And is Tom the one to have done it?

Tom the man appears in her mind’s eye. A man who so desperately wanted the world to cheer just like this.

“CLOSE YOUR EYES!” Malorie yells. And her voice is torn fabric.

Olympia guides her, but even Olympia seems enamored with what has happened.

Where’s Gary?

“Where’s Gary?”

“Mom!” Olympia is crying. Elation in her voice. “Mom! Tom did it!”

“Where’s Gary?”

Then…a voice.

A man’s. But not Gary’s. As if in a dream tortured so long it’s become a nightmare, Malorie hears the voice of her father.

It comes from deep within the darkness, her darkness, a depth even she has never been. She tries to repudiate it, to shove back, to refuse it just as she tried to shove Gary moments ago.

Now isn’t the time for false hope. Now isn’t the time to dream again.

“Malorie?”

But it is Dad’s voice. Real or imagined.

“Who…” Olympia begins to ask.

“What’s going on?” Malorie asks.

“Who…” Olympia says again.

“Malorie Walsh?” the man asks.

Dad’s voice again. Out of the darkness. Close to her ear.

“Oh, my God…” Malorie says. She grips Olympia’s arm for support.

When it becomes real, the truth of it, Sam Walsh, here, his fingers to her face, it hurts. It’s so powerful, the implications of this voice, this real voice, that it turns the light on behind her fold for the first time in seventeen years.

“Help,” she says. Because she can’t take it. All of this. At once.

Sam Walsh speaks again.

“I heard the boy call your name,” he says. “And your voice…I recognize your voice…”

Fingers again, on her face.

“Mal?”

Malorie breathes in. She holds it.

She hopes.

“Dad?”

The familiar hands are on her shoulders now. Olympia is saying something impossible, telling her this could be her dad.

And Olympia can see him.

“Oh, my God, Mom,” Olympia says. “Oh, my God…”

“I’m Sam Walsh,” her father’s voice says. “Are you Malorie?”

Malorie falls to her knees. This can’t be. It’s simply too much. There are so many voices out here. Tom’s on a stage. Olympia’s by her side.

And her father…

She wants to tear the fold from her face.

But even now…she lives by it.

The man is beside her, low. He’s on his knees. Olympia describes the impossible scene. She tells Malorie yes, yes, as a crowd who leaves their dead unburied cheer for her son, her son who may be going mad, even as Olympia tells her he’s not, even as Olympia sounds excited by all of this, by Tom, but also by this man, this familiar touch and smell and sound, beside her, the two of them together on their knees in an impossible street in Hell.