Bird Box

twenty-nine

Malorie wakes with her eyes closed. It’s not as difficult to do as it once was. Consciousness comes. The sounds, sensations, and smells of life. Sights, too. Malorie knows that, even with your eyes closed, there is sight. She sees peaches, yellows, the colors of distant sunlight penetrating flesh. At the corners of her vision are grays.

It sounds like she’s outside. She feels cool open air on her face. Chapped lips. Dry throat. When is the last time she drank? Her body feels okay. Rested. There is a dull throbbing coming from somewhere to the left of her neck. Her shoulder. She brings her right hand to her forehead. When her fingers touch her face, she understands they are wet and dirty. In fact, her whole back feels wet. Her shirt is drenched in water.

A bird sings overhead. Eyes still closed, Malorie turns toward it.

The children are breathing hard. It sounds like they are working on something.

Are they drawing? Building? Playing?

Malorie sits up.

“Boy?”

Her first thought sounds like a joke. An impossibility. A mistake. Then she realizes it’s exactly what’s happening.

They’re breathing hard because they’re rowing.

“Boy!” Malorie yells. Her voice sounds bad. Like her throat is made of wood.

“Mommy!”

“What is going on?!”

The rowboat. The rowboat. The rowboat. You’re on the river. You passed out. You PASSED OUT.

Hooking her lame shoulder over the edge, she cups a handful of water and brings it to her mouth. Then she is on her knees, over the edge, scooping handfuls in quick succession. She is breathing hard. But the grays have gone away. And her body feels a little better.

She turns to the children.

“How long? How long?”

“You fell asleep, Mommy,” the Girl says.

“You had bad dreams,” the Boy says.

“You were crying.”

Malorie’s mind is moving too fast. Did she miss anything?

“How long?” she yells again.

“Not long,” the Boy says.

“Are your blindfolds on? Speak!”

“Yes,” they say.

“The boat got stuck,” the Girl says.

Dear God, Malorie thinks.

Then she calms herself enough to ask, “How did we get unstuck?”

She finds the Girl’s small body. She follows her arms to her hands. Then she reaches across the rowboat and feels for the Boy.

They’re each using one paddle. They’re rowing together.

“We did it, Mommy!” the Girl says.

Malorie is on her knees. She realizes she smells bad. Like a bar. Like a bathroom.

Like vomit.

“We untangled us,” the Boy says.

Malorie is with him now. Her shaking hands are upon his.

“I’m hurt,” she says out loud.

“What?” the Boy asks.

“I need you two to move back to where you were before Mommy fell asleep. Right now.”

The children stop rowing. The Girl presses against her as she goes to the back bench. Malorie helps her.

Then Malorie is sitting on the middle bench again.

Her shoulder is throbbing but it’s not as bad as it was before. She needed rest. She wasn’t giving it to her body. So her body took it.

In the fog of her waking mind, Malorie is growing colder, more frightened. What if it happens again?

Have they passed the point they are traveling to?

The paddles in her hands again, Malorie breathes deeply before rowing.

Then she starts to cry. She cries because she passed out. She cries because a wolf attacked her. She cries for too many reasons to locate. But she knows part of it is because she’s discovered that the children are capable of surviving, if only for a moment, on their own.

You’ve trained them well, she thinks. The thought, often ugly, makes her proud.

“Boy” she says, through her tears, “I need you to listen again. Okay?”

“I am, Mommy!”

“And you, Girl, I need you to do the same.”

“I am, too!”

Is it possible, Malorie thinks, that we’re okay? Is it possible that you passed out and woke up and still everything is okay?

It doesn’t feel true. Doesn’t go with the rules of the new world. Something is out there on this river with them. Madmen. Beasts. Creatures. How much more sleep would have lured them all the way into the boat?

Mercifully, she is rowing again. But what lurks feels closer now.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, crying, rowing.

Her legs are soaked with piss, water, blood, and vomit. But her body is rested. Somehow, Malorie thinks, despite the cruel laws of this unforgiving world, she’s been delivered a break.

The feeling of relief lasts the duration of one row. Then Malorie is alert, and scared, all over again.