The Surrendered (49 page)

“Leave that alone,” he said. “It’s too heavy. Just go, okay?”

But June was already removing her light wool sweater, rolling it up over her head. Her blouse was untucked from the band of her long skirt and as it was pulled by the sweater she let it ride up, over her bare chest, taking her time to unfurl the sweater from her head before the fabric naturally fell and draped down again. From his downcast eyes she knew her breasts were clearly showing through the thin white shirting. She let her sweater fall to the ground and when he didn’t move she stepped quickly to him, as if he’d pulled her in an embrace. He tried to push her away but she clung tighter to him the more he squirmed and she was exhilarated by how tenacious she could be, how resilient, though a reciprocal, near-hungering ache uncoiled in her gut from the hard pads of his hands. Finally she pushed away from him, letting herself fall to the ground.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Hector shouted.

She expected to hear Tanner’s voice but when she looked up she glimpsed only his dark minister’s jacket and the tops of the children’s heads bobbing away as they hiked back toward the compound.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” Hector growled. “Don’t you ever touch me like that.”

“I won’t!” she said defiantly.

She put on her sweater and ran off. In the central yard it was nearly lunchtime, the younger children playing tag while the aunties set up tables outside, as it was a warm fall day. Sylvie and several older girls were bringing out utensils and cups and she joined them. Reverend Tanner was already sitting at one of the tables, watching their play with an opened Bible before him. June was ready to tell him a broader story of what Hector had done, or tried to do, but Tanner said nothing to her. He only glanced at the freshly soiled patches on her skirt, on her sleeves, and although this surprised her she realized that he couldn’t talk about such things in front of his wife and other girls. In fact he didn’t need to talk about them at all, for she had done the necessary work, and as she began setting down chopsticks and spoons she felt that she was a wellspring and that Hector was a leaf just fallen on the surface, soon to be tided inexorably away.

YET HECTOR DIDN’T GO AWAY. It seemed impossible to her, but Reverend Tanner made nothing of witnessing her and Hector down in the ditch. He didn’t seem to care. A whole week went by, and at the end of it the reverend even talked animatedly with Hector about the sections of concrete piping just delivered by truck. Tanner even decided to help Hector with the job of joining the sections, suspending his schedule for two days while young Reverend Kim from Seoul came down to help Sylvie with his teaching and liturgical duties. June and some other children watched them from a perch above the gently sloping hillside. Each thick-walled concrete section was a half-meter round and as long as a man and it took them past dusk of the first day to lug all the sections of pipe down the run of the ditch. It was simple work and they didn’t have to say much of anything to each other and labored in a steady rhythm, lifting a section from the pile beside the main outhouse and walking it down sideways or with one of them backpedaling. As night fell one might have thought the two men were interring corpses in a strange, threading line of a mass grave. The next day it rained lightly and they shifted the sections, using shovels for leverage in order to connect them, and by the end when they shook hands ever so briefly they were covered brown-gray from head to toe in mud and joining mortar.

Sylvie was again not well. Maybe it was the pressure of her husband’s new wish for a child, or her own guilt about Hector, or else that she was craving him even as she knew she should not have him, but June could see the parched quality of her skin, the streaks of red at her elbows where she constantly scratched at herself showing through her blouse sleeve. She needed medicine for her kit.

June kept telling herself that she could be the remedy. She told herself to keep disciplined, to stay the course she had laid out, to remake herself along the lines of an entirely different girl: someone who was not an orphan at all, had not lost anyone in her life, much less witnessed any horrors or degradation. She was a normal child who would soon have a normal life. And it was shortly borne out: after the morning prayer Reverend Tanner announced that at the end of October young Reverend Kim, who substituted for him when he was away, would take over as director of the orphanage. “But what will you do?” a boy obtusely asked. “Mrs. Tanner and I must be leaving,” Tanner solemnly replied. “We have to go back to America.” There was a long second of silence and then all the children were crying, many outright wailing, some fallen to the ground, the rest crowding around him and Sylvie, both of whom were crying, too.

Only June did not fret, knowing that she would soon be asked to prepare for the journey. She knew from others they would fly first to Japan, then go on to either Alaska or Hawaii, before landing in San Francisco. From there they would take a shorter flight to Seattle, where the Tanners were from, a place that Sylvie had once described to her as a city shrouded in constant rain and fog, a place on earth but stuck in clouds, where one always felt the weight of dampness in one’s clothes and hair and skin, which was strangely comforting, once gotten used to. Naturally some found it oppressive. But June liked the idea that the weather was a near constant, like a too-loyal friend, something to bear around and tolerate and maybe cherish, even if it would never leave you alone. And she knew that she and Sylvie would be just that for each other, and in time perhaps she could prove the same for Reverend Tanner, who would come to see her not as a bane he had yielded to but the living picture of his grace.

So she organized and reorganized her small footlocker, which every child had, discarding the pairs of socks that were past darning, resolving to wear the ugly olive-drab trousers as often as she could to preserve her two decent blouses and skirt, which she snapped in the air to rid of dust and then tightly folded. She polished her ill-fitting leather shoes, knowing that she would have to wear them on the plane. She went through her workbooks and tore out the pages marred by idle sketches or doodles and she honed her three pencils against the floorboards to sharp pinpoints. She cleaned the footlocker itself, removing the grime from the handle with a kerosene-dipped rag and sanding the rust from the rivets and steel-clad corners. Lastly she borrowed a pair of good scissors from the aunties and trimmed her own hair (which was in a rough, unkempt pageboy because she never sat long enough for them to cut it properly), smoothing out the line of the ends and pinning up one side like some of the other girls did but with the fancy, large tortoiseshell hair clasp Sylvie had given her very early on. It was in the shape of a butterfly, which she loved, but she had not used it even once out of fear of losing or breaking it. But she was wearing it constantly now, to remind herself to keep her hair and face and fingernails neat and clean, to be polite, even smiling and pretty, just as the younger girls who had been adopted before had been polite and pretty, so eager to please, but mostly because she was confident that her time here was truly ending, that her life was about to begin anew.

Thus it didn’t bother her in the least that the atmosphere of the orphanage was lifeless for some days after the announcement of the Tanners’ departure, the boys not even playing soccer or tag during free time. The aunties seemed less patient with the children, scolding them more hotly for not clearing the tables fast enough, or for making too much laundry. In fact it was mostly just Hector who seemed as active as ever, maybe more so, as the winter would soon be approaching and countless repairs needed to be completed before the frightful cold descended again upon the hills. As June watched him work at reframing a window-his face unshaven, his hair unruly, his eyes unwavering from the task at hand-a pang of recognition struck her low momentarily: his life was about to begin again, too. She almost felt sorry for having tried to bring him trouble. What would he do, after they were gone? It was why she could smell him from a distance, the boozy smell and the sharp body smell and the faintest ashen smell of someone’s embittered heart.

It was with the news that visitors from a new adoption agency in America were coming to take photographs of the children that the compound came back to life. The aunties heated water the entire day to draw enough for bathing all forty children, separate boys’ and girls’ tin tubs accommodating three or four of them at a time.

June refused at first to bathe, for there was no reason for her to do so, she was already spoken for, but as one of the aunties berated her she realized she ought to take every chance to better herself, as much as stay in line. And so she got in with three much younger girls, soaping up their hair for them, reminding them to shut their eyes, even drying them off quickly in the chilly air and helping them get dressed in their best outfits. She put on her own good clothes and accompanied the younger ones out and waited in line with them for their photographs, except that the kindly-faced, plumpish older couple who arrived by taxi had no intention of taking portraits but rather wanted to meet all the children in the hope of taking home as many as they could manage. They had a camera, but only for taking snapshots of their journey. Reverend Tanner was confused, as he’d obviously received erroneous information from the church office in Seoul, but he still had everyone meet the Stolzes, who sat in chairs in the central yard and shook each child’s hand. Sylvie had not yet reemerged from the cottage after the midday meal, Reverend Tanner making her excuses to the couple, telling them she had a bad cold.

Reverend Tanner introduced each child by name and age, adding some humorously flattering description or anecdote, and when June stepped up he didn’t hesitate at all, saying she was self-possessed and highly independent, adding that she took and gave no quarter to the boys during games, eliciting approving nods from the Stolzes. When they asked him about her English, she answered that she spoke it well, surprising and impressing them. Mrs. Stolz, wearing a dark green dress and black shoes, asked how she had learned the language and June explained that her father had been an educated man, a teacher, and had attended a top university in Japan.

“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.”