Malorie(54)

The woman slides the door closed, and the clicking of the latch severs their worlds.

Malorie is alone again.

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

She steps to the next door and knocks. She waits. She tries the handle. The door slides open.

She steps inside.

The train is rocking as she enters somebody else’s room. She stands still. She listens.

Is the stirring coming from the wheels beyond the wall she faces? Or does somebody move in this very space?

“I’m looking for my son,” she says. Surely whoever is in this room, if they were to see her, blindfolded, scared, hooded, surely they would empathize, understand, respond.

She steps deeper into the room, arms extended. Her gloved fingertips come into contact with what she thinks is the mirror.

Motion behind her. The door slides closed.

She doesn’t move. She waits.

The train hums. The wheels whir. Is Dean uncovering a creature as she stands here? Are his eyes open, allowing the unfathomable in? Does the lid to the second box creak open as he checks the first?

Is Dean, mad, in this room?

“Is anybody there?” she asks.

It’s impossible not to imagine everything, every kind of thing, every potential danger, in this darkness. People, expressions, features, feelings, animals, smells, rivers, homes, schools, cabins, trains, madness.

But there is no answer.

Malorie steps forward, checks the bench.

Tom wouldn’t be waiting here in the quiet, would he? Tom wouldn’t intentionally hide, would he?

She moves quick now to the bunk beds. She swipes across the upper bunk, feeling nothing but a blanket. She bends and reaches across the lower bed.

Someone grabs her wrist.

“Get out,” the person says. Malorie can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. Her heart is thundering. This isn’t Tom. And whoever it is now yells. “GET OUT!!”

Malorie is either shoved or kicked. Either way she’s falling, suddenly, backward, tumbling through many darknesses. The train jolts, hard, and when she lands, she lands funny, so that her shoulder hits first, then her chin.

“GET OUT!!” the person yells. And they’re no longer hiding, no longer curled up in a lower bunk in the dark.

They’re coming out now. Coming for her.

She scrambles, disoriented, afraid. She isn’t sure where the door is, where it’s not. Hands pull her by the hood, drag her toward the sound of a sliding door. Then she’s up. Before they can throw her out, she’s up.

“I’m sorry,” she says. But what she wants to say is, FUCK YOU! MY SON IS LOST IN THE NEW WORLD!

The door slams closed.

Malorie turns to continue up the hall.

Someone is there.

“I’ve seen him,” a man says. “Back this way.”

“What? My son?”

“Yes,” he says. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

Malorie tries to determine, in seconds, what the man might look like. How old he is. If he’s safe. But she’s moving, following him, back the way she came. Through the doors, car to car, passing the people she no doubt scared with her search for her son.

“He’s up here,” the man says.

He takes her by the hand. She thinks to pull away, but she wants to get there. Wants to get to Tom.

“He’s okay? He’s alive?”

“Yes,” the man says. “He’s absolutely fine. This way.”

Malorie is partially dragged now, partially jogs alongside the man. They pass through another car, walk another hall.

“Are we in storage now?” she asks.

Have they come that far?

“He’s right here,” the man says. “One more car up.”

“Are you sure you saw—”

“One hundred percent sure.”

He’s tugging on her, drags her to the next set of doors.

Malorie reaches out with her other hand, feels for anything familiar. What car is she in? How deep back into the train have they come?

She hears movement to her right. Someone in storage?

“Just on the other side of these doors,” the man says.

Malorie pulls her hand from his.

“A teenager? Black hair?”

The man laughs. “Ma’am. I told you I saw him. Right through here.”

His hands on her shoulders now, through sliding doors, out into the open air.

She can’t see it, but she knows this is where she boarded the train. The platform her teens pulled her onto, as the safety of Camp Yadin receded.

“Tom?” Malorie asks.

It’s a different voice that responds. Not her son. Not the man who took her here.

But a voice she recognizes all the same.

“Take her, Nate,” the second man says. Malorie imagines a beard. A briefcase. Hands tearing down the drapes in the house in which she gave birth to her son.

“No,” she says.

But it’s so obviously yes.

The blindfold is torn from her face.

“I’ll meet you at Athena’s,” the second man says to the first.

“No,” Malorie says.

But it’s so irreversibly yes.

She turns to reach for the train’s back door, but her hands only find other hands. Hands that grip her hard.