She is about to leave the house behind. The reality of this moment overwhelms her.
When she opens the door, the cool air rushes in and Malorie steps forward, her mind’s eye blurry with terror and scenarios too ghastly to speak of in front of the children. She stammers as she speaks, nearly yelling as she does.
“Hold my hands. Both of you.”
The Boy takes Malorie’s left hand. The Girl slips her tiny fingers into her right.
Blindfolded, they step from the house.
The well is twenty yards away. Small pieces of wood, once part of picture frames, outline the path, placed there for direction. Both children have touched the wood with the tip of their shoes countless times. Malorie once told them that the water in the well was the only medicine they’d ever need. Because of this, Malorie knows, the children have always respected the well. They never complained about fetching water with her.
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 more than 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 center 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 toward 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 toward 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.
two
It is nine months before the children are born. Malorie lives with her sister, Shannon, in a modest rental neither of them has decorated. They moved in three weeks ago, despite their friend’s 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 an argument on their first afternoon. Eventually, Malorie agreed to a coin toss, which ended in Shannon’s favor, 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 center 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 gray 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 five 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.