She was just about to lie down on her side when a kerosene lamp emerged from the main dormitory door, swinging to and fro. From the clipped gait she could tell that it was Min. She didn’t move or speak, and she could see him stepping back and forth in the dark, lifting up the lamp to try to see. He headed back to the building but a wind whistled past the sign at the top of the arch and the sound made him turn around and venture out past the field. He must have seen her shape against the thin lines of the gate door, for he lowered the lamp and approached her quickly.
“What are you doing here,
noo-nah
?” he said, his shoulders hunched up tight against the cold. He was wearing a sweater over his pajamas. He turned down the wick of the lamp. “It’s freezing. You should come inside.”
She didn’t respond. During dinner, before Min disappeared, she had resolved never to speak to him again, or maybe to do worse: she had flashed with a rage, wanting to pummel him, make him plead and cry. But the sight of him slightly limping, the kerosene lamp still too big for his hand, momentarily disarmed her.
“Please come now,
noo-nah
.”
“Just leave me alone.”
“I went in the chapel and made the fire in the stove. It’s been going for a half-hour already, so it’s nice and warm in there.”
“Go back inside, then.”
“You don’t look right. You’re going to get sick in this cold. You could die.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do,” he said, kneeling down beside her. “And it’s not because Byong-Ok might beat me. He doesn’t care about me anymore. The others don’t care, either. Nobody does.”
“You’re better off that way.”
“Are you still my friend?”
June stood up and began walking away. Her feet were tingling, nearly numb, her fingers cramping, and she thought that she should go now down the dirt road and veer off on a trail deep into the woods, where no one could find her.
“Well, are you?” he asked, following her closely. “I want to know. I don’t want to live here anymore if you don’t even care about me.”
“Why should I?” she said, turning and shoving him roughly. He fell to the ground, just barely keeping the lamp upright. She put her foot on his hand as she stood over him. “I should strangle you. Why did you lie about our being adopted? Didn’t you think I’d find out?”
“I didn’t know!” he cried, trying to pull his hand away. But she just stepped more heavily on him.
“You’re a liar!”
“I didn’t
want
to know!” he said wretchedly, trying with his free hand to push her foot away. She let him go and he curled into himself like a wounded snail, holding his hand against his chest. “Isn’t it the same for you? Don’t you have to make believe, too? Everybody knows I’ve got little chance, with my foot. Not when there are so many others with nothing wrong with them.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said, clutching the collar of his sweater. “Not with me!”
“Nothing?” he said, and almost laughed. “You can say it ten thousand times over, but it’s not going to make it true. You’re the way you are. Everybody knows it. The way you’ll always be. You’re trouble, just like me.”
She grabbed him by the throat with both hands, her fingers monstrously vitalized by the heat of his neck, his windpipe like the gently ribbed sections of a delicate reed, and had he not turned his face to the lamp, revealing the willing forfeit flooding his eyes, she might not have let go.
But she did. Min coughed horribly, shudderingly low, as if he were a dying old man, and after he regained his breath she got him up on her back and carried him to the main building. The chapel was lit by the bright honeyed light leaking out around the edges of the door of the old steel stove. Min had already moved the front pews together and close to it, as they had done the previous nights, their shared blanket was neatly laid out, his pillow set to one side to make enough room for hers, and she gently tipped him over the pew back and let him down on his side. She leaned over him, to make sure he was okay. He wasn’t speaking but he was breathing shallowly and steadily, and in the odd crib of the pews his body seemed even smaller than it was, loosed of stuffing, like some worn-out, sunken doll. He was staring up at her, not with wonderment or anger or even hurt but with the plainest appeal: Stay. Please don’t go. She didn’t know what she wished to do but what else was there now? He was not her brother or her friend or someone to care for or love. He was all right now and she owed him nothing. And yet she let him take her hand. He gently tugged on her and she climbed over the pew back to lie beside him, and when he turned and rolled right onto her, his face pressed into her chest, his hands seeking the pits of her arms, she wanted to push him off. But there was something in his certain sorry weight that seemed to seep down into her, suffuse her, until a strange new fullness had risen up in the stripped caverns of her belly.
They fell asleep. After some time June awoke to a dying fire and climbed out of the pews to feed a small log into the stove. The fire flared quickly with new heat.
“Could I have some water,
noo-nah
?” Min said to her, peeking up over the pew back, his voice raspy.
She said all right. Outside, the sky was clear but moonless and the stars barely thwarted the darkness. But her eyes quickly adjusted and she made her way to the well. It was by the kitchen, and after she worked the hand pump five or six times the frigid water splashed out of the spout. Beneath there was a wooden ladle in a bucket, and while she filled its large cup she noticed a tiny, weak glow at the far end of the field. It was Min’s kerosene lamp; they had left it by the gate. She went across the field to fetch it and was about to head back to the chapel when the low groan of a door broke the silence. June instinctively crouched down, thrusting the lamp behind her to shield its light.
A dusky figure emerged from the Tanners’ cottage. It was Hector. He must have gone over while she and Min were asleep. Hector turned and held out his hands toward the pitch-black doorway and then it was Sylvie, in her light-hued robe, stepping out gingerly on the stoop. He helped her down, her one leg unsteady, and though it was obviously painful for her she appeared to want to walk by herself, if closely braced by him. But as they made their way across the yard she tucked her face deeply into his neck, not so much with ardor but rather as if she were trying to blind herself, as if she were unwilling to see.
They had not noticed her. June waited until they were long inside Hector’s room before rising. The night air had grown even colder now but June did not feel its sharpness. She stood stiffly before his quarters, staring at the lamplight or stove light knifing out from a vertical gap near the bottom of the door. She had no picture in her mind of what might be going on inside, whether they were speaking or kissing or making love, but that was no matter now. She did not desire to see them or hear them as she had from the other side of the shared wall, for she did not want any image of their animate bodies, or the sounds of even chaste breathing, any signs of life.
June crept into the storeroom and took a can of kerosene. Outside she silently doused the wooden stoop, the walls, splashed the ground in front of his door. She raised high the wick of her lamp, the heightened brightness surging through the clear glass globe to illumine the whole side of the building and the night as though she were still in search of someone, still bearing the light of everlasting devotion. She lifted the lamp and was ready to hurl it against the door when a shadow inside interrupted the slat of light at the bottom. It was a moment’s pause, a mere flicker, and yet it was enough to send a shudder through her bones.
She extinguished the lamp. She picked up the square-bottomed ladle from the ground. It was night again, and she suddenly felt the full chill of being alone. Inside the chapel, Min had pushed open the pews so that he was sitting directly in front of the fire, the door of the stove opened for light; he was looking at the book Sylvie had given her, flipping through the pages. When he realized June had returned he quickly put it down. He said, “You were taking so long.”
“You can have it,” she told him. “I don’t care.”
“I don’t want it,” he replied. “I don’t want anything anymore.”
“I brought you water.”
She gave him the ladle and he drank half of it, saving her the rest. She took a sip and offered it back and he finished what was left. Then, with a surprising indifference, he threw the ladle into the stove. It was not worth ten grains of rice, but like many things in the orphanage it was a shared object and therefore of communal value, and the ease with which he tossed it in startled her. They watched it closely. The ladle was waterlogged and at first it only hissed but soon the twining and edges began to burn, smoke starting to billow from the bamboo cup, gathering beneath the long handle, and then in a whoosh it was aflame, its light hot on their faces. Min got up and left. When he returned he was carrying two of the small footlockers. One was his, the other June’s-he had stolen into the girls’ side. He opened the lid of his locker and began taking out the few items it contained, inspecting them for a moment and then tossing them into the stove. She did not say anything or try to stop him. He started with his box of pencils, and then a deck of Korean playing cards, and then he put in two special pairs of dress socks that he’d received from a church group in America. Next were some letters and greeting cards from the same people. Then he drew out the fine scarf he had made; aside from his everyday clothes, it was the last thing he had. He handed it to June to put in the fire, and after he nodded to say it was all right, she balled it up and dropped it in. It burned not quickly but rather steadily and well, the fire consuming it with its own slow savor.
“You want to try?” he said. “It feels good.”
June opened her footlocker. One by one she began tossing in her possessions, which were nothing at all, letting Min throw in every other, a straw doll she had never played with and old magazines and a yellow summer dress that she had worn only once and knew now she would never wear again. The fire flared with each item and they had to lean back from the blasts of heat. The last thing of June’s was not in her footlocker but on the pew, beside Min, and he picked it up now, the little book. “How about this?”
She regarded it for a long moment. “Okay,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she told him. “Put it in.”
Min leaned in toward the stove, one hand shielding his face. He then flipped it into the seething vault. It lay on the coals, its cover pristine and cool blue. It appeared as though nothing would happen, that it was miraculously immune to their private inferno. And then she knew how wrong she was to give it up. She was wrong to ever let it go. There were things not bound for oblivion. But all at once the book was in flames, blazing as brightly as anything gone in so far, and without hesitation June reached deep into the stove and grabbed at the heart of the fire.
“Noo-nah!”
Min gasped, trying to pull her back.
“Noo-nah!”
There was pain at first, pain so sharp and great and pure that for a moment June felt that she had become the burning itself, that she was the crucible and not the iron, and as she grasped the book a lightning flashed into every last part of her. She fell back onto the floor, Min immediately snuffing her hand and the book with the blanket. He was frantic because she would not let it go, and when the flames were finally out he was crying at the sight of her hand and arm. The horrid, bubbled skin was like half-molten, bloody wax. But to June it belonged to someone else, for there was no feeling at all, the nerves seared dead up to her elbow. It was the untouched rest of her body that was shuddering, as if buffeted by the wake of all the phantom pain from her hand. Yet her mind was clear.
“Somebody must help us!” Min said, panicking. “I’ll go get Mrs. Tanner!”
She told him no. He was frantic but she calmed him with an embrace. They were on their knees. She let him go and the boy sat on his haunches. She reached for the big oil lamp that she had fetched from outside. It was still quite heavy with fuel. She gave it to him and he hefted it from the bottom; he knew what she wanted him to do. He threw it into the stove, the glass globe shattering without much sound. June shut the hearth door, neither of them moving back. Min hugged her tight now. She was still holding the book, its cover charred but the inner pages still intact, and she could smell the smoke and her ruined skin as she wound her arm around his neck. She thought she heard voices outside but it was too late. She kissed him on the cheek.
“We don’t need anyone,” she said softly in his ear. “We’re going to stay here now.”
NINETEEN
SHE KEPT TALKING about
la chiesa dell’ossario
. The Chapel of Bones. She was still flush with the double dose Hector had given her, riding in the splendid chariot. The three-hour drive had taken nearly five because of jammed traffic and then getting lost several times, Hector having to pull over and check the map himself. June was no longer able to help him. There was a question as to what she could even see, her eyes opaque and darkened, the color of muddy coffee. But they were close now, ascending the road to the village on the next hill, and as if she knew they were making the last approach, she was preparing herself, reviewing. She had not been to this place before but she spoke as if she had seen it many times, as might a guide, telling him how the church was consecrated in 1870 as a reliquary of the fallen soldiers of the Battle of Solferino. It was the simplest church, nothing about it ornate, the only spark of color on the cream-and-white façade a mural of Saint Peter in a blue robe, a red shawl about his shoulders, a golden halo encircling his somber head. She said he would know it by this. But the car had sounded funny in the last half-hour, and now something was clattering in the undercarriage, and as Hector careened ponderously on the steep curves banking up the hill, he wondered if this last effortful stretch would prove its demise. He shifted to a lower gear and lurched the rest of the way, the heaving strain of the motor shaking the tinny sedan, and when he looked in the rearview mirror he saw her slumped against the door, her face pinched up as if she were tasting something bitter. The road widened on a plateau and he stopped across from a small hotel whose patio and cocktail tables were set practically onto the pavement. He was simply going to park, to give the machine a moment’s rest, when to his right he saw the church. It shined starkly in the late-afternoon light. It stood atop a brief rise of land opposite the old hotel, a wide gravel walking path lined with cypress trees leading up to its dark wooden doors. Above the doors was the figure of the saint, his colors just as June had described.