Malorie(21)

Could it be?

“Okay,” Malorie says. “Blindfolds.”

They put them on. As Tom closes his eyes and secures the fabric to his face, he imagines himself on a mountaintop with a box, as people all over the world line up to see what’s inside.

Yes, see, as Tom will allow them a look with his glasses, the very glasses he built himself.

“Now,” Malorie says, a touch of hysteria in her voice. “Now, let’s go.”

As they cross the threshold of Cabin Three, as they take that first step toward a train none of them can know for sure will be there, it strikes Tom that he’s hearing something in Malorie’s voice that he hasn’t heard in a long time.

Risk.

It scares him. Because risk implies doubt. And if there’s one thing Malorie never expresses, it’s doubt in her decisions regarding the outside world.

Stepping out, Tom feels young, much younger than Malorie. As if all her stories about the old world suddenly carry more weight. Now, here, they make up the history of someone who’s lived a life more like the worldly characters in Olympia’s books. Now, here, Malorie seems like she knows more than he does. This after years of Tom believing the opposite.

“Come on,” Malorie says.

And Tom knows she says it to herself.

He listens. He moves. And no matter how hard he tries to shove this feeling away, this sense of being green, he can’t shake the doubt that rattles in Malorie’s voice.

“Come on.”

Risk.

They’re taking one.

A big one.

Big enough to change how he sees the world.

Already. One step from home.





SEVEN


Malorie feels the darkness. It doesn’t press in on her but rather slides across her arms and legs, her neck, her nose, her eyes. Yes, even her eyes feel exposed to the new world, her eyes that are not only closed but protected by the blindfold. It feels like the darkness, her personal darkness, the one she travels through, has gotten into her sleeves and boots, gloves and pants.

Sam and Mary Walsh. St. Ignace.

Unbelievable.

“Do not remove your hoods.”

She can’t count how many times she’s said this to the teens already. She does not hold their hands like she did the last time they took to these woods, heading the opposite way a decade ago. Tom and Olympia are sixteen years old now. At times one or the other walks ahead, at times they both take the lead, leaving Malorie in the back like the frightened friend traveling through those darkened halls of the county fair’s house of horrors. She and Shannon did that. Every year, if Malorie remembers right. She can still hear Shannon laughing, now, even as she listens for Tom’s footsteps, for Olympia’s directions, for the sounds of what exists beyond the small space the three of them make. She remembers reaching out to Shannon on those rides, at those booths, in that haunted house, looking for her sister at age sixteen, feeling a bond she knows Tom and Olympia feel now.

“Guys?”

“Yes,” Olympia says. “Right here, Mom. We’re still on the path.”

The path, yes. One Malorie has never seen, of course. A path that school buses no doubt once used to deliver campers for the summer. It’s not hard to imagine a bus appearing, suddenly, now, ahead, taking a turn too tightly, barreling down upon them.

But old-world fears are silly out here. Malorie’s ear is on the creature the kids said was outside the cabin.

“The road isn’t far,” Tom says.

Malorie is past asking how they can hear these things. She’ll never rid herself of the image of them as babies, sleeping, blindfolded, under chicken-wire cribs covered in black cloth. She’ll never forget the two of them seated at the kitchen table, age three, their tiny heads cocked toward the amplifiers that delivered sounds from outside the house.

They haven’t used amplifiers in years.

“Hang on,” Tom says.

“No,” Olympia says. “It’s nothing.”

“Hang on,” Tom repeats.

Malorie remains still. The bag is tight to her back. It feels light enough to carry thirty miles. She can do it. And she’ll need all the energy she can get. She doesn’t want to begin to guess what shelters, what abandoned edifices, what people they will encounter on their way.

“Cover your faces,” she says.

She covers her own with gloved hands. The black leather presses against the black fabric of the fold, layering the darkness.

“Don’t let it touch you,” she says.

She doesn’t know what it means for one to touch a person any more than she knows if one can be touched at all. But the image of Annette turning the corner in the hall at the school for the blind is as present as the images of her and Shannon at the county fair.

“There’s nothing,” Olympia says.

“There’s something,” Tom says. “Whether it’s a creature or not, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Malorie asks. This scares her. Do they move differently now? Do they move at all?

Something crashes through the bushes, and Malorie cries out. She reaches for the teens, instinctively, before covering her chin and mouth with the black gloves.

“A deer,” Tom says. Malorie hears defeat in his voice. His sister was right. “If I was allowed to build my sound meter, we would’ve known that right away.”