transformed into a robot, and the pictures Maxon had kept in his locked drawer were all pictures of Maria in her metal form. Basically a bald robot with boobs. Sunny had to smile. Well, if Maxon was keeping robot porn, at least it was a bald female humanoid and not R2-D2.
She felt the bottom part of her belly tighten and a pain shot across her like a bolt of lightning wrapped around her gut. She clutched herself with both arms and crumpled up around her baby. She could feel the tightness of the muscles there; it felt like a rock. The pain twisted through her, stretched around into her back, and she found herself rocking back and forth and moaning. The nanny had taken Bubber to the pool in Maxon’s car. She could call the hospital, but how stupid.
She decided that after she opened the third envelope she would lie down, drink some water, turn on CNN, and take her mind off the baby. When the nanny got home, they would go to the hospital. She could wait until then. The contraction waned, the fist around her middle relaxed, and she took a deep breath. It was as if it had never happened, the relief was so complete. She wondered if it had really been that painful. Maybe she had been imagining things.
She slipped her finger under the seal of the small white envelope and ripped it open. There were two sheets of notepaper, penned in her mother’s spidery, formal hand. The first was addressed to Maxon, and the second was addressed to Sunny. She read the Sunny one first.
Dear Sunny,
It was so hot in Burma. I wonder if you remember. Yet you were always so cool in your little robes, you never seemed to sweat. I think it’s the hair on most people that makes them appear sweaty. Yet another benefit of your condition. The Chin people loved you, and they all wanted to bring you presents. I tried to throw all of their presents away when we left, but Nu saved most of that stuff and brought it with her when she emigrated. There are beautiful things, handmade things in the attic of the farmhouse that you may want to unpack and discover someday with Bubber and the baby.
I wanted to bury myself there in Burma, or evaporate myself. But when you came along, I didn’t want that anymore. I did what I did because I wanted to save you, to keep you from living in your father’s world. I thought that being in Burma would suffocate you, that being of a different race in addition to being bald there, and a zealot’s child, would make you so strange that you would have no chance of ever finding out who you really were. I worry now that maybe that is who you really were, that bald white baby under the mountain in Burma. What would have been your life, if we had stayed? I don’t know. Maybe I should have let you find out.
I don’t apologize for doing it. I want you to be happy, most of all. It is all I’ve ever wanted. From the time you were born, I was a mother first, and everything I did was for you. No one else mattered. I know you think that’s what you’re doing too, and I do apologize for railing at you over that damned wig. I’m just thankful for all the years you didn’t wear it.
Please don’t pursue Chandrasekhar and his witch doctor potion. He was a thief; he stole what he could of your father’s research. At one point, I tried to meet with him and stop him, but our lawyers told me there was really no point. It was such a small thing that he managed to pirate, and it didn’t work anyway. I promise you, it would not have worked. If your father had been able to develop it, maybe. But he died. I’m sorry for all of that.
Sunny dropped the sheet to the floor and read the second sheet.
Dear Maxon,
I am going to die from whatever is wrong with me right now. There is something you need to tell Sunny after I am gone. I was the one who turned in Sunny’s father to the Communists in Burma. I am the reason that he was killed. Please do not tell her until after I am dead. Choose a good moment, when she is feeling well and has had something to eat. Tell her clearly and calmly, with no movement in your face. Afterward say you’re sorry, and hug her with both arms. Then give her my letter.
Love, Mother
“You’re a murderer,” said Sunny out loud. “You’re a murderer.”
She remembered the perfect face of her mother, the young pale face in pictures from Burma, so ruthlessly serene. She remembered her mother’s body on the farm, sharp like a blade, hand clutching a broom, or a hairbrush, or a handful of envelopes. The way she had looked when Maxon got his acceptance letter from MIT. She remembered the hungry look in her mother’s eyes when she looked at Sunny across the top of her glasses, the way she said, “Sunny, you can do anything you want in this world. Be happy. Be free.”
And then her water broke.
27
Sunny stepped out the door. The afternoon buzzed too brightly around her, all the salt in the water in the air crackling her skin, all the leaves refracting the sunlight into her eyes, the entire neighborhood twisting like an abdominal muscle in distress. She held the side of the porch railing, dragging her feet all the way around to the steps, and then she lurched down them one by one. She needed to keep moving during the contraction in order to avoid falling deep into the panic that was under it. There was a flow from her uterus; it gushed a little as her left foot hit the sidewalk, sending a trickle down the inside of her thigh. She gasped. The belly tightened around the baby, and her spine felt broken in half; in the back of her at her waist there was definitely a knife sticking in. She choked but could not cough, it had gripped her too tightly, and she tried to bend forward to relieve her back, clinging so tightly to the porch railing. From somewhere outside herself, she thought there should be a voice in her ear, telling her to breathe. Otherwise she would pass out. Then it subsided.
She left the house where she had lived.
She needed help.
ON BUBBER’S BIRTHING DAY, everything was different. She woke up in the middle of the night with a contraction, firm and insistent. There was time to shower before the next one came, time to put on a wig before the next one after that. She tugged Maxon on the shoulder. “It’s time,” she said, just like the women said in movies and on television. “Maxon, it’s time.” He woke up, instantly alert.
“Okay. Let’s get Mother,” said Maxon.
“What? Do we have to?” Sunny said. “Can’t we just go?”
Maxon rubbed his face, pulled on his pants. “She came down here to see the baby being born. Don’t you think she wants to go to the hospital when you’re in labor? That’s where it’s most likely to happen.”
“It’s the middle of the night. She’s asleep.”
“We need her,” Maxon said. Sunny paused. She felt the strange thing happening in her uterus, and felt the foot of the baby roll across her belly just below her ribs. She would like to have her mother there, because she was such a strong supporter. However, her mother would not approve of the wig. She had been disapproving of the wig since the beginning of her visit, when she met Sunny at the airport and said, “Who are you?”
