She waited to leave until he thought she was asleep and had gone on his rounds. It was cowardly of her, but he hadn’t said a word to her after their lovemaking and she thought it would be a mercy for them both if she simply disappeared. But it was still an hour before the buses began running, and she walked all the way home in the steady, chilly March rain, wholly accepting the misery of being soaked to her bones. It took her an hour to climb the long road up the hill. The next two days she was fever-wracked and shaky, her aunt feeding her soda crackers and beef tea in bed, wondering aloud how her skirt and sweater could have gotten so wet, then telling her in the next breath that Ames Tanner had dropped by while she was asleep, leaving a note card that he’d inscribed in the cleanest, upright hand: “Will you give me the honor of learning more about your experiences? I am eager for your wisdom! Faithfully yours, A.T.”
Ames took her to lunch the following week, and to the movie theater and dinner the week after, not making any small talk but rather asking about her family’s travels in Africa and China, about the conditions they encountered and how her parents set up the ministries and schooling at each of the missions, about the other kinds of projects they instituted, in mercantilism and agriculture and disease control. He wanted to know how they had gone about learning the local languages, or if it was difficult to work with other missionaries, particularly the Catholic ones. He didn’t ask about the circumstances of her parents’ deaths, nor in fact speak of them as if they were even gone. She was glad to talk about them this way, for he made her feel as if they were not just alive but still out in the world somewhere, still setting up missions, still aiding and organizing and teaching, and she found herself recounting their activities of those last years in more detail than she had offered anyone else, including her aunt. He’d have her celebrate them, shout their praises if she would, make them gleam again by their brightest light.
He did ask, however, as he drove her back to her aunt’s house in his Packard sedan (his family was wealthy, being prominent in the timber business), whether she’d had serious boyfriends in her life, or any present suitors, and she immediately said no, though flashing on Jim. Ames nodded, still quite serious but obviously pleased. She hadn’t volunteered again at that particular soup kitchen, but she couldn’t help but think about Jim sitting in the dim factory office, the various curtains still tacked on the walls, nursing his bottle of the tincture. At certain moments late at night she craved the taste of it terribly, and longed for him as well, and she found she could master both impulses by kneading herself raw with the back of her thumb until the sensation was only, solely, painful; she would make her body quell its own urges with an even sharper reality. For she knew she must not hide out any longer. She must climb out from every cave of her making. Ames ’s presence in her life and his interest in her parents was in fact a blessing; he would bring her forth, even if her memories of those last hours might be fully rekindled.
And soon enough, one evening, the past engulfed her all at once. She was preparing for just her fifth dinner out with Ames when she cut herself shaving, the blood running freely from her calf. She was in the tub and instead of stepping out and blotting the wound with a tissue she propped her foot against the tiled wall and let it bleed, accelerating the flow with another quick gash, letting the blood stream past her knee to her thigh, the streaked pale limb fallen asleep and coldly tingling but still existing outside her sensation. It looked as if a wave of blood had washed over her leg but it was merely a surface current, and she was never in the remotest danger; the sight froze her, however, and although she heard the doorbell (her aunt was out of town) she didn’t stir, seeing only the bodies of Reverend Lum and his wife lying uncovered in the courtyard of the mission, a splotch of dark red that had spread over Mrs. Lum’s face the lone mark on the ground, light snow descending upon them. It was odd, for it was never an image of her parents, but rather of the Lums, which would always spark her mind.
She could hear Ames shouting up at the opened window of the bathroom, and when she didn’t answer right away he shouted again. He called her name and when she weakly responded with his he must have heard something wrong in her voice, for he pushed through the unlocked front door and bounded up the narrow stairs of the modest row house. He anxiously called and banged on the bathroom door, and when she didn’t answer he came right in, his eyes instantly drawn wide in horror at the dyed hue of the water, the smears of blood on the tiles, on the rim of the tub; her leg had slipped down below the surface. He instinctively grabbed her wrists and pulled them out of the water, but when he saw they were untouched he shook them in panic and cried: “Where is it? What have you done to yourself?”
She was listless from the still-hot water and feeling she could open her throat and disappear within it when Ames reached in and lifted her out in one swift movement. She glanced toward her feet and he quickly found the two tiny slits above her heel; he dressed them with bandages from the medicine cabinet. She was dripping and now cold, but when he knelt and covered her with a towel she bared herself and blotted his drenched suit jacket and trousers. He tried averting his eyes and kept asking what was wrong, but she felt him aroused underneath and hardly knowing what she was doing undid his belt and put him in her mouth. He said no but his face was bound up and he shuddered. In just a few minutes he was ready again and they lay down right there and it was then that blood came from her once more, the ruined towel beneath them like a shock of color in new snow.
The next day Ames proposed to her, something that he was planning anyway but which was certainly accelerated by what occurred, as well as by their assumption that she might be pregnant, which she was. They were married within the month. Yet she didn’t stay pregnant, nor could she remain so the next time, or the next. It was not his problem; she would become pregnant at least five times that they knew of, her body simply unable to nurture to term. The last time would be several years before they went to Korea, a three-month-old fetus with nothing obviously wrong with him, a devastating fact, though ultimately not as disturbing to him as was Sylvie’s demeanor afterward. She wasn’t inconsolable as she was the other times, even as those pregnancies were much shorter-lived, lasting barely a month, or two. This time after recovering from the extraction of the lifeless child Sylvie had simply showered and dressed and with hardly any despondency folded her hospital gown and placed it on the bed and silently waited for the nurse to come with the chair to wheel her out of the hospital. At their small home in Laurelhurst she left the nursery they had set up intact, which heartened Ames for a while, until he realized that she was slowly removing items from it, a book or picture, a stuffed toy or rattle, one piece at a time, until eventually the room was bare, save for the furniture and the crib. He blamed her, blamed her for the dire force her frailty and sexual abandon could have on him, and he more than she grew to be haunted by the idea that they had tainted themselves with the debased, confused desire of that first coupling. Out of anger or spite or desperation he began asking her about what had finally happened to her parents in Manchuria, as if he were sure that it was where the source of all her troubles might be found.
She refused to answer him. But was he right? Were they so easily derived? She didn’t think so, and yet who could dismiss the insistent push of those memories?
For it was too easy to recall how she and her parents had watched through the classroom window as the soldiers dragged the Lums’ bodies outside, her parents not shielding her from the sight. They were still in shock from the easy brutality of their deaths, Sylvie’s father perhaps most of all. After the Lums were left there, he had sat back down on the blanket with his head in his hands, her mother hotly whispering something to him in the roughhewn Provençal dialect they used when they wished to obscure their talk.
Sylvie could have gleaned the gist of their conversation if she had concentrated, as she had countless others over the years; she had never let on that she could understand them at all, not intending at first to deceive but rather, like any child, simply fascinated by the sound of her parents’ unrestrained engagements, whether it was joking or arguing or lovemaking. But Sylvie wasn’t listening now, or even trying to listen; she could not look away from the Lums. Her eyes were alive and working but as might a bright screen playing in a suddenly emptied theater. She had fled to somewhere inside herself, and was still running, and yet the horrid sight was strange in that they didn’t appear so terribly perturbed, in and of themselves, the Lums lying there almost peacefully in the gathering snowfall, the reverend’s hand accidentally come to drape upon his wife’s forehead, as though he were checking her temperature.
Her mother gasped, “You knew about him, Francis? My God!” with a fury Sylvie had never heard from her before. But they were done talking and her father stood up and took Sylvie in his arms and embraced her so tightly and suddenly that all the air in her chest was squeezed out, her vision near blurring. He smelled sharp with soured, dried sweat but she breathed him in as deeply as she could, burying her face in his thick brown hair. He was not a large man and she was nearly as tall as he but she felt like a little girl again in his grasp and without knowing it was coming she found herself breaking down all at once, sobbing and pressing her mouth against the smooth, curved bone behind his ear. She wasn’t afraid for her own life so much as stricken by the fear that she might not see one or both of them ever again. Her mother caressed her back. It was only the three of them in the classroom now. The officer and soldiers had taken away Benjamin Li, to interrogate him one last time. The Harrises, too, had been removed, forced back to consciousness with smelling salts and half-carried to their quarters in the corner of the compound, a sentry posted in front of their door. Through all their travels they were a constant trio, Sylvie schooled by them or by someone else (like Benjamin Li), the three of them slumbering together and eating together and often enough bathing together because of the usually meager supply of hot water-she would always picture their nakedness much more easily than her own-but now it seemed that they could never be close enough, that if it were possible she’d slip inside one of them and fill herself with their tears and their blood and become an indistinguishable plenitude.
And despite everything that had transpired, did she continue to wish the same in regard to Benjamin Li? Was it still possible that all of them could get past this wretched day? Her parents, she could see, might not have any feeling left for him, but they had shown him a lasting grace and Sylvie would lead them back to accepting him and convince them to plead for his life. For her father had been ever so right: Benjamin was not the cause of the situation; he had intended no one harm; he was nearly as much a victim of the cruelty as the Lums, perhaps equally so for the mountain of guilt he would forever have to shoulder. He was a gentle and lovely man and a dedicated teacher, and that he was a stalwart freedom fighter who could refuse under such horrid duress to divulge his secrets only painted him more valorously in her mind. He was indeed a person of principle and it was why he would never take advantage of her desires, why he’d given his school medal to her instead and exhorted her only nobly, why she must wait patiently, until she knew herself to be less blatant and childish, before she could ever hope to attain a lasting, worthy love.
“Your mother and I need to talk to you now, sweetie,” her father said to her, cupping her cheek. “We may not have much time, so please just listen.”
“Why? What’s going to happen? We’re going to stay together, aren’t we?”
“We will try our best,” her father said, trying to smile at her now. “We’ll stay together as long as possible. To the last minute. But you must promise us that if you can get away safely, you’ll go. Whether it’s with us or with the Harrises or by yourself. You must not hesitate. You must not think twice. You cannot be concerned with anyone else. Including us.”
“What are you talking about?” she cried righteously, her face hot with a flush of angry fear. “How can you expect that of me, when all you’ve taught me was to put first the welfare of others? How could I possibly leave?”
“But you must, if you have the chance. Please. Your mother and I would never forgive ourselves…”
Sylvie shook her head, pushing away from him. “I’m sorry, Father, but after all the dangerous times over the years, you can’t ask this of me now. You just can’t! It’s too late.”
“It’s not too late,” her mother broke in, with her full-throated voice. She squeezed Sylvie’s hands with a fierce grip. “You’re going to get out of this, with or without us. Do you hear me, darling?”
She nodded. Her mother was twice as steadfast as she could ever hope to be and a certain gaze from her was enough to both diminish and exalt, often simultaneously. Her father might be the beacon, the light conveying them forth, but even now, amid even this, her mother was the great clarifier, the person who could always make her know her exact place, who could always show her what she must do, and for this reason hers was the picture Sylvie would behold brightest in her mind, this serene and beautiful figure, alabaster for flesh, marble-dust for blood.
“Say you do.”
“I do.”
“Say it again.”
“I hear you, I do!” she said miserably, new tears wetting her cheeks.
“Here, we’re going to give you these things,” her mother said. “Just to hold for now.” She took off her husband’s wedding band and put it on Sylvie’s finger, where it hung loose. She removed her own and fit it on top, the second ring a good, tight fit.
“We love you more than anything,” her mother murmured, kissing her brow, her cheeks, her messy nose and eyes.