Something about her quieted something inside me, as if she had answered a question I’d never heard spoken aloud.

I still didn’t know where she slept. Twelve days after her arrival, the first time I could get out of bed without feeling like falling, I couldn’t sleep. I sneaked down the back steps, wondering what I would find. There, on the living room floor, in the corner furthest from the front window, lay Rita, curled up, using her pack as a pillow. She looked like every sleeping creature looks, stupid and defenseless, maybe dead, and her mouth was open and I detected a small line of drool. She was still dressed in her camo gear and boots. From the doorway I studied her. I stood there for a few minutes, listening to her breathe, then tiptoed upstairs.

In the morning I casually asked where she slept. She looked at me with that smile and said, “Oh, I think you know.”

“What?” Then I realized she’d caught me. My face tingled with shame. I tried to play it cool. “You can sleep on a bed, you know. This house is full of them.”

She never took her eyes off me. Her gaze was relentless, amused, calculating. She swallowed the piece of bread she’d been chewing and took a drink of bottled water. “I don’t know,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to be too needy.” And she smiled her smile at me, another mysterious inside joke between us.

On the afternoon the generator was fixed, I was feeling better and puttering around indoors, looking out the windows of the main house toward Apartment 201 and daydreaming, when the back door slammed. It was just Rita, rosy-cheeked from the cold that had settled into the landscape in the last week, and her face was happier than usual. I knew what that meant, and I smiled back. She beckoned me outside, and I followed her to the outbuilding where the generator was housed.

As I stood at the open door, I watched as she pushed the button to fire it up. I could sense us both tensing up and holding our breath at the same time, as if we were operating the same body.

When the machine slowly ground to life and then settled into a comfortable hum, we both breathed out air with a whoosh, and she let out a whoop, turned, and picked me up off the ground and swung me around. The sudden movement startled me, and I pushed her away reflexively, which caused her to lose her grip and drop me, and then I was sitting on my ass.

“Oh god, are you okay?” she said, immediately reaching out to help me up. Embarrassed, I took her hand and stood. She looked at me with a worried look on her face mixed with curiosity. Like she had recognized something in me. “Listen, sorry about that. Just got excited there.”

I shrugged. “It’s okay.”

We walked back to the main house in silence. Once there we wandered around, flipping on switches and stoves, seeing if everything worked. In the living room, when I flipped on the light, I noticed her pack was still leaning against the wall near the fireplace. She had not moved it since she arrived. It contained everything she owned—a change of clothes, rations, a flashlight, a first-aid kit. Once she showed me these tiny tablets that, when mixed with water, became toilet paper. We had a big laugh over that, my first real laugh with another fleshed person in a long time.