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.
She stayed in the cottage, seeing no one but Ames. She didn’t have to ask him why June was not appearing for her chores; the other morning the sharp tone of his voice had reached into her wracked sleep, June’s soft, flat murmurs echoing there as well, and when she arose she could see in his face that it would only make things impossible if she brought up anything about June. He was furious with the girl. There was not even two weeks remaining in their time here were and though she felt utterly wasted, she would somehow convince Ames that they must take her. But each time she tried to talk about June when he brought her tea or mentholated compresses for her neck, an easy reason to defer presented itself-he’d earnestly ask about where she was in her monthly cycle, or he’d simply tell her, as he did this morning, that he loved her, the locks at his temples appearing grayer than ever, his cheekbones jutting and sharp from his constant traveling, and all she could do was think again of his irreproachable character, how he had never sought anything but good for her and for everyone else, that he was just as fair and constant a man as he’d been every other day of his life.
But look at you, she said to herself now, peering into a hand mirror to check the condition of her neck, which was tormenting her with its itchiness, the skin now scratched raw and almost bleeding. Look at this Sylvie Binet, with two bloodshot horrors for eyes, the fever-matted hair, the ghoulish pallor that would certainly frighten the younger children. But she wondered if she wanted to be cured. Ames once said that although an awful thing happened to her in youth she had pulled herself far past it, but in truth she wondered if she would ever possess the necessary strength. She often felt a great part of her had been fixed in time, that despite appearances she had been simply stuck in place, never quite getting anywhere. Maybe that’s why the children liked her; it wasn’t her bright, golden hair or even her obvious adoration of them but their instinctive sense that she was as vulnerable as they, as desperately keen for a lasting bond. That she had never quite grown up. She remembered her father telling her in Manchuria how this world was littered with those cut off in mid-bloom, all this wasted beauty and grace, and that it was their humble task to gather as many as they could and replant them. It didn’t matter that they were stomped and torn. That the soil was rocky and poor. She must be the sun and rain. As long as she kept vigilant, as long as they never gave up, the blooms could thrive again.
She was sure this was true of the children. But what of a person like her? Could one ever reroot her own long-trampled self? Or would you in perpetuity need someone to pick you up at certain intervals, pluck you from the slow rot of your being? It was a good thing that people buried themselves in mostly shallow graves. If she thought about her adult life, it was an existence of constant exertion and work, but also one marked serially by the compulsion to yield. And however miserable and dissolute she ended up, however wretched in that suspension of utter fall or erasure, there was an undeniable seam of what must be gratitude, too, a kind of relief in finding yet another path to giving herself over.