Sylvie reached over to the shelf that served as a night table and pulled out a book and gave it to June. “I was hoping that you might like to have this. Would you accept it from me? Would you keep it safe, after Reverend Tanner and I have gone?”
June stared at the thin volume in her hands. It was the one covered in blue cloth, the one of the long-ago battle in the long-ago war. Here was the sole possession of Mrs. Tanner’s she had truly wanted, and had once stolen, and had given back. And so this is what she would have. This was her prize.
“Yes,” she said, gripping it tightly. “Thank you.”
She rose to leave. Sylvie hugged her and almost fiercely held on but June did not yield a hair to the embrace, a breath, even a prickle of her skin. How quickly she could check herself. She was only a child but she was a right hard stone. When Sylvie released her, June did not have to look at the woman’s face to know that it looked as if it had just been struck, brutally smashed.
June left the cottage. In the twilight the children were coming out of the mess hall, chattering and running around in the last weak lamp of daylight. They streamed past her as she carried the tray of empty bowls, the book pinned under one arm, staring at her for a moment and then fluttering by like the tiny, carefree birds that nested in the bushes and small trees around the orphanage and under the eaves of the buildings. During the summer there had seemed to be scores of the mouse-brown wrens perched about, hundreds of them, but now their numbers had rapidly thinned, culled by the growing scarcity of the season. After returning the tray, June watched the other children, and she thought how their numbers were thinning, too, but rather because of their character, or young age, or plain luck, and that those who remained would be only less fortunate, and grow older, simply settle ever deeper into the fixed molds of their selves, the selves that had already been passed over.
When the bell rang once again, the children scattered and dashed about in a final frenzy before being ushered inside by the aunties. June stayed outside in the leading shadow of the darkness. She crouched on her haunches well beyond the far end of the field, right by the rickety gate, her hands and neck and face steadily stiffening in the chill. One of the aunties called out for her and waited for an answer but didn’t call out again. They had become accustomed to not bothering with her. The kerosene lamps were now lighted in the dormitories, the windows aglow on both the boys’ and girls’ sides. In recent weeks she had indeed helped the youngest girls brush their teeth and dress for bed and had even read to them a few times, but tonight she would stay out until she couldn’t bear the cold. Or maybe she would simply remain here, lie down on the hard, gravelly dirt and close her eyes and hope that this would be the night that brought forth winter in its first full, harsh form. She remembered sleeping on the train with the twins, the same icy fingers grasping at them as they had huddled tight, and how she had hoped they might get all the way to Pusan without having to march again, to eat again, without fearing any more misery and privation. It was June’s decision to climb atop the overcrowded train. Since that night she had often wondered if it would have been better to wait for the next one, or to have taken their chances on foot, or else steered the twins and herself far off the main road without any provisions and simply waited for the one merciful night that would lift them away forever. The twins would not have suffered and she would not be here now. For what had surviving all the days since gotten her, save a quelled belly? She had merely prolonged the march, and now that her new hunger had an altogether different face, it was her heart that was deformed, twisting with an even homelier agony.
She was just about to lie down on her side when a kerosene lamp emerged from the main dormitory door, swinging to and fro. From the clipped gait she could tell that it was Min. She didn’t move or speak, and she could see him stepping back and forth in the dark, lifting up the lamp to try to see. He headed back to the building but a wind whistled past the sign at the top of the arch and the sound made him turn around and venture out past the field. He must have seen her shape against the thin lines of the gate door, for he lowered the lamp and approached her quickly.
“What are you doing here, noo-nah?” he said, his shoulders hunched up tight against the cold. He was wearing a sweater over his pajamas. He turned down the wick of the lamp. “It’s freezing. You should come inside.”
She didn’t respond. During dinner, before Min disappeared, she had resolved never to speak to him again, or maybe to do worse: she had flashed with a rage, wanting to pummel him, make him plead and cry. But the sight of him slightly limping, the kerosene lamp still too big for his hand, momentarily disarmed her.
“Please come now, noo-nah.”
“Just leave me alone.”
“I went in the chapel and made the fire in the stove. It’s been going for a half-hour already, so it’s nice and warm in there.”
“Go back inside, then.”
“You don’t look right. You’re going to get sick in this cold. You could die.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do,” he said, kneeling down beside her. “And it’s not because Byong-Ok might beat me. He doesn’t care about me anymore. The others don’t care, either. Nobody does.”
“You’re better off that way.”
“Are you still my friend?”
June stood up and began walking away. Her feet were tingling, nearly numb, her fingers cramping, and she thought that she should go now down the dirt road and veer off on a trail deep into the woods, where no one could find her.
“Well, are you?” he asked, following her closely. “I want to know. I don’t want to live here anymore if you don’t even care about me.”
“Why should I?” she said, turning and shoving him roughly. He fell to the ground, just barely keeping the lamp upright. She put her foot on his hand as she stood over him. “I should strangle you. Why did you lie about our being adopted? Didn’t you think I’d find out?”
“I didn’t know!” he cried, trying to pull his hand away. But she just stepped more heavily on him.
“You’re a liar!”
“I didn’t want to know!” he said wretchedly, trying with his free hand to push her foot away. She let him go and he curled into himself like a wounded snail, holding his hand against his chest. “Isn’t it the same for you? Don’t you have to make believe, too? Everybody knows I’ve got little chance, with my foot. Not when there are so many others with nothing wrong with them.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said, clutching the collar of his sweater. “Not with me!”
“Nothing?” he said, and almost laughed. “You can say it ten thousand times over, but it’s not going to make it true. You’re the way you are. Everybody knows it. The way you’ll always be. You’re trouble, just like me.”
She grabbed him by the throat with both hands, her fingers monstrously vitalized by the heat of his neck, his windpipe like the gently ribbed sections of a delicate reed, and had he not turned his face to the lamp, revealing the willing forfeit flooding his eyes, she might not have let go.
But she did. Min coughed horribly, shudderingly low, as if he were a dying old man, and after he regained his breath she got him up on her back and carried him to the main building. The chapel was lit by the bright honeyed light leaking out around the edges of the door of the old steel stove. Min had already moved the front pews together and close to it, as they had done the previous nights, their shared blanket was neatly laid out, his pillow set to one side to make enough room for hers, and she gently tipped him over the pew back and let him down on his side. She leaned over him, to make sure he was okay. He wasn’t speaking but he was breathing shallowly and steadily, and in the odd crib of the pews his body seemed even smaller than it was, loosed of stuffing, like some worn-out, sunken doll. He was staring up at her, not with wonderment or anger or even hurt but with the plainest appeaclass="underline" Stay. Please don’t go. She didn’t know what she wished to do but what else was there now? He was not her brother or her friend or someone to care for or love. He was all right now and she owed him nothing. And yet she let him take her hand. He gently tugged on her and she climbed over the pew back to lie beside him, and when he turned and rolled right onto her, his face pressed into her chest, his hands seeking the pits of her arms, she wanted to push him off. But there was something in his certain sorry weight that seemed to seep down into her, suffuse her, until a strange new fullness had risen up in the stripped caverns of her belly.