Bird box

She imagines the children, blinded by their black cloths, the sun embarrassing them with visibility, drifting downstream. Her own blindfold is tight against her head, damp. It irritates the skin by her ears. Sometimes, she is able to ignore this. At others, all she can think about is scratching. Despite the cold, she regularly dips her fingertips into the river and moistens the cloth where it chafes. Just above her ears. The bridge of her nose. The back of her head where the knot is. The wet cloth helps, but Malorie will never fully get used to the feel of the cloth against her face. Even her eyes, she thinks, paddling, even her eyelashes grow weary of the fabric.

A black bear, she tells herself again.

But she isn’t so sure.

Debates like these have governed every action Malorie has taken for the last four and half years. From the moment she decided to answer the classified in the paper and first arrived at the house in Riverbridge. Every noise she’s heard since has delivered visions of things much worse than any earthly animal.

“You did a good job,” Malorie says to the children, shaking. She means to reassure them, but her voice betrays her fear.

seven

Riverbridge.

Malorie has been to this area once, several years before. It was a New Year’s Eve party. She hardly recalls the name of the girl who threw it. Marcy something. Maribel, maybe. Shannon knew her, and Shannon drove that night. The roads were slushy. Dirty gray banks of snow framed the side streets. People used ice from the roof for their mixed drinks. Someone got half-naked and wrote the year 2009 in the snow. Now it’s summer’s peak, the middle of July, and Malorie is driving. Scared, alone, and grieving.

The drive over is agonizing. Traveling no more than fifteen miles per hour, Malorie frantically looks for street signs, for other cars. She closes her eyes, then opens them again, still driving.

The roads are empty. Every home she passes has blankets or wood boards covering the windows. Storefronts are vacant. Strip mall parking lots are barren. She keeps her eyes immediately on the road ahead and drives, following the route highlighted on the map beside her. Her hands feel weak on the wheel. Her eyes ache from crying. 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.

The hospitals didn’t answer their phones. Neither did the funeral homes. Malorie covered her, partially, with a blue and yellow scarf that Shannon loved.

The radio comes in and out. A man is talking about the possibility of war. If mankind bands together, he says, but then it’s all static. On the side of the road, she passes an abandoned car. The doors are open. A jacket hangs from the passenger seat touching the road. Malorie quickly looks ahead again. Then she closes her eyes. Then she opens them.

The radio is working. The man is still talking about war. Something moves to the right, and she sees it out of the corner of her eye. She does not look at it. She closes her right eye. Ahead, in the middle of the road, a bird lands and then takes off again. When Malorie reaches this spot, she sees the bird was interested in a dead dog. Malorie drives over it. The car bounces; she hits her head on the roof, her suitcase rattling in the backseat. She is shaking. The dog didn’t just look dead, it looked bent. She closes her eyes. She opens them.

A bird, maybe the same bird, caws from the sky. Malorie passes Roundtree Street. Ballam Street. Horton. She knows she is close. Something darts on her left. She closes her left eye. She passes an empty mail truck and its letters are strewn on the concrete. A bird flies too low, almost hitting the windshield. She screams, closes both eyes, and opens them. When she does, she sees the street sign she is looking for.

Shillingham.

She turns right, braking as she rounds the corner onto Shillingham Lane. She does not need to check her map for the number 273. It has been on her mind the entire drive.

Aside from a few cars parked in front of a house on the right, the street is empty. The neighborhood is ordinary, suburban. Most of the houses look the same. The lawns are overgrown. Every window is draped. In her eagerness, Malorie looks to the house where the cars are parked and knows it is the one she’s looking for.

She closes her eyes and slams on the brakes.

Stopped and breathing hard, the faint image of the house remains in her mind.

The garage is to the right. The garage door, beige, is closed. A brown shingled roof rests on white siding and bricks. The front door is a darker brown. The windows are covered. There’s an attic.