfectly pleasant encounter but that this is not going to go beyond that. Margaret wants to say, I look like someone you might be friends with, but I’m not. There’s a hole inside me, and I can’t fill it with other people, although I wish I could. Newcomers all radiate the same desperation: to make friends, put down tenuous roots, survive in this new environment. She doesn’t worry about Mindy, though; there are plenty of people for her to be friends with. She knows she will see her in a few months with three other friends, in their Lululemons, doing a boot camp class on the beach, or having lunch at Zuma, all of them with their 1.6 kids at home and possibly a dog. Mindy will at some point put two and two together and realize that the woman she was talking to at that lunch in the first year of her arrival was that woman, the woman who lost the child, and whenever they run into each other, at the supermarket or the American Club or the Mandarin Hotel, her expression will assume the same semiapologetic, stricken, sympathetic look that Margaret gets from every other woman.

She looks around the table during a pause in the conversation with Mindy. Every woman there is well exercised, watches her diet, has two or three children, a husband. They all have shiny hair, and they are all wearing sheaths and daytime dresses perfect for the occasion. No one is breaking the rules of the ladies’ luncheon. They radiate well-being and privilege, and yet she is among them, so who is to say what’s behind any woman’s smiling face? She butters a roll and eats it.

On her other side, a woman introduces herself. “I’ve seen you at school,” she says. “You are Daisy’s mother, right?”

“Yes,” she replies.

“I’m Courtney’s mom.”

“I’ve heard of Courtney.” She smiles. She has heard not great things.

“Yes, I hear about Daisy as well.”

“What is your name?” Margaret asks.

“I’m Diana Robinson,” she says. She has a brittle smile, which she breaks out now. “I’ve been meaning to call you,” she continues.

“Oh?” Margaret says.

“I’m not sure if this is the right occasion to talk. Do you think we could have coffee later?”

In another life, Margaret would have acquiesced, but she’s no longer apologetic for not making herself available to others.

“I have to leave immediately after lunch, so I’m afraid I can’t. Don’t you think we can speak now?”

Diana leans over. Margaret can tell she is enjoying this a little bit. “It’s about our daughters. Courtney has told me some disturbing things.” She pauses.

“Yes?” Margaret says. She has no patience for the drama of the middle school mother.

“Apparently Daisy has been going on websites that are inappropriate.”

This does shock Margaret, although she tries not to let it show. “What sort of websites?”

“It’s nothing crazy, just she seems to be preoccupied with different kinds of problems. Like she’s shown Courtney pro-anorexia websites, cutting, stuff like that.” She stops. “Also, child-loss websites.”

Margaret’s sudden fury surprises even her with its intensity. “What?” she says, so loudly that everyone at the table stops their conversation and swivels their head toward her.

Diana nods her head. “It’s not pornography or anything”—she whispers the offensive word—“but it’s odd, and I think you should have someone talk to her. That is, if you don’t have someone already.”

“So let me get this straight,” Margaret says, feeling as if her head might explode from the restraint she has to show, trying to keep her voice from rising. “So you are telling me that my daughter is exploring the Internet, about issues that lots of girls face, and that she is somehow corrupting your daughter? It seems rather harmless to me. Unless you’d like to explain to me how it’s not.”

Diana backtracks immediately, having misjudged so disastrously. Perhaps she thought that Margaret would be grateful, that she would thank her for watching out so vigilantly for her child. That they would become best friends, that she would have the famous tragedy victim by her side and they could navigate the tricky world of motherhood together.

“I think that every mother would want to know what her daughter is up to on the computer. I mean, we can’t be too careful these days,” she says, looking around the table for support. “Sometimes you have to stop things before they get out of control.”

Ginny, the woman who sponsored the table, looks aghast at the drama that is transfixing the rest of the group. Margaret takes a deep breath. She is not going to lose it today, on this woman, at this table.

“I think you’re overreacting,” she says simply. “Oh, look. The video is starting.”

Margaret turns deliberately around so that she can watch the screen. As the video starts, she steams. She knows this woman, this kind of woman. She thrives on her children’s social lives, the drama, as if she is living it herself. She doesn’t separate her life from her children’s, living through them, like some sick parasite with no life of its own.

But slowly she starts to watch the video instead, coming out of her head. It is the usual charity video fare, with images of children set to a sentimental song. There are two songs that are particularly popular and, she supposes, appropriate for these types of films. It grates to hear the same melody designed to elicit tears over and over again. Still, the videos always affect Margaret, and most women at these gatherings, as they’re supposed to, until they open their checkbooks and assuage the guilt of having their own well-fed, lovingly cared for children at home. The charity is about providing art access to children in low-income housing in Hong Kong, and their bright smiles, their bright eyes, set to a crooning ballad, bring tears to Margaret’s eyes. It’s like crying to a Barry Manilow song.

The head of the charity, a Chinese socialite with an indecipherable pan-European accent, gives a speech. Afterward they are given time to eat the main course. Margaret gets up to go to the bathroom and runs into Frannie Peck, putting on lipstick. She hasn’t seen her since Phuket.

“How are you?” she asks, kissing her on the cheek.

“Good. Enjoying yourself?”

Margaret shrugs. “It’s a good cause.”

Frannie winks. “I know. These things give me hives as well.”

Margaret is reminded of the time she saw Frannie crying behind the wheel of the car. People surprise you all the time.

“How do we escape?” she asks, grinning.

“God, I don’t know. I’m here with Winnie Leong, whose husband works with mine. Who are you here with?”

“Ginny McGrady.”

Hilary comes into the bathroom.

“Hilary!” Margaret says. “I haven’t seen you in months! Thanks so much for that great dinner before the break. How was your holiday? Sorry we didn’t see you in Bangkok, but it got so complicated.”

Hilary looks uncomfortable. “Okay,” she says. She looks at Frannie, still fixing her face at the mirror. “Oh, you might as well know,” she says in a low voice. “David’s having a midlife crisis, and he seems to have left me.”

“What?” Margaret says, shocked. “What are you talking about? We just had dinner all together!”

Frannie leaves unobtrusively.

“Sit down,” Margaret says, and pulls up a stool.

“Oh, I’m fine.” Hilary reconsiders her words. “Well, not fine, but I’m surviving. I breathe, and I put one foot in front of the other.”

“I’m shocked,” Margaret says. “Did you have any inkling?”

“No. It was right after the dinner, actually. He went out and… never came back.” Hilary laughs, a short, regretful bark.

“Really?” Margaret can’t believe that David Starr is capable of something that requires such emotional range. “It’s really uncharacteristic, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Hilary says. “But the older I get, the more I think that people are just unknowable, you know? And life is just full of, I don’t know, surprises? Shit?”

“I know,” Margaret says.

“Of course you know,” Hilary says. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s enough shit to go around,” Margaret says, and she laughs. Hilary laughs too, and they sit in the little velvet sitting room of the hotel bathroom in a companionable silence until someone comes in and breaks the spell, and they get up and shake themselves off.

They go out, and the lunch is a little more bearable, and Margaret can make it through until the serving of the dessert, at which time it is deemed socially acceptable to get up, thank your hostess, and leave.

It’s the first time she has gone out socially in ages, ever since they got back from vacation three months ago.

When they got home from the break in January, they entered a cold and quiet house. Essie had gone home to the Philippines for home leave and was not due back for several days.

The children disappeared upstairs, and Clarke went up to take a shower as she opened the suitcases and put the dirty clothes in piles in the kitchen. She started a load, hearing the rhythmic lull of the washing machine, inhaling the scent of too-sweet detergent, pleasantly alone in the room.

She was thirsty, dehydrated from the flight. In the cupboard, there were two glasses that a wealthy, impractical family friend had given to her and Clarke as a wedding present more than a decade ago. Fabulously expensive, they were paper-thin crystal highball glasses that shattered at a sideways glance. They started out with twelve, and after more than ten years of living and moving and children, two remained. She got one, filled it with cold Pellegrino from the fridge, and gulped down the cool, refreshing, salty bubbles. Bubbly water, an acquired adult taste, she thought.

Suddenly the relief she had let herself feel only in small dribbles came crashing in. Her tension, her worry, her relief, and still, of course, her sadness, made her unable to stand, and she made her way to the table, supporting herself with the hand that was not holding her water. She collapsed onto a chair, letting herself feel the immensity of what she had avoided on the vacation. She had avoided something that would have destroyed her as surely as if she had stood in front of a bus. How could she live, knowing that one more thing would have sent her sailing straight over the edge? One fragile child, two fragile children, three… The infinite variety of things that can go wrong with one life, multiplied by five.

They had gone to Bangkok after leaving Phuket, for a few days in the city, and they had gone to Chatuchak Market, the big weekend market. Philip wanted to buy toys, and Daisy was interested in a rattan bag. In another life, Margaret might have wanted a brass lamp or candlestick holders. There was so much humanity in that market — so many people, so many stories — that Margaret felt overwhelmed from the moment they got out of the taxi. It was hot and loud, and she was clutching a colored map that detailed odd sections, like the location of the “Crime Suppression Police.” Whenever they left the safe confines of the hotel, she felt uneasy, as if she were swimming in the ocean. She preferred to take small, measured outings and come back to the safety of the known, but the children and Clarke were antsy after five days on the beach and wanted to get out into a city.

The buzz in her head grew louder as they got out of the cab and walked to the entrance of the market. Clarke walked ahead, looming over the locals with a straw hat he had acquired on Kamala Beach. The kids found a food stand selling satay. “Can we have some?” Daisy asked. Margaret hesitated; it looked dirty. Cholera, malaria, typhoid — fatal diseases crowded her mind. “Sure,” Clarke said, short-circuiting her paranoia, and bought four chicken satays. She ate one, because if everyone else died of food poisoning, she didn’t want to be left behind. Then later she regretted it, because if everyone got sick, who was going to take care of the sick children? This was how she thought.

They bought bottles of water and walked on. She was always the one consulting the map and trying to find out where they were. “Just follow the clock tower,” Clarke had said easily. As if it were that simple. She looked at wood carvings and silk sarongs and ugly T-shirts, all the while keeping an eye on Daisy and Philip, and the map, so she would know where she was. She was carrying her large handbag, with all of Clarke, Daisy, and Philip’s extra items that they just handed off to her without thinking, including the half-full water bottles, and her shoulders hurt, and she wanted to scream. Sometimes it was just about the bag, she thought. Men strolled through life with a wallet in their pants, and women were saddled with children, the map, the bag, the half-empty water bottles. Resentment fired up through her body, flushing her cheeks, suffusing her with sudden rage.

Was it that men were heartless? Or without imagination? How could Clarke tell her that she needed to move on? How could he say that life should go on? It is unimaginable, but because she cannot lose him and Daisy and Philip, she has to pretend to agree, to try to do this thing that seems as ludicrous as flying. And sometimes it feels like flying, or walking on water, as if she is doing something so against the laws of nature, so against the very reality of being a human being, that if she looks down, or up, or anywhere but a spot a very short distance ahead of her, she will fall, and fall, and there will be no bottom to where she can go.

And then, surfacing from her thoughts, she realized: She could not see Philip. She could see Daisy and Clarke ahead, looking at some bags, but she could not see Philip. Her hair stood on end, and she felt electrocuted.

Calm down, she told herself. Calm down. You’ll see him in a few seconds.

But she didn’t. After ten long seconds, she screamed Clarke’s name so that he would stop. “Clarke! I can’t see Philip!”

Clarke stopped and grabbed Daisy’s hand as he came back to her. “When did you last see him?” he asked, calmly.

“Just now,” she said. “And I looked at the map, and when I looked up again, I couldn’t see him. I’ve been watching him like a hawk.”

“I’m sure he’s just down one of these alleys,” Clarke said.

Daisy was speechless, Clarke’s brow furrowed; all of them were frozen by the unsayable. But it wasn’t possible. But anything was possible. God wouldn’t let it happen again. But why would God let it happen the first time?

They fanned out, shouting, “Philip! Philip!” Margaret found herself thinking that at least Clarke was here this time, that she wasn’t alone.

They found him, of course, but it was a long six or seven minutes, and Philip was a mess, even though he tried to pull it together. Ten was still young. Found by a kind couple from Singapore, he had been crying and screaming, but it was amazing how far away from them he had gotten in that short time. In those moments of emergency, Margaret had felt her heart stop and start several times over, had to fight the urge to crumple to the floor and give up, had to remember to breathe, had to open her eyes extra wide, because she felt the world going black.

Afterward they went back to the hotel, and Clarke got on the phone to book them on the next flight home. They ate dinner at the hotel restaurant and flew home the next day.

So that was their Christmas holiday, the first without G, and that was how that went. Now school has been back in session for a few months, and she has been hiding at home, taking walks and escaping to her room in Happy Valley.

She gets home from the lunch right before Philip and Daisy come home on the bus. She asks them about their day and asks to sit with Daisy for a bit while she has a snack.

“I went to this lunch today,” she says, “and a lot of the moms were talking about computers and websites and how kids are getting onto the wrong websites.” She lets that sentence sit for a while.

“I know there’s a lot kids want answers to, and it’s easy to Google everything these days, but talking to me or another adult is probably the best way to get accurate information. There are a lot of crazy people on the Internet. Just as you wouldn’t get advice from a random person on the street, you shouldn’t trust everything on the Internet. Anyone can say anything, you know.”

Daisy looks uncomfortable, buries her face in a glass of milk.

“I’m here, honey,” Margaret says. “I am. You can talk to me about whatever you want. Is there something you are curious about or want to know more about?”

Daisy shakes her head, her face still in the glass.

“I love you.” Margaret bends over and kisses the top of her head. “I’ll leave you alone now,” she says.

She goes to her office and looks at menus that Priscilla has sent over for Clarke’s party. They have decided on a new private kitchen in Wong Chuk Hang that can fit 40 to 150, since Margaret has no idea how many people there will be. Priscilla has wisely gone ahead and reserved the space, having correctly gauged that she is not going to get a lot of answers from Margaret in a timely way. Margaret appreciates it, writes the check with a sense of relief that someone is taking charge and making decisions so that she doesn’t have to. After paying a few more bills, she picks up the paper.

There’s a section that fascinates her. It’s called Mainland News, and it’s a column of brief news items that are maybe two or three sentences each. They are odd and horrifying, gathered from regional newspapers, so she doesn’t know how reliable the reports are. Still, they are compelling and very peculiar. On any given day, there might be a report on a girl who was molested by her teacher, with the odd detail, such as a girl’s description of his “chalk-tainted fingers”; or a woman who had been held as a sex slave in a dog cage by a policeman and had escaped naked; or how job applicants were refused opportunities because they had pimples or were shorter than 160 centimeters; or other oddities of life in China. And of course there are many, many stories of child abductions. This morning, there is one of a woman being arrested for trying to sell a boy at a Nanping bus station, and another about a teenager being reunited with his family ten years after he was abducted and sold to a farmer in rural China. Whenever she reads these small blips of news, she thinks of the family behind the story, compressed into this one square inch of newsprint, and how it’s impossible to ever know the truth.

When her children find her there, it is six, and dinner is on the table. An hour has gone by, and she doesn’t know how. They come and tell her that dinner is ready.

When she gets to the kitchen, she feels even more removed, as if she is visiting her own home. The food there is unrecognizable in an odd way, as if her recipes have been refracted through a wavy glass, which they have, in a way, and come out into an alternate universe. Essie is wonderful, but she is from the Philippines and not native to spinach salads and grilled salmon, so they always come out a little tweaked, with too much honey in the teriyaki or not enough dressing on the salad, so it’s dry and tasteless. She is making approximations of the dishes. If Margaret lived in the United States, she would be cooking, her dishes would be her own, and her children would know how they were supposed to taste in their own home. She picks at the salad now, discovers a stray cocktail onion, randomly added, and puts her fork down in defeat. The children eat their salmon and chatter about the news at school, how someone is having a laser tag party, how a girl was giving away candy on the bus to make friends. Essie is telling her something about the washing machine. It’s all white noise. Clarke calls, Daisy answers, and he says he’ll be home by eight and to leave him some salmon. She floats above herself and sees herself, an American woman in Hong Kong with her two children in the kitchen, eating dinner. A phantom child, missing, hovers at the edges.

Doesn’t every city contain some version of yourself that you can finally imagine? In southern California, near where she went to college, it was driving barefoot in some old station wagon through a cool, damp night, drawling surfer boy by your side, going to Ralph’s to buy beer and aluminum folding chairs for a beach bonfire. The feel of the car pedal ridged smoothly against your sand-buffed foot. In New York, where she was a young working woman, it was walking down a chilly fall sidewalk with a soft paper cup of hot coffee in your hand, multicolored scarf wound three times around your neck, on your way to work in a Midtown skyscraper with steel elevators. Paris, sitting knees-up on a windowseat with a glass of red wine, looking out at something very old and beautiful. That was the thing about this strange afterlife here in Hong Kong: She doesn’t have a version of herself without G. She doesn’t know what the image is of what she is supposed to be. She cobbles one together, enough to live out the day, but she needs a more permanent, whole version, one with a possible, all-encompassing life, a picture, so that she can begin to try living again.

Hilary

“LAVENDER,” her mother says.

“What?” Hilary says, absentmindedly scrolling through the Examiner website, looking at local San Francisco news. She is on Skype with her mom.

“Lavender is as good as cedar, and smells better.”

“Oh, for the moths?”

“Yes, apparently it’s the new thing, or maybe it’s the old thing.”

“I’ll give it a try. Nothing else is working. In an oil or dried, like potpourri?” She clicks over to expatlocat. Clicks on Message Boards. Time to see if the troll is back.

Her mother talks about lavender, and she scrolls down the headers: “Husband traveling too much?” “Looking for dog groomer,” “My baby prefers the helper to me!” All the usual travails of living in Asia. She finds the thread with her story, clicks through, sees no new posts, breathes a silent sigh of relief.

“Mom, I have to go,” she says, glancing at the clock. “I’m supposed to go on a walk with Olivia.”

She meets Olivia at the base of Tai Tam Reservoir Road, where they will perambulate through the country park. Hong Kong is full of these parks and trails, green and wooded, a surprise to newcomers. Olivia brings her two dogs, Xena and Filly, golden retrievers, unusual for Hong Kong because of their size. It is only because she has a garden at home that she can keep them. The air is crisp and sweet, a perfect March day.

They kiss on the cheek. Olivia drinks elegantly from her water bottle, face shaded by an enormous visor. “So how are you?” she asks.

“I feel beset by the world,” Hilary tells her. “I have these moths at home. It’s like a plague of locusts, and they’re constantly dying everywhere. And this thing with Julian. And David…”

“Yes, what has become of our David?” Olivia raises an eyebrow. She has never mentioned the time she almost said something over lunch at the club, but her complete lack of surprise is a mild rebuke in itself.

“Apparently he’s been seen around town with a young girl.”

“So unimaginative,” Olivia says. “Why are they always so predictable?”

“Have you seen him?” Hilary asks.

“Absolutely not! And I would freeze him out if I did!” Olivia is outraged at the suggestion.

“I know he and Sebastian are friendly, and they have the work connection.”

“I’ve told Sebastian he’s not allowed to speak to him.”

They walk on in silence. Ahead of them, the dogs sniff a bush. The road becomes steep, and they breathe a little harder.

“And this thing happened,” Hilary says. She hadn’t been sure she was going to tell anyone about it, but she wants to tell someone, to get the stone off her chest, to quiet the clanging in her head.

“A thing…”

“A text message.”

“Oh, from whom?”

“From David. But it wasn’t meant for me.”

It had dinged into her phone at a quiet moment.

“I came so hard I’m still jelly.”

David has never texted or e-mailed her, except for that one e-mail when he said he wasn’t coming to Bangkok. It had been something of a principle. He always calls. Spouses should talk, not type, he had said. She had found it old-fashioned but kind of charming.

So what kind of Freudian slip makes a man text something like that to his estranged wife, whom he never texts on principle? Does he hit the Write button and then type his wife’s name in by mistake because he has been thinking of her? Does his girlfriend’s name also start with an H? Do you try so hard to avoid doing something that you automatically do it? Does he even know what he’s done? Or is he such jelly he can’t even think straight. This, she thinks with sardonic distaste at his sudden discovery. A man, revitalized, with a new life found. Their sex had become dutiful when they realized having children was going to be a bit more difficult. He had always been game, but she had felt it hanging over them.

The text had come in on a Saturday afternoon, so she had been left to conjure up an entire day for him and this woman. Breakfast, back to bed, lunch, then maybe he went to the gym and wrote that text from there?

Olivia is suitably horror-stricken, and yet, she says with a little bit of admiration, “Jesus. I never knew David had it in him.”

“I know!” Hilary knows exactly what she means. And the fact that she can feel this makes her think that the marriage was so over that what he did was not so bad.

“Do you hate him?” Olivia asks. “ ’Cause I feel like you don’t. At least, not enough.”

Hilary hesitates, opens her water bottle, sips some water. “I don’t know,” she says. “I kind of hate him, but I’m envious of him too, in a way. If you know what I mean. It’s like the moment you decide to leap, you leave everything behind.”

“I do know what you mean,” Olivia says, adjusting her hat. “You’re too kind, though.”

They walk on, the only sound the panting of the dogs.

“And what’s happening with Julian?” Olivia asks.

“Nothing,” Hilary confesses. “But I think it’s going to happen. It’s time.”

“That’s big!” Olivia claps her hands. “Have you told the orphanage anything about David?” She pauses. “Never mind. That’s one of those things that you realize are impossible once you think them through.”

“So I haven’t,” Hilary concurred. “Because, yes, what would I possibly say?”

“Awkward,” Olivia observes.

“Yes.”

“So that’s that,” Olivia says. “Onward!”

They walk on, talking about idle gossip. Olivia tells her what’s going on in the local Chinese scene, where a scion of a wealthy family has been found having an affair with a pretty karaoke girl and he claims he’s really in love and wants to leave his wife and two daughters. “He bought the mistress Van Cleef,” Olivia says, “and the wife got Chow Tai Fook!” Chow Tai Fook is the less expensive local jeweler. And that was the outrageous thing, not the fact that he was having an affair.

Hilary has always marveled at how locals talk so unromantically and practically about affairs, how the women tell one another that Angie Chan got an apartment for her fortieth birthday, that property was better than jewelry; that Melissa Wong made a million dollars last year day-trading. Olivia is one of them, but she is rare in that she goes outside their circle to be friends with someone like Hilary.

When they reach the end of the walk, Olivia gives her dogs water and hugs Hilary.

“I love you,” she says. “You’re a good person, an amazing person.”

“Thank you,” Hilary says. “I wish it were true.”

“I’m worried about you,” Olivia says. “I’m taking you out to dinner tonight. You need to get out, and not just in the daytime. No good you moping over a solitary bowl of soup.”

She demurs, but Olivia is insistent.

Hilary goes home to take a shower, turn on her computer, watch over the message boards as if the answer to her life were there. The problem is, she doesn’t know what the question is.

She and Olivia go out to a trendy Japanese izakaya restaurant filled with twenty-somethings, and over the course of the meal, it comes to light that Olivia’s husband saw David at the airport this afternoon and he’s going to be in Tokyo for a few days on business, and now Olivia, after several cups of sake, thinks they should go and check out his apartment.

“They won’t let me in,” Hilary says.

“Of course they will,” Olivia insists, and Hilary knows she’s probably right. Polite receptionists will always succumb to loud, obnoxious foreigners.

“But why?” she asks.

“Oh, come on,” Olivia says. “You have to be curious?”

“Yes, but not enough to break into his apartment.”

“We’re doing it,” Olivia says decisively, and waves for the bill.

In the apartment lobby, they pause.

“Should I do the talking?” Hilary asks.

“Yes. I’ll go to Cantonese if we need it.”

They walk over to the reception desk.

Hilary explains to the smiling woman in uniform that she needs to get into David’s apartment.

“You are Mrs. Starr?” the woman asks.

“Yes,” Hilary says.

“Do you have any identification?”

Hilary shows her Hong Kong ID card.

“But you have not been living in the apartment…,” the woman says delicately.

“No,” she says. “I live in the U.S. I’m moving over soon, but David came over first. I’m here to look for apartments. David was going to leave me a key, but I know he had a last-minute business trip.” She knows this is a common enough situation, when a man comes to work in Hong Kong first and the wife comes later. She also knows she is talking too much, explaining too much. What is it that people say about lying: Say as little as possible?

Still, a key is handed to her. It’s that simple.

In the elevator, she gets a fit of the giggles. “Wasn’t that ridiculously easy?” she says. “Too much, right?”

“You look trustworthy,” Olivia says. “She knows you’re not going to rob the place. Ah, privilege of the white middle class.”

“That woman doesn’t know about enraged, estranged wives, then.”

The elevator doors ding open. The carpeted hallway is quiet and dimly lit. They find their way to the apartment, 1501.

She opens the door. “Breaking and entering,” she whispers.

“We’re just entering,” says Olivia, ever practical.

Hilary hits a light switch. A neat, anonymous living room greets them, stuffy from lack of air circulation. They venture into the middle of the living room, letting the door close behind them.

“What if he comes back?” Olivia says, giggling.

“No, he’s in Tokyo for two days, he said.”

“We could sleep here!”

“I think we’re going to find more going on in the bedroom and bathroom, right?”

“And the kitchen.”

Olivia goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. She gestures for Hilary to join her in looking inside.

“Typical,” she sniffs. “Revolting.” There’s a stained pizza box and a few cans of beer, some Pellegrino.

On the counter there’s a half-drunk bottle of Glenlivet. He always liked a Scotch when he got home. Hilary opens the cupboards — unused pots and pans and spotless dishes. No one is nesting here, that’s for sure.

She goes into the bathroom, now unabashed. A razor, a contact lens case, a toothbrush, and a tube of Sensodyne lie next to the sink. She sniffs his toothbrush, feels it for dampness. Opening the medicine cabinet, she finds nothing but Q-tips and a bottle of Advil. Where is the girl? No tampons, no hairspray or brush. If he has a girl, she’s treading lightly on his life.

I came so hard I’m still jelly.

He wrote that to a ghostly girl whose presence haunts her.

She shuts the medicine cabinet and goes into the bedroom. Olivia joins her there. They look at the neatly made bed, the spotless sheets.

“The desk?” Olivia asks.

Hilary sits down and opens drawers. Empty. There are a few papers from work on the desk. She opens the closet door, sees a few suits hanging, shirts still in plastic from the dry cleaner. She runs her hand along the sleeves of the suits.

“It’s so depressing,” she says. “Is this enough for him? Is this what he wants? What is he trying to build?” And then she is weeping, quietly, shoulders rocking back and forth as she sobs.

Olivia comes over and puts her arms around her. “Clearly he has no idea,” she says. “And it’s not anything that you want to be part of.”

They leave quietly, a bit abashed now, riding the elevator down in silence, not looking at each other. They take taxis and go home, disappearing into the night.

Mercy

MERCY AND DAVID 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.

Margaret

THEY’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.

Hilary

HILARY IS LIVING her life more and more online. With the message boards, Facebook, and e-mails, she doesn’t need to go out for social interaction. And if she needs anything physical, she sends Puri and Sam out to get it, often with photos printed from the Internet of the exact kind of coffee or the brand of bread she wants, so they don’t bring back the wrong thing. She pores over adoption boards, infertility boards, expat boards; it is as if she wants to hear advice only from people she has never met and knows nothing about. Maybe she will migrate her life to a virtual world, where she will exist only as finger taps on a keyboard, a ghostly being made up of pithy comments and occasional snapshots. Anyway, she only really ever goes out to see Olivia now. Without work, without a husband, she has faded into the background. She never realized how much of her life was lived through David, through being married and being a couple. When she thinks of whom she would want to see, she cannot think of anyone, save Olivia. And apparently no one is very interested in seeing her either, as her phone remains silent and her e-mail inbox fills up only with sale notifications and reminders of club dinners.

She has heard of people being dropped after divorce or separation, but it’s still surprising to her. It’s not as if she thought she had so many friends, but it is shocking to realize that the world she thought she had constructed around her was so tenuous. Perhaps it’s because she doesn’t have children. She’s seen the close bonds that women with children form with one another, and that’s something she’s been shut out of completely. What is left? she wonders. Family. Is that it? And hers is so small. Her mother calls her dependably, in between taking care of her father, who descends ever further into dementia. And also, she’s been thinking about what a husband is. David used to be family, but now he’s the enemy. She understands now the thin line between love and hate. Casual bonds are flexible, can be attenuated without destruction. Not so the fierce close ones.

When she got on Facebook for the first time, she was struck by how these hordes of middle-aged people had taken on this medium that seemed to be for the young, and made it their own. They posted photos of their thickening, graying selves with self-deprecating comments, boasted about their work achievements, introduced babies and grandbabies, corralled people to reunions. Scrolling through her two hundred friends, she is amazed by the affection she feels for all these people who represent so many different times in her life.

Is this a sign that you’ve given up? When you spend all your time thinking of the past? She’s made the mistake of contacting people after going through their photo albums and feeling a brief, unreal intimacy. She writes inappropriately close things like “Remember in high school when we skipped science third period and went to Union Square?” and she gets back a puzzled, reserved response like “Hilary Krall, I haven’t seen you in so long. You look great.” And she deletes the entire exchange out of embarrassment, because, of course, they hadn’t spent hours remembering shared time and feeling close and they probably think… what do they think? The truth, most likely. That she’s in a bad relationship and in a bad place and looking for something, anything, that might get her out. People post pictures of their best times, but it’s not so hard to see past the smiling faces.

Funny how people really don’t change that much. She sees one woman who was always quirky and alone, even in high school. A misfit, to use an unkind high school word. This woman’s loneliness and her growing madness are so palpable it’s uncomfortable. It’s all there in her page full of unanswered questions to friends and family, reminiscences of past injustices, unfocused shots of her pet birds, her disheveled bedroom. Hilary clicks through a photo album, tries to compile an acceptable life for this woman, cannot.

How is it that life is so fragile? It’s not just life itself, and mortality; it’s more how a perfectly conventional-seeming life can collapse in a few short weeks. Several months ago, Hilary felt she was leading a normal life, and while she isn’t really mourning the loss of what was, after all, an imperfect life, there is still grief for the person she once thought she was. She feels vulnerable, a newborn trying to fashion a new life in the wake of all that has happened. She is moving toward the future but uncertainly, and without grace, she feels.

A moth blunders onto her screen.

She freezes.

“MOTHERFUCKER!” she screams, so loudly she surprises herself. It feels good. “MOTHERFUCKING MOTHERFUCKER!”

She remembers that Puri has gone out, to “market,” as she likes to say, using the word as a verb. Hilary is alone at home. She can scream as loudly and as long as she wants.

She screams it one more time, slamming down her laptop on the beastly, wormlike insect, smushing it between the screen and the keyboard. Then she puts her head down on her arms and starts to cry, big, gulping sobs that shake her body and wrench her lungs, wet the desk beneath her elbows. Has she cried before this? Of course, she hasn’t. It was a point of pride between her and her mother over Christmas break in Bangkok. Their family didn’t show feelings like that. They were stoics, proud in their impassivity.

She sobs on. Has something been taken from her? She doesn’t know. Was it a life she wanted? Did she want the husband, the child? Or was it something she had just been programmed to think?

Something showy about crying like this, alone. She starts to feel foolish, crying so loudly, and tries to stop. She succeeds, sits on her chair, feeling the stillness, feeling her body heave up and down as her breath regulates.

Julian.

She wants to see Julian. She is a better person when she’s with him. She’s thinking of others. He gets her out of herself. Julian.

She opens the computer, wipes off the remains of the moth with a tissue. Then she clicks her way back to the thread about her and Julian and begins to write. HappyGal to the defense.

Mercy

BEING WITH HER MOTHER makes her thirteen all over again. But her mother has changed too. Their relationship keeps teetering and swinging back and forth, unsteady, reshaping itself with every awkward exchange.

This is not a normal visit. Her mother has not left the United States for at least twenty years. Mercy thinks she probably had to get a passport to come here. So some planning happened.

Her mother has left her father, it seems. Something about gambling debts, and the theft of her nest egg, her gae-don, the Korean women’s tradition of lending money to one another at monthly meetings, and also something, muttered darkly, about other women.

What a mess. This is what she comes from.

That first afternoon, when she gets out of the taxi, her mother asks where she has been. But that is just one small blip of maternal concern, a flare struck and gone, it seems, forever. If it’s possible, her mother seems even more lost than she is.

They go up together in the tiny, rickety elevator with her mother’s suitcase.

“This is where you live,” her mother says in Korean, standing uncomfortably close to Mercy, because the suitcase is taking up half the elevator.

“I know, it’s not nice,” she says.

“When we immigrated to Queens, our apartment was very small, and we didn’t have our own bathroom,” her mother says. The elevator doors open, and she leads her mother down the tiny, narrow hallway lit by fluorescent lights. She takes out her keys and unlocks the door.

“Ta-da,” she says as she swings it open to her studio, her messy bed, with clothes strewn all over it — remnants of her rejected dressing choices before meeting David this morning.

“Very small,” her mother says without emotion.

“Only one bed,” she points out.

“It is big enough. We can share,” her mother says, with finality.

Over coffee later, after her mother has showered and changed and they have made their way to a little café down the street, Mercy asks, tentatively, how long she is here for.

“I don’t know,” her mother says. “Things are strange at home.”

She sips at her plain coffee. She never ordered latte or cappuccino, or the fancy drinks.

“I flew through Seoul,” she says. “On Korean Air. Incheon Airport is so modern!”

“I know,” Mercy says. “It makes JFK look third world.”

“Things have changed so much in Asia,” her mother says. “I wonder what it would be like if we had stayed in Korea. Before, America used to be the best place, but now I think it is not so good.”

“I miss America,” Mercy says. And she realizes it is true. That there is no reason for her to be here in Hong Kong, with her married lover — Can he even be termed a lover? The implied constancy is not there — and a baby, or, rather, an embryo and all the messiness in her life. But she can’t go back now.

“I bought the ticket through Mrs. Choi at church,” her mother says, putting down her cup. “And she says I can set the return date whenever I want. It is very flexible. And I can stop in Seoul on the way back. But I wanted to rush to see you. You are never home, and you never return my phone calls.”

“Sorry, Mom,” Mercy says.

“So, do you have a job?” her mother asks.

Mercy’s silence is her answer. Her mother rips off a piece of the almond croissant they are sharing — powdered sugar is sprinkled on her chin. How disappointing for her mother, she thinks, to have a daughter like her, but how used to it she must be. Just as Mercy is used to men being disappointing, having had her father as a model. She and her mother — they are lost in these patterns, unable to kick out into another, freer, better life.

“Hong Kong is very expensive, isn’t it?” her mother asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“I’m staying for some time,” says her mother, “so I help you with the rent.”

When Mercy went to college, she met not only those wealthy aliens; she also met other Korean Americans from different parts of the country. She understood the Queens Koreans, how most of them came from struggling families, dry cleaners and deli owners and ministers, but there was a whole other breed, like the Korean American kids from Beverly Hills or Bloomfield Hills, or the wealthier suburbs of Long Island. Their parents were doctors or real estate developers or just businessmen more successful than her dad. It wasn’t the wealth that bothered her, though; it was the fact that their parents seemed so normal, and they assumed that other Koreans were just like them. They complained about overbearing mothers, fathers who were disappointed that they hadn’t gone to Harvard, grandmothers who were a pain. It was this assumption that her family was like theirs, that her parents were together, a team, and that they had the time or the inclination to care about where Mercy went to school or how she led her life.

It wasn’t that her mother didn’t love her but that she didn’t know how to help her, being in a terrible relationship herself.

“Do you think I can get a job here?” her mother asks.

She feels a panic open up inside her. The world she has so carefully been trying to hold together, the fragile bubble, seems on the verge of collapsing.

“I don’t—” she begins, but someone is tapping her shoulder.

“Hey,” says a young man behind her.

She twists around, looks at his face, trying to place him.

“Charlie,” he says. “From Columbia. We saw each other a while back at the Conrad?”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “Great to see you.” The day she met David.

He looks expectantly at her and then her mother.

“Oh, this is my mom,” she says. As they shake hands and exchange pleasantries, she gets the feeling she often does, where she floats away, above herself, and observes the scene. She feels a deep pleasure at the fact that this scenario, this snapshot, is so normal. Here is a girl who lives in Hong Kong, whose mother is visiting, who is introducing her mother to another acquaintance, an old college friend she has run into. She sees it happening all over town, all the time, and always feels on the outside, like that will never be her, and all of a sudden, here it is, happening, although everything on the inside is so very different. She’s so different, and marked, but this instant makes her feel normal. In a sudden moment of insight, she wonders if everyone feels this way.

“Maybe I’ll see you around,” Charlie says. But he lingers.

Her mother sees the look on his face and excuses herself to go to the bathroom. After all, this is a boy/man with a suit and a briefcase. A man with a job.

“What are you doing this weekend?” he asks suddenly.

“Oh,” she says. “Um, well, my mom just got here, and that was a bit of a surprise, so I have no idea.”

“There’s this party at my friend’s house,” he starts.

“Oh, yeah?”

“A bunch of kids from Yale are throwing it, but they’re pretty cool.” She has almost forgotten that this is how people her age talk, having sequestered herself for so long.

“Great,” she says.

“Wanna go?”

A party for twenty-somethings. This is what she should be doing. Not hiding out from having been implicated in a hideous crime and getting impregnated by a detached married man. She feels the gap sharply, suddenly. Maybe this is why she says yes. Maybe this is why she gives Charlie her e-mail address and phone number. He walks away smiling, and she remains, feeling that she has duped him and it is all going to come crashing down. Her mother comes back, smiling, saying that he looked like a nice boy. “Chinese men,” she says, “are better than Korean men. They treat their women well.” And Mercy is back to where she started, feeling like a fraud, that she is the architect of her own awful destiny.

But it’s as if fate helps her to make bad decisions. Because her mother is here, it is easy (and truthful) to tell David that she can’t see him for a bit. After the news, he clearly needs a bit of a break as well.

“She didn’t come because…” He doesn’t finish the thought.

“No,” she says. “She has no idea. Just a coincidence.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Buzz me when she leaves.”

And she hangs up and suddenly feels, can it be? Free. She feels a bit freer. She’s burst from one situation into another.

So then she’s free to go to this party with Charlie, which delights her mother, because even with her track record, she is still Korean enough to think that a man can save a woman. Especially someone with Mercy’s destiny, who needs so much saving.

So Charlie wants to pick her up, which is really nice, but her mom is staying with her, so she meets him downstairs in the lobby at nine.

“You look nice,” he says.

“Thanks,” she says. “So do you.”

“Do you want to get something to eat before we go?”

So they go to a bistro nearby and get a table outside, because the night is not too cool, and start with cocktails. The chairs are tippy, and the table’s marble top is stained with red wine. She’s been here before, with David, and feels awkward, but none of the waiters recognize her, and she begins to relax.

She thinks just for a minute if, if, she should drink, but this baby, this tiny accumulation of cells inside her, is so minuscule and so easily ignored, such a thought and nothing else, that after the first sip of Tanqueray and tonic, she manages to forget about the whole thing entirely.

From then on, it’s a typical twenty-something date. Lots of cocktails to get loose and happy, a big meal, he pays, no awkwardness, and they get into a cab at eleven and go to the party, which is at some guy’s parents’ place, which means it’s an enormous apartment with lots of rooms with pictures of the absent parents, who have gone to Colombo for the weekend. There is a strobe light strung up and a rooftop where people are dancing with lit cigarettes in one hand and beer bottles in the other. Lots of her friends are there, and they scream with happy drunkenness to see her.

“Haven’t seen you in sooooo long,” they say, and hug, giddy with alcohol. They are so drunk they forget to ask how she is, which she likes very much.

After this happens for the fourth time, Charlie pulls her aside. He doesn’t know her situation. “You’re popular,” he says, his face flushed and happy.

“You’re handsome,” she says.

And then they kiss.

The night flashes by, in corners of rooms with beds with multiple couples making out, staggering to bathrooms to fall on the toilets, spilling vodka as she pours some more. When she looks at a clock, it says 1:00 a.m., then it says 3:00, and they’re at another club, Charlie by her side.

“Where were you?” she tries to ask.

“I’m here,” he says. But he doesn’t understand what she’s saying. She’s saying, “Where were you before all this other stuff happened, where were you when you could have saved me?”

But then she falls asleep, and when she wakes up, she’s in his apartment, and it’s ten in the morning.

Luckily, her clothes are all still on. And his are too. He lies, disheveled, snoring lightly.

She gets up and almost throws up. There was a shawarma pit stop at some point last night, and the garlicky meat stink in her mouth is nauseating. She goes to the bathroom and finds some mouthwash. Gargles. She looks at herself in the mirror, mottled pale skin, sunken eyes, greasy hair. The bathroom is small and humid and messy, a boy’s bathroom, with hairs stuck to the shower wall and mold in the grout. She sits down on the toilet and pees. It smells sweet, like fermented juice, residue of all the alcohol.

Bad decisions.

She wipes and gets up to look at herself in the bathroom mirror while she’s washing her hands. Poor, pregnant, hungover Mercy.

So many bad decisions.

Margaret

MARGARET IS DREAMING. G is nuzzling her, she can feel the solid, sweet shape of his head on her arm, rubbing as he used to. She used to call him her kitten, the way he would purr up to her and rumble with the simple pleasure of being near his mother. She would press his temples with her two palms while kissing his forehead, squeeze his butt cheeks, rub his chubby, perfect stomach with its adorable knot of a belly button. There is nothing like children to bring out the animal in you.

She picks him up and hugs him, smelling him, then wakes up, with the hard plastic wall of the airplane on her cheek. There is a little drool on her mouth.

It is a dream, and she is awake, and she is on an airplane, although Mr. Park said she shouldn’t come yet, that it might all be nothing, but of course, as soon as she heard there was anything, she had to go to the airport right away.

Clarke had come to the phone after his assistant got him out of a meeting, and she had been sobbing. He hadn’t been able to understand her.

“They think, they think, maybe…,” she had managed to say. “Maybe, a boy, the right age…”

“Oh, my God,” he said. “When can we go?”

She had told him she would go first, because Mr. Park had said it would take a few days to get the boy to Seoul, but he had needed some more information from her, and he shouldn’t have called her so early, but he knew she would want to know, even if it turned out to be nothing. A rural village, a single woman who suddenly had a child, a nephew she was raising, she said, because her sister had died. A suspicious neighbor had finally called the police, and it turned out the child wasn’t the woman’s and that she didn’t have a good explanation as to how he had come to her house. He was the right age, around five or six, and his Korean wasn’t too good, and his English was much better.

She had booked the black-eye, the flight that left Hong Kong at 1:00 a.m. and got in at 5:00 Korea time. Clarke would be on the first morning flight. Luckily, the plane had been half-empty, and she got a window seat with no one next to her. She had left a message at the police station that she would be arriving the next day, so Mr. Park would expect her. He had told her to wait in Hong Kong, but how could she have?

The Hong Kong airport at that midnight hour had been spooky, with carpet-cleaning machines whirling and dark, empty shops. She had nursed a cup of tea in the food hall, waiting for the flight to board. Around her, tired travelers checked e-mails, read newspapers, drank beer. She moved to the gate area and sat down. When the call came, the travelers all gathered up their things and traipsed to the gate, almost zombielike in their slow, sleepy gait.

Her body is awake now, immediately, when she realizes where she is. She is tingly, alive, painfully so. Her son might, might, be on the other side of this flight. She will fly across this ocean, go to this different country, check into the hotel and take up vigil again, so that she might feel his body nestle against hers, smell his sweet breath.

The cabin is dark. They switch off all the lights after takeoff, and most passengers are sleeping before the plane even gets off the ground. She was so wired that she thought she would never fall asleep, but it happened without her knowing. She is grateful for the rest. She looks at her watch: 3:00 a.m. She slept for a couple of hours and now has a few more hours of flight time.

It’s been seventeen months. Seventeen months since October break when they went to Seoul and G was lost. Seventeen months since she has seen her baby.

When they land, she and her fellow travelers are regurgitated, rumpled and disheveled, into a giant hallway. She goes through immigration and out into the still-quiet arrivals hall, it being a mere six in the morning. Outside is freezing — early spring can still be cold in Seoul — and her breath puffs out as she walks to the cab line. This city is the color of smoke — all gray concrete, cinder-block buildings, and morning sky — but turns into neon frenzy at night, with pulsating lights and the red and white streaks of passing cars. She gets a taxi to the hotel and lies back, exhausted, against the vinyl seat, seeing the flat gray of the Han River, the billboards announcing new electronics, and pretty girls advertising Korean shampoo. Stripped trees line the banks of the river, bare silhouettes until suddenly she sees one with a nest on it. She allows herself to imagine the return trip, with G beside her, surely looking a little bit different, certainly quiet, subdued, but back with her, back next to her. Will this vision come true? Will this gift be given to her? She doesn’t pray. She has prayed so much she is exhausted and not sure if she wants to believe in it, just as she doesn’t want to say she doesn’t believe in it just in case God is vengeful. How many bargains has she struck with the world in these past seventeen months? How many deals has she made with the devil or whoever she thinks might sway destiny? Too many that have come to nothing.

Mercy

MEETING CHARLIE FOR sushi at a small place on Jervois Street the next day, he is cheerful, ebullient, a puppy eager to please.

“I thought you were one of those girls who only like to go out with white guys,” he says, grinning. He assumes all is well, can’t read her hesitation. She is out with him, hence she must be into him. He is that young. When do boys catch up to girls? she wonders. Maybe never.

“I don’t really have a policy,” she says.

“But you dated mostly white guys in college, right?” he asks.

“I didn’t date all that much,” she says. “More like hook up. Nothing serious.”

This boy is earnest and sweet. He wants a girlfriend. “You’re not drinking,” he says.

“I’m hung over,” she says, which is true. She wonders if she’s already scrambled the cells of her unborn child.

“Did you have fun last night?” He pours himself some more sake from the small porcelain flask. He knows enough to order it cold.

“Yeah,” she says. She spent the day with her mother, making Korean banchan from the groceries her mother had bought from the Korean market in Tsim Sha Tsui.

“What did you do today?”

Parrying his questions is so easy it’s like child’s play. “Such a boring topic!” she declares. “How’s work?”

And instead of saying, “And that’s not boring?” he starts telling her about work.

She listens. It is not unpleasant, being here with Charlie, having small pieces of fish set in front of them at intervals. This is another life, one she should be having.

But still, Charlie is so… unsophisticated. He didn’t hang out with her crowd in college and is so unknowing it makes her cringe sometimes.

His parents are middle class, his father a math teacher at a high school and his mother a lab technician.

“How’d you find your way to Columbia?” she asks.

“Recruiters came to my local school. I never thought about going abroad, thought that was only for rich people, but this woman said I could apply for a scholarship. Some tycoon families in Hong Kong give aid to local students, and that’s what I got, because it’s hard to get financial aid for international students.”

“You must have done really well in school,” she says. “Did you get a full ride?”

“Yes, full scholarship. But we still have to pay some items, like the airplane and all the things I need for living.”

His English is still a little bit foreign, with a bit of an accent that surfaces from time to time and grammar that can be off. He doesn’t get some jokes, doesn’t know anything about American television from the eighties and nineties, doesn’t understand colloquialisms but can speak pretty good English, so he seems like a blurred facsimile of an American.

“And you are from New York, right?”

“Queens,” she says. “Not Manhattan.”

He’s not surprised. He doesn’t expect anyone he knows to be from Manhattan.

“Big Koreatown there,” he says. “We used to go for Korean food sometime. Love the bulgogi.”

She debates telling him about her aunt’s restaurant. Maybe he’s been.

“And Chinese,” she says. “Lots of Chinese places. And Irish pubs.”

He looks blank. “Irish?”

She doesn’t explain. “But yeah,” she says. “My dad was in ‘business’”—she makes quotation marks in the air—“and my mom worked sometimes, so I needed a scholarship too.”

He nods.

“You know Philena, right?” she asks.

“So rich,” he says, dunking sushi in the soy sauce. He puts the rice side down in the soy sauce, incorrectly. You’re supposed to put the fish side in. “Her family owns all the buildings in Causeway Bay.”

“Did you know her before?”

“No, no,” he says. “Just meet in the U.S. And sometimes see her here but not much.”

“I was her roommate for a few years,” she tells him.

“I know,” he says.

So he knew of her then, even though she didn’t know about him. Her crowd was known at school as the fast crowd, the party crew, the cool ones. She remembers her old boss at the listings magazine telling her, “You may be twenty-five and think you know everything, but I am forty-three, and I am here to tell you that life is high school over and over again.”

After dinner, she wants to go home, but he doesn’t want the night to end. He suggests a drink.

“How about the Mandarin?” he says. It is not far, so they walk. She’s getting more and more antsy, not wanting to be there, walking next to the perfectly nice young man she can sense is wondering whether or not to take her hand. Thankfully, he doesn’t.

They get to the bar, all smoky mirrors and dark velvets, and he orders a gin martini and she orders a club soda. The alcohol, mixing with the sake he’s already had, makes him voluble, and he tells her about his family and childhood.

“My parents live in a three-hundred-square-foot apartment,” he announces. “I live in a flat that is twice the size of theirs.”

“How does that make you feel?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says, wheezing. His eyes are glassy, and he is starting to slur. This is reason enough to drink, so you don’t have to see others being idiots and have to tolerate them.

“They must be proud of you,” she says. “I think my parents are proud of me, and I don’t even have a job.”

“Proud because of Columbia?” he asks. “You were at Columbia, right? Not Barnard?”

“Yes,” she says. “And it’s not the same thing.” She expected him to join in as she said it, being such a familiar chorus, but he looks at her blankly. They teach a lot at Columbia, but what they can’t teach is irony and sophistication. What poor Charlie doesn’t realize is what potent currencies they are. All his hard work and intelligence are only going to take him so far.

“My parents didn’t even dream I could go to college in America,” he says. “I had to make it happen. I had to tell them it was possible.”

“And now you live in an apartment that’s twice the size of theirs,” she says.

The bartender shakes the martini and uncaps the flask, pouring the clear liquid glinting with slivers of ice into a chilled glass. He sets the remainder down next to the glass and replaces their nuts with a fresh bowl.

“Amazing service,” she says. She is starting to hate Charlie. It is a relief to feel this, as she has spent such a long time worrying that people hate her.

He takes a sip. “My parents act like they are not as good as Americans or British,” Charlie says suddenly. “So when you ask how I feel about the fact that I live in a larger place than them at the age of twenty-seven, I guess I feel that you have to believe in yourself if you want to succeed.”

Callow. The word floats into her head. Charlie is callow. Unknowing. Naïve. Earnest. And if she can see him for all those things, what does that make her?

They end up back at his place, an enormous apartment complex of tiny flats in Pok Fu Lam, filled with young professionals, a dorm of sorts for the financial sector. After he paid for the drinks, they got into a cab, and she did not disagree when he told the driver his address. His building has a health club, a swimming pool, and a dining room you can rent out for dinner parties. He shows her all the facilities with pride, as if he owns them.

He is starting to sober up.

“Want to go swimming?” she asks.

“The pool is closed,” he says.

“That’s not what I asked,” she says. “I said, would you like to go swimming?”

“Sure.” He nods. He tries the door. “It’s locked,” he says.

“Who has the key?” she says. This is what she’s good at: breaking rules, behaving badly. She can take the lead.

He doesn’t know, of course.

“Where is the office?” she asks. “One where there’s someone on staff all night?”

He tells her.

“You stay here,” she says. “You look drunk. It won’t work with you there.”

She goes and charms the young, bored security guard into giving her the access code with a story of how she has left her phone by the pool. He offers to escort her, but she manages to push him off, saying he has to keep doing a good job guarding the building.

Charlie is sitting on the floor with his back against the wall when she comes back, checking his BlackBerry. She inputs the code, and they go in and turn on the lights. Their sounds echo around the walls, the humid air redolent of chlorine.

“How did you get the code?” he asks.

“Years of experience in bad behavior,” she says.

She can see him thinking about what they will swim in, so she strips down to her bra and panties. She looks down. Her stomach is still flat.

“Now you,” she says.

He tries not to look at her. This makes her like him a little bit more.

“Okay.” He shuffles off his pants, unbuttons his shirt. Soon he is in his boxers. At least he is in boxers. She had thought of him as a tighty-whitie guy.

The water is bracing, perfect. It moves against her skin like cool velvet. She forgets how wonderful it can be to be in water, weightless. She comes up like a seal, hair plastered to her skull, to find Charlie watching her.

“You are very beautiful,” he says.

She melts a tiny bit more. All his annoying traits — his lack of irony and sophistication, his tendency to overstate his accomplishments — seem dissolved into the cool water. Unclothed, he is a tabula rasa, without his annoying FOB tics or telltale sartorial mistakes. He has a lean body, with muscles that ripple just under the skin. The handsomest of Chinese boys are — she hates to say it, but it’s true — almost feminine, with big, moist eyes and dark, thick hair. Charlie is handsome unclothed, almost beautiful. He needed this, to be without any identifiers.

Later he will ruin it by buttoning his shirt up too high, by wearing jeans and white sneakers when they go out for brunch on a Sunday, but right now, in the pool next to her, glistening and wet and practically naked, he is Adonis, sculpted out of a smooth alabaster flesh that feels almost perfect. Here she can take him as he is, as he was when he entered the world, without complexes, without issues, without all that hard-won knowledge to hinder him.

This is why she urges him to unclothe completely, why she slips out of her bra and underwear.

“I’ve never skinnied before,” he says.

“Skinny-dipped,” she corrects.

And they take off their last remaining slips of clothes, feel the water envelop them totally. It is intoxicating and sobering at the same time (certainly for him). The erotic charge of being naked with water’s shifting cover is so strong, Mercy feels her body prickle with anxiety, with anticipation. She closes her eyes and dives to the bottom, just to hover, weightless, as if she is going back to some primordial, preexisting state. When she surfaces, there is Charlie, waiting.

When they sleep together later, she will be surprised. He is skillful, assured. People are different in different realms. The boy who sat across from her in class and questioned the TA with a knowing erudition; whom she would see later at a college mixer, leaning against the wall, social anxiety palpable, stripped of all confidence in this different arena. Even as they are intertwined, all skin on skin and exposed nerve, she imagines him practicing on bespectacled girls, eager to shed their virginity, their innocence, to enter the adult world.

What is this new creature, this boy/man who transforms into something else every time he turns in the light, every time he emerges in a new world? Is this someone who is for her? Is this how someone becomes yours?

She doesn’t know, so after he has fallen asleep, she wriggles out carefully from under his arm, all the time looking at his face, lit in the bent light from the living room, so at peace, his scent already a little familiar. She goes home at 2:00 a.m. to her mother, sleeping in her bed, her insides clanging with confusion and, yes, this, her baby.

Margaret

SHE GOES to the hotel, and luckily, the room is available, although it’s only 7:00 a.m. They remember her from before, and the hotel manager escorts her to her room, only barely stifling his curiosity about why she is back in Seoul. The room is cold, and she turns up the thermostat before pulling back the bedcovers and huddling under the comforter.

The black-eye is so draining she actually falls asleep for an hour and wakes to find that it is already eight thirty. She calls the police station, dialing the number from memory. Mr. Park is not there. She hesitates, then calls his cell phone. When he answers, she can tell from the announcements and ambient noise that he is just emerging from the subway. He is also exasperated.

“Mrs. Reade,” he says. “I told you it was not certain. It will still take some time. You should have waited for me to call you.”

“I couldn’t wait,” she says. “You should know.”

He sighs.

“Okay, I will call you when I get to the station.”

She gives him her room number at the hotel, lies down on the bed again, and turns on the television. There is a Korean morning show on, the kind with impossibly good-looking hosts and people doing funny tricks for their fifteen minutes. The sound of the show helps, the tinny music, the relentless upbeat voices. Her brain is distracted. It reminds her of when she went to a dentist and he wiggled her lip while he administered the novocaine, and it helped a lot with the discomfort.

So part of her mind listens as a woman comes on in ajumma clothes, clothes for a middle-aged housewife. Then music starts, and a pole descends from the ceiling. She starts to strip off her dowdy clothing, to reveal an impressive body in a gold bikini. This being Korea, the bikini is still quite modest. She starts a routine on the pole that is reminiscent of Olympic gymnastics, spinning around horizontally, with her arms splayed straight. It is very impressive. The presenters talk all through her performance, oohing and aahing.

She looks at the clock: 8:50. If time passed any slower, she feels, it would be going backward.

He doesn’t call until nine thirty. She jumps when the phone rings.

“Mrs. Reade,” he says. “There is no news to report. The boy is still answering questions.”

“Aren’t there photos?” she asks. “Or can I go there?”

There is a pause. She always feel brash and impolite in Korea, as if she’s always asking for more.

“I will call you back,” he says.

Clarke has e-mailed, saying he will arrive around two. She starts to feel stirrings of hunger but doesn’t want to leave the room in case Mr. Park calls, and she’s not sure her cell phone will work properly, so she orders coffee and some pancakes from room service.

The phone rings again while the food is being delivered.

“Mrs. Reade,” Mr. Park says. His voice is gentle. “There has been mistake,” he says. “I am so sorry.”

Her heart plummets so fast, so deep, that she feels dizzy from the altitude change within her.

“What?” she manages to say.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “The child has another family that has claimed him. It happened very fast. They are the correct family.”

In one corner of her mind, she can still hear the tinny sounds of the television. In another, she is aware of a black hole that she must avoid at all costs. She is teetering on the edge of it, peering down, wondering how she will prevent herself from falling. She does this by feeling a sudden surge of virulent anger toward Mr. Park.

“But WHY?” she cries. “WHY did you call me and tell me there was a chance? Why did you get my hopes up?” She begins to sob, wildly and openly.

“WHY?” She bangs the phone down.

She screams, screams again. It feels good, so she keeps doing it. The phone rings, and she ignores it. Her throat is raw and her voice giving out, so then she crawls under the blankets and climbs into a little ball at the bottom of the bed.

She cannot live; she cannot not live. The child, the children. She almost forgets how to breathe. The stifling air inside the blankets makes it even more difficult. She embraces the difficulty, the suffocating feeling, the frantic scrabble for oxygen. She almost passes out and then has to throw off the blankets before she does.

She lies there quietly, breathing deeply, the cold air.

There is a knock on the door.

“Mrs. Reade,” says a female voice. “Mrs. Reade. Is everything all right?”

She almost giggles at the question but succeeds in choking the laugh down.

“Sorry,” she calls. “Everything is okay now.”

A pause. Then the knock again.

“So sorry, Mrs. Reade. Can you open the door? I just need to check.”

She lies for a minute, and then gives in to the inevitable, what she has to do if she decides to stay in the room, stay in a world where people do normal things and, thus, have a chance to get to normal herself. She gets up and opens the door to a pretty young Korean girl in her twenties.

“I’m fine,” she says. “Sorry about the disturbance.”

The girl bows. “So sorry to disturb you. But our other guests were worried. I will leave you now, unless you need something.”

“Thank you,” she says.

She closes the door and goes back to the bed and lies down, in the fetal position.

What had Dr. Stein said to her back in those first days? “Your pain is so raw and intense. It’s like nerves that have been sheared off, and you are feeling wild, vibrant pain with no painkiller. I know it is unbearable. I know you cannot accept this new reality. I promise you: You can survive this, you must survive this, and time will make it bearable. You will be able to live. Time will help you.”

She remembers this. And how to cope. When you feel the grief about to hit you like a tidal wave, you breathe deeply. You decide whether you’re going to let yourself go there, or whether you’re going to get up and write a grocery list instead. You go through the motions of life and wonder that you are able. When you want to kill yourself from the pain, you write down everything you are grateful for. You go for a walk. You look at the children you still have. You hum, so the silence doesn’t overwhelm you.

So it wasn’t G. The main thing.

She must call Clarke, she remembers. Another thing. So he won’t get on the plane. But when she dials, he has already turned off his phone, is on the plane already. She hates this window of inaccessibility, so unusual in this day and age. The children are at school. They didn’t tell them anything, not wanting to get their hopes up. They think she is here to do legal paperwork. So she is here, in this hotel room, by herself, with nothing to do until Clarke gets here. Then they can fly back together.

People go back to work after tragedy; people need something to do. If she hadn’t had Daisy and Philip, what would she have done? They had given her a lifeline with which to tether herself. And she wonders, as she has before, if she has selfishly had her children to give her joy, to give her life a facile meaning she never has to question. Who would question someone who spends her life taking care of her children? Isn’t that the very meaning of life? She remembers reading a story in the paper about single women in Vietnam having children as they got older. One of them told the reporter it was so that she would have someone to take care of her in her old age. The bald practicality of the statement had taken her breath away. But wasn’t that what everyone did, they just dressed it up in prettier words?

There is a burst of applause from the television. It startles her back into the moment. She checks her watch. Ten thirty.

She decides to go to the department store so she is surrounded by people and light. She puts on her shoes and hesitates over her coat until she remembers she can get there through one of those underground tunnels.

At the store, she goes to the basement, where they have dozens of food stalls and stands. She buys a cup of coffee and a brioche and sits down to eat. It’s still quiet, being a weekday, and just a few people are sitting around her.

Remember this, she thinks. The hot, fragrant coffee. The buttery, flaky bread. Feel these. Taste these. Stay here.

Later she goes up to the top floor, where they have children’s clothes. She buys a coat for Daisy, a pair of pants for Philip, and goes back to the hotel.

People are different in hotels. She always has to get into a bathrobe and climb into bed when she’s alone in one. It’s because the bed is the focus of the entire room. There’s rarely room for a couch or somewhere to sit, so the logical thing seems to be to get into bed. She lies to one side, by habit — she has become used to Clarke and various children sharing her bed, something the children had done while young, which had been resurrected full force after the incident. Before, when they were infants and toddlers, she remembers waking in the middle of the night to find one, two, sometimes three children in there with them, with their stuttered, nighttime movements, often sitting bolt upright in sleep and then falling down again, their shallow, quick breaths while dreaming. Sometimes she would stay awake to watch them, lying there with their small, solid bodies, sprawled insensate, completely vulnerable, and kiss their temples, their sweaty scalps, smell their sweet breath. Then she would steal away to one of their beds so she could get some sleep.

She drifts into sleep and is woken by the sound of the door being opened. Clarke comes in. He smiles when he sees her, full of hope. Her stomach drops all over again. When he sees her expression, his face falls.

“So?” he asks.

“No,” she says.

He sits down on the foot of the bed and holds his head in his hands.

She puts her hands, palms flat, on his back, delicately, as if they might hurt him.

Her husband is a good man, and this whole thing has affected him in a way that is so vastly different from the way it has affected her that it has almost destroyed their marriage. They have taken turns comforting each other, but he has been the one to keep the family together, to try to make it whole, to encourage her to move forward. That is the way it usually is, it has been explained to her, but it is still unsettling to see how he tries to pretend that everything will be okay. She cannot imagine it, even as she sees how it has to be that way for Daisy and Philip. In some of her more interior moments, she even admits that she is being the selfish one, while he is the one with the harder job.

He turns. His eyes are rimmed with tears. “I just…,” he starts.

“I know,” she says.

He reaches for her. There is still this. This has remained. So far in the back of her head she has never articulated it out loud. But a faint whisper. Maybe another will come. Maybe.

Mercy

HER APPETITE has returned with a vengeance, a cacophonous hunger that surprises even her with its ferocity. Pregnancy is hollowing her out with cravings. Her days of eating lettuce slicked with oil and vinegar, just to fill the hours, are but a distant memory.

She and Charlie are at a new, hot restaurant she has chosen, a week into whatever it is they have going.

“This salmon has been harmoniously raised,” Mercy says, reading off the menu, raising an eyebrow.

“What?” Charlie says.

She tries to suppress her irritation and fails. She pops a piece of bread in her mouth.

“It’s funny,” she says. “It’s funny that it says that the salmon is harmoniously raised.” I’m being didactic, she thinks, and then thinks, Charlie doesn’t know what that word means.

He looks at her, shrugs his shoulders.

“You wanted to come here,” he says, but he’s not bothered.

“Because it’s ridiculous, you know? Like when they say the tuna is line-caught? Do you know what that is about?”

“No,” he says, buttering a roll.

“Because all these people are crazy, and they want to know where their food came from, or how it was raised, in what kind of environment. Like when they say the tuna is line-caught, it means that they didn’t fish with nets, because dolphins get caught in the nets and die, and people don’t want to think that there is collateral damage or side effects from when they eat their seared yellowfin with cilantro mustard.”

He never picks up the thought and runs with it.

“Like Portlandia. Have you ever seen it? The whole locavore, crazy liberal thing? And this salmon. It’s such bullshit. Have you ever heard of the salmon farms and the color wheels? The people who raise salmon have special feed that will dye the flesh, and the supermarkets and buyers can choose the color they want on a color wheel, and the fish farmers tweak the feed. It’s like our idea of what color salmon should be, that orange with white stripes, or the idea that tuna should be that dark red. It’s like a giant conspiracy of our own stupidity.”

She might as well be speaking Greek.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says.

“Because you don’t read the New Yorker, or the blogs that I do,” she says. “You are not interested at all in the same things. How can you not know anything about this stuff?”

She hates hearing herself even as she speaks.

“I do have a job,” he says.

Here is a man who is buying her dinner at an expensive restaurant she chose, who is kind to her, who is good in bed. And yet she is the one who feels annoyed. Oh, and here is a man who has no idea she is carrying another man’s baby.

When that thought comes to her, she folds the menu and puts it down. She was starving, but now her appetite collapses.

“You know, you are so American,” he says. It is a neutral statement, she thinks, but he says it in such a way that she doesn’t know what he is talking about.

“I have no idea what that means,” she says, trying not to sound combative.

“Americans are so involved in small, meaningless details. Asians are practical. I thought you were more practical, but when I hear you talking about organic salmon and stuff like that, I see you are a lot more American than I thought.”

“Oh,” she says. Of course he said organic salmon, which was missing the entire point. “Does it bother you? Do you like it or not like it?”

He throws his hands up. “I don’t like it or not like it. I prefer not to spend time thinking about such stupid things!”

Stung, she asks, “What do you prefer to think about?”

He sips his drink. “Things like work, if I’m doing well. Whether I should stay in this field or whether I should do something else. I’d like to find a girlfriend who could become a wife”—his gaze is steady on hers—“stuff like that, which is important, which will impact my life. Not whether the salmon is the organic or not.”

“Do you think about stuff like that all the time?” she asks, wonderingly. “You have to have some moments of silly thoughts.”

“I guess,” he says, in a tone that means he doesn’t.

“You live in a world without irony,” she says.

“You are always bringing up that word,” he says with exasperation. “Irony. Or meta. You are always saying things are meta. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

This is not going the way she planned. She thought that tonight she would tell him about G. Not about the baby yet. Baby steps. Ha ha.

“Sorry,” she says. Time to reset.

He is exasperated, she can see. Not the best way to start.

They order. He orders the salmon, without any apparent irony. She orders the pesto pasta. He gets a bottle of wine, although she says she will just sip at her glass.

“You don’t drink much,” he says.

“No,” she says.

Silence.

“How is work?” she asks.

“I had two almost all-nighters this week,” he says. “One for a Chinese electronics company that’s about to IPO and also a Malaysian food company. I got home at four in the morning and had to be back at the office by eight.”

“Ouch,” she says.

“It’s like this for everyone when they start,” he says. “You work hard and pay your dues.”

“So I hear,” she says.

“Are you looking for a new job?” he asks.

“Yes, and my mom is too,” she jokes.

He smiles. “That must be difficult,” he says. “I can’t imagine living with my mother, although a lot of people here live with family until they’re married. That doesn’t work for me. Not with my parents. We’re too different.”

Mercy is reminded of those marriage manuals from the 1950s that get passed around via e-mail or Facebook every once in a while: “When your husband gets home from work, don’t nag him. Ask him about his day while bringing him a drink and his slippers.” The slippers part always reminded her of a dog.

“So I wanted to say,” she starts, then thinks she should wait a bit, maybe until the appetizers come, so stops.

“Yeah?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“Oh, come on. You can say what you want to say,” he says. “You should feel comfortable with me.”

“Except we just had a quite uncomfortable exchange.”

“That?” He looks surprised. “You think that is uncomfortable? That’s just us talking and figuring out who we are in relation to each other.”

Sometimes he is surprisingly fluent in English and in emotions.

“Oh, well, I’m glad you think that.”

His appetizer comes, asparagus spears drizzled with a reddish oil.

“Do you want some?” He pushes the plate to the center of the table and asks the waiter for two small plates so they can share. This small generosity makes her eyes fill.

“You are crying?” he says, incredulous. “What is going on?”

“I’m just… emotional,” she says. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he says.

“ ’Cause there’s something I want to tell you.” I’m pregnant.

“Okay.”

“I don’t know if you heard what happened to me a year ago. Something bad happened. And it was my fault, and I’ve been trying to deal with it this whole time. Which is why I’m not working, and why I haven’t gone out or seen people in so long. But you probably don’t know, because we didn’t know each other back then, so you wouldn’t have noticed…” She’s blabbering out of nervousness.

He reaches over, takes her hand. “I know,” he says. “It’s a small world, and everyone hears about awful things like what happened to you with the child. In Hong Kong especially. It must be very hard.”

“Yes,” she says, relieved. “It’s so hard, and everyone is focused on Margaret and her family, as they should be, of course, but I feel like my life has been ruined too, and I’m not allowed to say anything or do anything, except be sorry and fade away. I don’t know why I haven’t moved back to the U.S., but I feel like that would be running away and I should suffer and… I don’t know.”

“I’m glad you told me,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for you to tell me, but I didn’t want to ask.”

“Thank you,” she says.

He doesn’t say, “What happened?” or “How did it go down?” or “Do you ever talk to the family?”—all questions she has been asked by other friends, not out of empathy but more out of an unseemly, almost prurient, interest. There are those advice columns that tell you to respond, “Why do you ask?” but that’s just such an aggressive thing to say to someone who is purporting to help you that she can never bring herself to say it.

“Terrible things happen all the time,” Charlie says. “You just got to keep living your life.”

“You are nice,” she says.

“I think Asian people are better at this sort of thing, suffering,” he says.

She almost laughs but realizes he is serious. “Oh?”

“Yes, of course,” he says. “Americans are very soft.”

“You like to make generalizations about Americans versus Asians.”

“Americans like to say things like that, tell people about themselves,” he says with a smile.

“Whoa, this is so meta.”

“Like that,” he says. “This meta thing is so American, and I don’t really get it.”

They laugh, and she thinks, Can it really be that easy? Then remembers the other thing. And feels sick again. What would it be like, she thinks, to live life without guilt, without worry, without feeling fraudulent? What is it like to be like Philena, to traipse through life protected by attentive parents and endless bank accounts? She wishes she could have that, just for a little bit, maybe just to see her through this time in her life when everything is going wrong, and even the things that are going right are going to veer off course at some point because of the other things. How fast will this guy flee when he knows everything? She would guess pretty fast.

“What did you do today?” he asks.

Today she tried to make an appointment at a public hospital, but since she’s not a permanent resident of Hong Kong, they told her that she will have to pay the nonlocal rate. Since the local rate is around HK$100 a visit and the nonlocal rate is ten times that, this is a big deal for her. She hadn’t known that only permanent residents got the cheaper rate, since everyone always talked about how cheap health care was in Hong Kong. She also found out that the birth was going to cost HK$100,000 or almost US$12,000, at least as a nonlocal. Since all this is unsayable, she smiles and says something about updating her resume and browsing online.

She actually finds the whole thing weird. The fact that Charlie is willing to put up with a girl who is unemployed, ostracized, and odd just because she happens to be rather pretty and compatible with him in bed makes her question everything about the world. Why does it work this way? Is this the way everything works? What sort of value system exists that that’s okay?

“Do you know Eddie Lai?” he asks. “He’s from Columbia as well.”

“Name rings a bell,” she says.

“Do you want to have dinner with him and May next week? You know they just got married. They’re having people over to their house, like a dinner party,” he says.

She sees it happening, this coupling, how she is being presented to society as Charlie’s girlfriend. She has been witness to it, all through college and after, but it’s never really happened to her. She’s always been the girl to hook up with at parties, to go out with a few times, but never anything lasting. Is it really this easy? How is it that she’s never been privy to it before? It’s seductive, this image of newlywed bliss, the starter apartment in Mid-Levels with the IKEA furniture and the expensive groceries from the gourmet supermarket. Acting at being real adults, having dinner parties with other couples. It is so close she can practically smell the California cabernet and the chicken with garlic cloves roasting in the oven — the beginner meal for young couples playing house.

She’s been with boys who are cheating on their girlfriends. She can tell the affair is even more amazing for them, the forbidden making everything heightened, double the pleasure, like a drug they snort and then fall back, hit over the head with ecstasy. In the morning comes remorse, but still, the intense pleasure is worth it for them. Damn couples, she used to think, even the illicit sex is better for them than for single people.

So if this is what it’s like, she wants to enjoy it, but she can’t. Because she’s Mercy Cho. Because things never go right for her.

“There are a couple of long weekends coming up,” Charlie says. “Do you have any plans?”

“My whole life is kind of a long weekend,” she says.

“True.” He grins.

“It’s Buddha’s birthday, right?”

“Yeah, and May Day, and a few before,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about going away.”

“Oh, yeah?” she says. “Where?”

“I don’t know. I want to go to a beach and drink cocktails with umbrellas on them.”

“That sounds nice,” she says.

“Want to go with me?” he asks.

“Oh!” She is surprised. This she had not expected.

“I just thought…” He is embarrassed, a little shy.

“That sounds great,” she says. She cannot even go on to say “but…” as she intended, because he beams and grabs her hand.

“Good,” he says. “My treat.”

Later she wonders what she should have said. “But I’m pregnant.” “But my mother is here.” “But why me?” All things she is thinking. Anyway, she will have several weeks to mess things up with him, so it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes she lets herself imagine what would have happened if she had met Charlie before she met David. Would her life have spooled out in this wonderful, unimaginably effortless way? Girl meets boy, boy likes girl, boy pulls girl out of her awful life. But then she reminds herself that’s a fairy tale, and of all people, she should be the last to believe in fairy tales.