Malorie(77)

“Did a census man ever come to your door?”

Sam seems to think about this. Malorie hears the wind through the leaves on the trees. Hears leaves gently swept across the lawn.

“Yes,” Sam says. “A little man. Very dangerous what he was doing. Your mother said it was noble. We offered him our place to stay for the night, but he said he had a lot of work to do.”

Malorie feels fresh tears behind her fold. She wants to find this man. Wants to let him know that what he did, what he does, it works.

“Let’s go see Mary,” Sam says.

He guides Malorie down concrete steps to the lawn. She can hear a fence rattling by that same wind. The fold is tight to her face.

“Here,” Sam says. “It’s not much. But I dug it myself and that means something to me.”

“How did she…”

“In her sleep, Mal. Thank God it wasn’t the creatures.” He kneels, guiding Malorie to do the same. She feels stone beneath her fingers. A large block of it. Leaves and grass, too. “Here.”

Then his hand slips from hers and Malorie is left alone with Mary Walsh. Until now, she believed she’d already lamented the death of her mother. But it strikes her, in full, here, that she’s never been allowed to grieve.

The creatures stole the time to do so.

“I missed you so much,” Malorie finally says.

Then she’s crying too hard to speak.



* * *



—

Malorie visits Mary every day for the two weeks they’ve stayed in this house. Not all of Indian River is as progressive as what she witnessed, without sight, in the town square. She understands why Sam didn’t leave. Despite the behavior by some that she considered unfathomably dangerous only fourteen days ago, she also gets it. People in the new world fall into two categories: safe and unsafe.

But who’s to say which lives the better, fuller life?

She thinks of Gary a lot. Too much.

She is preparing herself, she knows.

Olympia is on watch.

The teens join her at Mary’s graveside often. They tell her stories, about the river, about the school for the blind, about Camp Yadin, and the Blind Train. Malorie talks about Shannon. It feels good to do it. She describes the people she met in the house. About Tom’s namesake. About Olympia the woman. Felix, Jules, Cheryl, Don. Even Victor. And she can tell by the looks on her teens’ faces when they get back inside that they’re hearing a lot of this for the first time. Has it really been so difficult for her to relive the house? The people she met, loved, and lost?

Sam tells her of his crossbow kept in the home’s front closet. He says he’s killed numerous deer with it. Blind.

There are moments, wonderful hours, in which Malorie feels like she’s home in the Upper Peninsula where she grew up. As if this were the house she was raised in. As if far in the backyard is a cluster of trees she once ran away to, a place where Sam and Mary Walsh knew she would go.

While they eat canned goods in the kitchen, Tom tells Malorie what happened. He’d made the glasses all the way back in Camp Yadin but was too afraid to try them out. He brought them with him despite her telling him not to. Here, in Indian River, on stage, two men attempted to view a creature from the other side of the glass, the two-way mirror from a local grocery store. They didn’t go mad. About the time Malorie arrived is when Tom tried it himself.

He saw a creature through the glass. Yes. He saw Malorie, too.

Every time he tells the story, Malorie thinks she’s going to be horrified by the ending.

But she just isn’t.

Tom’s here. He’s sane. And maybe, maybe, he’s done something to change the world.

The people of Indian River are attempting to mass-produce the visors, Tom says. People have been sent to find more material from neighboring towns.

Olympia and Tom spend time outside. They look out there. Neither is mad. And when they’re inside again they tell and retell their stories to Malorie and Sam.

Sam takes Malorie’s hand often. He silently tells her it’s okay.

And it is.

Her teens are living, for the first time in their lives. One by way of genetics, the other by the creativity of his own mind.

Malorie endured. She delivered them to this moment in time. Dad and Mom endured. Many people in Indian River have, too.

Even those who didn’t deserve it.

“Teach me how to use that bow,” Malorie says one morning, alone with Sam in the living room. She’s ready now.

Sam nods.

“Of course.”



* * *



—

Olympia and Tom guide her as Malorie carries the weapon. She didn’t outright tell Sam what she’s doing, but he knows.

She hasn’t been able to bring herself to use Tom’s visor. It would be what feels like a seventeen-year leap. Yet, getting this done requires being able to see.

So she uses the eyes of her children.

This is the fourth time they’ve gone into town, looking for him, the man Tom still mistakenly calls Henry. The man Olympia knew, instinctively, was wrong from the start.

With each trip out, Malorie steels herself for change. She has never killed anybody. She has never had to pull a trigger, slit a throat, strangle an intruder. None of the dangerous people they encountered on their myriad journeys. Not even the uncommon strangers discovered in Camp Yadin, the place she last called home.