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She was asleep when Ames departed the next morning, the driver from the church office in Seoul picking him up before dawn. She must have woken just as the sedan headed out beneath the arched gate and down the hill; in her dreams she heard the squeals of children but it must have been the car brakes and she had quickly risen but by the time she opened the front door of the cottage there was nothing in the frigid air except the lean, sweet perfume of motor exhaust. When it dissipated she felt even colder in her nightgown, the buildings about her barely discernible in the dim, rising light. Ribbed batons of clouds underpinned the sky. They would blow away soon. Ames had told her he wouldn’t rouse her and yet she still felt as if she had been abandoned. He had gone not a kilometer and she felt the loneliness already. Her body wasn’t frantic anymore but now felt instead like a forlorn hive, every chamber of her desiccated and empty. As if she were made of a thousand tiny tombs. Of course it was having been left now to her own devices that was most disturbing, making her wish that it was mid-morning already, with the Reverend Kim long arrived, the children bolting about with the aunties keeping after them, the pitch and shout of the day careening them all forward. She needed time to speed up. But there was no sound or light or movement, and rather than just turn back in and shut the door, she stepped in her bare feet onto the chilly ground. The shock of it made her gasp. But her mind was finally clearing and the cold air was bracing her and she didn’t want to sleep anymore despite her physical exhaustion, for she was sick of sleep, and she stepped forth in the darkness toward the dormitory, her thoughts alighting on the children.

She wiped her feet on the towels the aunties placed before each of the three inner doors in the small vestibule; the doors led to separate dorm rooms, one side for the boys and the other for the girls. The one in the middle led to the chapel Hector had built. The vestibule itself was filled with their shoes, which because they were donated were of an unusually wide variety, sneakers and sandals and dress shoes and boots. Her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, everything made stony-looking in the weak blue light. And though she wanted now to peer in on June, missing the sight of her pretty, round face, a face so much more placid than her soul, she could not bear to speak anything of the coming days. For what could she have said to the girl? How could she ever console her? With the fact that she and Ames were not going to take any children at all? That she was finally as unfit to be a mother as she had been a wife, and even a mistress? That she was a bleeding heart and a coward, a person unfit, it turned out, to be herself? Their departure was imminent and Ames had not mentioned the subject of adoption and she could not breathe a word of question. As far as she knew, the arrangements they made on arriving in Korea to adopt some to-be-determined number of children had not yet been canceled. But it was no matter; Reverend Kim had confirmed as much the other day, when he gave Ames an envelope with the tickets for the first flight to Japan. There were just two, as Ames had specified. They had always assumed that they would take four with them, or five, or ten, as many as they could. But now they would return childless, which, she could now begin to see, perhaps as Ames had already seen, was a mercy for all.

She slipped into the boys’ room. She had ventured into both rooms before on certain restless nights, the sight of slumbering children a calming medicine. Here, as in the girls’, they slept in rows broken in the center by a large potbellied coal stove that the children took turns feeding through the night. There was no central heating and in the heart of winter it was important to keep it hot because there was no insulation in these walls, but this time of year it didn’t matter so much and the stove was now barely warm to the touch. The air was heavy and dampened with the smell of their bodies, and of sleep, and at this preadolescent stage it was much the same scent as in the girls’ room and though Sylvie could see how it might be off-putting or unpleasant she didn’t mind the sour fatness of the smell, in fact half-adored it, like day-old cake. She was tempted to lie down for a moment in one of the three newly empty beds. Their sleep was hard, so deep as to appear almost deathly, though one of the older ones looked as if he were being beset by awful dreams, his face pinched up like an infant’s, his fists guarding his head.

“Mrs. Tanner?” said a voice behind her.

It was Min, leaned up on an elbow in his cot. Despite what had happened to his foot he had remained the target of pranks by the three boys who were adopted by the Stolzes. He was the only boy who used to come to the knitting group; he told her he wanted to make a present of scarves for whoever eventually adopted him. The boys kept teasing him and he stopped coming before he could finish, and Sylvie had had to complete the second one for him. But the teasing had still continued, particularly by the just-departed trio. Once she’d had to wash his hair, which was full of ants, as they’d dribbled some syrup in the lining of his cap. Hector made the boys help him shovel out the latrines as punishment.

“You are okay, Mrs. Tanner?”

“I’m checking the fire,” she whispered. “I’m sorry to wake you. Please go back to sleep.”

“I am not sleeping,” he whispered back. “You are cold?”

“I’m fine.” She crouched down beside him, covering her chest and knees with her arms. She realized she wasn’t even wearing a robe over her thin nightgown, that her hair was an unruly, matted mess. It had been nearly a week since she had bathed. “Are you cold?”

He shook his head. She cupped his cheek but he wouldn’t lie down again, his face full of concern. He said, “You are sick, still?”

“Not so much anymore. I feel better.”

“I am happy,” he said. “I am waiting for you yesterday.”

“What for?”

He swung out his legs and quickly ducked beneath the cot and tugged out a canvas bag. From it he pulled two neatly folded scarves, both camel-colored, and handed them to her.

“For you and Reverend.”

“Oh, no,” she said. She tried to give them back but he immediately understood her fear of their implication and so he insisted, if somehow confusingly, “Not for me. Not Min.”

There was stirring, and murmurs from some boys nearby, and Sylvie took one of his blankets from the cot and led him out of the room. It was cold in the vestibule and she wrapped him in the stiff woolen throw, then wound one of the scarves about his neck. She tried to hand him back the other but he pushed away her hands.

“You must keep it, Min. Please. They’ll be wonderful presents, just as you intended.” She paused, carefully measuring his eyes. “Whoever is lucky enough to become your parents will cherish them.”

“No.”

“Please. This scarf can’t be for me.”

“I am not needing them anymore,” he said. “I am staying.”

“For the moment, yes, but not forever. The children who just left, you’ll be leaving someday just as they did.”

“You and Reverend are leaving first.”

“Yes.”

“I know you must go.”

“Yes.”

“I wish they are staying,” he said.

“The other children?”

He nodded.

“Even the boys who left?”

“Yes.”

“Truly? They were not always the kindest. Especially to you. Things will be better now. No more surprises.”

“I don’t care about that,” he said, with a perfect equanimity. “I wish they are not happy. I wish they are here.”

She didn’t know what else to say. He held out the scarf to her and she took it; she wrapped it around her neck. She bent down and hugged him and kissed him on the crown of his head and he suddenly clung to her, his bony little arms strong enough to press painfully against the back of her neck. It surprised her, how much it hurt, like something would fracture, even snap: chalk against chalk. But she didn’t steel a grain of herself, or try to shed him, letting him clamp her with all his might. She lifted up but he wouldn’t let go and he was hardly anything, or else everything; like every child here he was an immeasurable mass, and she cradled him for what seemed a very long time, waiting him out until he was drained of all force. His shoulders sank and then his head lolled on her, like he was suddenly asleep, like he was lifeless, or wanted to be, but when she turned to carry him back inside, gathering the end of his blanket in her free hand so they wouldn’t trip, a flash of pale in the darkened vestibule caught her eye. A hand or half-hidden face. She expected the sharpest glare. But glancing at the girls’ door, she saw there was nothing there, it was fully shut, and she took Min inside and settled him into his cot.