“What have you done?” she asked. It was a remarkable sight. The girl had stapled cream-colored latex gloves to her sweatshirt, to her trousers, had pulled them over her feet, and even wore one on her head like a five-fingered mohawk. “I repeat, what have you done?”
“See?” the girl asked and stood up. See? See what? She didn’t think she needed another reason to renounce children, but here it was: they speak in riddles. “I see a tremendous waste of medical supplies and I very much wish I wasn’t seeing it.”
“See what I am?” the girl asked.
“A nuisance?”
“No, a sea anemone.”
The girl spun in circles. It seemed she was hoping that the gloves would inflate and reach out like tentacles, but those gloves would barely open when Sonja jammed her fingers in them, and they just flailed limply against the girl’s chest, back, and legs. The whole production seemed so sad that Sonja couldn’t muster the anger this profligacy deserved.
“Sea anemones don’t talk. Now change into your other clothes.” Sonja nodded to the blue suitcase, still standing beside the mattress where she had left it six hours earlier.
“No. It’s my just-in-case suitcase.”
“Just in case what?”
“In case there is an emergency. So I’ll have the things that are important to me.”
“There was an emergency,” Sonja said. She sighed. The child was as dense as a block of aged cheese. “That’s why you’re here.”
“There might be another one.”
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Sonja said, rubbing her eyes. “Change out of this ridiculous thing and you won’t sleep in the parking lot.”
The girl, who, the previous night, had watched her father’s abduction, feared many things, but this ornery and exhausted doctor wasn’t among them. She glanced down to the drooping latex gloves; her father would have found her performance enchanting, would have scooped her up in his arms and called her his sea anemone. His approval sparked magic into the blandest day, could layer her in the self-confidence and security she otherwise might lack; and without it, without him, she felt small, and helpless, and the idea of sleeping in a parking lot suddenly seemed very real. “I’ll change,” she told Sonja with a defeated sag of her shoulders. “Only if I don’t have to unpack.”
“I insist you don’t,” Sonja said, turning as the girl undressed. “It’s my greatest wish that you and your suitcase will have vanished into the sea by morning. What’s so important in there that you can’t unpack?”
“My clothes and souvenirs.”
“Souvenirs? Where have you been?”
“Nowhere.” This was the first night she’d ever spent away from the village. “The souvenirs are from people who’ve stayed at my house.”
When the girl finished changing, Sonja said, “You have a dirty fingerprint on your cheek. No, not that cheek. The other cheek. No, that’s your forehead.” Sonja licked her thumb and rubbed the sooty fingerprint from the girl’s cheek. “Your face is filthy. It’s important to stay clean in a hospital.”
“It’s not clean to wipe spit on another person’s face,” Havaa said defiantly, and Sonja smiled. Perhaps the girl wasn’t as dense as she had assumed.
They ate in the canteen at the end of the trauma ward, where Sonja flaunted the hospital’s most sophisticated piece of technology, an industrial ice machine that inhaled much of the generator power but provided filtered water. The girl was more impressed by her warped reflection on the back of her spoon. “It’s December. The whole world is an ice machine.”
“Now you’re practical,” Sonja said.
The girl made a face at the spoon. “Can fingers ever grow back?” the girl asked, setting down the spoon.
“No. Why do you ask?”
The girl thought of her father’s missing fingers. “I don’t know.”
“How do you know what a sea anemone is, anyway? The nearest sea is a few countries over.”
“My father told me. He’s an arborist. He knows everything about trees. I’m still a minimalist.”
“Do you know what that is?”
Havaa nodded, expecting the question. “It’s a nicer way to say you have nothing.”
“Did your father tell you that?”
Again, she nodded, staring down to the spoon head that held her buckled reflection. Her father was as smart as the dictionary sitting on his desk. Every word she knew came from him. They couldn’t take what he had taught her, and this made the big, important words he’d had her memorize, recite, and define feel for the first time big and important. “He told me about minimalists and arborists and marine biologists and scientists and social scientists and economists and communists and obstructionists and terrorists and jihadists. I told him about sea anemonists.”
“It sounds like you know a lot of big words.”
“It’s important to know big words,” the girl said, repeating her father’s maxim. “No one can take what’s inside your head once it’s there.”
“You sound like a solipsist.”
“I don’t want to learn new words from you.”
Sonja dunked the dishes in a tub of tepid water. Behind her the girl was quiet. “So your father is an arborist,” she said as she scrubbed their spoons with a gray sponge. It was neither a question nor a statement, but a bridge in the silence. The girl didn’t respond.
Back in the geriatrics office she gave the girl a blond-haired Barbie doll from the lost and found. It had belonged to the daughter of a devout Warsaw Catholic who believed the makers of department-store toys were conspiring to turn his ten-year-old girl into a heathen, and so he had boxed up all but her Nativity figurines and, filled with the spirit of Christian charity, sent them to a heathen country where they could do no harm to the souls of children already beyond salvation. The doll, dressed in ballroom gown and tiara, appeared surprisingly chipper given her emaciated waistline. The girl inspected the doll, distrustful of this vision of humanity.
“Why is she smiling?” the girl asked.
“She probably found that tiara on the ground and plans to sell it for a plane ticket to London.”
“Or maybe she killed a Russian.”
Sonja laughed. “Sure, maybe. She could be a shahidka.”
“Yes, she’s a Black Widow,” the girl said, pleased with the interpretation. “She snuck into a Moscow theater and took everyone hostage. That’s why she’s wearing a dress and jewelry.”
“But where are her hostages? I don’t see any. Why else might she be smiling?”
The girl concentrated on the doll’s unnaturally white teeth. “Maybe she’s starving and just ate a pastry.”
“What about a cookie?” Sonja asked, as the idea came to her.
“She’d probably smile if she ate a cookie.”
“Would you?”
The shadow of the girl’s head still bobbed on the wall when Sonja found a chocolate-flavored energy bar in the upper left desk drawer, a new addition to the humanitarian aid drops, designed for marathon runners. The girl chewed the thick rubber and grimaced. “What is this?”