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.