The Expatriates (12 page)

Her children step carefully, lightly, into the pool, as if they know how fragile everything is, and of course they do.

It was hard, almost impossible, to know when to leave Seoul. In the beginning, they thought they would stay until they found him, because what was the alternative? And then, when days turned into weeks and weeks turned into a month, she started worrying about Daisy and Philip, how they were just sitting in a hotel room. Her mother came over, and their extended family in Seoul had been wonderful. Once they found out what happened, they came to the hotel every day with expensive melons and chocolates and offered to take Daisy and Philip out so they wouldn’t be bored, although it made her too nervous when the children were out without her. So sometimes they would just take them to their homes, but communication was difficult, and the children were frightened. But she knew she couldn’t lock them in a hotel room forever. She tried to get the international school in Seoul to let them go to classes, but although they were sympathetic, they were unwilling to admit her children for an unknown amount of time.

“It would be very disruptive to our community,” said the administrator, “and of limited use to your own children.”

In this new world, everything was so raw, so blinding. The first time she took a shower, her mother forcing her, she soaped her skin and told herself, G is gone, G is gone. She washed her greasy hair, fingers slipping over her roots, and thought, G is not here, he will not be here when I emerge from the bathroom. She put on new clothes, realizing, I don’t know where G is, and I don’t know when I’ll know. Everything looked new and meaningless. She looked out the window of her hotel room and saw a beautiful moon against the
dark buildings and wondered if she would ever find any pleasure in anything ever again.

In the meantime, she started working on a comprehensive description of what G had been wearing that day. It had been unseasonably warm, and he had on warm-weather clothes. What drove her nuts was that she knew the T-shirt and the shoes but she didn’t know which exact shorts he had been wearing. He had a few pairs that were very similar. He had two pairs of elastic-waist khaki pants and a pair from Target that had a button. He liked the elastic-waist pants more, because his little fingers were not yet very dexterous. His fine motor skills were not very good, and she had been told to let him play with pens and chopsticks to strengthen his hands. She didn’t know which ones he was wearing, because she couldn’t remember which ones she had packed. She wanted to call and ask Essie what was at home, but imagining the conversation exhausted her. She knew the T-shirt. It was yellow, long-sleeved, with the faded image of a green dinosaur eating leaves off a tree with
I’M A VEGETARIAN
on top in green letters. He had loved it, wearing it whenever he could. The shoes were velcro Weebok sandals she had bought online, and they were no longer available. She had printed out a picture of them from the website, with the “No longer in stock” message, because she wanted an image of them. Because this is what she can do. She can write things down or print things out so she has a record. She can make lists of what is missing. She can do these things so she doesn’t have to think of what she cannot do.

She then became seized by the idea of getting a duplicate outfit, so she scoured eBay and found the T-shirt, used, for $3.99 (although it was a 5T, not a 4T). Then she paid $35 in shipping to get it to Korea. She brought it to the police station in triumph.

“This is the T-shirt he was wearing,” she told Mr. Park, the sergeant who had been appointed to be her point person. He carefully took a photo and said he would add it to the file. She asked whether it would be helpful if she found the shoes he was wearing at the time,
and Mr. Park looked at her sympathetically and shook his head no. The T-shirt was enough.

She had already given them the photo of her extended family at the restaurant earlier that day, but G was on the periphery and barely visible, even when she blew up that part of the picture. She became obsessed with the fact that she hadn’t taken any photos of the kids later in the day, and her with an eight-megapixel camera on her phone! Perhaps if they had had an accurate photo of what G looked like on the day he disappeared and they had released it to the public quickly, someone might have recognized him. And then she wanted to document Daisy and Philip, but she wanted to do it without frightening them. She knew if she told Clarke, he would discourage her, so one night, before they got in the shower, she asked them if she could take photographs of them.

They submitted in a way that frightened her. They didn’t want to, but they did, because they knew it was important to her and that it would be futile to say no. They seemed a little bit like abused children. She was causing them more trauma.

But. She couldn’t help herself. So, a catalogue of moles.

She had been thinking about if she found G two or three years later and he had changed a lot. What if she was unable to know for certain if it was him? Yes, of course, DNA, but in the immediate sense, the first moment when they showed him to her. She wanted to know right away. Children change so much. How to be sure? She came up with this. A mole catalogue.

She stood Daisy and Philip in the bathroom in their underwear and took photographs of their arms, their inner thighs, anywhere they had a birthmark or irregularity or mole. And then she labeled and filed them on the computer she had had Essie send to Seoul. Daisy had a large mole on her left inner thigh, and two close to one another on her right back shoulder. Philip had a scattering of them on his right arm, above his elbow. He had a scar above his right eyebrow. She had the photos on her computer, backed up, and in hard copies.

Of course, the ones she needed, she didn’t have. She couldn’t remember the details of G’s body. He must have had moles, but who noticed those kinds of things on a third child? She pored over old photos on her computer, trying to see what spots he had on his face, things that would not change even after years and years. But everything seemed so mutable, so temporary: eyebrows, hair, even the shape of his face. He could get fat, he could be unrecognizably skinny, depending on what type of environment he was in. He might be with a family who had just wanted a child and got him off the black market and spoiled him rotten. Or he might be in some terrible place, a surly street urchin or worse. She can only bring herself to read snippets of what happens to children who disappear, glancing off the terrible surface of what might be. Her therapist tells her to stop thinking about it.

But sometimes she’ll read in the paper that in China and India, children are kidnapped and maimed so that they become more compelling and effective beggars. In other countries, kids are taken for their organs, but those are usually the older ones, older than G. There’s the sex trade, of course. This is what she has to digest. G, her one-eighth Asian child, who actually could pass for Asian. They would never have taken light-haired Daisy, who looks white. Too much trouble, a foreigner’s child, too much media attention, potential for international conflict. But Daisy and Philip look white. G looks Asian. Only G had that one recessive gene pushed to the fore, that stubborn Asian DNA strand that burst when he was made, so that while he’s recognizable as her child—only one person has ever asked her if he’s adopted—he looks quite recognizably Asian. So he has dissolved into the fifty million other Korean people on the peninsula.

After she photographed Daisy and Philip and they went to bed, quiet and submissive, she realized that she was damaging them further and they needed more normalcy. She booked a flight for them to go back to Hong Kong the next day with her mother so they could go back to school. She and Clarke stayed on.

That was when she weaned herself off the anxiety medication. The
Korean doctors had been liberal with prescriptions, but she wanted to stay sharp, be ready for whatever came her way. She only took an Ambien when it was two in the morning and she couldn’t stand it anymore.

Then, after six weeks, Clarke went back to work. She couldn’t believe it, but he said, “You’ll be here. I’m not doing anything that you can’t do. And we need to see our other children. Make sure they have a parent there, even though your mother’s there. They are suffering as well.”

And he left her, fuming, in the hotel room. What was it about men? They didn’t feel things the same way. How could he leave the country where his child was lost? Now the person she saw the most in the world was Mr. Park, a gentle man with glasses who handled her with extreme delicacy.

She remembered sitting with him in the police station, as she did almost every day. It was getting cold, November, December, and the building was not well heated. He apologized for the temperature and said the government saved money on heating.

“At home,” he said, “we have the floor heating, the
ondol
. It is very effective, and we eat and sleep close to the ground.”

She wondered what he went home to every night, whom he lived with, if he had children. She asked him once about his family, and he told her in a way that indicated he was making a sacrifice by telling her, so she didn’t delve into the personal again.

They shared coffee every day. Once, sick of the terrible brew they had at the station, she made an impulsive purchase at Hyundai Department Store on the way to the station. When she came in bearing the espresso machine, the policemen were struck dumb and then all in unison said they could not accept the present, government regulations and all. She insisted, said it was for her as well, as she was there every day, and then she set it up and made everyone a cup, foaming the milk she had brought and stirring it into paper cups. She and the policemen sipped the good coffee together in silence, each lost in his own thoughts.

The police were very polite and concerned but completely ineffective. She didn’t go ballistic on them, because she didn’t think it would
help her or G. But it was incredibly frustrating. Every day brought new leads: phone calls, e-mails from people who thought they’d seen G. But they never led anywhere. Seoul was blanketed with closed-circuit televisions, but there was a blind spot where they had been, and when they studied the adjoining ones, they couldn’t see G anywhere. One store’s camera had been broken for a week and was getting fixed that day, so the whole system had been down. This is the direction where they thought G must have been taken. They told her of another case where a boy had been taken and they had been able to trace his path with different security cameras. It had taken them a few weeks, but they had traced him to a village an hour outside Seoul, reachable by bus, where a mentally disturbed woman had taken him as her child. He had been shaken but healthy when they found him. She had treated him well, he said, but had insisted that she was his mother. He was seven years old, so he knew it wasn’t true but was frightened of challenging her, so he had played along and stayed with her in her house, afraid, but even more afraid of what lay outside.

The police were very proud of this case, but it didn’t seem that they were having the same luck with her child. They apprised her of all their work, but nothing ever panned out.

Clarke flew back every ten days or so, but there was never any progress to show him. He brought the kids with him the first few times, but they got upset when they had to leave her, so they decided it was better to let them stay in Hong Kong.

After three months, he took her by the hand while they were eating dinner at the hotel. “Come back home,” he said. “We have to live our lives. We can return whenever they find something. We can’t destroy four more lives. Philip and Daisy deserve a chance.”

She felt a white-hot hatred for him then that swept through her so violently she felt it physically. She snatched her hand back and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the night. He left the next morning in silence.

In Korea by herself, Margaret got into a rhythm. She’d wake up in the morning around six and go to the hotel gym for an hour.
She’d run on the treadmill, watching the television. She got to know the other regulars at the health club, as many locals used the hotel facilities as their gym. An old white-haired man stretched with his young trainer every morning, a few businessmen in their forties, a few pretty young housewives. They nodded to each other in the morning. Afterward she went upstairs and showered and put on comfortable clothes to go to the police station. She walked over—it took about fifteen minutes—and checked in with the police. Initially they had asked her to stay at the hotel and they would contact her with any leads, but she had been politely persistent, and now they let her stay around the police station with her laptop and access the Wi-Fi. How could they say no to someone like her? It was sterile, with white linoleum floors and fluorescent lights and that peculiar Korean smell she now recognized, from the accumulated smell of a thousand bygone boxed lunches. It was comforting to her now.

She would ask for any updates. They would show her a few badly translated e-mails or phone messages that had come in during her absence—“I know kidnapped child in Suwon!”—and say they were following up. That she was allowed to stay was against all protocol, but they found a way as long as she didn’t ask too many questions or interfere with their work. They knew it was hard for her to stay at the hotel.