It was strange, but sometimes he felt he might like to be adopted away, too. Welcomed back but by an unfamiliar set of people and in a circumstance in which he would have no responsibilities except for some strenuous job or chores. His mother was gone now, too, from a massive stroke during the last month of the war, and though he still had his sisters, he didn’t want to return to Ilion or any place like it and he even surprised himself with the ridiculous fantasy of being the Tanners’ handyman, lodged in a shack he imagined would be damp and cool for being set on a property on a bay of Seattle, waiting for Sylvie Tanner to come bring him a slice of cake, a mug of tea.
The kitchen aunties had opinions about everything and held forth in their hardscrabble voices, and while cleaning out the garbage cans he heard their baseless conjectures about why the Tanners were childless (“She’s too thin to become pregnant”; “She must not want his children”; “They lost the one they had”), and why she gave special attention to June (“She needs the most mothering”; “The girl reminds her of herself”), but none of these remarks quite described the cloister Sylvie was willing to make for them, despite Reverend Tanner’s obvious displeasure and the growing puzzlement of the other children. Did the marks on her heels explain it any better? Was any addiction or compulsion (like his own jags of drinking and fighting) really worth looking into, for explanation or cause? Those pin-dots-and all his own perfectly healed scars-went forward and back, and they were now their own reason and consequence.
As the weather cooled with the onset of autumn, the schedule of Sylvie’s day began to change; she would teach the English class and take the midday meal with the children, but instead of communing with them in work or play the rest of the afternoon she began to retire to the cottage, at first excusing herself in the late afternoon but then going off sooner and sooner until finally she would slip off right after lunch, sometimes for the rest of the day. Whenever she went inside, June would go with her and leave only just before eight o’clock, when Hector shut down the compound’s generator and the entire orphanage went dark. There was talk that Mrs. Tanner was ill-even her usual paleness seemed diluted, as if water had been added to her blood-but she didn’t complain of anything or travel to any hospital, and no doctors visited her. Of course Hector saw her differently, noticing only how she would keep scratching at her arms, her throat, how she would momentarily disappear within herself while the children or aunties were talking to her, coming back only when they raised their voices. He assumed she had a stash of vials hidden somewhere, but what would she do when she ran out? He could get her more, for sure, from the base in town, or some bar in the red-light district. Was that where she really went, when she took her weekly trips into town? Maybe she had already depleted her supply; for a while now everyone else had believed she was suffering from what appeared an intransigent head cold, her eyes rheumy, puffed; she sniffled and blew her nose constantly. She hardly seemed to eat at meals, always just sipping from the roasted barley tea the aunties made for her daily. She didn’t look thinner so much as hollowed out, in certain bright morning light her skin seeming practically diaphanous, the veins of her throat run through with such a deep, dyed blue that Hector kept ready to press his hand against her neck, to warm her in case she fainted. She was paying no more or less attention to him, paying him the usual small kindnesses of a sandwich or a roll of Spam kimbap delivered by June to where he was working, or leaving a pint of bourbon or scotch by his door if she’d been into Seoul for supplies. The regular attention led him to believe she was thinking of him daily but it was still only June who came around, Sylvie no longer stopping by even to watch him work the trench or the roofs. Soon he was alternating between irritation for this surely pitiable person and a feeling as if he were completely parched inside, crackled with a web of fault lines that ran from his insides outward and showed to everyone who looked at him. He felt somehow wounded and ashamed.
One morning, before first light, he set himself to the trench work, carving out a few meters of earth, thigh deep and twice as wide as he. He welcomed the toil; the only time he felt remotely righteous was as an instrument. In the afternoon he ascended yet another badly leaking roof and pried up the broken tiles and peeled away the rotted layers beneath, reframing the section with fresh planks and sheathing, sometimes working right through dinner. By the end of the day he could hardly lift his arms to strip himself bare behind his living quarters, where he washed his mucked clothes beneath the shower he had rigged. He knelt and scrubbed them with the harsh oil soap, kneading each against a piece of flat stone like the aunties did. After draping them on the bushes he turned to himself and worked the large soap block severely against his arms and flanks in order to get up any suds in the hard well water. Early one evening Sylvie came around the back corner and before he could say anything or cover himself she simply left the supper tray on the ground and was gone. The next day he didn’t see her at all but on the following one she appeared with June at her side where he was digging and offered him a drink of cool plum tea, the two of them departing immediately after he handed over the empty glass, only June looking back at him, twice, three times, as if making certain he would keep his distance.
After that, during the nights, in his cot, he couldn’t help but keep thinking of her. At first he pictured her chastely, as he might recall a striking woman he’d seen on the street. Was it the beauty of her particular age? She was the age he most often remembered his mother being, still youthful and beautiful enough to draw catcalls from laborers, servicemen. But then his thoughts would turn hazardous. He imagined her beside him in darkest silhouette, only the burnt flax of her hair visible, its brush alighting upon his body in scattered, sweeping sheets, a blowing rain. Or she came to him clothed only by a wide emerald ribbon, and he had to walk around her, undoing her until she was bare. But sometimes June would appear and encroach upon his reveries, as if he had no control of her whatsoever, haunting the shadows behind Sylvie. He screened the image of them bathing together, if innocently, patiently taking turns sitting in the tub in the middle room of the cottage, pouring water on each other’s back and shoulders, pleased in the thought that no one would disturb them, all this ironic in light of Reverend Tanner’s changed attitude toward him. He had surely grown more tolerant of Hector over the past month, was sometimes even friendly when he stopped to ask about the progress of the work projects, as if he, too, understood that this smaller, tighter universe which had coalesced amid them was self-sufficient and complete.
Reverend Tanner went about his duties with his typical intensity and rigor but there seemed to Hector a different scale to his prayers and his ministrations, an urgency and heat to his teaching and sermons that in another preacher might hardly be noticed but in Tanner seemed the spur of a revitalized faith. He had happiness, as well as zeal. He had lost weight with his traveling and the change in diet, his long face grown gaunt, his dark minister’s suit jacket hanging off his shoulders in mournful gathers such that he looked like a gangly youth donning his father’s clothes. But despite the awkwardness of his appearance he had become more approachable as the weeks passed, his manner when he was addressing the children, at least informally, softened by a newly lingering gaze: when they lined up in the mornings they were no longer to him just rows of moral projects and obligations, but each a hardened kernel of memory, this mystery of survival. If anything, his view was more akin to Hector’s than to his wife’s, that in recognizing the awful turn of their experiences they should now (with his aid) move past them, and quickly, by whatever means might work best: education, the love of God, lessons in discipline, self-reliance. Of course Hector knew his own ways to trounce the past. Sylvie had come to see them differently still. Perhaps she would not have wanted to, would have rather subscribed to the modality of forgetting, but during the brief interviews she was conducting with every child-she was writing an adoption file on each, with biographical information and a description of character (“She is a delightful and bubbly girl with a talent for singing”)-one of the older girls suddenly broke down and as Sylvie comforted her she began, unbidden, to tell what had happened to her family during the war. Word must have gone around, as many of the others did the same, even some of the toughest boys unwinding upon her the circumstances that had brought them to this place.