Janice Lee - The Expatriates

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.

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.”