Malorie(33)

Olympia kneels in the tall grass, to feel for what she nearly stepped on.

“That’s so close-minded, Mom!” Tom says. “It’s just…it’s insane!”

“Tom, you will listen to me…”

“Maybe I won’t!”

Olympia touches it then withdraws her gloved hand.

“I’m sick of it!” Tom says.

“You?” Malorie yells. “You aren’t allowed to be sick of anything!”

It’s a woman at Olympia’s knees. A knife in her heart. Her own fingers on the handle.

“We don’t even know if they still drive people mad,” Tom says. But there is less force behind this.

“We what?” Malorie asks. “What does that even mean?”

Olympia removes her glove. The blood is caked, hardened by the sun. The way it climbs up the woman’s neck it feels like fingers.

“Olympia!” Malorie yells.

Olympia stands up.

“Right here, Mom.”

Silence then. As if, by mentioning Olympia’s name, Malorie has added some element of balance.

“No more,” Malorie says. Olympia knows she doesn’t only say it to Tom. She says it to everything. To the creatures. To the fact that she’s searching for people she’s already grieved.

Olympia cocks an ear ahead.

“Guys,” she says. “I hear an engine.”

She doesn’t think it’s a car. It sounds more like a generator, the steady hum of an amplifier. A big one.

“Ahead?” Malorie asks.

“Yes.”

“It’s not a car,” Tom says.

“No,” Olympia says.

“Tell me more,” Malorie says.

“It’s…wider than a car…” Tom says.

“It’s the train,” Malorie says.

Olympia blanches. Is Mom right? Is this what a train sounds like?

It sounds huge.

“We gotta move fast,” Malorie says. “Two miles?”

“A little less,” Tom says.

“Now,” Malorie says. Tendrils of hysteria present. “Now.”

The train.

Is it, though? Or is that, as Olympia has read in so many books, only what they want it to be?

Malorie and Tom are gaining distance on her. Olympia turns once, back to the dead woman in the tall grass on the side of the country road.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Sorry I didn’t acknowledge you at all.”

But she knows this was the right thing to do. Her mom and her brother are working together, ahead, neither any darker for a dead body.

An omen.

A portent.

Not now.

And sometimes, again, keeping secrets is the right thing to do.

She hurries to catch up with them. The unfamiliar engine hums steady in the distance, and she imagines a machine bigger than the house she was born in.

She moves.

She catches up.

She keeps secrets.





TWELVE


Malorie’s mind is ablaze.

She thinks it’s a train. She wants it to be. She can’t tell. She’s never focused so hard on a sound, any sound. What does a train actually sound like, from this distance, from this state of mind?

She moves fast. Too fast. Yet Olympia is a step ahead. Her daughter calls out when there are dips in the road, and more than once she’s reached back to take Malorie by the arm.

It doesn’t matter that she fought with Tom. Nothing matters right now but the incredible hum in the distance. Every few feet the source sounds like it’s coming from a different place. To her right; no, left. It’s got to be less than a mile now, no, more like three. At times, the sound vanishes altogether, and Malorie imagines a train vanishing, like a trick on television, the whole giant thing fading until, just when she thinks it’s gone, it appears again, over a horizon that could be near or far.

“Tom?” she asks.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

She doesn’t need to ask after Olympia. Her daughter is leading the rush, like she’s done so many times before. Malorie remembers the trip from the school for the blind to Camp Yadin. Even then, little Olympia took charge.

“Watch out,” Olympia calls. “Big turn in the road.”

Malorie moves toward her, her daughter, while thinking of herself as a daughter, daughter to Sam and Mary Walsh. She suddenly can’t tell the difference between who’s who here, and then Olympia’s hand is at her elbow, guiding her.

Olympia says something about the train, how it might not be leaving, might not be there at all. But Malorie’s mind is so gorged with the possibility of seeing her parents that she’s mistaking the train for them, as if it’s Mom and Dad idling in the distance.

“I can run ahead,” Tom says. Because he doesn’t worry about falling. Because he’d bounce back up. Because he’s sixteen.

“No,” Malorie says. But maybe this is one time she should say yes. “You can’t get hurt. Not now.”

Her voice is breathless, the syllables broken by heaves. Is she panicking?

It strikes her that Sam and Mary Walsh could be standing by the monster that idles. If the train goes to Mackinaw City, and if her parents had, at one point, worked their way downstate, doesn’t it stand to reason they could’ve taken the train south? Even as Malorie runs to take it up to them?