The men examine the thing, blindly, for many minutes.

“Maybe we could use this,” Tom says to Jules, but Jules is already calling him from a distance.

Tom crosses the street. He follows Jules’s voice until they meet up on another lawn.

The very first house they go to is unlocked. They agree they will not open their eyes in this house. They enter.

Inside is drafty. The men know that the windows are open before they check them. Tom’s broomstick tells him the first room they enter is full of boxes. These people, he thinks, were getting ready to leave.

“Jules,” Tom says, “check these. I’m going to search farther into the house.”

It’s already been twenty-four hours since they left their own house.

Now, with carpeting beneath him, he walks slowly through a stranger’s home. He comes to a couch. A chair. A television. Jules and the husky are barely audible now. Wind blows through the open windows. Tom comes to a table. He feels along its surface until his fingers stop at something.

A bowl, he thinks.

Lifting it, he hears something fall to the tabletop. He feels for it, finds it, and discovers it’s a utensil he didn’t expect.

It’s like an ice-cream scooper, but smaller.

Tom runs a finger into the scooper. There’s a thick substance in there.

He shivers. It’s not ice cream. And once, Tom touched something just like it.

On the bathtub’s edge. By her little wrist. The blood there was like this. Thick. Dead. Robin’s blood.

Shaking, he brings the bowl closer to his chest as he sets down the scooper. He slides his fingers slowly down the smooth ceramic curve of the bowl until he touches something resting in the basin. He gasps and drops the bowl onto the carpeted floor.

“Tom?”

Tom doesn’t answer at first. The thing he just touched, he once touched something like that, too.

Robin had brought it home from school. From science class. She kept it in an open coffee can full of pennies. Tom found it when Robin was at school. When he was searching the house for that smell.

He knew he’d found it when, just inside the rim of the can, atop the pile of coins, he saw a small discolored ball. Instinctively, he reached for it. It squished between his fingers.

It was a pig’s eye. Dissected. Robin had mentioned doing that in class.

“Tom? What happened in there?”

Jules is calling you. Answer him.

“Tom?”

“I’m all right, Jules! I just dropped something.”

Backing up, wanting to leave this room, his hand nudges something.

He knows this feeling, too.

That was a shoulder, he thinks. There’s a body sitting in a chair at this table.

Tom imagines it. Seated. Eyeless.

At first he cannot move. He’s facing where the body must be.

He hurries out of the room.

“Jules,” he says, “let’s get out of here.”

“What happened?”

Tom tells him. Within minutes they are out of the house. They’ve decided to work their way back home. A dog is enough. Between the tent and what Tom found in the bowl, neither of them want to be out here anymore.

They cross one lawn. Then a driveway. Then two. The dog is pulling Jules. Tom struggles to keep up. He feels like he’s getting lost out here in the darkness of his blindfold. He calls to Jules.

“I’m over here!” Jules calls.

Tom follows his voice. He catches up to him.

“Tom,” Jules says. “The dog is making a big deal about this garage.”

Still trembling from his discovery in the house, and still frightened, deeper, by the senselessness of the tent in the street, Tom says they should continue home. But Jules wants to know what the dog is so interested in.

“It’s a freestanding garage,” Jules says. “He’s acting like something’s alive in there.”

A side door is locked. Finding only one window, Jules breaks it. He tells Tom that it’s protected. Cardboard. It’s a small fit, but one of them should go inside. Jules says he’ll do it. Tom says he’ll do it, too. They tie the dog to a gutter and both men crawl in through the window.

Once inside, something growls at them.

Tom turns back toward the window. Jules calls out.

“It sounds like another dog!”

Tom thinks it does, too. His heart is beating fast, too fast he thinks, and he stands with one hand on the window ledge, ready to pull himself back out.

“I can’t believe this,” Jules says.

“What?”

“It’s another husky.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Because I’m touching his face.”

Tom eases from the window. He can hear the dog eating. Jules is feeding it.

Then, by Tom’s elbow, there is another sound.

At first, it sounds like children laughing. Then like a song.

Then the unmistakable sound of chirping.

Birds.

Gently, Tom backs away. The chirping quiets. He steps forward again. It gets louder.

Of course, Tom thinks, feeling the excitement he’d hoped for when they left the house the day before.

As Jules talks quietly to the dog, Tom approaches the birds until their squawking is unbearable. He feels along a shelf.

“Tom,” Jules says in the darkness, “be careful—”

“They’re in a box,” Tom says.

“What?”

“I grew up with a guy whose father was a hunter. His birds made the same sound. They get louder the closer you get to them.”

Tom’s hands are on the box.

He is thinking.

“Jules,” he says, “let’s go home.”

“I’d like more time with the dog.”

“You’ll have to do it at home. We can lock them in a room if there’s a problem. But we found what we set out to find. Let’s go home.”

Jules leashes the second husky. This one is less difficult. As they exit the garage by the side door, Jules asks Tom, “You’re bringing the birds?”

“Yeah. I’ve got an idea.”

Outside, they retrieve the first husky and head toward home. Jules walks with the second dog, Tom with the first. Slowly, they cross lawns, then driveways, until they reach the marker they set the day before.

On the front porch, before knocking on the door, Tom hears the housemates arguing inside. Then he thinks he hears a sound coming from the street behind him.

He turns.

He waits.

He wonders how close the tent is to where he stands.

Then he knocks.

Inside, the argument ceases. Felix calls out to him. Tom responds.

“Felix! It’s Tom!”

twenty-six

You’re going to have to open your eyes . . .

“You need to eat, Girl,” Malorie manages to say. Her voice is weak.

The Boy has eaten nuts from the pouch. The Girl refuses.

“If you don’t eat,” Malorie says between grimaces, “I’m going to stop this boat and leave you here.”

Malorie feels the Girl’s hand upon her back. She stops rowing and shakes some nuts out of the pouch for her. Even this hurts her shoulder.

But above the pain, a thought hovers. A truth that Malorie does not want to face.

Yes, the world behind her blindfold is an ill gray. Yes, she is worried she might be losing consciousness. But a much darker reality weaves through her myriad fears and problems, serpentine, clever. It floats, then hovers, then lands at the front lines of her imagination.

It’s a thing she’s been protecting, hiding, from the rest of herself all morning.

But it’s been the focus of her decision making for years.

You tell yourself you’ve waited four years because you were afraid to lose the house forever. You tell yourself you waited four years because you wanted to train the children first. But neither of these are true. You waited four years because here, on this trip, on this river, where madmen and wolves lurk, where creatures must be near, on THIS DAY you will have to do something you haven’t done outside in even longer than four years.

Today you’re going to have to open your eyes.