Malorie(12)

Malorie waits. She listens.

“The man left the literature,” Tom says.

“What?” Malorie asks.

She imagines pictures of creatures. She imagines the teens losing their young minds by way of a photograph left on the porch.

“You didn’t—” she begins. But Olympia cuts her off.

“Mom. There are pages and pages, lists of survivors.”

Malorie feels something dark swirling inside her. Did they find Gary’s name on that list?

“Come on!” she says. “Speak!”

When Olympia does, she’s standing closer to Malorie, and Malorie knows it’s because her daughter believes she might need a stabilizing hand.

“In St. Ignace, Michigan, Mom,” Olympia says.

“What? What about it?” But St. Ignace is in the Upper Peninsula. Where Malorie is from. And the city name, coming from Olympia’s lips, coupled with the word survivors, suggests something Malorie is not prepared to hear.

“Your parents’ names are on the list, Mom. Their names are on the list of survivors. Your parents are alive.”





FOUR


Malorie can’t sit still in what was once the lodge’s main office. The desk still harbors some of the items the long-ago director used daily. A magnetized rectangle for paper clips. A yellow pad for notes. A calendar seventeen years old. There was once a two-way mirror in here, so the campers couldn’t see the director observing them eating below in the common area. But that mirror has long been tucked beneath Tom’s bed, materials for proposed inventions Malorie won’t let him build, and a black cloth hangs in the open space instead.

She refuses to believe the news. Even the possibility of it. Then she believes it. Then she refuses. Believes it again. She’s seen the names with her own eyes now. Sam and Mary Walsh. Common names, she tells herself. So many Sams. Even more Marys. And Walsh…

But the exact combination, and the fact that they are listed in the Upper Peninsula, is actually hurting her. It’s a variety of pain, in her stomach, her bones, her heart, she’s never known before. Seventeen years ago Shannon accompanied Malorie to buy a pregnancy test. The world had already changed irrevocably by then, but the sisters didn’t know it yet. The last time Malorie spoke to her parents, she told them of the baby. Then Sam and Mary Walsh stopped answering their phone.

Seventeen years.

Tom and Olympia know to leave her alone with this. They are in what used to be the secretary’s office, the outer office, as Malorie sits, then stands, then sits, in here, the pages spread before her on the desk. The door is shut. She swept the room before removing her fold.

She reads the names again.

“How?”

Even this word hurts. She should be moving. North. Toward them. This is every griever’s fantasy, to see Mom and Dad once more. To say the things she never said.

She should leave. Now.

But…is this real?

And how old is this list? How many years gone? The pages suggest the man who claimed to be from the census traveled most of the Midwest. And how long has that taken? Is such a thing even possible? And is this his first visit to Michigan? Or did he note these names, the names of Malorie’s parents, a decade ago?

Oh, she should’ve let him in.

The Sam and Mary Walsh Malorie knew lived near the Wisconsin border. They’d have no reason to go to St. Ignace, to the bridge that unites Michigan’s two peninsulas. Even when facing the end of the world. Especially then. Shannon used to joke that the Upper Peninsula is the end of the world. So why would Sam and Mary have migrated south?

Did they come…looking for their daughters?

She can’t breathe. It’s simply too heavy. She feels like she could faint. Or worse.

She paces the office, her eyes darting back to the names on the page. She can’t calm down, can’t formulate a single solid opinion. She imagines Sam and Mary Walsh surviving as long as she has, the sorrows and horrors they would have endured, the unfathomable stress of living in a world so different than the one they raised their children in.

She wants Tom the man to be here with her. She wants to hear what he would say.

Did she and Shannon give up on their parents too soon? Neither had anything to go on other than the silence from Sam and Mary’s end and the thought that, perhaps, their parents were not the survivor type.

But was Malorie? When this all began…was she the survivor type?

“Fuck.”

“Mom?”

It’s Olympia, from the outer office.

Maybe Mom and Dad have changed, too. If there’s one thing Malorie has learned while raising these kids, it’s that parenthood is not static. Parenthood does not stand still. And the mother of two teens in the new world undergoes alterations, sudden instinctual thrusts, almost as powerful as the creatures she protects them from.

“No,” Malorie says. Because…there’s just no way. No way her parents are still alive in Michigan, gardening blindfolded and painting their windows black. There’s no way they’ve endured the horrors she has and still hold hands the way they once did, always did, sitting beside each other on the couch.

She feels dizzy. Faint. She sits on the edge of the old desk and stares into the abyss of her past, her childhood, life in the old world, so long ago now and so severely, maddeningly different.