Free The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee Page A

later that her phone sometimes rang, but when she picked it up, it disconnected, and later, that it was on vibrate, because she must have pushed that button inadvertently. She had her phone in her shaking hands, clutching it with desperation, willing it to connect her to someone who could help, someone who would do something. She screamed at Mercy to go to the hotel and get someone to help. Around her, Korean people stopped and stared. She noticed this too, in a corner of her mind, that they just stood still and stared at her. She supposed they were voyeurs, but also grateful that today it wasn’t them, that disaster could press by you so closely in a crowd that you could feel its terrible presence but that you could go home and eat dinner with your family and say a silent thank-you that it had passed you by.
    Daisy and Philip were mute, standing close to her without being told, terror holding them rigid. She regretted this later, that they had seen her so unhinged. She thought that Clarke would have handled it better. They didn’t cry until much, much later, when they were told togo to bed by their ashen father, and then they cried and cried and cried and couldn’t sleep until all of them went silent in the room, Margaret holding Clarke’s hand as they sat in chairs overlooking the street where it had all happened. She had spent a few hours in the nearest police station filling out forms with a nice young lady who spoke some English. The added layer of not knowing how to speak or write the language she saw all around her made her feel as if she couldn’t breathe, that she couldn’t move freely in this world.
    She had wanted to stay in the street where she had last seen him, but after five hours, at eleven at night, the other children were falling apart and needed to be in a quiet room. Still, she had put them in their room with Clarke, Mercy a black void among them, not physically there but a terrible presence still, and then she had gone back to the street, where she had stayed until one in the morning, when the streets were empty and she had to admit there was little chance that G would be brought back. She came back and watched Daisy and Philip shift uneasily in their restless sleep, with this blackness inside her stomach. They were still in their clothes. She had no idea where Mercy was.
    This is what could kill you about children as you watched them: the way they slept, their open-mouthed unconscious faces, their frail collarbones, their defiant stance right before they cried, their innocence. Their crazy, heartbreaking innocence. It could really kill you, if you thought about it.
    She wanted the hours back. She wanted to go back ten hours, to when life was understandable. She wanted to not ever have to go to the bathroom again. She wanted to have a kind stranger lead a crying G back to her, to be enfolded tight in her waiting arms, to be squeezed, to feel the corporeal flesh of him, the shaking, sobbing child. This was understandable. The absence of him was incomprehensible. Most of all, she wanted to erase Mercy from her life. To absent the girl and get her boy back. That was what she wanted.

PartII

Hilary
    H ILARY PAUSES . There is a stain on the piano’s ebony surface.
    “Puri,” she calls. “There is a water mark here from where Julian left his glass during his lesson.”
    At some point in her life, she realized that she never says anything directly anymore. She has become a master of indirection, or misdirection. She will say, “Mr. Starr is arriving from Kuala Lumpur at 11:00 p.m. tonight” or “I stained this blouse with red wine at dinner,” when she should say, “Please keep the lights on and notify the gate guard that Mr. Starr will be late” or “Send this out for dry cleaning.”
    Puri, of course, cannot always decode the message, and Hilary will come across the garment, still stained, folded neatly in her closet, or David will complain that the guard didn’t let his airport car into the