Girl in Ice(37)
No pills, no pills, my mind echoed endlessly.
How would I ever go out on the ice again? How would I ever get home?
Screams from the living room shocked me to my feet. I bolted down the hallway. Their faces ghostly by the TV’s shifting light, Jeanne held Sigrid down while Wyatt took vial after vial of blood from her arm. Nora and Raj stood back while Sigrid shrieked, her eyes never leaving mine.
I ran at them. “Get off of her—let her go!”
“Stand back!” Wyatt growled, intent on his task. “Or she’s going to get hurt.”
Wyatt was right, all I could do was watch as the tubes filled with her dark blood, until Jeanne finally released her and she ran caterwauling by me to her room.
fourteen
The storm ended at dawn. We all took shifts shoveling out the main door, heads down, exchanging minimal good-mornings, as if each of us—in our own way—was the guilty party. I felt sick at heart about what had happened, furious at Wyatt and Jeanne, frustrated that we—me, Raj, and Nora—seemed to constantly bend under Wyatt’s will. What was wrong with us?
Around noon, I ventured outside to relieve Raj. I found an eerie and terrifying sight. Snow flowed over the tops of the buildings, the Dome now just a blip of yellow in the alabaster bay. We’d practically been erased from the landscape.
The severity of the storm had forced Wyatt to abandon the snowcat several yards from the Cube. Now, cursing and metal-on-ice chopping sounds came from it; I wandered over to investigate. Raj was bent double inside the cabin, chipping away. The wind had been so powerful that snow and ice had tunneled through the narrowest cracks between the windows and doors, caking the interior like thick white mold.
“How’s it going?”
He gave me a look, like, Really? and kept on banging at the ice with a hammer and chisel. “It’s just swell in here,” he said, eyes on his task. “I’ve been out here three hours, and this is how far I’ve gotten.” He stopped to wipe the fog from his glasses, looking like a polar explorer in his cave of rime and blue ice.
“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?”