“And what about you, June? Would you like to be educated?”
“I am already. Mrs. Tanner has been teaching me.”
“I can see that!” Mrs. Stolz said to her, with a spark of delight. “And do you have any brothers or sisters here?”
She didn’t answer but Reverend Tanner pursed his lips and shook his head, which Mrs. Stolz immediately understood to be a topic for another time. She took June’s hand and patted it tenderly, her hands thick and fleshy and warm.
“What do you think about living in America? Mr. Stolz and I live in a place called Oregon. Do you know where that is?”
She shook her head.
“It’s near Seattle,” Reverend Tanner said, his mention of it significant to June but not in the way he was thinking.
“You know Seattle?” Mr. Stolz asked her. “That’s way too big a town for me.”
“We’re close enough, I suppose,” Mrs. Stolz added, if perhaps somewhat confused herself. “It’s a half-day’s car ride.”
June said, “I will go there soon.”
“You seem quite certain of that.”
“I am.”
“Well, I guess why shouldn’t you be?” Mrs. Stolz said, gently squeezing her palm. “You’re a very strong girl, aren’t you?”
June was about to tell her it didn’t matter what she was but Reverend Tanner answered for her, pronouncing with a strange, surprising tone of pride that she was “as strong as they come,” and it was then that Mr. Stolz stepped forward and aimed his tiny camera right at her and quickly clicked the shutter. He had taken pictures of only a few other children. June’s instinct was to put her hand over the lens, but Reverend Tanner immediately introduced the boy behind her and Mrs. Stolz tightly pressed her hand in farewell as one of the aunties ushered June away.
By the time the Stolzes got around to meeting the last child in line June was back to the girls’ bunk room, where she changed out of her good blouse and skirt. She had first gone straight to the Tanners’ cottage, tapping on the front door and then going around to the back, but a new dark brown window shade had been put up, covering the glass right to either edge of the frame. There was no answer at the rear door, either. Despite her resolve not to bother her, she needed now to see Sylvie right away, not to interrogate her or make her promise anything but simply to stand before her and read her eyes, her face. Did she know what the old couple was here for? Was that why she had not come out? Was she hoping that someone like them would take her? Relieve her of this burden?
“May we come in?” a voice said. It was Mrs. Stolz, her head poking in the doorway of the bunk room. When she saw that June was dressed she entered, her husband at her side. They seemed somehow shorter and even plumper now that they were standing up: these two smiling folk dolls, their cheeks round and pink. He was dressed in a denim work shirt and rough wool trousers and scuffed-up shoes, and though they seemed to her as impossibly rich as all the other civilian Americans she had ever seen, she understood now that they were probably country people, small-town citizens like those in the village where she had grown up. But rather than feeling enmity toward them for how those villagers had treated her mother and father with suspicion and resentment and ultimately callousness and cruelty, instead a tide of longing unexpectedly washed over her, this longing for the days before her father yielded to his demons and retreated to his study, longing for her mother’s proud face, longing finally for her two brothers and two sisters who could not even stand here as she was in an ugly, too-large pair of trousers, and all at once June was not mature or resolute or strong in the least but a fallen pile of child, sobbing and shaking.
“Oh my dear, oh my dear, dear,” Mrs. Stolz cooed, embracing June and pressing her to her ample breast as they sat on the cot. “It’ll be fine now.”
“Easy there,” her husband said, leaning over them as he patted June on the back. “You have a family again. We’re going to take six of you. We have plane tickets for six.”
“For goodness’ sake, John, we haven’t even asked her yet!” she said to him, shushing him. And then to June: “Would you like to come live with us, sweetheart? As my eager husband said, you’ll have sisters and brothers. We’ll have plenty of room and plenty to eat. We have four of our own but they’re pretty much grown up. We have a big farmhouse and barns and surrounding us are all the fir trees you will ever want to see.”
“Not like here.”
“John, please!”
“You should know we have animals, too,” he went on anyway, as though he had practiced his pitch and didn’t wish to lose the chance. “Horses and milking cows and chickens, not to mention dogs and cats. Do you like animals? Do you want to have a pet?”
She didn’t know whether she did want one or not, but she nodded, weakly, for it was all she could manage, the rest of her gone slack in Mrs. Stolz’s arms. June had no feeling in her limbs. And if she felt no love or kinship yet, it was enough to be absorbed into this kind stranger woman’s flesh, to lose herself and still be alive, to shed the tyranny of this body, always aching and yearning, always prickly and too aware. Even more than death, she was sure, she hated this enduring. This awful striving that was not truly living. But maybe it was ending now…
“You don’t have to tell us right this minute,” Mrs. Stolz said. “We’ll be staying here for a couple more hours. We’re going to go talk to some other children now, but we made sure to see you first.”
“Nobody chose me before.”
“We’re all the more fortunate, then! We’re lucky. There must be a reason. You have a spirit in you that is wondrous, anyone can see it, and you’re going to be happy in our home.”
“You’ll be the oldest,” her husband said. “You can help with translating, among other things. There’ll be some chores, naturally, just like the jobs Reverend Tanner says all of you do around here.”
“You don’t have to help with anything you don’t want to,” Mrs. Stolz said, glaring at her husband. “I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through already. What you’ve had to live through and see. But I can promise that you’ll be safe and sound with us. You’ll always have our love and support. And God’s love, above all. You’re going to begin a whole new joyous life.”
She hugged June closer, and despite a seam of unease, June shut her eyes, bracing the woman tightly in return, while Mr. Stolz took a step back to snap another picture, this time of the two of them; but he found he had run out of film. While he turned the crank to wind in the roll, Mrs. Stolz stroked at June’s temple, her hair.
“What a lovely thing,” she said, touching the tortoiseshell clasp. “You know, it’s the first thing I noticed when I saw you. I thought it made you look so beautiful and graceful. Just like a fluttering butterfly.”
No sooner had Mrs. Stolz spoken the words than June tried to break away from her. The woman, not understanding, clutched at her again, holding on, but June warded her off with a forearm that pressed stiffly enough against her clavicle that the woman gave out a panicked cry: “Oh no, what’s wrong? Please!”
Her husband took hold of June, more in confusion than anger, but she rose and stamped on his foot, causing him to drop the camera, the back panel springing open and exposing the stretched film. June heard him curse loudly as she ran away, Mrs. Stolz weeping beside him as she sat crumpled on the bunk room floor. She ran as fast as she could, up into the bare hills, climbing until she started to descend, the sun following her down in the next valley until it grew dark.
When she finally returned, just before lights-out, the Stolzes were long gone. No one knew the Stolzes had come to see her, and she had only missed dinner, which she sometimes did before, staying in with Sylvie Tanner. The ten-year-old girl in the next bunk, So-Hyun, told June that they had adopted six of the children, just as they said they would, three girls and three boys, of varying ages. They were in Seoul now, and in two days they would be leaving the country. They didn’t have room for the children’s footlockers and so they’d left them behind, eac
h child taking only one sentimental object, like a doll or book or blanket; the rest of their things were distributed to the others. So-Hyun had gotten a sweater, which she showed to June, a red wool one that was of good quality but was pocked with several moth holes in the chest and back.
“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 sa
ke 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.
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