“That wasn’t me. I didn’t take that out,” Abel said. “That was her. Now she’s starting to take our money.”
“Michelle,” Anna said.
Abel nodded. “She’s the only other person who can use this account. I wonder if I should close it. Or change the password. But I probably can’t even do that because I’m still not eighteen. She’s the only one who can do that. In any case … she hasn’t gone off to God-knows-where to start a new life.” He looked around, looked over the heads in the café and outside at the people walking over the ice, at the harbor, at the beach of Eldena. “She’s here. Somewhere close. I just haven’t spotted her yet.”
Anna went home with Abel and Micha. It just happened. Or maybe the little queen had decided that she should; maybe she had scratched words into the dirt on some invisible windowpane: TAK HER HOM WITH YOU, like K IS EacH Oth ER.
Abel made spaghetti. And that night, Anna almost believed that Linda was right. That everything would turn out okay. Abel was standing in the tiny kitchen, humming a melody to himself, wearing a makeshift apron like some backyard chef; Micha was painting a picture for school in the living room, a “what I did this weekend” picture; and Anna was cutting up tomatoes. From time to time, she went into the living room to look at Micha’s artwork. First, a flute appeared; then, a piece of cake seemed to grow out of the flute; then, a red tulip was growing out of the cake; then, red police tape was slung around the tulip … and then Anna discovered someone who Micha said was Abel and someone she said was Anna—the two of them discernible only by the color of their hair—and, in the end, a green square filled the rest of the paper. On the square, she’d written “Hop” and drawn a yellow triangle: a green ship with a yellow rudder. A gray animal was flying in the middle of the picture—it might have been a dog, but it might just as well have been an elephant. Abel and Anna kissed in the kitchen for too long, forgetting the boiling tomato sauce, which spilled over the rim of the saucepan and onto the stove. They wiped it away and laughed. How absolutely, wonderfully all right everything was!
“How can I be so happy,” she whispered, “when there’s a murderer walking free somewhere out there?”
“Go on being happy,” Abel said as he painted a circle on her cheek with some tomato sauce. “Maybe it’s contagious. I hope so.”
They ate the spaghetti at the small living room table, and Abel didn’t say anything when Micha decided that it was easier to eat it with her fingers. “Now there’s only one last thing to do before you go off to bed,” Abel finally said. “Remember what we wanted to do today?”
Micha twirled a blond strand of hair around her finger. “Cut my hair.” She produced a tragic sigh.
“Yep,” Abel said. “Today is hair-cutting day. If there weren’t any hair-cutting days, we’d all end up running around like wild people and nobody would recognize us anymore. Just imagine, you come to school one day and your teacher asks, ‘And who might this wild child be?’”
“She wouldn’t ask that,” Micha giggled. “Mrs. Milowicz only asks when she can talk to Mama, but she asks that all the time.”
“Soon,” Abel said. “Tell her, soon, Micha.”
Then he fetched sharp scissors and a comb from the little bathroom, and Anna watched as he combed Micha’s blond hair. “Snow hair,” he said. “Polar bear hair. When she runs around in the sun in summer, it turns even lighter … nearly white.”
Anna saw his hands slide through that snow hair, saw them handle the scissors. She imagined those hands in her own hair, imagined those hands doing things that had nothing to do with hair cutting. Tonight, she thought, tonight when everything’s all right, maybe … maybe I won’t go home tonight. Will he leave after Micha’s gone to bed? Does he have to meet someone in town? Or will he stay? Does he want what I want?
“Hold still,” Abel said. “You know these scissors are sharp. So sharp you could cut someone’s neck with them and kill him.” The scissor blades reflected the light of the ancient living room lamp hanging from the ceiling. Micha was fidgeting on the sofa, fed up with holding still. “Stop it!” she demanded. “You’re tickling me, and you’ve cut off enough! It’s my turn! Give the scissors to me …” She half-turned to snatch them from Abel, and that was when it happened: Abel’s hand slipped. He cried out; Micha screamed; Anna saw the glittering metal of the blades sail through the air and land on the floor. She looked at Abel’s fingers. There was blood on them.
“Fucking hell!” he shouted. “Micha, are you crazy? What was that about?”
“You cut my neck!” Micha cried out. “Now I’ll die and it’s your fault!”
Abel found a handkerchief and pressed it to the place where the blood came from. It was just a tiny cut on Micha’s neck, a scratch made by the scissor tip when it grazed her skin. It was nothing really, but Micha kept on crying, and Abel pulled her into his arms and hugged her while pressing the handkerchief against her neck.
Anna breathed again. Suddenly dizzy, she had to sit down in one of the armchairs. Nothing had happened, and still the whole scene seemed symbolic—blood on a person’s neck, blood like the blood from a bullet wound—and she thought of Rainer and of Sören Marinke in his ice-cold grave beneath the sand and snow.
“Just a tiny little pain,” he sang softly, “three days of heavy rain … three days of sunlight … everything will be all right …” He held her like a much smaller child, the child she’d once been.
She stopped crying and finally freed herself from his arms. “Am I still bleeding?”
“No,” Abel said. “The singing’s done the trick. It always does. You know that.”
Micha nodded. “When I was small,” she explained to Anna, trying to sound very grown-up, “and I fell and hurt my knees, we always sang that song.” She wiped the last tears from her face. “And it always, always stopped the bleeding, didn’t it? Can I get one of those teddy-bear Band-Aids?”
Abel lifted her up—another gesture from former times, from when she’d been smaller—and carried her to the bathroom to find the Band-Aid. Suddenly, Anna thought: she’s growing up. One day, she’ll be too big to be carried around like that. One day, he won’t be able to hold onto her, she’ll move on, and he’ll be left all alone. Maybe the responsibility for Micha is more of an anchor than a burden. A lifeboat. A wooden plank to hold onto so you don’t drown. She shook her head to rid it of these thoughts. She could hear Abel and Micha laughing in the bathroom; she heard water running, the accident with the scissors already forgotten, and everything was all right again, just as the song said. When Micha came back to the living room to say good night, she was wearing turquoise pajamas, stamped with a lopsided Mickey Mouse, who obviously had trouble focusing his eyes. She proudly showed Anna the green Band-Aid with the teddy bear, which was stuck to her neck. A trophy. And then the door of her room shut behind her, and Abel flopped down onto the sofa.
Anna put Magnus’s bottle of wine on the table. “Let’s drink away that scare.”
He nodded his head, went to the kitchen, and came back with a corkscrew and two water glasses. “Looks like we don’t have wineglasses.”
“I’d drink it from the bottle with straws,” she said. “But I do need some of it now.” She sat cross-legged in the armchair and held out her glass. The wine hadn’t turned to vinegar yet. Fortunately.
“Bad luck seems to really feel at home here lately,” Abel murmured. “Since Michelle left, it’s settled in like it wants to stay forever. It follows us out the door, sticks behind us like a dog. You can run as quickly as you want to, but it’s always quicker.” He picked something up that had fallen under the table and looked at it, a small thing resembling a shaver.
“Is that a … hair trimmer?” Anna asked doubtfully.