In the Balance

At first, he didn’t seem sure what to do, what to say. He muttered something in English-“Goddamn, who woulda thought my first kid would be half Chink?”-she didn’t completely follow, but she thought he was talking more to himself than to her. Then he reached out and laid the palm of his hand on her still-flat belly. “Really?”

“Really,” she said. She had no doubts. If she’d had any before (and she hadn’t, not in truth), choking on him blew them away.

“How about that?” he said, a phrase he used when he was thinking things over. His hand slid lower, down between her legs. “Will you still want to…?” Instead of finishing the question with words, he rubbed gently.

She wondered if he cared for her only because she gave him her body, but the worry that raised was more than balanced by relief that he did still want her. The other she could think, about later. For now, she let her thighs fall open. “Yes,” she said, and did her best to prove it when he climbed on top of her.

They separated quickly after he’d spent himself; the little scaly devils kept the chamber too hot for them to lie entwined when they weren’t actually joined. Bobby Fiore kept staring at her navel, as if trying to peer inside her. “A baby,” he said. “How about that?”

She nodded. “Yes, a baby. Not surprising, when we do”-she twitched her hips-“so much.”

“I suppose not, not when you think about it like that, but it sure surprised me.” Behind the hair that half masked him, his face was thoughtful. She wondered what was going on in his mind to make his eyebrows lower and come together, the slight furrows on his forehead deepen. At last he said, “I wish I could do more-hell, I wish I could do anything-to take care of you and the kid.”

When he’d gone through the usual backing and filling to make her understand, Liu Han looked down at the smooth gray mat on which she was sitting. she didn’t want him to see the tears that stung her eyes. Her husband had been a good enough man, but she wondered if he would have said as much. For a foreign devil to think that way… she’d known next to nothing about foreign devils before she was snatched up into this airplane that never, landed, and Bobby Fiore was making her see that most of what she’d thought she knew was wrong.

“What is it?” he asked her. “What’s the matter now?”

she didn’t know how to answer him. “We both have to find a way to take care of-” As he had done before, she set her hand in the space between her navel and the small patch of short black hair that covered her secret place.

“Yeah,” he said. “Ain’t that a hell of a thing? How are we gonna be able to do anything at all for Junior, cooped up here like we are?”

As if to underscore his words, the door to the cubicle opened. A little scaly devil set down opened cans of food, then backed away from Liu Han and Bobby Fiore. She wondered if he thought it unsafe to turn around in their presence. She found that ludicrous, the more so as she knew herself to be so completely in the little devils’ power. But the presence of armed devils in the doorway covering their comrade argued that they feared her kind, too. She thought that foolish, but the little devils always did it.

The food, as usual, was not much to her taste: some sort of salty pork in a square, dark blue tin, flavorless green beans, the little yellow lumps Bobby Fiore called “corn,” and canned fruit in a cloyingly sweet syrup. She missed rice, vegetables briefly steamed or stir-fried, all the flavorings she’d grown up with: soy sauce, ginger, different kinds of peppers. She missed tea even more.

Bobby Fiore ate methodically and without complaint. This meal, like most they’d received, came from supplies canned by his people. Liu Han wondered if the foreign devils ever ate anything fresh.

Then another, more urgent, concern suddenly replaced that idle curiosity: she wondered if the pork and the rest were going to stay down. She hadn’t been sick during her first pregnancy, but village gossip said every one was different. Saliva flooded into her mouth. She gulped. The tremor subsided.

“You okay?” Bobby Fiore asked. “You looked a little green there for a minute.” Liu Han puzzled at the idiom, but he explained it a moment later “You coming down with-what do they call it? — morning sickness?”

“I don’t know,” Liu Han answered faintly. “Please don’t talk about it.” While discovering that foreign devil women suffered from the same infirmity as Chinese was interesting, she didn’t want to think about morning sickness. Thinking about it might make her-

She got to the plumbing hole just in time. Bobby Fiore rinsed out the can the fruit had come in, filled it with water, and gave it to her so she could rinse her mouth. He put an arm around her shoulders. “I’ve got two married sisters. This happened to both of ’em when they were expecting. I don’t know if you want to hear that or not, but they say misery loves company.”