“I try to help her with many things.”
“Yes, yes. Please keep doing so, especially when I’m away. She gives herself so completely to the demands of the orphanage, and by the end of the day she has nothing left. I think she has begun to suffer for it.”
June nodded. Indeed she was suffering, which the aunties saw as physical illness brought on by exhaustion, the untreated water, the strange food, by having to wake each morning to a sad, destroyed land. This often happened to foreign aid workers, they said. At some point they just broke down. But June knew Sylvie’s trouble had less to do with the conditions than with something else, that she had fallen into what she referred to in her diaries as “the ash pit,” a hole that seemed to drain all her energy and will. It seemed to June the condition would come and go mysteriously. At first when Sylvie didn’t appear at the morning meal, Reverend Tanner would announce that she had taken ill and was resting, but as the frequency had increased in the past weeks he did not say anything, and someone like young Reverend Kim would suddenly appear to teach her class for the day, and sometimes the next. And when this was the case, June would know she could simply let herself inside the cottage in the afternoon and do her chores, though not to knock on the bedroom door if it was shut. Sometimes she wasn’t napping but sitting as still as a stone on the wooden step out back, and when she’d see June she’d smile and beckon to her, let her sit beside her and embrace her with her long, slack arms. They wouldn’t talk or even move, the woman’s breathing faint and shallow. If Reverend Tanner showed up they would separate and sit up and she would notice how Sylvie would instantly brighten for him but then practically collapse the moment after he left. One day it was raining and she found Sylvie outside again on the step but this time she was sitting with her head on her knees, her wool sweater and housedress soaked through, her hair a matted, tangled mess, the shivers visibly running through her body but going completely unregistered in her face, a lifeless mirror of the chalky, overcast sky.
“It’s why I ask you, June,” Tanner went on, “that you let me know if she’s been particularly unwell. She tries to hide her distress from me and for the most part I feel I’m in the dark. I have more traveling ahead of me and I wish you could be my eyes and ears. Even after hours, if you wish.”
“At night?”
“Whenever you believe she needs you. Or seems lonely. I’m afraid she’s lonely too often.” His gaze wandered, like he’d lost himself for an instant. But then he said: “It’s for her sake, her well-being, you understand that, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, patting her arm. “Thank you.” He opened his fountain pen to resume his letter writing, pausing for her to leave.
“Do you still want a family of your own?” June asked. “Or will you stay here forever?”
“Forever sounds like a very long time,” he said. “But you never know.”
“What about your own family?”
“We’re still thinking about that.”
“There are many children here,” she said, desperate to sound generous. “You must meet so many children on your visits.”
“Yes, I do. So many. All worthy and good. Really every last one of you.”
When he uttered those words she took his implication whole; she went back to her chores with the conviction that Reverend Tanner had made a bargain with her, that all she need do was to remain his wife’s closest helper, her devotee, her constant friend, and then, if she must, let him know what trouble might lie ahead. She knew he meant Hector, there could be no one else, it was only he who was spending more time with her since she had grown infirm.
She kept vigilant of their movements whenever Reverend Tanner spent a night away, but it wasn’t only for him. One night she tried to watch them but they extinguished the oil lamps and the only thing she could do was listen. There was hardly any sound to start, not even any shifting or creaking from his cot, just the barest rustle of clothing, the press of lips, the scantest murmurs, and then, finally, the breathing. His breaths came first, very low, and then hers as if it were difficult, as though a patch of thick gauze were covering her mouth. Their rhythm ticked loose and various until suddenly it unjumbled, clicked in. All the while June, tightly crouched in the peerless dark between the wall and a kerosene barrel, was suppressing her own breath, her lungs aching for release, the gleaming painting of their lovemaking begun to screen in her mind. Strangely only her belly felt alive, this yawning breaking emptiness that pushed low and hot while the rest of her went heavy, dead, and it was only when they were finally done and surely fallen asleep that she dared move, her hands and feet tingling and shaking enough that she had to crawl on her elbows from the storeroom.
The following day, having returned to the orphanage, Reverend Tanner sat down next to her during the evening meal. June sat alone now, having agreed not to monopolize Sylvie’s company. She had completely forgotten about her conversation with Tanner on awaking that morning, her throat parched, her head fogged and aching, as if, like Hector, she had been drinking all night.
“How goes it, June? Is everything fine?” he asked. Sylvie was at a far table eating with the younger children. Hector was not present, being likely out in the field.
She could merely nod, not yet ready for his questioning.
“You don’t seem terribly certain,” he said, though almost jocularly, as though he didn’t in fact wish to hear anything else.
Her memory of the previous night was a stilled curtain but its music now rose up in her chest and brought the skin of her neck to life, her cheeks feeling as though they were suddenly flushed. She thought Tanner would take her aside for an interrogation but all he did was brood a moment with a half-expectant, half-wary gaze and say brightly, “Well, I must be going. Good day, June.”
For days afterward she tried to determine what to do. All her considerations foretold only trouble if they should continue, and yet she found herself hoping for Reverend Tanner to spend an evening away again. It was like the hunger she didn’t suffer anymore, this grave sensation so resident that it took on its own life, its own existence, was the body within her body that now drew all her energies. At fourteen her figure was at last changing, after being stunted during the war; since living at the orphanage she’d put on more than eight kilos, mostly on her thighs and hips and on her chest, which the older boys glanced at, but warily, fearing she might catch them and take it as a provocation to fight. She noticed this and sometimes she’d sit back wherever she was and make a show of closing her eyes, let them look at her for as long as they wanted. She might even press her shoulders back, to accentuate the new fullness. Her doing so wasn’t in vanity or pride, or from the slightest interest in any of them; it was pure experimentation, a trial to determine how it felt to be an object of desire, and she found that the more she felt their stares the more her own desire fired, trebled, eventually took on its own reason.
So she stayed silent when in the ensuing weeks Tanner departed on his various trips, and waited for Sylvie to emerge from her cottage in the middle of the night. Whenever she and Hector let the oil lamp burn, June could see them glide over each other with a patience and tenderness that was the opposite of the jerky, horrid couplings she’d had to witness during the war. And though she was startled by the broad, taut ropes of his body, her eye kept resting upon Sylvie’s calf, her knee, the way her belly would grow shallow under his kisses and dip far enough below the spur of her hip that she appeared starved herself. She had the loveliest glow, the light seemed to stream from her eyes, from her half-opened mouth; nor did the illumination dissipate until well after they were done, when June saw her open a small black kit and remove a needle from its velvet-lined well. Hector did not take it himself but he helped her, binding her calf with the rubber cord and tapping her heel and then shooting her with the medicine that made her shiver and then go slack, turn a ghostly bone-blue.