by Anna Ferrara
The rest of the time, unbeknownst to my office, I worked on editing videos. Videos from the MultiMediaCards from the hidden cameras in Milla’s apartment, to be specific. I coded a program that would allow me to edit the footage in the cards while keeping the time codes intact, that could also blend shots in a way that made it look as if the people in them were actually moving from one position to the other. I would freeze the shots of us sleeping in separate positions and blend them with other shots of us moving around in separate positions to make it look as if all we ever did was sleep next to each other without touching. I made sure we always slept naked and compiled a library of shots of us sleeping separately in various positions so that I never had to worry about not having enough shots to fill in the duration of footage I removed. My program worked like a charm. My office never suspected the footage in the MultiMediaCards had been tampered with and I was free to do whatever I wanted in bed, or, more often than not, whatever Milla wanted me to do to her.
I didn’t think Milla would want to continue having regular sex with me once her belly got large but she did; her sex drive never waned and—and this was a surprise for me too—we both always came. Always. In fact, more often than not, we both came more than once. Before, I never thought women could come every single time, mainly because I seldom reached orgasm when sleeping with Jackson, so I thought it especially odd that a woman—and a pregnant one at that—could bring me more orgasms than a man could. To this day, I still don’t understand it; it seems counterproductive to the survival of our species if you ask me.
The part of my new assignment I hated the most was the part where I had to do the weekly camera swop. Milla was sticky; she followed me everywhere, even when we were at home, so finding some time away from her, to do a thing as dramatic as a camera swop, was both rare and risky. If it were up to me, I would have chosen not to do it at all but unfortunately, after my two-week M.I.A. stint, my boss dropped me an email saying he never wanted to see a lapse in footage ever again. ‘I’m afraid there will be consequences if it happens again,’ he wrote. It was comply or die so I complied.
I found a way to get the camera swop done by convincing Milla to take a thirty-minute silent soak in her bath tub, alone, with only scented candles for light, once every Sunday evening. I told her it would be good for both her and her baby, that it would make her baby calm and good-natured. She bought it and did it religiously. Once I got the swop done, I would always sit down and look as if I had been doing nothing but reading or watching television the whole time. She didn’t suspect a thing; she even wanted to name the baby after me.
She short-listed ‘Summer’, ‘Summerine’, ‘Summerlyn’, ‘Summet’, ‘Sumehrae’, ‘Sumaya’, ‘Sumea’ and ‘Sumee’ and told me to pick one. I didn’t want any of those Sum-related names, for obvious reasons, so I suggested a Western-sounding Cantonese name instead: Tso Yee (Joey), Mei Yee (May), Ko Yee (Chloe) or even Kar Yee (Karrie). We never once agreed on a name. She was bent on her Sum-names and I was bent on anything but. In the meantime, Milla simply called her ‘our baby’, while I stuck with calling her ‘the baby’ even though Milla made a face every time I called her that.
It is only practical that I do so, I explained, given the biological circumstances of her existence. It was for the good of ‘the baby’ most of all. I didn’t want her to end up the butt of jokes at school because she went around innocently telling everyone she had two mothers; I didn’t want her to have to deal with Christians or people like my mother! I did so only because I cared about her. I would love her and raise her and do everything in the world for her but I would not call her ‘my’ baby, I said. Being a child of a single parent still beat being a child of two gay women, that was a fact.
Milla never did agree with me on that. “I don’t want our kid living in a web of lies like you did or avoiding people like I did,” she said. “I want her to grow up free. Free to be herself, whoever she turns out to be.”
“She can’t be, Milla! Not in this environment! Not in this cookie-cutter world!”
Milla didn’t say anything in reply to that. She knew I was right, I think, she just didn’t want to admit so. She stopped making faces after that so I never brought the topic up again.
Most of the time, though, we were generally happy. We smiled a lot, hugged a lot, kissed a lot… until one day, just one week before the new millennium, when Milla was just a couple of weeks away from delivering, Milla stopped hugging or kissing me or even smiling at all. I tried my best to love her, pamper her and make her laugh in all the ways I knew she enjoyed but she never did get happier. Then—
New Year’s Eve, more than a week after she first started being glum, I found her sitting on the stained carpet in the middle of my office unit, in front of my floor-top computer, with one of my notebooks in hand and my StarTAC flipped open in the other.
I dropped the lunch box I had gone to get and ran towards her the moment I noticed she was crying.
She tossed the StarTAC and backed away the moment she saw me coming. Rage was all over her face.
“Who the fuck are you?” she said to me the moment our eyes locked.
After that day, everything between us changed forever.
Chapter 25
31 Dec 1999, Friday
“I will tell you everything one day, just, not right now.” I raised both hands and made my way towards her at a snail’s pace in hope that would convince her to forgive me for being a lying, double-faced creep.
“Stay the fuck away from me!” She found a way to prop herself into a standing position, even though her watermelon-sized belly made it extra difficult for her, and put the black spiral notebook she had in hand between us. “Who do you work for? A triad? The police? Another gang? Who?!”
“Milla, darling, let’s just talk this through, calmly.”
“I said don’t come near me!”
“Okay.” I stopped where I was, a good few metres away from her.
“And how in fuck’s name am I supposed to be calm when—” She flipped the notebook open and read the words from the page she found herself at. “‘—16 December: Breakfast at home? Read book? Cooked and had lunch alone? Installed a cot for baby, napped, cooked dinner, bathed, slept early?!!’”
“Milla, please—”
She kicked the stack of MultiMediaCards on the floor next to her and scattered them all over the carpet. “Why in fuck’s name do you have cameras hidden all over my house? Why do you write down every single fucking thing I do? And why in the world do you have a mother?!”
My mouth came open but I closed it again when I realised I had nothing to say.
“Do you even love me?”
“Yes! I never lied about my feelings for you—”
“Oh really? Then tell me who you really are! Why the fuck you’re doing all this!”
“I…” Remembered the clause in my employment contract that stated I was to pay damages to Everquest if I ever broke the non-disclosure clause. “…can’t. Not right now.” We might need the money, Milla! What if I need to save you from trouble like you did for me? I can’t go bankrupt! Not now! “But I swear we mean you no harm—”
“We? We?! How many God damn people are in on the shit you’ve been doing? Have they seen us? Everything we’ve been doing?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I gulped.
Milla’s mouth flew open and her hand flew over her forehead. She frowned at the notebook she was holding and tossed it like it were a filthy piece of garbage she no longer wanted to touch. “Why?” she said with an eerie sudden calm. She wiped the wetness on her cheek away. “What do they want of me? Who are they.”
“I don’t know. I’m not supposed to ask.”
“Are you kidding me?”
After some consideration, I shook my head.
She seemed to find the look on my face amusing. She laughed a little, in a forced way. “You mean you spent months invading a person’s privacy without even try
ing to understand why? Because ‘you’re not supposed to ask’? Do you have no brain of your own? No principles?”
I felt my cheeks start to burn again; my limbs began to tremble. Yes, I didn’t. All my life, I’d been told to simply do as I was told. ‘Never say no to your boss’, ‘listen to your mother’, ‘listen to your teacher’, ‘don’t question your elders’. Nobody ever told me to question why I was being told something! Why didn’t I think of questioning it myself? I didn’t know. I had no clue. All I cared about was keeping and growing in my job, I guess. And when you were at a job, you were just supposed to do whatever you were told, weren’t you?
Milla frowned, as if in disgust, and laughed a little. She shook her head. “You know how I found out? I found out because I was stupid enough to go to the East Asian Morning Post one afternoon, thinking I could surprise you with risotto!”
Blood rushed from my head to my limbs in that instant and I started feeling as if I could faint at any moment.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d end up face to face with a fifty-year-old Chinese woman who had no blinking idea why I would think she would be young, mixed, with a preference for Italian food!”
“Milla—”
“And never in my wildest dreams did I think you’d be a sick pervert who lied to me about every God damn thing!” In the blink of an eye, she burst into tears and—
—I found my own eyes full of tears too. “I didn’t lie about being in love with you, Milla,” I whispered.
“Then tell me who you really are! How is it you have a fake ID so real even a master criminal with a business making fake IDs can’t even tell it’s fake!”
I contemplated doing so but the thought of losing all my savings—the savings I never had the opportunity to spend—made me think otherwise. I need that money! The baby might need that money! Milla might need that money! “I can’t. I’m sorry. But I won’t let anything bad happen to you or the baby, I swear!”
I tried to get closer to her—I wanted nothing more than to give her a hug yet again, to go back to the way we were before—but Milla wouldn’t let me. She backed away, keeping the metres between us constant, and glared at me with hard, reddish eyes. “The baby,” she said and scoffed. “Now I get why she’s always the baby to you. And why you don’t even mind me being a drug dealer. You’re just as much a criminal as I am.”
“No, Milla, that is not—”
“Don’t you dare come anywhere near me or my baby or my apartment ever again. If I see you anywhere close, I’m calling the police.” She turned and moved along the periphery of my office to get to the exit.
I ran towards her and tugged on her arm to try to hold her back. “Milla, wait, please—”
She shook me off with the ferocity of a woman fighting for her life. “I said I don’t want anything to—ohh!”
“What?” I took one look at the way Milla was suddenly doubled over, clutching at the protruding stomach underneath her baggy black dress, and I began to panic. “Are you okay?”
Milla inhaled a long, deep breath, removed the shock that had been on her face, and straightened herself out. “Yes,” she said, with conviction. She marched right over to the grey door that was my office unit’s only exit and saw herself out.
“Milla!”
I found her at the lift lobby, furiously pounding her index finger into the down button. She looked fine, just incredibly impatient and not willing to wait one second longer for the lift to arrive.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes,” she said but then, all of a sudden, gasped, grabbed at her stomach and at the wall and became all bent over yet again.
“Shit, it’s time, isn’t it? I’ll get you to the hospital.” I tried to take her by the arm but she shoved me away while glaring at me like she hated me with every last inch of her soul.
“Get lost! I don’t want you at the birth of my child and I don’t want you anywhere near me or her, you he—ah! Aah! Oh, f—aaah!” Milla’s face crinkled into a wince, right as a stream of fluid gushed out from between her legs and splashed down onto the floor.
“Oh my God! I’ll call Dr Jones!” I reached for the Nokia in my pocket and fought to get my shaky fingers steady enough to make the dial.
“I don’t need you!” she said, but caught sight of the huge puddle between her legs and suddenly began looking quite scared. The lift doors opened in that moment and she dashed right in. She was about to reach for the buttons inside when all of a sudden, she stopped, grabbed her stomach and winced yet again.
My heart began to race. “Oh yeah?” I jumped into the lift with her and pressed the close button on her behalf. “I think you do.” I sounded like I was out of breath and felt as if I really was too.
“Don’t... touch me!” she said, right before she closed her eyes and began stroking her stomach with both hands while blowing out in the way those books we read together said a mother should do when in labour.
“Okay, okay, I won’t,” I moved to the corner of the lift that was furthest away from her in an attempt to make her feel more at ease. “Can you walk?”
She didn’t reply; she didn’t even open her eyes. She simply kept rubbing her stomach and blowing out like her life depended on it.
“Okay, okay,” I said, to myself. “Stay calm. What do we do now? We call Dr Jones. That’s right.” I lifted my Nokia to my face and, with a shaky thumb, punched in the number I had memorised in preparation for this very day.
Dr Jones’ phone rang. And rang. And rang. No one picked up. In the meantime, Milla’s blowing became more erratic and at some point, her eyes shot open, wide with fear, and she began panting.
“Shit.” I began to feel as afraid as Milla looked. “Come on, come on!”
“Hello?” The English accent was unmistakable.
“Dr Jones! It’s Sandra, calling on behalf of Milla Milone! Her water just broke, I’m sending her over to you right now! Milla! Wait!”
The lift door had opened and Milla had barged out without looking back. She didn’t get far though. Before she could even get to the doors of the office tower, she stopped, grabbed at the installation of letter boxes on her left and became hunched over yet again.
“I’ll wait for you at the lobby,” Dr Jones said. “Call me when you’re close.”
“Will do!” I hung up and went to Milla right away. “Wait here! I’ll get you a cab!”
“No! I don’t need you in my life, I swear to God!” She didn’t look me in the eye when she said those words; she kept her eyes on the floor and in them, I saw a look I had never seen before.
Fear. My brave, fearless Milla was actually afraid. Petrified, almost. More afraid than she had been when I nearly got my ears chopped. Seeing her afraid—for the first time ever—scared me, but I knew it wasn’t my place to be scared right then. I swallowed my own fear and said, as gently and calmly as I could, “I know. And I respect that, but you must know, I will never stop being here for you, especially when you need me, and right now, you need me, so please, just wait here, okay?”
She turned her head away from me so I couldn’t see what she thought of that, but I did see tiny drips of water falling from her head, down onto the floor.
I ran out of the building to flag a cab right away.
By the time our cab pulled into the MDYM Hospital lobby, it was pretty obvious Milla had gone into full-blown labour. She had been groaning and squirming in the back-seat the whole way over—to the horror of our cab driver—and was still wincing and doing the whole blowing thing when the hospital’s nurses got her into a wheelchair and wheeled her into MDYM’s sleek glass building.
Dr Jones had been waiting for us as she said she would be, to my relief. Seeing her waiting at the lobby, in that crisp white coat of hers, really soothed my frazzled nerves. I felt much better knowing Milla was now in her good hands. Even better when she told me I could go sit beside Milla in her ward once they were done checking on her and
the baby. I could also be with Milla when the birth commenced, she said, so long I put on scrubs, booties and a hair net.
She spoke to me as if I were Milla’s husband or legal partner. I thought that really nice of her, even though I eventually declined. “We kind of... quarrelled,” I added when Dr Jones reacted with surprise. “She doesn’t want me in there with her... anymore.”
“Oh?” Dr Jones looked around and leaned in when she realised the people closest to us were a good ten metres away. “Lovers’ tiff?” she said, in a low, secretive voice.
My body bounced right back into panic mode when I heard those words and I felt my cheeks fire up yet again. I stuffed both my hands into my pockets the second I realised they were shaking, and vigorously too. “Yeah. Something like that,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Up till that point, I thought me and Milla would be a secret I’d carry to my grave. I never thought I’d be speaking about it with anyone other than my office so when I had to, when the unexpected did happen, I had no knowledge of how to deal with it. I even felt as if the moment might be unreal.
“I wouldn’t be too worried about it,” Dr Jones said, to my surprise. Her thick English accent and that encouraging, schoolmarm way with which she smiled at me made me feel as if I were talking to a school teacher; the kind and caring sort. “I’m sure you’ll both find a way to work things out, if it’s each other you truly want.”
I was shocked. Just... blown away. I never thought I’d actually be hearing another person validate my relationship with Milla in that way. Ever.
Dr Jones saw the look on my face and laughed. “It’s okay, Sandra. It’s perfectly okay.” She winked then turned and walked away, her white coat flapping behind her like the cloak of a superhero.
All of a sudden, I felt as if I didn’t want her to go. I called after her.
“Thank you,” I said when she stopped and turned around to look at me. “For being here. For us.” I smiled for a warm and fuzzy type of joy was starting to spread through the core of my being.
