Bird Box

by Josh Malerman

  At the well now, the ground is bumpy beneath their feet. It feels unnatural, soft.

  ‘Here’s the clearing,’ Malorie calls.

  She leads the children carefully. A second path begins ten yards from the well. The entrance to this path is narrow, and it splits the woods. The river is less than a hundred yards from here. At the woods, Malorie momentarily lets go of the children’s hands so she can feel for the scant entry.

  ‘Hold on to my coat!’

  She feels along the branches until she finds a tank top, tied to a tree at the path’s entrance. She tied it here herself over three years ago.

  The Boy grabs hold of her pocket and she senses the Girl take hold of his. Malorie calls to them as she walks, constantly asking them if they are holding on to one another. Tree branches poke her in the face. She does not cry out.

  Soon, they arrive at the marker Malorie has stuck in the dirt. The splintered leg of a kitchen chair, stuck in the centre of the path, there for her to trip on, to stumble over, to recognize.

  She discovered the rowboat four years ago, docked only five houses from their own. It has been more than a month since she last checked on it, but she believes it is still there. Still, it’s difficult not to imagine the worst. What if someone else got to it first? Another woman, not unlike herself, living five houses in the other direction, using every day of four years to gather enough courage to flee. A woman who once stumbled down this same slippery bank and felt the same point of salvation, the pointed steel tip of the rowboat.

  The air nips at the scratches on Malorie’s face. The children do not complain.

  This is not childhood, Malorie thinks, leading them towards the river.

  Then she hears it. Before reaching the dock, she hears the rowboat rocking in the water. She stops and checks the children’s blindfolds, tightening both. She leads them onto the wood planks.

  Yes, she thinks, it’s still here. Just like the cars are still parked in the street outside their house. Just like the homes on the street are still empty.

  It is colder, out of the woods, away from the house. The sound of the water is as frightening as it is exhilarating. Kneeling where she believes the boat must be, she lets go of the children’s hands and feels for the steel tip. Her fingertips find the rope that holds it first.

  ‘Boy,’ she says, pulling the ice-cold tip of the boat towards the dock. ‘In the front. Get in the front.’ She helps him. Once he is steady, she holds his face in both her hands and says once again, ‘Listen. Beyond the water. Listen.’

  She tells the Girl to stay on the dock as she blindly unties the rope before carefully climbing onto the middle bench. Still half-standing, she helps the Girl aboard. The boat rocks once violently and Malorie grips the Girl’s hand too tight. The Girl does not cry out.

  There are leaves, sticks, and water in the bottom of the boat. Malorie sifts through them to find the paddles she has stowed on the boat’s right side. The paddles are cold. Damp. They smell of mildew. She sets them into the steel grooves. They feel strong, sturdy as she uses one to push off from the dock. And then …

  They are on the river.

  The water is calm. But there are sounds out here. Movement in the woods.

  Malorie thinks of the fog. She hopes it has hidden their escape.

  But the fog will go away.

  ‘Children,’ Malorie says, breathing hard, ‘listen.’

  Finally, after four years of waiting, training, and finding the courage to leave, she paddles away from the dock, from the bank, and from the house that has protected her and the children for what feels like a lifetime.

  It is nine months before the children are born. Malorie lives with her sister, Shannon, in a modest rental neither of them have decorated. They moved in three weeks ago, despite their friends’ concerns. Malorie and Shannon are both popular, intelligent women but in each other’s company they have a tendency to become unglued, as shown the very day they carried their boxes inside.

  ‘I was thinking it makes more sense for me to have the bigger bedroom,’ Shannon said, standing on the second-floor landing. ‘Seeing as I’ve got the bigger dresser.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Malorie responded, holding a milk crate of unread books. ‘That room has a better window.’

  The sisters debated this for a long time, both wary of proving their friends and family right by erupting in argument on their first afternoon. Eventually, Malorie agreed to a coin toss, which ended in Shannon’s favour, an event Malorie still believes was somehow fixed.

  Now, today, Malorie is not thinking about the little things her sister does that drive her batty. She is not quietly cleaning up after Shannon, closing cabinet doors, following her trail of sweaters and socks through the halls. She is not huffing, passively, shaking her head as she runs the dishwasher or slides one of Shannon’s unpacked boxes from the centre of the living room, where it’s in both of their way. Instead, she is standing before the mirror in the first-floor bathroom, where she is naked, as she studies her belly in the glass.

  You’ve missed a period before, she tells herself. But this is hardly consolation, because she has been anxious for weeks now, knowing she should have been safer with Henry Martin. Her black hair hangs to her shoulders. Her lips curl down in a curious frown. She places her hands on her flat belly and nods slowly. No matter how she explains herself, she feels pregnant.

  ‘Malorie!’ Shannon calls from the living room. ‘What are you doing in there?’

  Malorie does not respond. She turns sideways and tilts her head. Her blue eyes look grey in the pale light of the bathroom. She plants a palm on the sink’s pink linoleum and arches her back. She is trying to make her belly skinnier, as if this might prove there could be no little life within it.

  ‘Malorie!’ Shannon calls again. ‘There’s another report on television! Something happened in Alaska.’

  Malorie hears her sister, but what’s going on in the outside world doesn’t matter much to her right now.

  In recent days, the Internet has blown up with a story people are calling ‘the Russia Report’. In it, a man who was riding in the passenger seat of a truck driving along a snowy highway outside St Petersburg asked his friend, who was driving, to pull over and then attacked him, removing his lips with his fingernails. Then he took his own life in the snow, using a table saw from the truck bed. A grisly story, but one whose notoriety Malorie attributes to the seemingly senseless way the Internet has of making random occurrences famous. But then, a second story appeared. Similar circumstances. This time in Yakutsk, some three thousand miles east of St Petersburg. There, a mother, by all accounts ‘stable’, buried her children alive in the family’s garden before taking her own life with the jagged edges of broken dishes. And a third story, in Omsk, Russia, nearly two thousand miles southeast of St Petersburg, sprouted online and quickly became one of the most discussed topics on all social media sites. This time there was video footage. For as long as she could, Malorie had watched a man wielding an axe, his beard red with blood, trying to attack the unseen man who filmed him. Eventually, he succeeded. But Malorie didn’t see that part. She tried not to follow any more on the subject at all. But Shannon, always more dramatic, insisted on relaying the frightening news.

  ‘Alaska,’ Shannon repeats, through the bathroom door. ‘That’s America, Malorie!’

  Shannon’s blonde hair betrays their mother’s Finnish roots. Malorie looks more like her father: strong, deep-set eyes and the smooth fair skin of a northerner. Having been raised in the Upper Peninsula, both dreamed of living downstate, near Detroit, where they imagined there were parties, concerts, job opportunities, and men in abundance.

  This last item hadn’t proved fruitful for Malorie until she met Henry Martin.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Shannon hollers. ‘There might have been something in Canada, too. This is serious, stuff, Malorie. What are you doing in there?’

  Malorie turns the faucet on and lets the cool water run over her fingers. She splashes some
on her face. Looking up into the mirror, she thinks of her parents, still in the Upper Peninsula. They haven’t heard of Henry Martin. She hasn’t even spoken to him since their one night. Yet, here she is, probably tied to him forever.

  Suddenly the bathroom door opens. Malorie reaches for a towel.

  ‘Jeez, Shannon.’

  ‘Did you hear me, Malorie? The story is everywhere. People are starting to say it’s related to seeing something. Isn’t that strange? I just heard CNN say it’s the one constant in all the incidents. That the victims saw something before attacking people and taking their own lives. Can you believe this? Can you?’

  Malorie turns slowly to her sister. Her face carries no expression.

  ‘Hey, are you all right, Malorie? You don’t look so good.’

  Malorie starts crying. She bites her lower lip. She has grabbed the towel but has yet to cover herself. She is still standing before the mirror as if examining her naked belly. Shannon notices this.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Shannon says. ‘Are you worried that you’re –’

  Malorie is already nodding. The sisters step to each other in the pink bathroom and Shannon holds Malorie, patting the back of her black hair, soothing her.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Let’s not freak out. Let’s go get a test. That’s what people do. Okay? Don’t worry. I’ll bet you more than half the people who get tests wind up not being pregnant.’

  Malorie doesn’t respond. She only sighs deeply.

  ‘Okay,’ Shannon says. ‘Let’s go.’

  How far can a person hear?

  Rowing blindfolded is even harder than Malorie had imagined. Many times already, the rowboat has run into the banks and got stuck for a period of several minutes. In that time she was besieged by visions of unseen hands reaching for the blindfolds that cover the children’s eyes. Fingers coming up and out of the water, from the mud where the river meets the earth. The children did not scream, they did not whine. They are too patient for that.

  But how far can a person hear?

  The Boy helped get the boat loose, standing and pushing against a mossy trunk, and now Malorie paddles again. Despite these early setbacks, Malorie can feel they are making progress. It is invigorating. Birds sing in the trees now that the sun has come up. Animals roam amidst the thick foliage of the woods that surround them. Fish jump out of the water, making small splashes that electrify Malorie’s nerves. All of this is heard. None of it is seen.

  From birth the children have been trained to understand the sounds of the forest. As babies, Malorie would tie T-shirts over their eyes and carry them to the edge of the woods. There, despite knowing they were too young to understand any of what she told them, she would describe the sounds of the forest.

  Leaves crinkling, she would say. A small animal, like a rabbit. Always aware that it could be something much worse. Worse even than a bear. In those days, and the days that followed, when the children were old enough to learn, Malorie trained herself as she trained them. But she would never hear as well as they one day would. She was twenty-four years old before she was able to discern the difference between a raindrop and a tap on a window, relying only on her hearing. She was raised on sight. Did this then make her the wrong teacher? When she carried leaves inside and had the children, blindfolded, identify the difference between her stepping on one and crushing one in her hand, were these the right lessons to give?

  How far can a person hear?

  The Boy likes fish, she knows. Often Malorie caught one in the river, using a rusted fishing pole fashioned from an umbrella found in the cellar. The Boy enjoyed watching them splash in the well bucket in the kitchen. He took to drawing them, too. Malorie remembers thinking she’d have to catch every beast on the planet and bring it home for the children to know what they looked like. What else might they like if given the chance to view it? What would the Girl think of a fox? A raccoon? Even cars were a myth, with only Malorie’s amateur drawings as reference. Boots, bushes, gardens, storefronts, buildings, streets, and stars. Why, she would have had to re-create the globe for them. But the best they got was fish. And the Boy loved them.

  Now, on the river, hearing another small splash, she worries lest his curiosity inspire him to remove his fold.

  How far can a person hear?

  Malorie needs the children to hear into the trees, into the wind, into the dirt banks that lead to an entire world of living creatures. The river is an amphitheatre, Malorie muses, paddling.

  But it’s also a grave.

  The children must listen.

  Malorie cannot stave off the visions of hands emerging from the darkness, clutching the heads of the children, deliberately untying that which protects them.

  Breathing hard and sweating, Malorie prays a person can hear all the way to safety.

  Malorie is driving. The sisters use her car, a 1999 Ford Festiva, because there is more gas in it. They’re only three miles from home, yet already there are signs that things have changed.

  ‘Look!’ Shannon says, pointing at several houses. ‘Blankets over the windows.’

  Malorie is trying to pay attention to what Shannon is saying, but her thoughts keep returning to her belly. The Russia Report media explosion worries her, but she does not take it as seriously as her sister. Others online are, like Malorie, more sceptical. She’s read blogs, particularly Silly People, that post photos of people taking precautions, then add funny captions beneath them. As Shannon alternately points out the window, then shields her eyes, Malorie thinks of one. It was of a woman hanging a blanket over her window. Beneath it, the caption read: Honey, what do you think of us moving the bed right here?

  ‘Can you believe it?’ Shannon says.

  Malorie nods silently. She turns left.

  ‘Come on,’ Shannon says. ‘You absolutely have to admit, this is getting interesting.’

  A part of Malorie agrees. It is interesting. On the sidewalk, a couple passes with newspaper held to their temples. Some drivers have their rearview mirrors turned up. Distantly, Malorie wonders if these are the signs of a society beginning to believe something is wrong. And if so, what?

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Malorie says, partly trying to distract her thoughts and partly gaining interest.

  ‘Don’t understand what?’

  ‘Do they think it’s unsafe to look outside? To look anywhere?’

  ‘Yes,’ Shannon says. ‘That’s exactly what they think. I’ve been telling you.’

  Shannon, Malorie thinks, has always been dramatic.

  ‘Well, that sounds insane,’ she says. ‘And look at that guy!’

  Shannon looks to where Malorie points. Then she looks away. A man in a business suit walks with a blind man’s walking stick. His eyes are closed.

  ‘Nobody’s ashamed to act like this,’ Shannon says, her eyes on her shoes. ‘That’s how weird it’s gotten.’

  When they pull into Stokely’s Drugs, Shannon is holding her hand up to shield her eyes. Malorie notices, then looks across the parking lot. Others are doing the same.

  ‘What are you worried about seeing?’ she asks.

  ‘Nobody knows that answer yet.’

  Malorie has seen the drugstore’s big yellow sign a thousand times. But it has never looked so uninviting.

  Let’s go buy your first pregnancy test, she thinks, getting out of the car. The sisters cross the lot.

  ‘They’re by the medicine, I think,’ Shannon whispers, opening the store’s front door, still covering her eyes.

  ‘Shannon, stop it.’

  Malorie leads the way to the family planning aisle. There is First Response, Clearblue Easy, New Choice, and six other brands.

  ‘There’s so many of them,’ Shannon says, taking one from the shelf. ‘Doesn’t anyone use condoms anymore?’

  ‘Which one do I get?’

  Shannon shrugs. ‘This one looks as good as any.’

  A man farther down the aisle opens a box of bandages. He holds one up to his eye.

  The sist
ers bring the test to the counter. Andrew, who is Shannon’s age and once asked her on a date, is working. Malorie wants this moment to be over with.

  ‘Wow,’ Andrew says, scanning the small box.

  ‘Shut up, Andrew,’ Shannon says. ‘It’s for our dog.’

  ‘You guys have a dog now?’

  ‘Yes,’ Shannon says, taking the bag he’s put it in. ‘And she’s very popular in our neighbourhood.’

  The drive home is torturous for Malorie. The plastic bag between their seats suggests her life has already changed.

  ‘Look,’ Shannon says, pointing out the car window with the same hand she’s been using to hide her eyes.

  The sisters come to a stop sign slowly. Outside the corner house they see a woman on a small ladder, nailing a comforter over the home’s bay window.

  ‘When we get back I’m doing the same thing,’ Shannon says.

  ‘Shannon.’

  Their street, usually crowded with the neighbourhood kids, is empty. No blue, stickered tricycle. No Wiffle ball bats.

  Once inside, Malorie heads to the bathroom and Shannon immediately turns on the television.

  ‘I think all you gotta do is pee on it, Malorie!’ Shannon calls.

  Inside the bathroom, Malorie can hear the news.

  By the time Shannon arrives at the bathroom door, Malorie is already staring at the pink strip, shaking her head.

  ‘Oh boy,’ Shannon says.

  ‘I’ve got to call Mom and Dad,’ Malorie says. A part of her is already steeling herself, knowing that, despite being single, she is going to have this baby.

  ‘You need to call Henry Martin,’ Shannon says.

  Malorie looks to her sister quickly. All day she’s known Henry Martin will not play a big part in the raising of this child. In a way, she’s already accepted this. Shannon walks with her to the living room, where boxes of unpacked objects clutter the space in front of the television. On the screen is a funeral procession. CNN anchormen are discussing it. Shannon steps to the television and lowers the volume. Malorie sits on the couch and calls Henry Martin from her cell phone.