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And soon enough, one evening, the past engulfed her all at once. She was preparing for just her fifth di
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 pla
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 ru
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.