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Liu Han knew what the matter was. Just another proof she was pregnant, she thought. She hadn’t been able to please her husband that way, either, not until she gave birth. Maybe that was one reason he’d ignored her so much.
“What’s the matter?” Bobby Fiore said again.
she didn’t know how to answer. If she told him and he turned cold to her… she didn’t think she could stand that. But he’d find out before too long, anyway. She remembered how good having the initiative with Yi Min had felt, even if only for a little while (she also wondered, for a very little while, what the scoundrel was up to-something to his own advantage, she had no doubt). That memory helped make up her mind.
she didn’t know how to say “baby” in English or the little devils’ speech; she knew Bobby Fiore wouldn’t understand it in Chinese. She sat up, used her hand to sketch the shape her belly would take in a few months. He frowned-he didn’t get it. She pantomimed cradling a newborn in her arms. If that didn’t put the idea across, she didn’t know what she’d do.
His eyes widened. “Baby?” he said in English, giving her the word. He pointed to her, to himself, made the cradling motion.
“Yes, ba-bee.” Liu Han repeated the word so she’d remember it. “Baby.” she’d need to use it a lot in the months-in the years-to come. “You, me, baby.” Then she waited to see how he would react.
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.”
Liu Han did not understand all of what he said, which was perhaps just as well. she did appreciate the water, after she’d rinsed and spat a couple of times to take away the horrid taste, she felt much better. It wasn’t like throwing up when she was ill: now that her body had done what it needed to do, it seemed willing to let her alone for a while.
“I wish the Lizards had a priest up here,” Bobby Fiore said. “I want the kid to get brought up Catholic. I know I’m not the best Christian there ever was, but I try to do what’s right”
Liu Han hadn’t thought much of the Christian missionaries she’d seen in China. How to raise the baby was, however, the least of her worries at the moment She said, “I wonder what the little scaly devils will do to me when they find out I am with child.”
she did not think her fear was idle. After all, the little devils had snatched her from her village, then from the prison camp. While she was up here in the airplane that did not land, they’d made her submit to several men (and how relieved she was not to be carrying a baby by any of them!). They could do as they pleased with her, do whatever interested them… without caring in the least what she thought about what they wanted.
/> “Whatever they do, they’ll have to do it to both of us,” Bobby Fiore said stoutly. She reached out and set a hand on his arm, grateful he stood by her. She would have been more grateful had she thought his brave words bore any relation to reality. If the little devils decided to keep the two of them in separate cubicles, what could he possibly do about it?
He said, “You ought to try and eat some more. You’ve got company in there, after all.”
“I suppose so.” Dutifully-but also cautiously-Liu Han ate a little corn, some of the beans, and even the last mouthful of pork left in the tin. She waited for her stomach to give them back, but it stayed quiet: having emptied once, it now seemed willing to relent. She hoped it would keep on being so forbearing.
Then, too late, she realized the little scaly devils would not have to wait until her belly bulged to learn she was pregnant. she’d grown so resigned to the moving pictures they made of her-not just when she was coupling but almost all the time-that she’d almost forgotten about them. But if the scaly devils could sort through the mix of Chinese, English, and their own language that she and Bobby Fiore spoke with each other, they’d know at once. And what would they do then?
If they were human, they’d have known when my courses didn’t come, she thought. But the devils hadn’t noticed that. Bobby Fiore didn’t think they were devils at all, but creatures from another world. Most of the time, Liu Han remained convinced that was nonsense, but now and then she wondered. Could real devils be so ignorant of matters Earthly as her captors sometimes acted?
In the end, what they were didn’t much matter. They had her-and Bobby Fiore-in their power either way. Liu Han wondered if any of the other women they’d brought up to the airplane that never landed were also pregnant. If they’d been used as she was, some probably were. She hoped so. she didn’t want to face the ordeal alone.
She glanced over at Bobby Fiore. He’d been watching her; when her eyes met his, he looked away. Wondering if I’ll throw up again, Liu Han guessed. She smiled wryly. What did a man know about a woman who was with child? Not much, which was why she hoped some of the others up here shared her predicament.
