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Wires run from under the back door into the first-floor bedrooms, where amplifiers alert Malorie and the children to any sounds coming from outside the house. The three of them live this way. They do not go outside for long periods of time. When they do, they are blindfolded.
It’s October in Michigan.
And then the children will be adults. Adults who have never seen the sky. Never looked out a window. What would twelve years of living like veal do to their minds?
The world outside, the empty malls and restaurants, the thousands of unused vehicles, the forgotten products on idle store shelves, all of it presses in on the house. It all whispers of what awaits them.
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.
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 amphitheater, 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.
She feels an unyielding flow of guilt for having left her sister, dead, on the bathroom floor of their house. She did not bury her. She just left.
“You guys believe that there are creatures out there?” “Yes,” Tom says. “George, the man who owned this house, he saw one. Just before he died.”
How can she expect her children to dream as big as the stars if they can’t lift their heads to gaze upon them?
George said he got the idea from an old book, Possible Impossibilities. It talked about irreconcilable life-forms. Two worlds whose compounds were entirely foreign might cause damage to one another if they were to cross paths.
We left because some people choose to wait for news and others make their own.
The moment between deciding to open your eyes and then actually doing it is as scary a thing as there is in the new world.
In all this cold, painful world, the Boy, hearing her struggle, is helping her row.
The communal birdsong swells and peaks before it flattens, twists, and the boundaries explode. Malorie hears it like she’s inside of it. Like she’s trapped in an aviary with a thousand madcap birds. It feels like a cage was lowered over them all. A cardboard box. A bird box. Blocking out the sun forever.
This action, this handing off of her child, will always shine to Malorie. The moment Olympia did right by her child despite having lost her mind.
“Good. Take the river. It’s about as dangerous a thing as you can do, but I imagine if you and Tom have made it this long, you can do it. I found you guys on the map and it looks like you’ll have to travel at least twenty miles. Now, the river is going to split—”
“Well, we don’t have windows for one. We have running water. And we grow our own food. It’s as self-contained as you can find nowadays. There are plenty of bedrooms. Nice ones. Most of us think we’ve got it better now than we did before.”
“The river is going to split into four channels. The one you want is the second one from the right. So you can’t hug the right bank and expect to make it. It’s tricky. And you’re going to have to open your eyes.”
“And this is how you’ll know when that time comes,” the man tells her. “You’ll hear a recording. A voice. We can’t sit by the river all day every day. It’s just too dangerous. Instead, we’ve got a speaker down there. It’s motion activated. We have a very clear understanding of the woods and water beyond our facility because of devices like it. Once the speaker is activated, the recording plays for thirty minutes, on a loop. You’ll hear it. The same forty-second sound bite repeated. It’s loud. Clear. And when you do, that’s when you’ll have to open your eyes.”
It will take her six months to wash the house of the bodies and blood. She will find Don on the kitchen floor, reaching for the cellar. As if he raced there, mad, to ask Gary for his mind back. She will check for Gary. Everywhere. But she will never find a sign of him. She will always be aware of him. The possibility of him. Out there. In the world.
It will be four years before she answers yes to whether or not she is coming soon to the place Rick described on the phone.
She rows with Tom, too, and the dozens of things he said, the countless things he did and the hope that inspired her, encouraged her, and made her believe that it’s better to face madness with a plan than to sit still and let it take you in pieces.
“It wasn’t a matter of choice,” Rick continues. “We blinded ourselves with whatever we had—forks, kitchen knives, our fingers. Blindness, Malorie, was the absolute protection. But that was the old way. We don’t do that anymore. After a year, we realized we’d fortified this place enough to lighten this awful burden on our shoulders. So far, we’ve had no security lapses.”
