The heat came out first. I'll never forget it. It came out of that house into the eleven-degree air like the breath of an animal, thick and wet, and it smelled like a gas stove smells when you first light it, and like something burnt, and like dog. And then the little dog came out, the black-and-tan one with the bat ears, low to the floor, staggering, its legs going every which way like it was walking on a boat, and it came down the steps and fell over in the snow next to Ingot. Ingot put her nose down to it and nosed it over onto its feet. It fell again. She lay down in the snow beside it, right up against it, and put her chin over its back.
The captain and Chuy went in. They pulled their coats up over their mouths and noses and went in low, and Hank stood in the doorway with the bar, and I stood at the bottom of the steps and could see past him down a short hall toward the yellow light at the back of the house. I heard Chuy say, "Kitchen, Cap, kitchen," and the captain say, "Get the window, get it open, break it," and then glass, a lot of glass. And then the captain came back up the hall toward us, fast, bent over, and he was carrying the little girl.
She had on a pink sweatsuit, not the snowsuit, and socks with no shoes, and her hair was in two little braids that had mostly come out. Her face was very red. Not flushed, red, like she had been out in the sun all day. Her eyes were half open and her head hung back over the captain's arm, and her arms were tight against her chest, and in her arms, held there with both hands so hard her knuckles were white, was the other half of a nursery monitor. The transmitter. Cream-colored plastic with a grille on the front, exactly like the one sitting next to my grandfather, with the cord pulled out of the wall and dragging behind her on the floor, plugged in to nothing. It must have had batteries in it too, because it had never once stopped talking to us. She had pulled it off a table somewhere and carried it with her. She had been talking into it. She had been talking to her mother, who couldn't hear her, and the only one in the world who'd been listening was us.
The captain went down the steps two at a time past me and laid her on the snow on the walk, right in the red light from the engine, and Hank came down after him with the green bottle and cracked it open and put the little clear mask over her face, too big for her, it covered her whole face from her chin to her eyebrows, and turned the knob all the way. I heard the oxygen hissing. The captain put his ear down to her chest, and then two fingers on her neck, and then he patted her cheek with his hand, hard, harder than I'd have thought you were allowed to hit a kid.
"Honey," he said. "Hey, honey. Hey. Wake up for me. Wake up."
Nothing happened. The oxygen hissed. The red light swept over her and went away and came back. Ingot got up from beside the little dog and came over and put her nose down next to the girl's ear, right next to the edge of the mask, and sniffed, and whined, and licked her once on the side of the neck, a big wet lick from her collar to her ear. Nobody told her to get back.
And the little girl coughed. She coughed inside the mask and her whole face screwed up and she opened her eyes, both of them, and looked up at the sky, and at the captain, and at a spotted dog standing over her with one blue eye and one brown one, and she started to scream. She screamed and screamed. She screamed so loud it came through the mask. It was the best sound I had ever heard. Hank sat back on his heels in the snow and said, "Well, all right," and wiped his face with his sleeve, and the captain said, "That's it, honey, you go ahead, you yell all you want," and his voice was not steady at all.