“Can you turn it on, heat it up?”
“If I ever reach the controls. How’s Sigrid?”
“Hard to tell. She’s doing her old push-the-bed-against-the-door thing.”
“Look, Val, I feel terrible about last night. It happened so fast. They had her pinned and that needle in before either of us could move.”
“Hey, I abandoned her too.”
He started to speak, stopped himself. Slipped his glasses back on and had a good look at me. “Maybe it’s a good thing. He’s got his sample. It’s over.”
“You really believe that?”
“I believe we have to get through the next couple weeks the best we can.” He banged at a thick covering of ice over the ignition; it cracked and fell away. He inserted the key and fired up the machine; I nearly swooned at the whoosh of heat. “Let’s just survive it. Agreed?”
* * *
EVEN AS OUR meager afternoon light began to fade into velvet black, Sigrid refused to leave her room. I left a dinner of fried fish and canned black beans—her new favorite—outside her door.
The next morning, the dish sat cold and untouched.
“Hey, Sigrid.” I stood outside her room sipping a cup of coffee. Knocked a few times. “It’s me, Bahl. I’m coming in.”
The door was unlocked, bed back under the window that faced the Dome. Sketch pad on her lap, Sigrid sat cross-legged on the floor, her slight back bent, a child island in a sea of drawings.
She didn’t acknowledge me. The air tasted static with her manic energy, her helter-skelter tufts of wild blue-black hair tipped by lush morning light, her ripe smell so familiar to me now I barely noticed it. I approached her, my slippers noiseless on the thick rug. Her scruffy bloodstained bandage—apparently there’d been a struggle to get the needle in—sat balled up next to her. It hit me in the chest how much I cared about this child, and how dangerous caring was, because of how quickly people can be taken away. I took a breath into lungs that felt stingy and small. I tried not to spin off into dread, to bring myself back into the room, focus on the things that brought me to sanity—the small things, the practical things: getting her fed, getting her to talk, getting her to comprehend the danger of not making herself understood.
I knelt to examine her drawings, expecting more squiggles and birds, but no. Each was the same: She’d traced seven circles per sheet of paper. Every circle drawn with a black marker and left blank in the middle except for the very last one. On the first few drawings, she’d neatly filled the final ring with red ink, painstakingly coloring inside the lines, but with each subsequent drawing her work on the last circle turned more and more frantic, out of control, until agitated red marks burst through its boundaries, the violence extending across the page.
Her breathing was labored.
“Sigrid.”
She looked up at me, fist clutching the marker midair. Bald fear in her eyes. Clearly I’d interrupted some nightmarish reverie, some memory no child should have. She grabbed my pant leg and pulled me toward her, whispering, “Bahl, Bahl.”
“Yes, I’m coming.” I sat cross-legged beside her. She ripped a fresh sheet from the pad, smoothed it on the rug.
“I’m sorry about what happened. Is your arm okay?”
No answer.
As if she were afraid my attention might lag, she raced through another drawing, each circle more sloppily drawn, until she came to the last one. Tossing the black marker aside, she seized the red one and attacked the final circle with it, tearing through the paper, not stopping even as she stabbed at the rug, staining it, crying in a helpless way before hurling the marker at the wall. She rocked in place, holding herself, panting.
“Hey, Sigrid, hey.” I reached out and touched her shoulder, but she swatted my hand away. Jumped up and whirled around to face me. A crescent-shaped knife glinted in her fist. “Whoa, put that down,” I choked out, hands up in surrender. “I’m not going to hurt you. Now give me the knife.” I held out my hand.
She circled me, knife held high. Through choking cries of rage and disappointment, she rambled on in her language, “Bahl” interspersed between phrases. I kept my eyes front, inhaled the fusty rug smell, focused on the Dome, a blip of banana-yellow cheer in the bleak landscape.
“I’m so sorry I let that happen to you. I’ll never let them touch you again.”
She stood behind me now, crying and talking at the same time, the knife hovering at my neck; its silver face mirrored in the window, glimmering. I closed my eyes. Felt her hot breath on me. Is she really going to try to hurt me? Does she feel no one can help her now? What can I say to calm her down?