Malorie leaves home by boat with the children at the moment when four years of preparation become an irreversible departure. A fog may conceal the family as they reach the river, but it will not last; with the children still blindfolded, Malorie must leave the house that has protected them, trust their trained hearing, and set out by boat toward an unknown destination.

The decision to leave

The immediate opening is a possible window in the weather. Malorie sees the drapes soften through tear-blurred vision and reasons that, if fog can hide her and the children on their way to the river and the rowboat, she must wake them before it disappears. She strikes the kitchen table with her hand and wipes her eyes, making a physical break with hesitation before going to the children’s bedroom.

The departure has been anticipated, but never made easy by anticipation. Malorie has spoken of a future morning when she would wake the children and require them to leave forever. She deliberately avoided calling the trip an escape: she could not bear to make their daily life sound like something they should flee. A small pouch of food in the cupboard served as practical preparation as well as evidence that the promised journey was real. Malorie repeatedly let the food go stale, replaced it, and replenished it while the day remained only a possibility. Now, with the fog outside, the possibility becomes the present.

Her decision follows years of living behind coverings and training the children to avoid sight. Their bedroom window is buried under blankets, and black domes of cloth supported by chicken wire cover the two mattresses. The wire once fenced a small garden by the backyard well; for four years it has instead protected the children from what they might see. Malorie loosens the wire from nails in the floor and takes blindfolds from her pocket. The room’s improvised defenses make the departure more than a change of address: to leave safely, the family must carry its rules and safeguards with it.

Preparing Boy and Girl

Malorie wakes Boy and Girl by name and gives each a blindfold. Girl asks where they are going; Malorie answers that they are going on the river. The children do not complain or delay. They tie the black cloth tightly over their eyes with practiced ease, a competence that wounds Malorie because it is the product of a childhood shaped around danger rather than curiosity. She had imagined children asking why they were being taken onto a river they had never traveled, but instead they follow instructions.

Before they set out, Malorie checks both blindfolds and looks from one small face to the other. In that moment she understands that the journey out has begun at last. She makes the stakes explicit: they will travel by rowboat, the trip may be long, and they must do everything she says. She tells them not to stop for any reason until she announces their destination; if hunger comes, they can eat from the pouch, which she places against the backs of their small hands. Most urgently, she orders them not to fall asleep, because she needs their ears more than ever.

The instructions define the children’s role in a journey they cannot see. Their hearing is not incidental support but part of the family’s survival plan. Malorie’s authority is absolute in the moment, yet the scene shows how much that authority depends on the children’s obedience and attention. When they answer yes and comply, their learned discipline allows the group to move; it also makes visible the cost of the system that has taught them to act like experts in a danger no child should have to navigate.

Leaving the house and finding the boat

Malorie takes each child by the hand and leads them through the house. In the kitchen she wipes her eyes, pulls out her own blindfold, and ties it tightly around her head and dark hair. She pauses with one hand on the doorknob. The door opens onto the path she has followed countless times to fetch water, a familiar route now crossed in the opposite direction: away from the home and toward an uncertain exterior.

She tells the children to hold both her hands. Boy takes her left; Girl slips her fingers into her right. Blindfolded, the three step outside. The well stands twenty yards away, and small pieces of wood from old picture frames mark the path. Boy and Girl have touched those markers with their shoes countless times. Malorie has taught them that the well’s water is the only medicine they will ever need, and they have accepted the work of fetching it without complaint. Familiar objects and routines thus guide the family to the boundary of the life they are leaving.

At the dock, Malorie hears the rowboat rocking before she reaches it. She stops to tighten both children’s blindfolds, then leads them across the wooden planks. The boat is still there, like the parked cars in the street and the empty houses around their home: remnants of an abandoned world that remain in place even as the family must move through it. The water sounds frightening and exhilarating at once. Kneeling where she believes the boat to be, Malorie releases the children’s hands and searches by touch, finding the rope before the boat’s steel tip.

She tells Girl to wait on the dock while she unties the rope, then climbs carefully onto the middle bench and helps Girl aboard. The boat rocks violently once; Malorie grips the child’s hand too tightly, but Girl does not cry out. Leaves, sticks, and water lie in the bottom. Malorie searches among them for the paddles she has stored on the boat’s right side, feels their cold, damp surfaces, and sets them into the steel grooves. Using one paddle to push away from the dock, she takes the family onto the river.

From shelter to exposure

The river is calm, but the calm does not mean safety. Malorie hears movement in the woods and hopes the fog has hidden their departure, even as she knows it will lift. After four years of waiting, training, and finding the courage to go, she paddles away from the dock, the bank, and the house that has seemed to protect them for a lifetime. The shift is stark: the home’s barriers and familiar paths are behind them, while the river offers a route forward without removing the dangers of travel.

The choice of the river has been framed as dangerous even by the person later guiding Malorie toward a safer place. Rick tells her to take the river and estimates that she and Tom will have to travel at least twenty miles; he warns that the route is about as dangerous as she can undertake, while judging it possible because they have made it this far. He also begins to explain that the river splits and that the place he is directing her toward is better. His directions establish both the journey’s practical stakes and the limited nature of Malorie’s knowledge when she launches: she has a route, but not certainty about what lies along it.

The family’s later progress confirms that departure is not a single solved problem. In the boat, Malorie asks the children to listen and continues to depend on their hearing. On a later stretch, the Boy listens when she asks what he can tell her about something they encounter, but he can only say that he does not know and sounds ashamed. The exchange shows the strain placed on the children as well as the value of the skill Malorie has demanded: listening can guide them, but it cannot guarantee that they will understand or identify every threat.

The journey’s bodily cost and significance

The boat’s risks accumulate in the body. Malorie has feared an injury of this magnitude throughout the years of confinement and preparation. Earlier close calls included falling down the cellar stairs when the children were two, striking her head on a rock while carrying a bucket from the well, a possible broken wrist, a chipped tooth, and recurring bruises on her legs. In the river journey, her shoulder wound becomes severe enough that she wants to stop, find a hospital, and call for a doctor, but stopping would place the children and the journey at risk. The contrast between the wish for medical help and the obligation to keep going makes the cost of leaving concrete.

The wound also exposes how little margin the family has. Malorie tells the children that her pain comes only from rowing, although she knows the injury is serious. At another point, the Boy says the blindfold no longer hurts, and she tells him not to talk unless he hears something. Her fatigue and disorientation deepen as she listens to the children breathe and move in the boat. They remain blind beneath their coverings, but reaching a place where they might see things they have never seen depends on Malorie getting them there.

The departure therefore changes the family’s condition without resolving its danger. The house was shelter, but it was also the space from which Malorie had prepared the children to leave; the river is a possible route to a better place, but one that demands continued restraint, listening, and physical endurance. By carrying the old rules into a new environment, Malorie makes the first step toward a different life while confronting the fact that protection cannot make the journey safe. The boat’s push away from the dock is at once a release from confinement and an entry into exposure.