“This,” Malorie says, placing a bloodied hand on the Girl’s head, “this is Olympia.”
The Girl looks at Malorie quickly. She blushes. She smiles. She likes it.
“And this,” Malorie says, pressing the Boy to her body, “is Tom.”
He grins, shy and happy.
On her knees, Malorie hugs her children and cries hot tears that are better than any laughter she’s ever felt.
Relief.
Her tears flow freely, softly, as she thinks of her housemates working together to bring water from the well, sleeping on the living room floor, discussing the new world. She sees Shannon, laughing, finding shapes and figures in the clouds, curious with warmth and kindness, doting on Malorie.
She thinks of Tom. His mind always working, solving a problem. Always trying.
She thinks of his love for living.
In the distance, farther down the long school hall, others emerge from different rooms. Rick places a hand on Constance’s shoulder as they begin to walk farther into the facility. It’s as if this whole place knows to give Malorie and her children a moment to themselves. As if everyone and everything understands that, at last, they are safe.
Safer.
Now, here, hugging the children, it feels to Malorie like the house and the river are just two mythical locations, lost somewhere in all that infinity.
But here, she knows, they are not quite as lost.
Or alone.
acknowledgments
While writing Bird Box, I heard mention of a mythological creature known as the Lawyer. Because this news came to me from a good friend, I happily agreed to meet one. On the way, I confessed to said friend that I had no idea what someone like myself would do with a Lawyer. “I’ve got nothing to law!” But my friend assured me—and he was right to. Wayne Alexander did more than “law,” as he read this tale and told me an abundance of his own, each more compelling than the last.
Soon, Wayne informed me of a second fabled being: the Manager. I was inclined to confess, “But I’ve nothing to manage!” Undeterred, Wayne introduced me to a duo, Managers—Candace Lake and Ryan Lewis who, like Wayne, did much more than their professional title implied. Not only did we read Bird Box together, but we began toying with it, our e-mails tallying a higher word count than the book itself. Along the way, we became friends (Ryan’s phone in particular has become something of a notebook for me, flooded with ideas as small as “Hey! Janitor closets are kinda scary!” and as lofty as “What do you think of a thousand-page movie script?”)
Eventually, Candance and Ryan began speaking of yet a third, impossible entity: the Agent. “But I’ve nothing to agent!” Mercifully, they ushered me toward one. Kristin Nelson quickly taught me that, though it’s delightful to have one thousand ideas, it’s just as worthy to make one of them presentable. We went deeper with Bird Box. Kristin and I fed the book, starved it, then fed it again. We dressed it up in funny clothes, sometimes keeping only a glove or only the hat. Other times it would sing to us, not unlike Tom’s birds, letting us know when it was content.
And when Bird Box was ready, Kristin made mention of a fourth and final shadowy personage: the Editor. This time I was scared. “But I do have something to edit! Oh no!” In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction. But, of course, it didn’t turn out that way. Lee Boudreaux is as much an artist as the writers she works with. And the ideas she suggested were great, original, and even scary.
Lee and all of Ecco, THANK YOU. And Harper Voyager in the UK, THANK YOU.
And, Dave Simmer, my friend, thank you, too, for introducing me to the Lawyer, and for opening that mythical door to begin with.