Janice Lee - The Expatriates

“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.

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.