Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

But nothing. Just smoke, sharper now, and noxious enough that she had to lean back.

Then a shouting from the other end of the well: Mala frantically calling for Tico. Was the woman on fire? Fan hollered down the well. But less than a minute later the door of the room opened and it was Mala, wholly fine. Once she saw the girls, however, her expression grew stern, now resolved in what she needed to do. She asked Fan to prepare a bag of things for the girls; she herself would go downstairs and call for an ambulance. She wasn’t going to ask Miss Cathy’s permission.

This is your chance, too, little one, she said. Pack a bag as well. This is not the place for you. I’m so sorry. So sorry for everything.

Fan said, You don’t need to apologize to me.

Yes, I do! Mala held her by the shoulders. You most of all! I could see you were different, but what did I do?

It doesn’t matter anymore.

Yes, you’re right, Mala said. You should just go, right away. Take any bus heading out the gate! Here’s my fare card. There’s enough on it to take you quite far. So go as far as you can!

Fan could easily see this was her best chance, too. It was a matter of simply walking out, though of course there were awful possibilities that she would be leaving behind. And yet there was not a mote of her that could have abandoned these girls now. If she didn’t love them as Mala did, or even Miss Cathy, whose feeling for them, if unnaturally skewed, was arguably the most intense of all, Fan at least loved them as if they were of her household, these dear cousins whom she ought to always nurture and safeguard.

I can’t leave yet, Fan said.

No one would blame you! Not even the Girls!

That’s exactly why I can’t, Fan said. Mala clasped her cheek and then ambled away, though not before propping the Girls’ door ajar with the broken night table leg, and Miss Cathy’s suite door with a chair — in case, Mala said, Fan changed her mind.

Of which there was very little possibility now, as Fan made her way to Miss Cathy’s immense, many-chambered bathroom. She did not know what she would do or say to the woman, holding out zero hope of convincing her of anything. But she must have been caught up by a fury, for we can see how there was a new propulsion to Fan’s step, not a speeding up but rather a feeling that she could pass right through a solid if she wanted, that she would not be halted. And that’s one of the funny things about Fan, as we think about her now, which is that when it mattered most she was an essentially physical being, rather than some ornate bundle of notions, wishes, dreams. Perhaps that other sort is more often seen to be heroic these days but we B-Mors — and maybe now you, too — respond more deeply than the rest to someone’s determined gaze, or the way they move across a room, or simply stand there, as Fan did that day at young Joseph’s wake, with such solidity that you might think the world and everything in it was, for a flash, turning around them.

Though naturally not everyone can appreciate this. Miss Cathy, for instance, was surely thinking of the impudence of our Fan as she appeared in the doorway of the bathroom, rather than of her remarkable presence.

What are you doing here? Miss Cathy said, no doubt startled by the fact that Fan had somehow gotten out of the other room. The Girls were attending to one another with various implements and tonics and polishes, with Miss Cathy herself, hair turbaned in a towel, in the midst of curling Seven’s hair. It could have been a scene from one of the ancient oil paintings in Mister Leo’s gallery, an array of fleshy, radiant maidens in an opulent marbled bath, though of course in this tableau the maidens were petite and angular and variously aged and orbiting about this much larger, paler, older figure, this cold sun of a woman who seemed to pull every mote of warmth and color from the stone-tiled room.

I want to join, too, Fan said. May I?

Miss Cathy hardly seemed to have heard her words, gazing absently at the brush in her hand and then rolling the brush under to give the girl’s hair an inward lilt. But she said, Come in then. The others lightly murmured. They were beaming kind smiles but they were clearly uncertain as to why Fan would now leave their sisters, who were stricken in the other room. They must be doing better, was what they silently concurred with one another, though none of them dared ask her for confirmation.

Had they been different souls, Fan might have tried to rally them with some sign, had them ring their keeper and bind her up with the belts of their terry robes, ensuring that whatever Mala could arrange would go unimpeded. Perhaps someday they would thus act, but for now Fan could see that there was no chance for such an uprising. And so she did what she must have thought was best, which was to sit herself down among them and select a bottle of polish from one of the baskets and ask Two if she liked the color she’d chosen, a milky, opalescent silver, to which Two nodded, giddily flapping her extended feet.

Fan remained patient, despite the fact that with each breath of her own she surely felt the straining of Five’s chest in the other room. Yet what was she intending? What was she waiting for? If her aim was to ensure that Four and Five could be transported back to the medical center, she might have tried somehow to trap Miss Cathy inside, maybe dammed the bathroom threshold with the massive bed or stuffed armchairs while the others spirited them away. But no, she did this instead, placing herself into the heart of the group, the strong solvents sweetening the air enough to lodge them all in a heady register.

After Fan painted Two’s toes, Two naturally wanted to paint Fan’s. But to everyone’s surprise, Miss Cathy said she would do it, handing the hairbrush to Two. She would often brush hair and sometimes paint fingernails, but it was very rare that she would do one of the girls’ toes. In fact, it had been many years since she had. Yet now Miss Cathy had Fan soak her feet in a small tub of hot foamed water. Then she filed away the softened skin of her soles, afterward buffing the toes and the spaces in between with a soft brush and wiping the nails and cuticles clean with rubbing alcohol. She dabbed each one with a cotton puff like they were tender little wildflowers. All the while Fan was surely wondering why Mala had not yet returned with help; yet there was little else for her to do. Another sort of heroine might have summoned the darkest parts of herself, resolving, by either bestial fury or righteous mantle, to wield the scissors sparkling right there in the open drawer of the vanity, or else raise her wooden footstool high above this woman’s bent head, and transgress all.

Of course, she did not. We have to view Fan as recognizing, at that moment, not just Miss Cathy’s mania but how much the Girls meant to the woman. This might seem exactly wrong, given how apparently willing she was to leave poor Four and Five to the full run of their fates. For it was ultimately not a particular girl or girls who were most important but their totality, the way they could web her and cocoon her and settle her down each night and day so that there was no untoward pinch or ache or wrinkle, the temperature of their corpus always regulating and kind. It was all about her, yes, it was solely her storm or fine clime they were subject to, and in this regard the greatest potential disturbance was not their complement being diminished but the specter of sudden change. What the woman needed now was to put a scrim up against the sky.

And soon enough, the feeling was right; it seemed Fan had found the necessary position. They all chattered back and forth about how they would color a panel of their wall with this activity, about what they might eat. Seven kept talking about craving oden , Miss Cathy finally asking what that was. It was as if nothing were awry, which was obviously what Miss Cathy and by extension the Girls wanted most, especially in this uncertain moment, and surely in every other moment, too, the primary dream of keeping being the dream of consolation, of feeling at last solved and right, for kept and keeper both. And doesn’t that dream, in truth, endure for the rest of us, too? Perhaps in this regard we B-Mors — and perhaps your people, too — are merely the Girls writ large, our leagues, clustered for best use and sanctuary, at last achieving a modest state of grace that for too long has been our lone, secret pride.