Malorie(11)

Did she hear something? Something above?

The teens know the rules, but of course that doesn’t mean the teens follow them. When Malorie sweeps the camp, they are to remain in Cabin Three. It’s a waste of time to investigate sounds made by either Tom or Olympia while she’s out making sure the three of them are still alone.

“If anybody’s here,” she begins. But she doesn’t finish this time. Despite the fact that she’s gotten very good at living with fear, she’s still not immune to moments of abject horror. Like when she’s standing in the basement of an abandoned camp lodge, and a man she did not see the face of was just moments ago knocking on her cabin door.

The image of a gun spins in her personal darkness. Olympia thinks they should get one. She cites the thousand books she’s read and how guns have saved more than one character’s life. But Malorie has been strict on this from the beginning. The last thing she wants in this camp is a tool Tom might use in the name of progress. It’s not hard to imagine opening a cabin door and getting shot at by a pre-prepositioned rifle, as Tom prides himself on a triumphant invention. And, of course, it’s not only Tom she doesn’t trust with one. It’s any of them, in the event one should see something they shouldn’t.

Yet, here, now, it feels like something more than her sense of purpose and a sharp knife could be helpful.

She listens.

She smells.

She waits.

She has done these three things so often over the last ten years that she hardly remembers a time when she didn’t. Sometimes, her new-world behavior seeps into her memories of the old. Didn’t she sniff the air every time she entered Shannon’s bedroom as a child? Didn’t she ask Mom and Dad if their eyes were closed when they came home from the store?

There is no past and present behind the fold. No linear lines of any kind.

The beans in one hand, the knife in the other, and the searching stick under her arm, Malorie crosses the basement again and arrives at the stairs quicker than she thought she would.

She’s scared.

It’s not the nicest thing to realize. Because once it begins, once the initial, hot tendrils tickle your arms and legs, flow down your back and calves, it’s hard to stop the feeling from growing to its full size: panic.

She turns to face the open basement. Did something move deeper in as she came farther out? No man is down here. She believes Tom and Olympia are right that he left, because their ears have never let her down before.

But does something share this space with her?

She hears Tom the man begging to be let into the attic as she gave birth to, if not his son, his namesake.

The kids know the rules, yes. They know to keep still until she returns from her sweep. Unless, of course, there’s an emergency.

“Fuck you,” she says to the open space. To the creatures, too.

Because sometimes it helps.

Then she’s hurrying up the stairs just like she and Shannon used to do as kids. Cranberries or a book in hand, the girls would race, side by side, elbowing each other to get to the top first. Malorie remembers falling on the stairs once, scraping both elbows, seeing between the steps the face of her old stuffed Sylvester the Cat and taking the rest of the steps at a screaming run.

Now she’s up in the kitchen again. She’s breathing hard. She’s trying to understand how a man could call himself part of any census. She’s thinking about what he said about someone catching a creature.

“Why did you have to say that in front of Tom…”

Because Tom will not only believe something like that, he’ll want to be near it.

She takes her steps slow on the way back to the common area. She pauses to listen between each. A thing she’s discovered in the new world is the brief intake of breath a person takes before speaking. And the sound they make when they shift their weight from one foot to another.

Does she hear any of this now?

Malorie waits. She thinks of the man’s voice and, while she doesn’t want to admit it, she believes his aim was true. She’ll never believe she’s gotten to the point where she can judge character from behind a blindfold. And she’ll never make the mistake Don made with Gary. But she’s open-minded enough to think perhaps a census has to start somewhere.

As she crosses the space, she resists a sense of guilt, for having denied the man his hour or two, for not listening to what he had to say, for not telling him her own stories. Maybe she knows things others don’t. Maybe she could’ve helped.

“No,” she says, as she reaches the lodge door. No, because no matter how much the new world improves around her and her teens, she will always, always rely on the fold and the fold alone.

She opens the door, takes a step, and bumps into a person.

She makes to swing the knife, but Olympia speaks before she does.

“Mom! It’s me and Tom!”

It takes Malorie a second before she believes it. All these thoughts of Annette and Gary, creatures and a man who says he’s one thing but could be another.

“What are you doing?” Malorie asks. Her voice sounds red. “You know the rules!”

“It’s an emergency,” Olympia says.

“Mom,” Tom says. “Seriously. You need to hear this.”

“It’s the man at the door,” Malorie says.

“No,” Olympia says. “Not exactly.”