Janice Lee - The Expatriates

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.