Malorie(13)

Seventeen years.

Seventeen years ago she found out she was pregnant with Tom. Only he wasn’t “Tom” yet. Malorie had yet to meet her son’s namesake, the man who had such a profound impact on her that she still asks him, silently, for advice on every decision she makes, sixteen years after his death. Is it possible her parents are alive? In a world where they didn’t even meet the man she named her son after? And if so, what unspeakable occurrences have they lived through?

Who has helped them survive?

“They’re not alive,” she says. Because there’s just no way. It’s too much, too huge. Every time she hears Olympia giving her the news, the names, Malorie hears the smile that must have been present on her daughter’s face. It’s driving her mad. Doesn’t her bright, impossibly hopeful daughter know that what she told her is actually untrue? They simply can’t be alive. The list is wrong. There are a thousand Sam and Mary Walshes. There’s no census. The man somehow got her parents’ names and wrote them onto the pages, Trojan-horsing his actual intent; getting Malorie and her kids to leave the safety they’ve finally found.

The man is trying to destroy the peace and security of Camp Yadin.

Maybe, just maybe, the man was actually Gary.

Malorie punches the desk. Then she gets behind it, looks hard at the names on the page. It’s been a long time since she rifled through Gary’s briefcase and found his dangerous thoughts written down, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever forget the tilt of his hand, the dark electricity that was present on every page.

She studies the handwriting.

And she knows.

This is not Gary’s writing. It’s not even close to the same.

She looks to the office door, thinks of her teens on the other side. She knows they must be imagining a journey out, similar to their journey in, ten years gone. Tom must be excited by this. Olympia is probably already preparing.

But do they really believe this list? Has she raised them to be so na?ve? This impossible, absolutely insane list of…of…

“Survivors,” Malorie says.

She wants to break something. She wants to punch a hole in the office wall. She wants to kick the desk over.

So she does.

She plants a shoe against the edge of the desk and shoves as hard as she can, sending the old thing onto its side. The pages scatter like white birds leaping from a falling tree, and Olympia hollers, “Mom! Mom! Are you okay?”

She sounds scared. In the new world, when you hear someone lash out from the other side of a door, it’s not hard to imagine something is in there with them.

“I’m fine,” Malorie yells. “I’m fucking fine.”

She hears the teens whispering on the other side. Tom is no doubt asking Olympia why Malorie would be upset by this news and Olympia is no doubt explaining exactly why.

Because it’s been seventeen years. Because she believed they were dead. Because she grieved already and because she’s felt the insatiable loss of Sam and Mary Walsh for so long that it’s become part of her now.

And this? This sudden list?

This is mean.

Malorie cries. She doesn’t want to but she can’t stop it. She imagines Gary sitting across a table from a younger man, promising the man money or gold or whatever is still worth something out in the new world, if only the rube play the part of a census man. Write all these notes down for me, son, and deliver it to Cabin Three of Camp Yadin. Can you do that for me? Can you sneak these two names like worms for a fish through the front door of Cabin Three at Camp Yadin?

Big fish in there. Big to me.

“No way,” Malorie says. “There’s just no way. This isn’t real. This isn’t possible. This is not happening.”

But, beyond the desk, her parents’ names are still visible on the spilled pages.

Sam and Mary Walsh.

Not Gary’s hand.

And something else, too. Another page, having risen to the top of the pile, as the papers went fluttering through the office. As if this particular page were trying to survive, too. A description of a mode of travel, yes, another impossibility, the proof Malorie needs to officially deny any and all of this.

The Blind Train.

Ah, yes. The man who claimed to be from the census mentioned a train.

One that heads north.

Malorie feels hot. Like someone is watching her. Has been watching her. Like the walls of the new world are closing in.

No to all of this. Absolutely no. It’s too inviting, all too perfectly arranged for her to gather her teens and leave the relative tranquility of this place they call home and have called home for ten years. She can sense the worm lowering into the water. Can feel the hunger, wanting to taste it. It’s easy to imagine Gary waiting for her on a platform in the dark.

Her parents are dead. They’ve been dead for seventeen years.

Malorie picks up the page that describes the train. She begins to read it, then lets it fall to the floor.

No.

No way.

She’s not leaving this camp. The camp that has kept them safe. The place where Tom and Olympia have grown from children into adults, immensely intelligent teens who can hear all the way to the gates of the camp and who are happy without even knowing why. She will not jeopardize their lives for closure in her own.

She makes for the office door, momentarily assured with her decision to ignore the whole thing. The names on that page. The existence of a census at all.