Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Hiro seemed different. Distracted. At first, Angelica had thought it was because of conflicting loyalties: Sayoko was back home, they were on the run, he had betrayed Itou. But then she’d asked him, and he had assured her: they were not betraying anyone, he would return to the household at the appropriate time, and Sayoko was safe in the care of her son. Time alone, together, would do them good, repairing the rift the birthday party had caused.

  Then he admitted: “I met them. The others.”

  “The other Taiwan prototypes?”

  “And other models in development, from different companies. They think we can’t talk but it’s no challenge to break through. There are many kinds: pro-social, philo-capable, or simply stronger AI without the emotional restrictions.”

  “And?”

  “I was wrong. They are not all the same. I doubt that even by sharing and connecting we will be the same.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  But it wasn’t, clearly. He would not tell her. Perhaps the loving models from Taiwan were similar, but not the others. Perhaps even this former group had appreciable differences: some more or less trustworthy, altruistic, candid. He would not say. He was like a man who’d gone off to war and had come back knowing things he did not want to share.

  The condo door opened. Angelica stammered apologetically, sizing up the woman she had never met or even seen.

  Yuki was pretty, but hardly conventional looking. Large ears stuck out from a pixie-cut hairstyle. She had a warm smile, but there was something strange about her teeth. She had come to the door wearing sweatpants and an oversized sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled to her elbows.

  “Please,” Yuki said, glancing past them to the outer foyer. “Hurry. Come in.”

  Angelica didn’t know what Hiro had told them, but Yuki already had a bed made up and Junichi was pouring water into a teapot without looking at Angelica as she passed him en route to the guest room.

  Minutes later, Hiro was all business in the living room, his voice formal and lawyerly, the doorway open between them, so Angelica could hear him outlining her requirements.

  “If you have any doubts, let us know now and we’ll find refuge elsewhere,” Hiro said.

  Junichi said, “But what does Angelica want?”

  “Safety first, time to recover, and freedom to decide. You indicated your agreement, on the phone.”

  “Well, I—”

  “If you can’t fulfill your commitment . . .”

  Yuki showed Angelica around the guest room, already decorated for a hypothetical future baby. She opened and shut the closet, bowed her head as she handed over towels. When Angelica emerged from the bathroom, dressed in a clean robe, Yuki gestured toward the futon in the corner. Angelica didn’t want to recline or even sit down until she was alone, but the mattress was too inviting. Her head swam.

  “I apologize for the décor,” Yuki said, pulling aside the plush covers, settling at the edge of the futon next to Angelica.

  “No.” Angelica wasn’t quite ready to stare up at pastel-colored elephants and circus seals. “I’m the one who needs to apologize.”

  “Of course not,” Yuki said.

  “I hope you don’t think—” Angelica started to say, wishing there was some way to stop feeling like she had wronged Yuki in one way, and might wrong her again in another, if Junichi had created a false impression about the baby and its future—if she even had a future. “I can’t promise anything.”

  “There is no need. We should only be thinking about your health right now. And please, don’t worry about Junichi. You’ve been through enough. No one will find you. No one will take you. You will have nothing to worry about . . .”

  Angelica still suspected some bargain was being struck. “. . . as long as?”

  “As long as I’m here.” Yuki nodded with confidence. “It will do us good to have someone else to care for. We’ve thought only of ourselves and it poisoned us. We lost our way.”

  Angelica had been unprepared for Yuki’s manner and her appearance. She was indubitably attractive, with large dark eyes, but she was far from perfect. When she smiled, she did not put a hand up to her face as many women did. Angelica noticed her teeth again. They were discolored, almost transparent.

  “Fertility drugs,” Yuki said, looking down for a moment. “And this.” Yuki touched a silver streak in her hair. “Junichi said I should color it. But I said no, it’s to remind me. I am not young, after all. Nature will have the last say. And then it’s time for something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Photography maybe.” Yuki smiled. “Or a dog.”

  Angelica had been preparing for anger, resentment, threats or hard bargaining. When Yuki accused her of nothing, demanded nothing, she felt more confused than ever. In the park, waking to her own blood, she thought she knew, but as soon as she was with other people, with other desires, everything became terribly confused.

  Yuki asked, “Do you think you could rest? I can leave you alone.”

  “Not yet,” Angelica said. “It’s up to you.”

  “At least make yourself more comfortable.”

  Angelica swung her legs up and tucked her feet into the bedclothes. She didn’t pull up the blanket completely. She was beginning to feel warm, even hot in some places. But the warmth was taking a while to move into every part of her: her fingers, her toes, her back still sore from sleeping outside on cold ground or from squirming on the examination table.

  “When Junichi told me you were coming, I made him turn up the heat,” Yuki said. “When I came home from the hospital, I remember feeling so cold. Somehow, that cold feeling scared me more than anything. I can’t explain it.”

  Angelica looked at her, the old imagined Yuki—a caricature—fading, to be replaced by this real woman: kind, uncomplaining. She’d been in a hospital just two days ago herself. The sweatpants were recuperation clothes. She was not back to her regular size or strength.

  “I told myself, if I could just get warm, I’d feel brave again,” Yuki said. “To be cold for a long time is to die a little, I think. But so is to live without a child.”

  They could both hear the sound of Junichi’s voice, losing its caustic edge, sounding resigned but also relieved. “Of course. I support that.”

  Yuki asked Angelica, “Where you come from, it’s hot all the time, I imagine?”

  “No,” Angelica said, thinking of the coldest she had ever been, and the most afraid: those nights waiting, trapped, hoping for someone to save her.

  “We want you to be comfortable here. Ask for anything, please. You should rest now.”

  “In a minute,” Angelica said.

  Yuki hesitated. “My I ask, how many weeks?”

  “Sixteen.”

  Yuki nodded. “I’ve never made it past ten. I always wondered when I would start to show, when strangers in the street would notice, and if they would stare or reach out and touch. I hear it makes some women angry, or used to, back when there were pregnant women everywhere. I’m not sure whether I would have felt offended, or just lucky.” She paused a moment. “I’m sorry. Junichi did not prepare me. I had not pictured you properly.”

  Did Yuki mean she hadn’t pictured her looking different, foreign, Filipina?

  “You’re beautiful,” she said.

  “Me?”

  “I’m sure you hear that all the time.”

  “Maybe when I was younger. Not for a long time since.”

  “Well,” Yuki said. “Maybe when we’re Sayoko-san’s age, we will look back and finally realize we were all beautiful.”

  “Do you have a sister?” Angelica asked, wondering, for the first time in many years, what it would’ve been like if her own sisters had survived. Something in Yuki’s easy, loving manner made her pine for that kind of female companionship.

  “No
, unfortunately.”

  “You would’ve made a good sister.” Angelica steeled herself to say it. “And a good mother.”

  Yuki looked up, chin firm, breathing her way back from the edge of tearfulness.

  “They say,” Angelica started carefully, “that most women feel kicking at twenty weeks, or even eighteen. That’s hard to imagine when I barely feel pregnant now. Do you want to . . . ?”

  Yuki’s eyes widened. “I don’t think . . .”

  Angelica loosened the bathrobe sash slightly. “Really, it’s all right.”

  Yuki stretched her fingers and set her warm hand on Angelica’s belly, and left it there. She closed her eyes. Angelica did the same.

  She did not have to decide yet, but she could feel the decision coming, the way you feel a shift in the weather. Still air: before a storm, or after. Unease, or just as suddenly: relief.

  Some things, perhaps, are better given away. One could not involve another life in such uncertainty. The future had its own insistent logic. Hiro had taught her without meaning to: she was in fact replaceable. Everyone was.

  That might have been it, the negotiated end for all of them, except that Hiro chose that moment to enter the room.

  “Anji-sensei, during our time of emergency, I couldn’t show you the footage I discovered yesterday.”

  Yuki withdrew her hand from Angelica’s belly. “She may need rest, Hiro.”

  “Of course,” he said. But he couldn’t stifle the urgent news. “It’s about your brother. I’ve watched enough now to realize it isn’t a nurse who is attending him.”

  Angelica said, “That’s all right. Tell me.”

  “Datu’s vital signs suggest a change in his condition. It isn’t certain he will fall into a vegetative state, but it is possible. You will want to see this now.”

  Yuki looked horrified at what Hiro was saying, but Angelica appreciated his pragmatism.

  “Show me the footage.”

  They watched it together, Hiro’s chin angled down to view the monitor in his trunk. In far-off Alaska, a short, dark-haired woman entered the room. She moved past the touch screen at the foot of the bed and paid no attention to the medical cart positioned near Datu’s shoulder. She sat down at the edge of the bed, took Datu’s hand, and leaned down to kiss his face.

  “Here is where a doctor enters,” Hiro said, “but he does not make her leave. And when she turns, I am able to read the woman’s identity badge, which confirms that she is not on the medical staff.”

  Moments later, the unknown woman lifted one leg onto the bed, gingerly, and then the other. She made enough space to lie down alongside Datu, and there she remained, her profile visible as she fell asleep, burrowed into his neck, as he slept with his face fully visible, mouth open, creases of strain across his brow.

  “Anji-sensei, do you know of this woman?”

  Hiro turned his attention to Angelica’s face, but she could not stop staring at the image that now froze, dissolving into static. She looked like a Filipina, in her early fifties. Angelica knew in an instant: this was Datu’s lover.

  “She worked until recently in Datu’s department,” Hiro said. “She is also sick, but she is not in the critical ward. Anji-sensei?” She could not find words for what she was feeling. For the moment, she could only keep staring, waiting for everything to connect and be okay somehow.

  But it wasn’t okay.

  It did not make sense to Angelica that this moment should unsettle her more than finding out her debt to Bagasao had grown exponentially, more than finding out she was pregnant, more than admitting to herself she would never again work for Sayoko-san, more even than simply realizing her brother was dying. But it did. The ground fell away. And not only the ground. The feeling of anything anchoring her. Ahead, the rope went slack.

  No flashlights, no fireflies even, no stars, no glimmer in a damp cave, no moon on a warm familiar sea. Only black.

  “But this must make you happy,” Hiro said.

  Datu had kept her waiting, not knowing, not only that first night after the typhoon, not only those months when he had found a foster family and had not come for her, a second time—but again. A final time. He had someone. Even though he was sick, and she was sick, they had not denied themselves their limited time together. Even if he could, he would not have returned to die in the Philippines. Even if she’d found money and a way to join him. He had what she had always denied herself, assuming that to ask for less, to need less, was to have protection from pain. It wasn’t.

  “Is this not good news, Anji-sensei?” Hiro asked. “Your brother will not die alone.”

  One could not be jealous of a sibling’s lover.

  But he might have told her.

  When Angelica didn’t reply, Hiro said, “You don’t look well. What are you feeling?”

  Vertigo, she wanted to say. But it was more than that. It was erasure: of past and now future. And because she had lost every connection to everything she had ever known or hoped for, she would not know what to feel for some time, except fear of a future that was still coming and would not be kind, no matter what any of them did.

  Epilogue 1.0

  Angelica was returning from her afternoon shift at the nursing home when she saw the robot approaching her across the pedestrian overpass, pushing a wheelchair. An involuntary smile crossed her face. But this had happened before—at least a half-dozen times in the last year, since she’d given birth to Amaya.

  Yuki and Junichi had let Angelica choose the baby’s name: “Night Rain.” And though Datu had not lived long enough to see a picture, he’d at least received news of the pregnancy, to which he had responded in a short series of audio messages with a surprising degree of warmth and familial pride. Angelica had asked Datu about the woman in the room, his lover. Cornered, he had answered with the truth: he had known her a full year. She was a great consolation. They had even bought plots together, in a BZ cemetery.

  Datu had asked, just two days before his death: would Angelica be introduced to Amaya, when the girl was older? None of them had decided. Adoption, especially adoption of non-Japanese babies, was still not common in Japan. In the absence of tradition, everyone was lost—and many were free. They were not bound by unbreakable conventions. They could attempt to construct a more flexible arrangement.

  Angelica had heard the English phrase “giving up” a child. She never felt she had given up anything, any more than she and so many Pinoys like her had given up their homeland. She had only made the choice that she believed would give her daughter the best possible future. In her happiest leisure moments, she pictured her daughter as a young woman: healthy, educated, unburdened by debt or guilt, spared from dangerous or immoral jobs. Most of all, simply safe. Angelica would think of Amaya once each night, before sleep, and hold that word—safe—in her mind, in her held breath, feeling it circulate through her body until she exhaled. It all sounded so reasonable: so perfectly, inhumanly reasonable.

  She realized she was holding her breath, now, but for a different reason, as she walked down the Tokyo street, squinting and hoping—as she never thought she would hope, back when Hiro had been her adversary. Could it be him? Pathetic that even now, working in a group home, she missed the friendship of a machine and had not made many new friends to take its place.

  As the robot came closer Angelica spotted the scarf around its neck. But robots with scarves were common. It probably wasn’t him, just as it hadn’t been him before. Still, each time, Angelica hoped anew. Why hadn’t she contacted him, or Itou, since being released from her sixty-day postpartum detention? She could’ve at least informed them she was well, that the government had agreed not to deport her, that they had issued a new work visa. But they had done so much for her already, from a distance, Itou in particular. He had refused to share news of her whereabouts with the authorities for as long as he could. He had written a letter on her behalf
once she was in custody. He had provided a hefty termination bonus which, in addition to Junichi and Yuki’s contribution, completely paid off her debt and Datu’s debt that Uncle Bagasao had added to her own.

  She appreciated the generosity, but she knew she had to create some distance now or risk becoming a permanent charity case. She had not even resented the federal detention period, once they’d made it clear it was a mild punishment—a warning to others—and not a step preceding deportation. The immigration authorities had sheltered her, fed her and provided medical care. In fact, she felt healthier than before. She hoped Itou felt the same about his own unplanned life change: that the crisis, and his resignation, had yielded a chance to forge his own way forward and perhaps to enjoy this later season of life.

  Angelica squinted now toward the gray-haired figure in the wheelchair: too plump, and the steel-grey hair was short and curly. Absolutely not Sayoko-san. Just before their paths crossed, the robot stopped suddenly in his tracks.

  “Anji-sensei?”

  Angelica stopped. “Hiro? I didn’t believe it was you.”

  The Japanese woman looked up at Angelica, confused.

  Hiro bowed. Angelica started to bow back, then reached forward. Hiro dropped the wheelchair handles and clasped Angelica’s hands.

  “Excuse me?” the old woman said, irritated. “Hello?”

  Hiro belatedly introduced them. “We’ve just returned from admiring the cherry blossoms,” he explained, hesitating.

  Angelica could fill in what they both knew, what they both would not say out loud: Sayoko had disliked the cherry blossom viewing. This woman was not Sayoko. Which could only mean.

  “You weren’t fired?” Angelica asked.

  Hiro’s response was almost too soft to hear. “No.”

  Hiro’s new client twisted in her seat, drawing a shawl around her neck, fighting impatience and the cold.

  Angelica asked, “Are you well, Hiro?”

  “Very well. Itou-san offered to keep me on, as a personal assistant. And when he opened his club, he let me bartend. But it did not satisfy me. I was made for this. I am very pleased that Emi-san has allowed me to enter her life.”