Janice Lee: The Expatriates

They leave it at that, light, not too heavy, letting the intent pass over them.

“Want to swim?” Clarke asks.

“Mmmm,” Margaret says. “Maybe in a bit. I want to get hotter before I go in.”

“I’ll get the kids to go in with me,” he says. He rises and goes to their children, talks to them, and they wade in.

Scrolling through her Facebook feed this morning, Margaret saw someone post “Grief is the price you pay for love.” She is a passive observer of this kind of social media, but she has seen how it’s a kind of hive-mind, that it reflects the lives and mind-set of her peers, how posts about raising children, taking care of elderly parents, job stress have taken over the musings about finding your love, social occasions, newborns.

She thinks about that now. Is grief the price? Why does love have to be so costly? The benefits she has reaped from this love, have they been enough? When she had just Daisy toddling around, an older woman had said to her, “I think by the time they’re two, kids have repaid their parents for everything. They give us so much joy in just those first two short years of their life. All the worrying and misery that might come after is just paying the piper.” Margaret, then a frazzled, first-time mom, wondered what the woman was talking about. But now she thinks she knows. She’s had those moments, a nestling child in her arms, a kiss and a deep inhale of the heady scent of a sleeping baby, a laugh of pure joy shared with her husband at something funny that has been said by an unknowing innocent — she has had so, so many of those moments. Her life has been rich with those moments. She is grateful for them. She wants to remember and honor them.

This is such a moment, she realizes. Sitting here, on the beach, with the warm sand beneath and the bright sun above, with Clarke and two of her children present, she feels something like a brief moment of contentment.

You don’t win anything for being saddest the longest, Dr. Stein has said. There’s no prize for being the most miserable. You are not betraying anyone by trying to live a better life. You are not giving up on anyone.

I’m not telling you to be happy. I’m telling you that it’s okay to have moments when you’re not sad. You can laugh, maybe once a month, maybe twice. It’s okay.

Here’s the thing. You think only one specific event, one miracle, will make things better, but actually, life will get better if you only let it. You have to let life get better. You have to for your family’s sake, and for your sake. You don’t think your happiness matters, but it does. It matters for your family. They can’t be happy unless you see that you have the ability to be. Time will help. It can be agonizingly slow, but it always does.

Forward. Outward. Those are the directions she has to follow.

Remember this moment, she thinks fiercely. Hold on to it.

A BABY SLEEPS in a hospital bassinet, swaddled in a pink blanket. Mercy, exhausted, lies in bed, watching her. She has not slept for three days, for fear that the baby will stop breathing, a fear that has no foundation in reality save her own realization that she will die if her baby dies, that there is no way she can exist without this little one next to her.

No one told her how excruciating everything would be: the white-hot exhaustion, the fear of expelling anything, anything at all, from her shredded private areas, the way she woke up this morning with rock-hard melons on her chest that felt like they might burst at the slightest touch. She nods off and wakes up, goes to the bathroom to look at her drawn face, says to herself, “I’m a mother.” She acknowledges her new self, tries to get used to it, all the while fighting the urge to run away, out of the room, to find her old world, her old self, which she knows is gone forever. Her belly is loose and flabby, missing its occupant. She has stared in the mirror at her naked body, lifted up the flesh of her abdomen, let it flop down, marveling at the difference.

Her mother is busy, pouring all her anxieties into cooking seaweed soup and bringing it to her in the hospital, insisting she have it fresh for every meal, so that means she is mostly alone, she and her baby, alone in a room that looks over the racetrack in Happy Valley. The baby is quiet, sleeping most of the time, so the room is eerily silent, save for some faint sucking sounds. So she spends a lot of time looking at all the windows in the apartment buildings and imagining the lives that are going on inside and marveling at the fact that every single one of those people was born, just like this baby.

The baby is such a scrap of a thing, with teeny hands and soft nails that are somehow also razor sharp. Her mouth purses into a rosebud, making Mercy’s heart stop with love. At the birth, the baby didn’t draw breath for a few beats, but then she inhaled and let out a good cry. Her Apgar scores were seven and eight, and Mercy was a bit indignant that already her daughter was being subjected to a standardized test.

This child is hers. When the baby stirs, moving her head a little, letting out a mewl, Mercy loosens her hospital robe so her chest is exposed, carefully unswaddles her baby, and sits down, leans back, and holds her baby, flesh to her flesh. Someone watching her might think it felt natural.

Sometimes she takes her sleeping baby in the rolling bassinet and perambulates through the halls, passes other mothers doing the same, all moving slowly, with their sore, weak gait, as if they are holding basketballs between their thighs. Most are accompanied by their partners or by their other children. They smile and nod, coo over one another’s babies. Mercy likes to go to the nursery and see all the other babies, most sleeping, some sucking on pacifiers, all terrifyingly similar, with their old baby faces. She has not put her baby in the nursery, preferring to keep her with her in her room.

She has had no visitors except her mother, although David has indicated that he will come in the next few days — after she has had a few days to adjust, is how he put it in the e-mail. It is more for him to adjust, she thinks, but without too much resentment.

She sits there a moment longer, and then the baby mewls again.

Mercy sits up, moves so the baby’s face is next to her giant breast. The baby’s mouth opens but cannot get a hold of the rock-hard breast, and Mercy winces from the slicing pain that comes from the avid mouth. Milk starts to spray out from her nipple, and the baby’s lips get wet and slippery, and suckling becomes even more impossible. Mercy closes her eyes in agony, the baby tries again, cannot latch, starts its thin, desperate cry. Mercy tears up in frustration.

A knock at the door. Usually it is a nurse to take her blood pressure or to give her some pills for iron deficiency or a doctor to check the clipboard.

Mercy looks up and cannot reconcile who is there. The woman who should hate her the most in the world, who should be the last person to see her with her own baby, to see her with anything good.

She cannot talk, cannot say hello, just gapes, and then, as the baby tries again to get a hold and fails, and starts to wail in earnest, she starts to cry herself.

“Oh, lord,” says Margaret. “These are terrible days. I know. They say it’s the best time of your life, but it’s also the worst.”

And then, behind her, Mercy sees another woman. She knows who it is immediately, although she has not met her. Another woman who should not be here, who should not see her with this baby, a bastard child from her own husband. Yet here these women are, bearing what she can see are flowers and food and gifts. So they are not here to torture or demand retribution. But how can it be?

She doesn’t understand.