Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  You know what they’ll do to me, he’d said.

  Max did know.

  His mind came back again to the silky, dangerous voice of the Genius: Do you think you can tell me lies and I will simply walk away?

  No, Max thought. I don’t.

  And that was the problem. He’d known it even before seeing the soldier’s fear. The Genius would never walk away. The wood might be quiet for a while, but he was coming.

  Max said nothing, but the unsettled feeling infected them all in one way or another. Susan came to sit beside him beneath the aspens.

  “I know it was rotten, with that soldier,” she said. “I know you didn’t like hitting him.”

  That was true. Max had known his share of bullies. He remembered the first time he’d met Ivan, in the fourth grade. Already he was a foot taller than anyone else, and looking for someone to kick. He’d chosen Max because Max had brought a geode to class, and Ivan thought it funny to say that the kid with the strange hair thought a rock was show-and-tell. Mo had joined him a year later. He was a small wiry kid with a mean streak and a quick temper who thought the height of hilarity was someone falling down or getting knocked that way. He loved to make other people look like idiots. Even when he wasn’t the butt of it, Max never thought that was funny.

  Hitting the soldier — worse, fooling him — made Max feel like one of them. He hated it.

  “He was ready to drag you back down to that tiled room and that monster-faced lady,” Nell said from her place at the other end of the blanket, where she’d been divvying up peaches for supper. “Now he thinks he’s lucky. What’s rotten about that?”

  Max only shrugged. Susan knew.

  “You didn’t have to fool him like that,” Max said. “That was uncalled-for.”

  Nell frowned at him. “You could say, Thank you, Nell, for making him tell the others not to follow.”

  He thought of telling her how useless that had been. Did one soldier’s word mean anything against the Genius? Maybe it made her feel better to think so for a while. He didn’t know. When he didn’t answer, she glowered at him and turned her back.

  A wind rushed through the wood and rustled the aspens until they clattered and whispered to one another. Just like us, Max thought. Stuck in a cage and rattling the bars.

  “Let’s try for the window again,” he said suddenly.

  Susan looked up at him.

  “How?”

  “What about it being too big?” Nell said.

  He shrugged. “If you can make the wind blow, you can make a window,” he said. “It’s just understanding the rules, right? We need to picture what we want.”

  He started to tick off all the ingredients for making a window, and their window specifically.

  Jean raised her hand eagerly. “Ooh! Me! I have something!”

  Nell snorted. “It’s not school, Jean.”

  Jean ignored her. “It was cold to touch it, but that night — it turned warm.”

  “Right!” he said. “Temperature. Good one, Jean!” She rewarded him with a grin.

  Kate added the width of the sill, which she could climb on back home, and the way the shade was bent, having once been hit by an errant ball.

  They talked about glass and wood, and the width and height of the window for so long that at last Max could really see it. And after a while, he thought about it so much, it was like a song in his head — glass and wood and height and width and cold-turned-warm — until the picture of the window hung behind his eyes.

  And then the air hummed and thickened, and it was there.

  The window hung in the sky just above Max’s head, vivid with the colors of the setting sun. Jean squealed with joy, and Kate rushed to it, jumping up to try to reach the glass. Nell stretched to lay her hand flat on the clear surface.

  “It doesn’t give,” she said.

  Susan circled the glass, and Max hoisted Nell onto his shoulders so she could press her face against it. But it was no use. They’d produced a window at last, and it looked exactly like the window back home. But it was just a window, nothing more.

  They tried again, then again, then a fourth time. It didn’t matter. Windows hung, suspended from nothing, but they were only glass. They didn’t open to anywhere.

  At last they stood among the aspens, staring in disappointment at the strange hanging windows they’d made, glass fading with the sunlight and beading, eventually, with the heat.

  Max wondered what there was left to hope for.

  The watchers had long climbed the mountain in ones and twos, as lonely in their way as the lost, if only for a time. Was it easier to move into darkness clothed in anger? The exile thought it must be, for they pushed on in eagerness, seeking the roads and the cities of men. If they sensed the presence of another upon the rise, they gave no sign. Nor did the exile seek them. Eyes of the valley, they called themselves. The exile knew them better as its arm of judgment and its punishing hand. Still, life calls to life, and brothers carry with them the scent of home. So watching from a distance, the exile marked their coming and knew when they departed.

  Thus it was that their increase told its story. At the height of summer, beneath a waning moon, they came steadily, a stream of them crossing beneath the trees, making their way to the dark place beyond. What was it that drew them there? In years past, the wisest had begged that they go. Open arms to the afflicted, welcome home the lost, he had said. Why let fear forever bind you? For such counsel they had called him poison, called him fool. Anger burned in the valley, and his coaxing talk of strength and welcome went unheeded. Had those below heard it at last? No. There was nothing of forgiveness in the whispers of the travelers as they moved through the trees.

  If there had ever been forgiveness in the valley, it was long dead.

  The earliest story Max knew about himself was a story of struggle and surprise. He’d been born just minutes after Susan, and though she had come into the world mostly fine, it had been tougher for Max, whose lungs, at first, didn’t work. As a small boy, he had liked to examine the pictures his parents kept of that beginning time, amazed that the scrawny, very un-Max-like baby in the glass box, covered in tubes and wires, could be him.

  At age five or six, studying pictures of his newborn self, he’d come up with a list of questions about the entire incident, chief of which was why his chest was caved in as if he were starving. Didn’t any of those tubes send food? His father had explained that he was trying to breathe, and though the doctors sent him oxygen through a tube, each day they’d send a little less, so he had to work at it, his lungs fighting to draw air.

  “That’s the only way to make lungs grow,” his mother had told him. “If you didn’t fight for air, you’d have been stuck in that box forever.”

  She said he’d fought so hard, he’d surprised them and come home early. Max had always been proud of that. He liked to think of his newborn self exceeding expectations.

  Getting home again was now the focus of Max’s day and night, but no amount of twisting his brain into knots seemed to help.

  They had made glass, windows even, but they were useless things, hanging in the wood to mock them. Susan tried to make them disappear, but one fell, shattering in the dirt. The shards of it glared up at them, iced with afternoon sun.

  “We should clean it up,” she said. “It’s littering.”

  Max sighed and told her they’d do it later. Watching the window fall had drained him, and he could see the others felt the same. Kate and Jean returned to a game they had devised with stones, Nell stretched out on the blanket and buried her head in her crossed arms. Max peeked to see if she was crying, but if she was, she made no sound, and after a while he could see by the way her back rose and fell that she was asleep. Susan collected bits of broken glass, but even she abandoned the project in the middle and sat looking at the way they caught the light.

  “What are we doing wrong?” she asked him. “What’s a window beyond glass and wood?”

  Max squinted up in
to the slim branches of the aspens. They gave so little cover compared to the rest of the wood that heat prickled his skin, and he could feel the pressure of it on the top of his head.

  “Maybe it wasn’t our window that did it at all. Maybe something hit our window and took us through. Do you think that’s it?”

  Susan shrugged. “It didn’t feel like that.”

  They jumped at the sound of an animal howling in the distance.

  “What was that? A wolf?” Kate asked. “Are there wolves here?”

  They hadn’t seen any. Max had thought the barren ground responsible for keeping away the foxes and deer he’d seen on the way to the city. He hadn’t considered wolves.

  “There’s nothing for them to hunt here,” he said, as much to reassure himself as her.

  “Maybe we should find a better place to camp,” Susan said. “Maybe we should keep walking.”

  Nell looked sweaty and red faced when they woke her. The imprint of her arms had left a long pink stripe across her forehead.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she grumbled. “You sure you didn’t imagine it?”

  Max rolled his eyes. “Trust me,” he said.

  “I think wolves would have woken me,” she said.

  “Well, they didn’t.”

  They returned the peaches to the blanket sack. Jean wrinkled her nose at it.

  “Can’t we make something else?” she asked. “I’m sick of peaches.”

  “Then think of something,” Nell told her. “Complaining about it won’t help.”

  “Grouch,” Jean muttered.

  They trudged along for a while, looking for a good cave or an outcropping that gave them a better view of their surroundings.

  “Stop dragging your feet,” Susan said to Jean.

  Jean glared at her. “I can drag them if I want to.”

  She dragged them loudly for several minutes, driving Max nearly insane. He swallowed the things he wanted to say and instead forced himself to fall back and walk beside her. He picked up a stick and handed it to her.

  “If you’re tired, this will help.”

  She took it and continued walking, still dragging her feet. But now she used the stick to stab at the ground, too, making a sharp thwack with each step. In her free hand, she held her Barbie by its ankles, swinging it beside her so its grubby hair came up as the stick came down. She glowered at him, daring him to complain.

  Max sighed. He wasn’t used to getting the worst of Jean’s stubbornness. But he’d seen her slump when the windows failed to let them through, and now she bristled at everything. He missed the cheerful faith she usually had in him. He missed her in general. Jean didn’t wake with nightmares the way Kate did, but she was growing silent and irritable, playing solitary games and brooding.

  “Dear Jean,” he said to her suddenly in his letter-writing voice. “When we find a good camp, we’ll figure out how to make bread. Then you can have a peach sandwich. Your brother, Max.”

  Jean shrugged. He tried again.

  “Dear Jean, Won’t you like that? Bread and peaches? Peaches and bread?”

  But she didn’t even bother to play the game. “No. I’ll hate it. I hate everything here. It stinks.”

  Dismayed, he watched her swing her doll, letting its dirty hair flap.

  “Don’t you like doing the things we can do here?”

  Jean shook her head. “I can’t do them. They’re too hard.”

  “You can! It just takes a little practice!”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t. I hate this stinky forest with its stupid brown ground. I hated that bad city. I hate the people. I just want to go home.”

  He had no answer for that. She might be only seven years old, but Jean knew what was what. She was only saying what they all felt. Max looked around at the wood. The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows on the ground.

  He felt a peculiar tightness in his chest. It seemed to him suddenly that all his life he’d been thinking about the day he’d leave home. There were so many things to do out there! Home was just the place you waited in between doing them. While Susan had to be coaxed outside, away from her books, he woke each morning thinking about where he’d go, what he’d do, the people he’d meet when he got there. If he thought about home at all, it was usually in terms of the day he’d be saying good-bye to it. He had big adventures planned — to the Arctic, maybe even the moon. It occurred to him that he hadn’t wanted to get home so badly since before he could think, since he was a baby, stuck in that glass box.

  But it was different now. The forest might stretch for miles; he could walk forever and every sight would be new. He was farther than the Arctic, than even the moon. And yet for all that, he was inside a box again. He trudged up the rising ground beside Jean and felt as if someone had taken everything away, erasing the bright glow of tomorrow and maybe and what if? There was nothing left.

  It made it hard to breathe.

  They spotted the cave a little while later, when they’d wandered into a rocky section of the wood. Gray boulders flecked with white broke through the earth and jutted up among the trees, and where the ground rose steeply, a series of rock steps led to a wide-mouthed cave.

  “Perfect!” Nell said. She slung the blanket sack over her shoulder. “From up there, we can see everything!”

  They took the shortest way up, climbing the rocks to get to the cave. Nell reached it first and ducked inside.

  “Does it look good?” Susan called after her. “How big is it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Hey! Nell!” Max yelled.

  He reached the opening next. The cave was tall enough to stand in, and once he’d ducked inside, he could see it was even wider than he’d thought. Nell stood in the center of it, her back to him, the blanket full of peaches still resting on her shoulder.

  “Didn’t you hear us calling you?” he asked her.

  She was backing slowly toward him. He took a step her way, blinking, and caught a whiff of a heavy animal odor that made the hair on his neck stand up.

  “What is it?” he whispered. “A bear?”

  Nell kept backing toward him. She shook her head.

  He could hear the others behind him as they reached the opening. Susan started to say something, and he held up a hand.

  “Shh!”

  He wasn’t sure she saw him. She, Jean, and Kate stood blinking in the entrance.

  Nell had almost backed up all the way.

  “Get out,” she whispered as she passed close to him. “Get out now!”

  He saw it then. A foot from where she’d been standing, four filthy, matted bodies curled against the wall. Blue cloth littered the ground near them, torn to bits.

  Slashers.

  Max tensed and started to ease himself backward, too.

  “Their hands!” Nell whispered to him. “Look at their hands!”

  He squinted in the dim light. One of the figures lay sleeping with an arm flung out, and he saw the palm of its rough hand. It was covered in blood.

  A slasher moaned and stirred in its sleep. Max tried to force himself to move slowly, to tread without a sound.

  “What is it?” Susan whispered behind him. Her eyes would adjust in a second. If the others saw . . .

  A slasher groaned and lifted its head.

  Kate gasped.

  The thing’s head swiveled, and it took them in. It growled, then threw the others aside and jumped to its feet. Suddenly, they were all awake.

  Before Max could even shout, it leaped for Nell. She screamed and held up an arm, but it slammed her against the stone wall. Max grabbed its hair and yanked, but the others were up now, and he could feel their sharp nails on his back, their sharper teeth.

  He flailed and kicked as they threw him to the ground and turned back to Nell. Overhead, the things shrieked and the girls yelled. Max struggled to his feet as the scuffling slashers kicked and clawed him. Susan charged in, swinging Jean
’s stick, and caught them with the end of it. He heard it smack sharply again and again.

  He’d nearly reached Nell when a slasher threw him to the ground and rolled him over, tearing with rough nails at his shirt, his arm, his collar. He kneed it and it reared backward, yelping, when he caught a glimpse of its face in the shadows. Glazed eyes stared out of the mat of hair. For a moment, they sharpened, and the slasher opened its mouth.

  “Hey!” Max yelled. “Listen! Can you understand me?”

  But at the sound of his voice, it jerked its head as if slapped and the spark dimmed. Max looked again and saw only terror and desperation. The slasher growled.

  Susan caught the thing from behind with the stick, and it howled and raised its hands, moaning with a nearly human voice. Max tried to shove it off him. The thing was so heavy! A second later, it growled again, then swiveled back to Nell, who rolled on the floor as the other slashers buffeted her, snatching at her shirt and hair, tugging at her hands as she clutched the ends of her makeshift sack.

  “Nell!” Max yelled. “The food! They want the food! Throw the blanket!”

  Three of the things were on her, and now he could see clearly that they were yanking at the blanket sack. She’d fallen on it, and they ripped and mauled her, trying to grab it.

  He rolled over to get to her, but the fourth slasher seized him and tossed him down. He reached up to snatch at the hair on its chest, but this time his hand caught the remains of fabric.

  Nell was yelling. One of the slashers had turned on Susan, and she kept at it with her stick. Jean darted to where Nell lay struggling beneath the other two and tugged at the blanket, cringing as the things swiveled her way. After a second, Kate joined her.

  Reeking, mountainous beasts too big for the space of the cave, the slashers blocked the light and loomed above the girls, but Jean and Kate jumped out of reach, and Susan, who’d been caught for a second by a gnarled hand, wrenched free and smacked the attackers with her stick. Nell kicked and struggled, and Max reached for the slasher on his chest and grabbed its face, hand closing on a mass of hair, slick with spittle. He pulled as hard as he could, careful to keep out of reach of its teeth. It yowled sharply, like a cat.