Malorie(25)

Isn’t everybody just doing the best they can?

Isn’t she?

“It’s cold,” Olympia says.

It is hours before the sun will rise. The sky and the road are as dark as the world behind their folds.

“We’ll warm up,” Malorie says.

But she can’t stop thinking of the young man. He talked of ending his own life without needing a creature to make him do it.

Malorie allows herself to imagine what he might have been like in the old world and what he might’ve been doing now if the creatures never came.

Would he have been a good friend? A thoughtful person? A father?

Her heart burns for him. For all of them. Ron Handy. The census man. The people described in the census papers.

But the empathy is short-lived as something howls in the dark distance. Malorie thinks it’s a dog. A wolf. A man.

“We’ll find somewhere else to sleep,” she says. “I promise. Just a little farther.”

But whatever the distance is to peace of mind feels more than just a little farther. It feels like it’s beyond the state of Michigan. Beyond the world. New or old.

And absolutely beyond the last stop of any train, real or imagined.





NINE


Nineteen miles along old country highways, not maintained, overgrown, cracked, no longer used.

Malorie feels insane. The old way. Exhausted, sore, and like she’s chosen to put her teens in danger, hastily, without enough of a plan.

The hood covers her head and neck and the blindfold her eyes. She wears sleeves and gloves despite the heat and also despite the lack of any concrete proof that the creatures have ever destroyed someone’s mind through touch. She drinks from the water bottles they’ve refilled numerous times on their journey (using filters from the camp kitchen rather than the ones Tom invented himself, a thing Tom argued against). She reminds them they need to eat, and she continually asks the teens what they hear. More than once they’ve come to a complete stop and waited upwards of a half hour, as Olympia seemed certain one was near, even when Tom didn’t agree.

And no matter what they are enduring or when, Malorie thinks of Mom and Dad.

It’s not hard to pluck a good memory of the two of them, the way they were. Both effusive, both smart as hell. They were what her friends called “hippies,” though neither lived that exact lifestyle. It was their positivity her peers made light of, the way her parents had of constantly talking about expanding the mind.

Intelligence, Dad told the sisters, is being able to talk your way out of a fight.

This after Malorie had fought with them about bedtime. Oh, how she wishes she had those fights, those words, that time back.

And here…she might.

The thought is almost too big to acknowledge. Nobody is granted a reversal of grief.

Nobody.

They would love the teens, Malorie thinks. But she wonders if Tom’s progressive nature would frighten them. It’s an odd, sudden thought to have, and it feels wholly out of place. As if, for a moment, Malorie was nervous to introduce her son to her parents. She has nobody to tell her if this feeling is natural. No book to reference. No friends to ask. Sam and Mary Walsh would love both kids. She knows this. Yet thoughts of Tom are becoming cloudier by the hour.

She walks. She listens. She thinks.

It hurts, as if the creatures and the new world they’ve created are present in her memories of the old. She remembers sneaking into a movie with Shannon, a movie rated R for nudity, and how, despite the images, hard kissing they’d never witnessed before in any way, Shannon fell asleep. Malorie sees her sister’s eyes are closed and wonders, now, was there something Shannon was hiding from? A thing that could’ve driven her mad? How about when Mom and Dad lowered the blinds at night, as Mom (Mary, Mary Walsh, Sam and Mary Walsh) told the girls that moonlight induced nightmares, and oh how the sisters giggled at the idea. Was Mom actually taking the same precautions Malorie takes now?

Close the blinds. Close your eyes.

Memory and the now, melded.

Her childhood bedroom has blankets over the windows. The bus ride to school is terrifying, as the driver can’t look.

The train the train the TRAIN you’re heading toward is a blind train, Malorie, what are you doing what are you doing what?

Sam and Mary sit in the front seat of the family car. Shannon and Malorie play games in the back. Dad turns the wheel suddenly, and the girls cry out and Mom says that was close, and Malorie, now, here, Malorie remembers it as if there was something in the road Dad wasn’t supposed to see, something that drove him mad.

But Mom and Dad might not be mad.

And somehow that’s the craziest part of all.

“A car,” Tom says.

For a second Malorie imagines he’s read her mind, as if her son, who has performed so many incredible auditory feats, heard all the way into her head.

“A car?” she echoes.

“Something,” Olympia says.

“Not something,” Tom says. “A car.”

“Stop,” Malorie says. “Side of the road. Now.”

She doesn’t want to step off the road. She doesn’t want the straight line made between herself and her parents to be compromised. She wants to go to them, go to them, go to them now.

“Car,” Olympia says.

“Told you,” Tom says.