Bird Box (8 page)

“I wasn’t going to, man!” Felix says. He pulls his arm free.

The knocking comes again. A woman’s voice calls to them.

“Hello?”

The housemates are quiet and stand still.

“Somebody answer her,” Malorie says, getting up from the piano bench to do it herself. But Tom is ahead of her.

“Yes!” he calls. “We’re here. Who are you?”

“Olympia! My name is Olympia! Let me in?”

Tom pauses. He looks drunk.

“Are you alone?” he asks.

“Yes!”

“Are your eyes closed?”

“Yes, my eyes are closed. I’m very scared. Please let me in?”

Tom looks to Don.

“Somebody get the broomsticks,” Tom says. Jules leaves to get them.

“I don’t think we can afford any more mouths to feed,” Don says.

“You’re crazy,” Felix says. “There’s a woman out—”

“I understand what’s going on, Felix,” Don says angrily. “We can’t house the whole country.”

“But she’s out there right now,” Felix says.

“And we’re drunk,” Don says.

“Come on, Don,” Tom says.

“Don’t turn me into the villain,” Don says. “You know as well as I do exactly how many cans we have in the cellar.”

“Hello?” the woman calls again.

“Hang on!” Tom responds.

Tom and Don stare at each other. Jules comes into the foyer. He hands one of the broomsticks to Tom.

“Do whatever you want to, people,” Don says. “But we’re going to starve sooner because of it.”

Tom turns to the front door.

“Everybody,” he says, “close your eyes.”

Malorie listens as his shoes cross the wood floor in the foyer.

“Olympia?” Tom calls.

“Yes!”

“I’m going to open the door now. When I do, when you hear it’s open, step inside as quickly as you can. Do you understand?”

“Yes!”

Malorie hears the front door open. There is a commotion. She imagines Tom pulling the woman inside like the housemates pulled her inside two weeks ago. Then the door slams shut.

“Keep your eyes closed!” Tom says. “I’m going to feel around you. Make sure nothing came inside with you.”

Malorie can hear the broomstick bristles against the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and the front door.

“Okay,” Tom finally says. “Let’s open our eyes.”

When Malorie does, she sees a very pretty, pale, dark-haired woman standing beside Tom.

“Thank you,” she says breathlessly.

Tom starts to ask her something but Malorie interrupts him.

“Are you pregnant?” she asks Olympia.

Olympia looks down at her belly. Shaking, she looks up, nodding yes.

“I’m four months along,” she says.

“That’s incredible,” Malorie says, stepping closer. “I’m about the same.”

“Fuck,” Don says.

“I’m a neighbor of yours,” Olympia says. “I’m so sorry to scare you like this. My husband is in the air force. I haven’t heard from him in weeks. He may be dead. I heard you. The piano. It took me a while to get the courage to walk here. Normally, I’d have brought over cupcakes.”

Despite the horror everyone in the room just listened to, Olympia’s innocence breaks through the darkness.

“We’re glad to have you,” Tom says, but Malorie can hear exhaustion and the pressure of looking after two pregnant women in his voice. “Come in.”

They walk Olympia down the hall toward the living room. At the foot of the stairs, she gasps and points to a photo hanging on the wall.

“Oh!” she says. “Is this man here?”

“No,” Tom says. “He’s not here anymore. You must know him. George. He used to own this house.”

Olympia nods.

“Yes, I’ve seen him many times.”

Then the housemates are gathered in the living room. Tom sits with Olympia on the couch. Malorie listens quietly as Tom somberly asks Olympia about the objects in her house. What she has. What she left behind.

What can they use here.

eleven

M
alorie has been rowing for what feels like three hours. The muscles in her arms burn. Cold water sloshes in the boat’s bottom, water she has splashed, little by little, with each dip of the oars. Moments ago, the Girl told Malorie she had to pee. Malorie told her to do it. Now the Girl’s urine mixes with the river water and it feels warm against Malorie’s shoes. She is thinking about the man in the boat they passed.

The children
, Malorie thinks,
didn’t take off their blindfolds. That was the first living human voice they’ve ever heard other than one another’s. Yet, they didn’t listen to him
.

Yes, she has trained them well. But it’s not a nice thing to think about.
Training
the children means she has scared them so completely that under no circumstances will they disobey her. As a girl, Malorie rebelled against her parents all the time. Sugar wasn’t allowed in the house. Malorie snuck it in. Scary movies weren’t allowed in the house. Malorie tiptoed downstairs at midnight to watch them on television. When her parents said she wasn’t allowed to sleep on the couch in the living room, she moved her bed in there. These were the thrills of childhood. Malorie’s children don’t know them.

As babies, she trained them to wake with their eyes closed. Standing above their chicken wire beds, flyswatter in hand, she’d wait. As each woke and opened their eyes, she would smack them hard on the arm. They would cry. Malorie would reach down and close their eyes with her fingers. If they kept their eyes closed, she would lift her shirt and feed them.
Reward
.

“Mommy,” the Girl says, “was that the same man who sings in the radio?”

The Girl is talking about a cassette tape Felix used to like to listen to.

“No,” the Boy says.

“Who was it then?” the Girl asks.

Malorie turns to face the Girl so her voice will be louder.

“I thought we agreed you two wouldn’t ask any questions that have nothing to do with the river. Are we breaking this agreement?”

“No,” the Girl quietly says.

When they were three years old, she trained them to get water from the well. Tying a rope around her waist, she wrapped the other end around the Boy. Then, telling him to feel for the path with his toes, she sent him out there to do it on his own. Malorie would listen to the sound of the bucket clumsily being raised. She listened to him struggle as he carried it back to her. Many times she heard it fall from his hands. Each time it did, she made him go back out there and do it again.

The Girl hated it. She said the ground was “too bumpy” out there around the well. She said it felt like people lived below the grass. Malorie denied the Girl food until she agreed to do it.

When they were toddlers, the children were set at opposite sides of the living room. Malorie would roam the carpet. When she said, “Where am I?” the Boy and Girl would point. Then she’d go upstairs, come back down, and ask them, “Where was I?” The children would point. When they were wrong, Malorie would yell at them.

But they weren’t often wrong. And soon they were never wrong at all.

What would Tom say about that?
she thinks.
He’d tell you that you were being the best mother on Earth. And you’d believe him
.

Without Tom, Malorie only has herself to turn to. And many times, sitting alone at the kitchen table, the children asleep in their bedroom, she asked herself the inevitable question:

Are you a good mother? Does such a thing exist anymore?

Now Malorie feels a soft tap on her knee. She gasps. But it is only the Boy. He is asking for the pouch of food. Midrow, Malorie reaches into her jacket pocket and hands it to him. She hears as his little teeth crunch the once-canned nuts that sat on the cellar shelves for four and a half years before Malorie brought them up this morning.

Then Malorie stops rowing. She is hot. Too hot. She is sweating as much as if it were June. She removes her jacket and places it on the rowboat bench beside her. Then she feels a small tap against her back. The Girl is hungry, too.

Are you a good mother?
she asks herself again, handing over a second pouch of food.

How can she expect her children to dream as big as the stars if they can’t lift their heads to gaze upon them?

Malorie doesn’t know the answer.

twelve

T
om is building something out of an old soft guitar case and a couch cushion. Olympia is sleeping upstairs in the bedroom next to Malorie’s. Felix gave it to her just like Tom gave his to Malorie. Felix now sleeps on the couch in the living room. The night before, Tom took detailed notes of the items Olympia has in her house when she told him. What began as a hopeful conversation resulted in the housemates’ deciding that the few things they could use weren’t worth the risk of getting them. Paper. Another bucket. Olympia’s husband’s toolbox. Still, as Felix pointed out, if and when the need for these objects outweighed the risk, they could fetch them after all. Some things, Don said, might be needed sooner than later. Canned nuts, tuna, pasta, condiments. While discussing foods, Tom explained to the others how much stock they had remaining in the cellar. Because it was finite, it worried Malorie deeply.

Right now, Jules sleeps down the hall in the den. He is on a mattress on the floor at one end of the room. Don’s mattress is at the other. Between them is a high wooden table that holds their things. Victor is in there with him. Jules snores. Soft music plays on the small cassette-deck radio. It’s coming from the dining room, where Felix and Don are playing euchre with a deck of Pee-wee Herman playing cards. Cheryl is washing clothes in a bucket in the kitchen sink.

Malorie is alone with Tom on the couch in the living room.

“The man who owned the house,” Malorie says. “George, that was his name? He placed the ad? He was here when you got here?”

Tom, who is attempting to make a protective, padded cover for the interior windshield of a car, looks Malorie in the eyes. His hair looks extra sandy in the lamplight.

“I was the first one to answer the ad in the paper,” Tom says. “George was great. He’d asked strangers into his home when everyone was locking their doors. And he was progressive, too, a big
thinker
. He was constantly presenting ideas. Maybe we could look out the windows through lenses? Refracted glass? Telescopes? Binoculars? That was his big idea. If it’s a matter of sight, maybe what we’d need to do is alter our sight line. Or change the physical ways in which we see something. By looking
through
an object, maybe the creatures couldn’t hurt us. We were both really looking for a way to solve this. And George, being the kind of man he was, wasn’t satisfied with just talking about it. He wanted us to try these theories out.”

As Tom talks, Malorie pictures the face in the photos along the staircase.

“The night Don arrived, the three of us were sitting in the kitchen, listening to the radio, when George suggested there might be some variety of ‘life’ that was causing this to happen. This is before MSNBC proposed that theory. 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. And if this other life-form were somehow able to get here . . . well, that’s what George was saying had happened. That they
did
figure out a way to travel here, intentionally or not. I loved it. But Don didn’t. He was online a lot back then, researching chemicals, gamma waves, anything unseen that might cause harm if you looked at it because you wouldn’t know you were looking at it. Yeah, Don was pretty hard on us about it. He’s passionate. You can already tell he gets angry. But George was the kind of man who, once he had an idea, was going to see it out, no matter how dangerous it was.

“By the time Felix and Jules arrived, George was ready to test his theory about refracted vision. I read everything with him that he pulled up online. So many websites about eyesight and how the eyes work and optical illusions and refracted light, how exactly telescopes work, and more. We talked about it all the time. When Don, Felix, and Jules were asleep, George and I sat at the kitchen table and drew diagrams. He’d pace back and forth, then he’d stop, turn to me, and ask, ‘Have any of the victims been known to wear glasses? Maybe a closed window could protect us, if certain angles were applied.’ Then we’d talk about that for another hour.

“We all watched the news constantly, hoping for another clue, a piece of information that we’d be able to use to find a way for people to protect themselves. But the reports just started to repeat themselves. And George got impatient. The more he talked about testing his ‘altered vision’ theory, the more he wanted to try it. I was scared, Malorie. But George was like the captain of a sinking ship, and he wasn’t afraid to die. And if it worked? Well, that would mean he’d helped cure the planet of its most terrifying epidemic.”

As Tom speaks, the lamplight dances in his blue eyes.

“What did he use?” Malorie asks.

“A video camera,” Tom says. “He had one upstairs. One of those old VHS cameras. He did it without telling us. One night he set it up behind one of the blankets hanging in the dining room. I woke first that morning and found him asleep on the floor in there. When he heard me, he got up and hurried to the camera. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘I did it. I recorded five hours of footage. It’s right here,
here
, inside this camera. I could be holding the cure to this thing. Indirect vision.
Film
. We have to watch this.’

“I told him I thought it was a bad idea. I also thought it wasn’t likely he’d captured anything in just a five-hour span. But he had a plan that he presented to all of us. He said he needed one of us to tie him to a chair in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He’d watch the footage in there. The way he saw it, tied to the chair, he shouldn’t be able to hurt himself if things went badly. Don got really angry. He told George he was a threat to us all. He rightfully said that we had no idea what we were dealing with, and that if something were to happen to George, then something might happen to us all. But Felix and I weren’t opposed. We voted. Don was the only one who didn’t want him to do it. He talked about leaving. We talked him out of it. And finally, George told us that he didn’t need permission in his own house to do what he wanted to do. So, I told him I’d tie him to the chair.”