Malorie(49)

Now isn’t the time to lie down.

She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out.

Then she’s up again. Can this be happening? It’s bad enough that they can touch you now (can they?), it’s bad enough that there are more of them now than there used to be (are there?), it’s bad enough that this very train will pass through what Dean described as a concentrated area, a place where, for whatever unholy reason (and Malorie doesn’t want to know what that reason is) they congregate alongside the tracks, but now this? That one might actually be with them on the train?

“We have to tell everyone to close their eyes,” she says. Because now she’s thinking of the other people on board. Not because she worries for their happiness. But because of what they might do to her and her kids if that thing in the box (is it really there?) were to get out and walk the same halls Malorie just took herself. Out there where men don’t feel they have to respond to the smaller, blindfolded woman who keeps her entire body covered for fear of contact of any kind.

Jesus, she thinks. You gotta slow down.

“Well, we can’t tell everyone if we can’t leave the cabin,” Tom says.

And Malorie slaps him.

It’s sudden and it’s unplanned, and it feels like the only thing to do.

Because Tom has been looking for a reason to leave this cabin since the moment she said they wouldn’t be leaving it anymore. Because Tom is at that damnable age where he believes he must resist every fucking thing his mother tells him.

He’s walking away from her now, no doubt a hand to his face. She can’t help but feel pride for having touched what she believes to be the cloth of his fold at the tips of her gloved fingers when she slapped him. Even now, having done something she would never have dreamed herself capable of doing seventeen years ago, even now she thinks, Good. He’s wearing his fold.

“Wow,” Tom says. And he’s about to say a lot more. She can tell. She can hear it in the three letters, as if they comprise a picked lock, the door now open to everything.

“Wait,” Olympia says. “Hang on. This is crazy. Mom, you need to calm down. We’re okay. This is good. We’re on a train. We’re heading to see your parents. We’re—”

Then it comes, Tom’s rage, but in an unexpected form. Malorie anticipates a rash of words. She even braces herself for a return strike. But no, the door to their cabin slides open, then closes, and Tom’s angry steps thunder up the hall.

“No,” she says, imagining a box in storage opened, the lid slid aside, something terrible sitting up. She makes for the door, and Olympia holds her and talks to her, says things like Mom come on, he needs a minute, Mom it’s okay, Mom don’t go out there angry, Mom let him be, Mom it’s Tom, remember Tom? Your own son?

Remember Tom?

Mom?

And Malorie does. Or close. She remembers Tom the man, her son’s namesake, instead.

The incredible man enters her mind’s eye with startling detail, and she’s momentarily embarrassed he witnessed her striking her son.

Tom, she thinks, I’m sorry.

But does she say it to the man or to the son? She’s crying now, in Olympia’s arms, behind her fold, crying at the echo of Tom the man’s scream to be let into the attic where Malorie is in labor. As the creatures Gary convinced Don to let inside walk the house below.

“It’s okay,” Olympia says. “We’re gonna get there safe. We’re gonna—”

“No,” Malorie says. “We’re not. Not this time. We pushed our luck. We shouldn’t have left. We had it good. We survived the house. The school. We had it good and I got greedy. I saw the names of my parents and I lost my mind. I got lazy, Olympia. I got lazy.”

Her voice cracks with the last of these words. Olympia makes to say something, but Malorie is already removing her daughter’s hands from her shoulders.

She feels pride for the gloves Olympia wears.

Even now.

Then she’s out the door, too. Off to find him. Tom, who, of all the people on this train, would be most excited about a caught creature in a box.

And the proof of progress such a horror would be.





NINETEEN


Tom’s eyes are open. Because damn it all. Why not? The man who runs the train walks with eyes open. And he’s ridden it every single time it’s gone! Malorie’s crossed a line. That’s all there is to it. Maybe it all made sense when they were little kids, when they were going to take the rowboat to the school. Maybe then Mom had reason to be the way she is. But today? Here? They’re out in the world now. Tom has never felt, heard, smelled, or seen anything like this. He’s walking the hall. Doors to his left. A black wall to his right. It all shakes. It rattles. Why? Because they’re on a train. A thing he and Olympia have never done before. Christ, they haven’t done anything before!

Malorie has gone too far.

It’s the first time she’s struck him since using a flyswatter when he and Olympia were babies, teaching them to wake with their eyes closed. And this wasn’t a lesson. This was anger. Darkness, darkness, darkness. Doesn’t Malorie get it? Whether you were born into this world or not, you’re told how it used to be. And then? Then, you want to know that world for yourself.

You want to see it.

The door opens at the end of the hall, and a woman steps through. Her eyes are closed until the door shuts behind her. Then she opens her eyes. She sees Tom and smiles nervously. He wonders if she thought, for a second, that he was a creature. He doesn’t know what to make of her. How many women has he seen in his life? How many men? Back at the school for the blind there were lots of people. But Tom was six years old. He’s sixteen now.