I found the cabin two days after Wallaby left me. I was following the last Clue given me. Look for the sign past the next creek, it said. I’d found a dry creek bed just hours from my camp, but there was no sign, so I kept walking, searching. I was beginning to fear I was off course, lost, and then there it was: a little brook babbling, You found me, you found me. Just downstream a culvert, a road, a driveway. And my sign, obvious, if unexpected: a swath of baby-blue balloons tied to a mailbox, dancing, drifting. I followed their driveway to a small single-story cabin, blue, with a stubby chimney. There were more balloons tied by the front door and a gray welcome mat. I remember bright fish swimming the mat’s perimeter, framing the words HOME SWEET HOME and smiling frozen cartoon smiles—though I didn’t yet recognize this as my next Clue.
The front door wasn’t locked. The cabin was blue and unlocked—they couldn’t be more obvious than that. I stepped into a room awash in sky blue. Balloons littered the floor, a tower of blue-wrapped packages stood on the dining table; there was a blue couch, a blue chair. Throw pillows. Everything that was colored was blue. Everything. No, an exception—I remember a rug, the contrast of my gray-black handprint on the soft yellow after I opened the flue and built my fire. But everything other than that was blue, I remember.
I kept to the living area, kitchen, and bathroom at first, leaving two doors that I assumed led to bedrooms closed. The electricity didn’t work, but there was running water—and a blue baby bottle in the sink. I assumed the tap water was safe to drink and filled my bottles without boiling it first, a mistake. There were granola bars and an open bag of cheese curls in the cupboard. I ate my fill, which was also maybe a mistake, but I think it was the water that made me sick. I found some Twinings Lady Grey Tea too and made myself a cup, thinking that was a nice touch.
After finishing my tea, or maybe while I was still drinking it, I started to open the packages on the table. I expected food and a new battery for my mic pack, a Clue telling me where to go next. But the first item I unwrapped was a stack of picture books. One had a giraffe on its cover, another a family of otters. They all had animals on the covers, though on one it was just a teddy bear crushed to a little boy’s chest. When I peeled back the paper on the second package—small, soft—I found a row of tiny white and blue socks, six pairs marked NEWBORN.
I remember tossing the socks onto the table and walking to the couch, suppressing—barely—an urge to stomp on one or all of their omnipresent balloons. Even now, I feel the sting of their message. I know I told them my reasons for coming. I told them when I applied and I told them again each round of the selection process. I told them in my first confessional. Again and again, I told them. I shouldn’t have been so surprised that they listened.
After that I lay on the couch and failed to sleep for a long time. I was finally dozing when I heard it: a mewling cry. The sound pulled me toward full consciousness and my waking mind struggled to determine the direction of its source. Down the hall, behind a bedroom door.
The only light came from the stars and moon, and was filtered through windows. I remember creeping down the hall, feeling my way, stepping softly in my socks—this was the last time I took off my boots to sleep. The sound was weak and animal-like. A kitten, I thought, and meant for me. They knew I would take care of it. I’m more of a dog person, but I’d never abandon an orphaned kitten. I’d never abandon any orphaned mammal, except maybe a rat.
When I opened the bedroom door, the mewling stopped, and I stopped with it. A wall of arched windows framed a queen-size bed. Compared to the hallway, the dusky light there was luminous; the bedding reflected the dreamy blue-gray of night. There was a teddy bear on the dresser, one of those nanny-cams. I remember identifying the camera made me feel a little better, a little braver.
But I was still startled when the crying resumed a few seconds later. It was louder, and I was able to identify the source as the mound of blankets on the bed. A hiccupy gulp interrupted the cry. Puzzled, I stepped toward the bed. The oblong shape beneath the blankets made me uncomfortable, but I’d come too far to stop, and they were watching, everyone was watching. I picked up the fabric and pulled it back.
Given the chance, a fraction of a second will gladly feel like forever, and that is the kind of forever I experienced as I lifted and immediately dropped the blanket. The light-haired mother prop lying there with marble eyes, black-brown dripping down her latex face to stain the sheets beneath. And in her puffy, mottled arms, a doll swaddled in pale blue. Its lips puckered and frozen, waiting for the bottle by the sink. I barely saw, but I saw. The blanket drifting so slowly from my hand to cover the prop, the doll.
It shames me to admit that their trick worked, that for the length of that forever I thought the props were real. And then the soundtrack looped back to its beginning and the cry sounded again and this time I heard it: a faint mechanical buzzing within the sound. At the same time they sprayed the smell through the vents, I think, or that’s when I noticed it, or maybe in my memory it’s just less important than the sound. Either way, this was my first experience of their rotting stench in close quarters and it permeated my being. I stood there, transfixed, a length of time that I know couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but every time I think about it, every time I remember, it feels longer, it feels like hours.
Even though I knew it was fake, even though the doll was ridiculous-sounding, ridiculous-looking, it hit me, hard. I don’t know why: exhaustion, the poignancy of what that scene was intended to represent. It was like they knew the secret truth behind my confessionals, that this was their way of telling me that they knew I wasn’t really here for a pre-motherhood adventure, but because I don’t think I ever will be ready to have a child. I want to be ready, I want to do it—for him—I wish I could, but I can’t. I applied, I came, in order to delay not the inevitability of motherhood, but of telling my husband the truth.
Standing in the too-blue cabin, I couldn’t stop thinking of myself in the prop’s place beneath the covers. The doll’s face was—is—seared into my memory, but my guilt grasped the image and warped it. I saw my husband’s chin, miniaturized and smoothed. I saw the little pug nose that flares so dramatically in photos of me growing up. I saw the divot on its flaking head pulsing.
The doll’s soundtrack reached the cough—a tight, choking sound. I remember my stomach clenching, a visceral reaction.
I panicked. I turned and ran out of the bedroom. I grabbed my pack and jump-shoved my feet into my boots. I stumbled out the front door, sliding on HOME SWEET HOME as balloons entangled my feet. I broke free and took the path of least resistance: the dirt driveway, which spilled onto a crackled asphalt road where my quivering legs poured me to the ground. Just off the side of the road I lay among last year’s leaves, mired in exhaustion and hate and dispersing adrenaline. They wanted me to quit, that much was obvious, and I wanted to, I wanted it to be over, but I couldn’t give them the satisfaction. I lay there, stewing, for a long time. Eventually, I sat up and took off my glasses. I remember my stomach roiling, caustic fluids riding between my throat and bowels like tides. I pinched my glasses between my fingers and stared at where I knew they were without seeing them, reminding myself over and over that the prop and the doll weren’t real, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next, where I was supposed to go. Then an amorphous bubble of lighter space somewhere beyond my glasses caught my unfocused eye. An iridescent, dancing space that after a breathless moment I realized was the balloons, reflecting moonlight and skipping about the mailbox in the wind.
That’s when I understood: The Clue wasn’t the picture books or the balloons, it was the welcome mat. Home Sweet Home. That’s the direction I had to go next. East.