The Expatriates Read Online Free Page B

story. Last month, there had been an article about a pretty teenager in Tennessee who had her arm blown off while drinking beer with friends and playing around with a gun. In another story she found, a man had driven his girlfriend’s two sons to school, only he had been drunk (at eight in the morning!), and they had been killed in a car crash, because he hadn’t put them in their car seats. The man survived, courtesy of his airbag. The mother had been at home, asleep. Or the famous case of the chimpanzee woman. A woman had a chimp as a pet and had sedated it before her friend came over. The chimp had reacted badly to the drug and torn the friend’s face off. The victim had to have a complete face transplant, and children on the street cried when they saw her.
    Mercy wants to find a story that echoes her own.
    These stories always talk about the victim, and how she or he is coping. There are lots of pictures, in
People
magazine, at least, of the victim at home, disfigured or pale, chopping some sort of vegetableon a wooden board in the kitchen while his or her loving and supportive spouse or family member looks on. There are quotes from friends about how brave the victim is, how his character has been strengthened by the tragedy. You can survive a tragedy, given time. But what Mercy wants to know is never there. The person responsible for the calamity is never mentioned. No one wants to hear about the guy who shot the gun by mistake, or the drunk boyfriend driver, or the chimpanzee’s owner. The victims are richly sympathized with, and their guilty, confused perpetrators are erased from the story. They don’t exist. They are supposed to disappear.
    What did all those people do?
    What are their stories?
    She knows her own. She sits at home, eats almost nothing, looks at her dwindling bank account online, and wonders when she’s supposed to start her life again, when she is allowed.

Margaret
    H ER BODY LIKE VAPOR . Margaret sits in the tub, perspiring from the hot water, her hair pleasantly damp around her face, sweat and steam mingling into one fragrant wetness. The smell: pungent, salty, body, along with the lavender oil she poured into the water. She feels as if she might disappear, melt right into the steam, an intoxicating feeling. After her meeting with Priscilla, she found her way here, of course.
    Dr. Stein says she should live life, meet people for lunch, form words so she can speak them, nod her head, put one foot in front of the other. She has to do this to live.
    She had seen the building for months, passing by it every time she drove to town. One like many others, a dilapidated structure of many small apartments or rooms, with washing hung outside on bamboo poles, often turning gray with soot. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would hang laundry outside in Happy Valley, where the air is thick with dust from the exhaust of passing cars. Sometimes the curtains were drawn back from the windows, and she could see inside various homes: bunk beds, usually metal, a TV flickering, very basic.
    A small sign appeared one day, red letters on white plastic, in English and Chinese: FLAT TO LET, WE EKLY, MONTHLY , and a telephone number. She passed the sign several dozen times before she stopped at a traffic light and wrote down the telephone number.
    The next week, she took a taxi there—parking was difficult in the tight, scrambly streets, and no one answered the phone when she called. The door was smudged glass with chipped plastic Chinese characters glued on. She pushed the metal bar. A rank lobby with chipped tiles onthe floor, torn red vinyl couches along the wall. An old woman sitting behind a steel desk, eating a pungent lunch out of a Styrofoam container, shabby ledgers and an impossibly old phone. A phone that no one answered.
    “I would like to see the room,” she said, girding herself for the exchange that lay ahead.
    “Mae-ah?”
the woman grunted in Cantonese, uninterested. One of her front teeth was