Eros, Philia, Agape - By Rachel Swirsky Page 0,7

began wailing again. “It’s okay, Rose, it’s okay,” murmured Adriana. She felt a strange disconnect in her head as she spoke. Things were not okay. Things might never be okay again.

“I’m leaking,” cried Rose, holding out her bloodstained fingers. “See, mama? I’m leaking! I need healer bots.”

Adriana looked up at the teenager. “Do you have bandages? A first aid kit?”

The boy frowned. “In the house, I think…”

“Get the bots, mama! Make me stop leaking!”

The teen stared at Adriana, the concern in his eyes increasing. Adriana blinked, slowly. The moment slowed. She realized what her daughter had said. She forced her voice to remain calm. “What do you want, Rose?”

“She said it before,” said the teen. “I thought it was a game.”

Adriana leveled her gaze with Rose’s. The child’s eyes were strange and brown, uncharted waters. “Is this a game?”

“Daddy left,” said Rose.

Adriana felt woozy. “Yes, and then I brought you here so we could see lambs and calves. Did you see any nice, fuzzy lambs?”

“Daddy left.”

She shouldn’t have drunk the wine. She should have stayed clear-headed. “We’ll get you bandaged up and then you can go see the lambs again. Do you want to see the lambs again? Would it help if Mommy came, too?”

Rose clenched her fists. Her face grew dark. “My arm hurts!” She threw herself to the ground. “I want healer bots!”

* * *

Adriana knew precisely when she’d fallen in love with Lucian. It was three months after she’d bought him: after his consciousness had integrated, but before Adriana fully understood how integration had changed him.

It began when Adriana’s sisters called from Boston to inform her that they’d arranged for a family pilgrimage to Italy. In accordance with their father’s will, they would commemorate him by lighting candles in the cathedrals of every winding hillside city.

“Oh, I can’t. I’m too busy,” Adriana answered airily, as if she were a debutante without a care, as if she shared her sisters’ ability to overcome her fear of their father.

Her phone began ringing ceaselessly. Nanette called before she rushed off to a tennis match. “How can you be so busy? You don’t have a job. You don’t have a husband. Or is there a man in your life we don’t know about?” And once Nanette was deferred with mumbled excuses, it was Eleanor calling from a spa. “Is something wrong, Adriana? We’re all worried. How can you miss a chance to say goodbye to Papa?”

“I said goodbye at the funeral,” said Adriana.

“Then you can’t have properly processed your grief,” said Jessica, calling from her office between appointments. She was a psychoanalyst in the Freudian mode. “Your aversion rings of denial. You need to process your Oedipal feelings.”

Adriana slammed down the phone. Later, to apologize for hanging up, she sent all her sisters chocolates, and then booked a flight. In a fit of pique, she booked a seat for Lucian, too. Well, he was a companion, wasn’t he? What else was he for?

Adriana’s sisters were scandalized, of course. As they rode through Rome, Jessica, Nanette, and Eleanor gossiped behind their discreetly raised hands. Adriana with a robot? Well, she’d need to be, wouldn’t she? There was no getting around the fact that she was damaged. Any girl who would make up those stories about their father would have to be.

Adriana ignored them as best she could while they whirled through Tuscany in a procession of rented cars. They paused in cities to gawk at Gothic cathedrals and mummified remnants, always moving on within the day. During their father’s long sickness, Adriana’s sisters had perfected the art of cheerful anecdote. They used it to great effect as they lit candles in his memory. Tears welling in their eyes, they related banal, nostalgic memories. How their father danced at charity balls. How he lectured men on the board who looked down on him for being new money. How he never once apologized for anything in his life.

It had never been clear to Adriana whether her father had treated her sisters the way he treated her, or whether she had been the only one to whom he came at night, his breathing heavy and staccato. It seemed impossible that they could lie so seamlessly, never showing fear or doubt. But if they were telling the truth, that meant Adriana was the only one, and how could she believe that either?

One night, while Lucian and Adriana were alone in their room in a hotel in Assisi that had been a convent during the Middle Ages,