Malorie(70)

She knew what it was right away. Even at six she understood it was the thing Malorie had raised her to fear. Yet, gazing upon it, she didn’t feel any worse than she did when she woke up that morning. She was scared. But that was all. And the fear never quite eclipsed any she’d known before. Not even the fear she felt when Malorie told her they were taking a river they’d never even swam in.

More importantly: she didn’t feel crazy. Nothing like that at all. Maybe she was too young to know what mad might feel like, but she wasn’t too young to think.

In fact, the only thing she was worried about, really, was the idea that someone else might see it, too. That someone else would come around the corner and go mad and hurt everybody. Malorie talked about that potentiality all the time.

Then someone did come.

Annette.

Olympia had long wondered about the red-haired woman who told everyone she was blind. She wondered because one night, late, Olympia left their bedroom (a converted classroom like all the rest) to use the bathroom alone. And there, in the stall, seated, she heard someone else enter. Someone who thought they were alone, too.

Olympia, embarrassed, already keeping secrets even then, though not of the magnitude she soon would, heard a match strike and saw a candle come to light, illuminating a sphere in the otherwise pitch-black darkness of the restroom. She peered through the stall door and saw the woman holding the candle to the mirror; saw Annette looking at herself.

Annette. Blind.

But looking.

So why pretend? Even then, so young, she guessed it had something to do with wanting to be unbothered. Wanting people to leave her alone. Wanting people to consider her safe in a world where anybody who can see is liability. Malorie herself spoke of Annette without fear. This meant something. In what Malorie called “the new world,” going unnoticed was good. For this, after a time, Olympia came to believe that Annette was simply still trying to be good.

In a world without personal possessions, secrets were precious indeed.

She saw the woman’s face clearly in the glass, floating features in the otherwise dark space. Olympia’s heart hammered in her young chest as she watched the woman’s eyes for the first time, saw them connect with her reflection in the glass, saw the relief in Annette’s face for being allowed to look, here, where she was sure she was alone.

Then Annette looked at Olympia.

Olympia wanted to gasp, wanted to cry out, wanted to say oh, no, don’t worry, I’d never, I’d never ever, I’d never ever tell a soul that you aren’t blind!

But Annette only stared. Then she blew out the candle, and the face seemed to vanish, a wisp of smoke, features swallowed by darkness once again.

Olympia didn’t move. Nor did she hear the woman, who was much older than Malorie, move. The two remained still in the darkness for what felt to Olympia like a very long time.

When Annette did move again, Olympia steeled herself, ready for the stall door to be thrust open, or worse, to creak slowly, as the old woman’s wrinkled hands entered the dark rectangle, searching for the body belonging to the pair of eyes that had caught her.

The girl who knew her secret.

But Annette did not come. Rather, her bare feet slapped the tiled floor on the way out of the bathroom, and Olympia remained still long after that same door swung closed.

“Don’t look,” she said to Annette, later, months later, as she set out to get the basket for Rick. As Annette rounded the corner. “There’s one at the end of the hall.”

Annette’s red hair hung vibrant to a powder-blue robe.

“Look?” she asked. “But I’m blind.”

“Oh,” Olympia said, because she didn’t know what else to say and because, too, she’d just seen a creature for the first time in her life. Even the word creature was starting to feel like the wrong name for what lurked at the end of the hall.

Then Annette looked.

Years later, now, leading Malorie up the road to Indian River, as her body seems to physically swell with the uncertainty of a brother who has fled and a mother who now knows she is immune, Olympia finds the room within herself to feel that lack of closure, that lack of understanding, once more: why did Annette look when someone told her not to?

Was it because Annette had seen her in the glass in the bathroom and wanted to discredit what Olympia knew to be true? Was it because the voice that warned her was young and Annette, so old, had simply had enough of taking orders, of living the way people had to in the new world?

Or maybe, Olympia still thinks, maybe the woman was curious. And nothing more.

She tells Malorie this story now. But saying it out loud doesn’t add any clarity. And Malorie doesn’t give her any opinions.

Mom, Olympia knows, is only thinking of Tom.

“You saw the massacre at the school for the blind,” Malorie says.

“I did.”

Olympia guides Malorie around another turn. Still no sign of Tom ahead. It’s possible Gary knows a shortcut to the community. Malorie said so.

“I’m so sorry,” Malorie says. “I should’ve helped you with that. I could’ve.”

She hears the sorrow in her mom’s voice, and she doesn’t like it. The last thing she wants is to make Malorie feel worse. About anything.

Here, they rush to her son.

Here, they’ve gotten off the train that might take them to her parents.