“I didn’t come to you tonight,” she said.
“It’s because you’re strong,” he said. He was standing now, glowering as he angled his words sharply down at her. Had he not had a voice he might have actually struck her. “You don’t pace around your room like an animal in a cage. But I’m an animal that’s too awake. Before you showed up I didn’t care one way or the other about anything. But now here I am, waiting to be petted and fed. Told how much I’m loved. Here,” he said, holding his open palms before her. “What if I need comforting? What if I need some ministering to? What will you do for me, Mrs. Tanner?”
She didn’t move. She was silently crying, the tears running down her face. Her natural paleness was warmed in the honeyed lamplight, her brow and cheeks a vital, gleaming shade, and as much as he was raging he couldn’t help but see that she had never appeared as lovely to him as now. Which only made him burn. “You won’t help me?” he said. “You won’t come to my aid? It’s okay. You do me good just like that. I’ve told you some of the things I’ve done and so you know that I’m not a good man. I’m an awful person, by any account. But looking at you makes me feel better about myself. You know why? Because you’re like me. You’re frail and selfish, but you’re reckless, too. You’re a whore for love. Hope is your drug. To me that adds up to a pretty sorry religion.”
Sylvie didn’t answer. But a different color had now risen in her face. She said, “My mother once told me something. I never quite understood her, but I think I do now. She said there was a surplus of benevolence in this world. Of loving mercy. Surely too much of it went begging. But it was worse, she said, when it was misspent. Because then it was no good at all.”
“I don’t care if it is,” he said, fiercely gripping her shoulders. “Misspend it on me.”
She took his hands then and had them cup her face, blot her eyes. She turned them over and kissed his palms. She kissed his fingers and his wrists. He kissed her madly in return and began pulling off her robe but she said not here and so they made their way slowly across the yard to his room, Hector bracing her. Once inside they made love. Or a kind of love. He was overwrought. It was as if the entire army of him had fallen upon her, overrunning her in waves, the breakneck charge of a thousand faceless troops. He kept waiting for her to try to slow him, or tilt against him with equal fervor, with the disquieting roughness he craved from her, but even as she mirrored him and was strong enough it was as if she drifted outside of herself and was watching them from across the room. After a short while he was done. He got up and pulled on a pair of trousers, a mountain of shame in his gut. She lay in silence on the cramped cot, her back to him. Then she rose and put on her robe. She was looking for her slippers but he told her that she had come barefoot. He asked her not to go but when she opened the door he didn’t try to bar her.
Outside, the smell of kerosene oddly prevailed. But it was a car that made her halt. It was rolling up through the gate, following the path that went around the field and then led in front of the buildings. It was too late to be Reverend Kim. The glare of the headlamps swept across her like a harbor light as she stood in Hector’s doorway and the car imperceptibly slowed, as if the driver momentarily had taken his foot off the gas, before resuming speed again. Sylvie stepped off the stoop and onto the ground but she didn’t move. The car had turned and was tracking straight for her and for a second Hector was certain it was going to run her over. But it stopped just short of her and when the driver came out it was too dark behind the bright beams to see but of course he knew it was Tanner.
“Sylvie,” Tanner said, his voice throaty, beseeching. “What is this? What’s going on? There was a message you were hurt. I drove myself back all night. Why are you out here?”
Sylvie stood barefoot in her white robe directly in front of the car, the stars above them gone out for her brightness. She was clearly naked beneath. She drifted toward him, her hand outstretched, but Tanner slapped it away. When she tried to get close to him he hit her, once, quite hard, and she fell beside the wheel of the car. “What are you doing to us?” Tanner shouted down at her. “What are you doing?”
Hector made a short sprint and rammed him, knocking him to the ground. Tanner lay gasping for wind. Hector was kneeling and checking on Sylvie when a sound like a mortar round, a plosive, metallic thump, went off from the direction of the dormitory. As he craned to see what had happened a dead, sheer weight struck him, this broad, leaden plate meeting the back of his head, his shoulder blades, like the angry hand of a god. Hector crumpled from the blow, his mind momentarily emptied as he fell forward on his face. He couldn’t quite move. He could see but not yet speak. The cold ground tasted almost good to him, clean and flinty, like a freshly etched stone. And he could hear Sylvie shouting at her husband, who loomed tall above them; Tanner had walloped him from behind with the heavy sedan door. Hector got up on his knees and would have been struck again but for the sudden bright dawning of firelight, sharp licks of flame spearing up around the chimney pipe on the roof above the chapel.
“My God,” Sylvie said, getting to her feet. “The children!” Though faltering, she ran to the chapel. Tanner went after her. Some of the children were already fleeing the building, smoke billowing from the top of the chapel door, oozing out from under the eaves. None of them could see it yet but the flames inside were spreading quickly, flying through the parched wood of the old structure, and by the time Sylvie reached the main door others were climbing out of the windows from the dorm rooms on either side. Sylvie frantically counted the children, making sure the youngest ones were out. Tanner was asking everyone to check for his bunkmate, each calling out a name and waiting for a reply, when Sylvie said, “Where’s June? Where is she?”
“She’s not here!” one of the children said. “Neither is Min!”
“Where are they?”
“They were in the chapel,” Byong-Ok said.
“But why?”
“They were bunking there together.”
“Oh, my June!”
Sylvie was headed in but Tanner grabbed her. She fought him but he commanded her, “Stay here! Stay here with them!” Tanner took off his suit jacket and used it to cover his mouth and nose. He took a few quick breaths and then held the last and rushed inside the door. Although his skull felt smashed Hector was now on his feet, and he could see Sylvie drifting toward the door. She was calling for them to come out. She was calling their names. But before he could gather himself enough to try to dissuade her she stepped inside and disappeared.
Hector went in after her. The vestibule was choked with smoke. He bent down so he could breathe and when he pushed through to the chapel there was a blast of heat. The roof timbers were aflame. The front pews were on fire, as were the altar table and the cross, which had fallen to the floor. The back wall of the chapel was burning, part of it fallen away or blown out where the woodstove had been, and nearby were Sylvie and Tanner, huddling over a child. A fierce draft was being drawn in from the gap in the wall, feeding the conflagration. Hector felt his own hair begin to singe, the skin on his shoulders begin to prickle and burn. The heat was turning, it was on the verge, as though a sun were just about to push into the room. And in a flash a plumed beast of flame leaped up from the flooring to enfold the couple and child, for a moment cradling them in an almost placid repose before swallowing them whole. Hector gave a bloody cry. The walls gave a shearing squeal and a terrible crack and then the chapel roof fell in. There was a great burning pile where there had been a room, the black sky exposed. He was trapped at the edge of the pile by burning beams across his legs, shattered clay roof tiles searing his arms, his chest. He was in the bonfire now. The adjoining walls of the dorms would collapse next. Yet he didn’t try to move. He was more than ready to pass; maybe at last transmogrify. But a hand gripped his wrist, another lifting the beam from his back. The girl was inordinately strong. And she dragged him through the collapsed back wall and out into the cold, quenching night.