“Did they seem upset?”
“They were all crying,” So-Hyun said, a bit glumly. She was a bit of a smart aleck, which made June admire her. “But I think it was in happiness.”
“I meant the American couple,” June said.
“Oh, them,” So-Hyun said. “The woman was crying, too.”
“In the same way?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me!”
“I guess so. Yes.”
“Did Reverend and Mrs. Tanner see them off?”
So-Hyun said, “Just the reverend.”
“How was he?”
“He wasn’t crying,” So-Hyun said, sleepy now as she lay in her bed. “He asked where you were.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“What we always say. ‘Who knows! Who cares!’ ”
The lights went out then, one of the aunties padding through the bunk room with an oil lamp to make sure everyone was in bed. When she got to June she gave her a cross look, but June didn’t care. She didn’t care, either, about what So-Hyun said, even if she acidly added the latter line, because of course it was only the truth. All that was important now was that the Tanners would soon depart, as the couple from Oregon had, but with her in tow. She didn’t care anymore if there were others they might take along as well. Or whether Sylvie became pregnant again. In fact she herself was hoping for it now. For if they had a baby, June would cherish it as her own, give her life over to the child, if necessary, in all the ways that she had not been able to do for her siblings.
She couldn’t sleep that night, overeager to bond with Sylvie again (after their weeks of observing a mutual distance), to go over the plans she surely had to make for their imminent travel and resettling in Seattle. She would explain, too, if Sylvie asked her, what had happened with the Stolzes, that despite the woman’s kindness and the very fine life she described, June had realized just in time that she was not meant to go with them. She could not be a part of any other family again. In a different lifetime she would have her parents back, her older brother and sister would be healthy, the twins happy and whole; but in this one she had been paired up, she and Sylvie aligned like twins themselves, if by one of them not quite acknowledged.
Just before dawn broke she got out of bed, her mind feeling as honed and ready as a newly forged blade. Though her belly was unfilled from not having eaten supper or lunch the previous day, the emptiness felt more like purity than privation, what she imagined a pilgrim might feel at the end of an arduous journey, this state of cleanly ecstasy that suddenly became, in the last meters, both its own great fuel and flame. She dressed quickly as the others slumbered and went across the yard and knocked on the door of the Tanners’ cottage. She knocked again when there was no answer. Finally the door creaked open and Reverend Tanner looked out at her in his plaid pajamas, putting on his spectacles in the blue morning light.
“What’s happened? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I want to talk with Mrs. Tanner, please.”
“Mrs. Tanner is asleep,” he said angrily, “and I was as well. What is wrong with you, June? You make everything so difficult!”
“I do not mean to.”
“I don’t believe you!” he said, barely in control of himself. He stepped outside, closing the door behind him. “Or else I must think you have a wrecking force within you. Mrs. Stolz was terribly, terribly upset. She actually feared she’d done something awful to you.”
“She did nothing to me.”
“Of course not! But I can’t imagine what you said or did to make her think she had. If she weren’t such a generous, humane woman, they would have fled. Certainly her husband wanted to leave right away. Do you realize that? Do you realize that you near ruined the other children’s chances as well? Did you ever for one moment think about them?”
June was silent, though not in acquiescence. Not in remorse. Rather she had receded, deep within the whorl of her thoughts. She was simply waiting for Sylvie now to come out and embrace her just as fully and breathlessly as Mrs. Stolz had, to welcome her inside.
“You have nothing to say, do you?” Tanner said. “Nothing at all?” He glared at her as the first warm light arose, the cowbell for reveille suddenly clanging from the direction of the kitchen. She had heard it hundreds of times before but today the rounded hollowness of the sound struck her deeply, the echoes mapping her empty reaches. It would be breakfast soon but she did not wish to eat, despite what she would normally know as well as anyone alive to be the welling pangs of hunger. But it was not that now, she was certain, for instead of distress or panic she felt rather the strangest satisfaction, a peerless morning calm. She would remain right here until Sylvie came out, and she didn’t move or speak, even as Reverend Tanner ascended the stoop and without turning to look back at her firmly shut the door.
SEVENTEEN
EVERYONE BELIEVED she had been suffering from the flu.
Sylvie tried to believe it herself. It was the same as the other times she cut herself off, no better or worse. In Seattle there would be a period every few seasons when she fell ill and she would have to gather herself into a normal, presentable state of sickness before Ames returned from his work at the synod offices. He was always tender to her, his renewed concern that she was innately sickly lining his forehead as he peered down at her while he took her temperature. She was volunteering then in various organizations run out of the church so it wasn’t such a problem to stay home for a few days, but here she had impetuously quit her habit and disrupted everything.
She had not been able, for example, to come out and embrace and kiss the children the Stolzes adopted, and by this she felt doubly sickened. The three younger boys, Sang and Jin and Jung, were a boisterous, puckish threesome unrelated by blood but who always roved in a tight pack, playing pranks on their playmates and the girls and sometimes even the older boys, who’d chase them into the hills. Sylvie was the only one who was spared the odd frog in the shoe, a brigade of crickets under the bedcovers; once even Ames had found an oversized bird’s nest constructed from twigs on his classroom chair-he was nicknamed “Big Crane” by the children because of his lankiness and skinny legs. The three girls were the Kim sisters, who along with a dozen others regularly knitted with Sylvie, and each had given Ames her unfinished project to leave with Mrs. Tanner, three pairs of woolen mittens and matching caps, graduated in size. They were small enough that she could have finished all of them in the morning and sent them with Ames on his way to Seoul to deliver them before they flew out of the country, but her hands were too twitchy and she had to poke at her palms with the knitting needles to try to quell them, as she kept dropping stitches or stretching out the knitting too much.
She had felt this before, though this time it wasn’t the steady, drenching enervation that laid her low but a pointed, angry sickness, her flesh and skin feeling as though they wished to pull away from her. Finally she had to give up the knitting, her nose running and her eyes hotly welling up with a relentless, involuntary flow that kept steady even after her frustration waned. Her head was sodden, as with a bad cold, but her limbs felt alternately prickly and numb and just as after the other times when she had suddenly thrown away her kit-this time tossing it, three days ago, in the fire the aunties built to heat the children’s bathwater-in a matter of a day harsh flashes of hot and cold swept through her body like vengeful weather.
She was suffering because she had to suffer, because she needed to, every pincer and tremor and hard drum of craving a deserved punishment, yes, but also a reminder that she was still vital, still alive. She had little hope that she could ever bear a child and was not certain she wanted one of her own anymore, but for her husband’s sake she would endure. She could keep down only a few saltines and some sips of roasted corn tea. Ames brought these to her, insisting that she allow him to take her to the army hospital in Seoul. But she refused him, afraid the doctors would instantly recognize her ailment. I’ll be myself again in a couple of days, she told him, though she was fearful who myself might be this time when the sickness finally lifted; after the previous quitting, it felt as though her soul had been worn down by half, and by now the math was surely pitched against her. She didn’t believe he knew. But whether he did or not didn’t matter: this was the very last time, she was done with this ugliness, and when they returned to the States she would devote herself as never before to the work of his next ministry, which had been rearranged by Ames to be not in Seattle as planned but in southeastern Washington, outside of Spokane, where both of them knew there would be nothing around them but boundless fields of alfalfa and barley.