"Is everything going well?"
Reiko smiled and patted her belly. At the moment there were no problems; the fetus was growing well.
Hideyuki asked when she was due, and she told him the truth. The date was about three months ahead, and rapidly approaching. But when he asked about the baby's sex, she gave the vaguest of answers.
"I wonder."
In truth, she knew the baby's sex. Last month, when she'd gone to the obstetrician for an ultrasound, she'd looked at the monitor and seen a cute little protuberance right where the baby's legs joined.
Ah—a boy.
Lying there on the bed watching the screen, she'd actually uttered the words. The doctor maintained a studious silence, but a nurse was standing nearby and her expression indicated that Reiko was right.
She had decided not to let Hideyuki know that it was a boy. She didn't want him to expect the child to be a reincarnation of Kaoru. She decided that ambiguity was what was called for.
Reiko gathered herself to leave, and Hideyuki began to get up to see her to the door.
"You don't have to get up. Please, lie down."
"It's alright, never mind about me. Where are you planning to have the baby?"
She lent Hideyuki a hand as he braced himself against the wall and hobbled toward her. She mentioned the name of a local obstetrics clinic.
At that, Hideyuki stopped in his tracks.
"So you're not going to have it here."
She could sense reproach behind his words. The university hospital was close to his heart; he had lots of colleagues on the staff, and his son had studied there as a medical student. He no doubt felt that in an emergency, she'd get better care at the hospital than at some little clinic down the street.
Of course the idea had occurred to Reiko. But the fact that the hospital was where Ryoji had killed himself held her back.
"Well, I thought about it, but..."
Hideyuki couldn't know that her son had killed himself there. She hesitated to voice such inauspicious memories right now, so she was left floundering for a reason.
"You ought to have it here." Hideyuki was virtually pleading with her. He plainly wanted to see his grand-child as soon as he possibly could. He might have escaped a once-certain death, but he wouldn't be checking out of the hospital for quite some time yet. If she had the baby in the hospital, he could see it right away, and much more frequently after that.
Reiko understood all this, and it shook her. A mere thirty minutes of conversation had told her all she needed to know about Hideyuki. Even if he hadn't been Kaoru's father, she would have liked the man.
"I'll consider it."
In reply Hideyuki stretched out his hands to clasp hers. His hands felt like Kaoru's.
"Come back and visit again sometime. I'll be waiting."
Reiko had a feeling of déjà vu. Everything from the way he greeted her to the passionate grip of his hands was the way it had been with Kaoru. Only, now, the roles of visitor and visited were reversed.
As she closed the door behind her, she thought,
Maybe I should have the baby here after all.
5
A month before she was due, Reiko began to slip back into melancholy. At night, alone in her room, her anxiety spiraled out of control, and she began to fear she was going mad. Winter was almost over. It was March now, nearly six months since Kaoru's departure.
Her condo was too big for someone living alone.
With its huge living room and three bedrooms, it had been almost too much even when she'd lived there with her husband and son. Now its vastness oppressed her. It symbolized emptiness itself; she couldn't bear it. Having lost her loved ones one after the other, she was now alone—not strictly speaking, but close enough—in her fight. The enemy was no longer the MHC virus, but an overwhelming solitude.
The living room was crammed with luxurious fur-nishings, each one the product of her late entrepreneur husband's financial clout. They were without value now.
Reiko sank down onto the couch, pulled her knees up, and buried her face in them, sobbing. She couldn't figure out what to do to make up for the desolation she felt inside, a desolation so powerful it made her tremble. Her life was a bleak landscape stretching out before her. Though she told herself to live, despair was always with her.
I just want someone to talk to.
That was her sincerest wish. She was sure Hideyuki would play that role for her splendidly, if she wanted him to. They shared the same emotional wounds, and for that reason, among others, he was sure to be a good conversation partner. She'd already done the paperwork to specify the university hospital as the place where she was going to have the baby. But Hideyuki alone wouldn't be able to stave off her sudden attacks of loneliness—to help her master the enemy that occupied these rooms.
Reiko closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind of the spaciousness of the apartment. As she did so, a com-pact, edited version of her life played in her mind. A landscape made up of memorable events from her younger days—grade school, middle school, high school, college—floated before her mind's eye. An objectified view.
She knew exactly why she was seeing these third-party visions of her past. The other day, organizing her closets, she'd found, quite by accident, a floppy disc full of digital images.
They'd been assembled twelve years ago for display at her wedding. A rush of nostalgia came over her and she ended up looking through them again and again on the monitor. She'd provided the digital images herself, but her friends had edited them together into a light-hearted, even humorous version of her life. It had been ages since she'd looked at some of those pictures, and so, seeing what her friends had put together, she'd laughed out loud.
The sequence had been displayed on a huge screen in the wedding hall. It began with scenes of her as a baby and ended with a shot of her at twenty-two standing side-by-side with her future husband. It was hardly a complete picture, just a simple sketch of her life from ages zero to twenty-two.
Reiko paused on the last scene. It had been shot with a still camera, not a videocam; she and her future husband were standing with the ocean at their backs.
Reiko wasn't facing the camera. Instead she was twisted to one side, sticking her belly out toward her husband.
Why had she assumed such an awkward pose?
Reiko recalled the conversation they'd been having when the photo was taken. They weren't married yet, but already she was carrying her husband's child. She had wanted to make it clear in the photo that the child was being born because he was wanted, that he would enter life welcomed. That was why she'd stuck her belly out and placed her hand on it for the camera. She'd made no effort to hide her pregnancy from the wedding guests, either. The master of ceremonies had paused on the image and announced to the crowd that twenty-two-year-old Reiko was carrying the groom's child, and the two of them had been bathed in cheers.
When she closed her eyes she could hear the applause. She'd had everything back then. Her parents were still alive, the man who was to be her husband was at her side, and his child was growing within her. Ryoji.
She hung her head, helpless in the flood of memories. Reflecting on the past never assuaged her desolation but only made it worse. It wasn't good for her to be alone. As long as she was, her mind would always be under the sway of images from the past.
"That's it."
She got up from the sofa and went into the room with her AV equipment in it.
The room held a computer with a huge display.
Amano had arranged it so that she could access and view the Loop from home.