His failing found expression now in even the small measures, too, like the fact that he couldn’t quite summon the hatred even June assumed he should have for her. In the car, in her delirium, or perhaps under its cover, she told him what she had done. Yes, she had caused the fatal fire. Yet in his own way he had stoked it, too, with his rank, blinding want, and he had always believed that it should have been he who never emerged.
On that last night, Sylvie had begged him to let her be. Why had he not heeded her? Why hadn’t he simply stayed in his room? Once the fire started, surely he would have rushed inside the dormitory first and gotten them all out. He’d been drinking all evening, sitting in his dim room with a bottle of harsh Japanese-brand scotch whiskey, feeding his accelerating thoughts, which alternated between wanting to flay Sylvie with harangues, with the lowliest of sentimental entreaties, with self-pitying rants and outright attacks, and trying to figure out how he might lovingly convince her to stay on. To love him back. But he was useless at romance. He had no profound or pretty words. He thought she had made up her mind on the day they had all collected leaves around the orphanage, when she had followed him into the chapel. Afterward they left the chapel and headed in different directions but she met up with him as he had asked, about one hundred meters along the most southerly trail, where there was an obscuring thicket of woods. They didn’t make love but had still fallen upon each other in a primed, overdesperate state and in a matter of minutes they had clawed and tasted one another with the privation of ghouls. They had hardly undressed, and yet later, when he was bathing, he could feel the tines of her fingernails striping his back, his neck, his thighs. He’d done the same to her but with his mouth, his ravenous teeth, biting her wherever she pointed to herself, as if they were playing some curious grade school game. She had gasped with each snap, tears filling her eyes, then pointed again. It was then that Hector was sure that he had won, mishoping, misreading her erotic fervor for a deeper devotion; for he was too young and ignorant to know that she was not acting or dissembling but rather offering herself to his pure and towering want, surrendering to his great keen need, which to her was as lovely as he.
It was already midnight when he finished the bottle and went to her cottage, knowing that the next day Tanner would be back. He and Sylvie had not yet made love while her husband was presently away, his carrying her after she twisted her knee in the soccer game the first time he’d time touched her since the brief, furious moment in the woods. Simply holding her was an alert of his craving but a kind of anchoring, too, how he needed the literal burden of her to offset the hateful, numb condition of his being. His unassailable body. And as he went around to the back of the cottage he realized how vulnerable he felt whenever she was close, as though he were at last mortally subject, as prone as the next. His heart a boy’s, brimful and shaking. Yet he knew, too, though he was still resisting it, that it was already finished between them, or that it had never truly begun, and it was this dire feeling that pushed him to try to be with her again. The window shade was down and when he tried the door it was locked and he rapped at it harder and harder until the sound was loud enough to rouse the children across the way. She opened the door and let him in. Her knee was still just as he had wrapped it and she limped away without even looking at him.
“Does it still hurt a lot?” he asked her, following her to the bed.
“Not anymore,” she said wearily, her head bowed. He knelt before her and took her knee in one hand and her calf in the other, gently and carefully testing the joint. She winced with its play. “It’ll be fine. Please go now. Please.”
“I said I would come.”
“I asked you not to,” she said, pushing off his hands.
“So you don’t want to see me anymore?”
“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“He’ll be back tomorrow!” Hector cried, the instant thunder in his voice surprising even him.
She was silent. “Please, Hector. You can’t be here now.”
“Why? Because you’ve changed your mind?”
“I’ve never changed my mind. Not about you. It was never a question of that.”
“Then what was it a question of? Would you tell me? Because I’m stupid. I’m confused. Are you in love again with your husband?”
“I’ve always loved him,” she murmured.
“You’ve always loved him,” he scorned her. “I guess you were loving him right from the beginning. I guess you were thinking about how you loved him when you were fucking me on this bed. You’ve thought about him so much that every time he goes away you come around to wherever I am.”
“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.
“THERE YOU ARE,” June said softly when he finally returned to the room. Nearly two hours had passed. He could tell by her eyes that she had not quite expected to see him again. Somehow she had managed to move a stuffed chair to face the vista of the church on the hill, and she was sitting in it before the now opened window. Though it was nearing dusk the breeze was still quite warm, faintly fragrant with pine and earth. She repositioned herself now and sat up, as if to try to demonstrate that she still had a measure of control. But even this tiny exertion was too much for her and her head lolled over the chair back at an unnatural angle, her mouth hanging open. “Did you bring me something?”
He had: the proprietor had arranged a few cookies and bite-sized café pastries in a basket, as well as a pink plastic parfait cup with a scoop of lemon ice. Hector put the basket on her lap and she beheld it like a girl at Easter. She picked up the spoon and was about to take some ice when she paused and asked if he would like some. He shook his head. She dug out a dollop and placed it upside down on her tongue, holding the spoon there as she closed her eyes, her drawn cheeks clenching with the tartness, or the sweetness, or both. He couldn’t help but watch her swallow, the mechanism ponderous, wholly voluntary now, and he imagined the melting ice finding the besiegement of her insides, how utterly thronged she was with disease, that there was nowhere to go. She didn’t take another taste, just clutching the spoon at her belly as she sat for a moment with her eyes closed, as if she were counting the seconds before the first kind swells of a drug washed over her. He asked her if she wanted a shot and though her face had gone suddenly ragged and chalky she firmly said no.