Janice Lee - The Expatriates

And also, she thinks he had already bought their tickets to go away. So now she has cost him thousands of dollars as well.

So she does what she always does when her life goes awry. After all, she’s an expert. She puts it out of her mind and tries to move forward. Her prenatal visits are ongoing. She e-mailed David, delicately, about the cost. He e-mailed back immediately that she should send him all bills, then after the first two, he said she shouldn’t have to submit forms like an expense report and then just transferred HK$75,000 into her account (almost US$10,000) and said she should let him know when she needed more. So there’s that. It sits in her account, more money than she’s ever had at one time. Maybe he sent it all at one go because he doesn’t want a lot of contact with her, although he always signs his e-mails saying he’d love to see her and hopes that she is feeling well. He never gives a date, though, or any other indication that he cares about what’s happening with her. That should be a sign in and of itself.

She also told her mother, who took the news in the oddest way. She told her in halting Korean, and her mother took it in slowly. Then she hugged Mercy and, shaking a little bit, let her go to see the tears in her eyes. “I will have grandchild,” she said. “I am so happy.” Nothing about ruining her life or who the father is. She just let her be.

Actually, no one has asked her what she’s going to do, whether she will keep the baby, any of the questions she would have thought natural. She knows it’s getting late now to have an abortion, and she’s felt no urge to have one. It’s funny how she and her mother have both assumed that she’s going to have the baby. It’s not that they’re religious about it, or because of any sort of dogma, other than she does feel like she’s having a child, and the idea of not having it seems wildly improbable. She is pro-choice, always was, but this, her own body, is making the choice for her.

She hasn’t even Googled when the last possible date would be, although she has gone onto several pregnancy websites and looked at what babies look like at different months. At the last appointment at the government hospital, she asked when she could get an ultrasound, and the doctor said since she was young and healthy, she wasn’t lined up for one. That was when she decided to go private. After a little research, she ended up with an appointment at an obstetrician’s in Wan Chai. Her first one is today, and she didn’t tell her mother because she doesn’t want her to ask if she can come.

“I’ll ask Shirley if she need extra help for the party,” her mom says.

“Okay,” Mercy says, just to get her mother out the door.

After the door shuts and she is finally, blessedly alone, she showers and lies down on her bed, wrapped in a towel. Looking down, she opens up the towel to see how her stomach rises in a gentle peak. She sees the up and down of her breath. She sucks in her stomach, sees it go flat, then suddenly lets go in a panic, feeling as if she is squashing her baby, although she knows that is not possible at this stage. The websites say you might feel little flutters inside at this point, as the tiny baby starts to move around. It might not even be a baby yet. It might still be an embryo. She hasn’t gotten all the terms straight.

Her wet hair is warm against her scalp, and she feels water drops sliding off her face. Outside, a garbage truck beeps its slow retreat.

She gets up, dresses, leaves the apartment, and finds her way to the doctor’s. In the lobby of the office building, a brass plaque, Wan Chai Obstetrics, announces the name of her new doctor, a Dr. Henry Leong. The elevator has fancy brass buttons covered by a sheet of plastic that is sprayed with disinfectant every hour, or so a notice claims. Hong Kong: still disinfectant mad, decades after SARS.

The doctor’s office is pleasant, with fresh flowers and up-to-date magazines, although most of them are in Chinese. Private, public, private, public — the refrain keeps going through her head. Why does money have to make everything so much nicer? The receptionist hands her a clipboard to fill out and asks her to pee in a cup and weigh herself on the scale next to the desk. Mercy’s the only one in the waiting room until the door buzzes open again and a woman of about thirty comes in with her husband.

Mercy fills out the form and eavesdrops on the new arrival, an Englishwoman who is discussing with her husband their upcoming babymoon.

“Angie said Bali was great, but the food is terrible. I think Thailand is a better bet.”

“Okay,” her husband says, scrolling through his phone.

“And there’s a really lovely hotel in Phuket called the Andara. Bit expensive but think we should splurge since it’s our last vacation as a couple.”

“Is it on the beach?”

As they make their way through the inanities of travel, Mercy finishes up and places the clipboard on the desk, then weighs herself. The woman watches her and exclaims, “I can’t believe how they have you weigh yourself out here in front of everybody!”

Mercy looks back and lifts an eyebrow, which she regrets instantly, as it then gives the woman a chance to talk to her.

“Do you know what you’re having?” she asks, smiling, friendly. Perhaps she wants to make friends, mommy friends, and form a playgroup.

Mercy shakes her head, unwilling to talk, unwilling to unveil herself as a fellow native English speaker for fear of further intimacies. Better the woman thinks she is local, unable to converse.

But then the receptionist asks, “How much you weigh?” forcing her to speak.

“A hundred thirty-two,” she says softly, so the woman can’t hear her, but of course she does, so when Mercy sits down, the woman pointedly starts talking to her husband again.

“Listen,” she says finally, “I’m having kind of a terrible day.”

The woman nods curtly and continues speaking pointedly to her husband.

Mercifully, her name is called, and she goes into the waiting room. The nurse takes her blood pressure and leaves her with a cotton gown to change into. Mercy takes off her clothes except her underwear and folds them neatly. She lays them on the surface next to the sink. She wonders if she should take her underwear off as well. The one time she got a massage at an expensive spa, courtesy of the ever-generous Philena, she wondered the same thing. She sits down on the crinkly paper.

A knock on the door.

“Hello,” says the doctor, a soft-faced, aristocratic-looking Chinese man, in British-accented English. Outside, his credentials had been displayed prominently on the wall — Edinburgh, some other vaguely posh-sounding school.

“Hello,” she says.

“So.” He scans her file. “The date of your last period was approximately January 24.” He takes out a little wheel. “So that puts you at”—he spins it—“almost four months. A Halloween baby.” He looks up. “You took your time getting here. Most of my patients are here the moment they miss their first period.”

“Well,” she says, “I was being seen at the public hospital up until now.”

Behind the clear glass of his spectacles, a recalibration. Swift, but Mercy is an expert at recognizing these sorts of social calculations.

“I see,” he says. “So you’ve been taking good care of yourself.” It is more a statement than a question. “Folic acid and prenatals?”

“Um, no,” she says. “I’m not so good at that kind of stuff.”

“I see,” he says again. “Well, while you’re under my care, that stuff ”—he repeats her word—“is nonnegotiable. You must start taking the pills, although you should have been taking them from day one. Actually, it’s already too late for the folic acid, but you can start on the prenatal vitamins. They may cause a little constipation, because they’re rich in iron.”