“Tom,” she says, as if her son were in this room (safer room?) with her. “Tom, please. Don’t be angry. Don’t do anything unsafe. Please, Tom, don’t be unsafe.”

Please,

Tom

don’t go mad.

She recalls the name Indian River, spoken in a familiar voice. Just before being shoved from the train. But the moment she thinks it was Gary, the voice shrinks further into her head, a spider avoiding detection.

Indian River, she knows, is no place for her. It doesn’t matter if they’ve caught a creature there or not. The kind of community that would celebrate something like that is…

“Fucking insane,” she says. And her voice is rising with panic and guilt.

Her breathing picks up again. She can’t sit still. She tries climbing the walls.

Oh, Malorie shouldn’t have brought Tom and Olympia to the train. She shouldn’t have let them taste the new world. Certainly not a train. She didn’t have to bring them. There were options. She could’ve searched for her parents on her own.

But now…

This is Malorie’s fault.

The things people say about her are true. Paranoid. Overbearing. A helicopter mom. And here she thought there was no other way to be. Here she couldn’t be any other way.

She remembers swatting a two-year-old Tom with a flyswatter when he woke with his open eyes. She remembers slapping his face in the cabin on the train. She remembers yelling, so much yelling, so much saying no no no, Tom, NO!

But if you tell someone no enough times, they start thinking yes, just to hear something else, just to hear a different word, they start thinking yes.

Malorie imagines Tom’s young face standing before a group of new-world lunatics, the lot of them excited to pull back a tarp, to show him what they’ve caught. That’s the world Tom wants. Like the one in Indian River. She sees his blue eyes, huge now in her mind, his black hair, hair like hers. Young Tom bracing himself for that fabulous rebellion, making small fists to fool himself into feeling bigger than he actually is. She sees something in his mind, his brain, the spot where actual insanity begins. She hears it flutter, coming alive.

She imagines the tarp pulled back.

She sees Tom’s eyes go wide, wider.

Because that’s why they’d want Malorie out of the way, right? The people who put her here? Why else if not to get to her kids?

She opens her mouth to say the name Gary, but she won’t do it. Can’t.