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“You won’t be waiting alone,” he said.
She hugged him tight again for that and they lay there together without moving for a long time.
Nadine Cross had been in the living room of her old place for almost five minutes, gathering things up, before she saw him sitting in the chair in the corner, naked except for his underpants, his thumb in his mouth, his strange gray-green Chinese eyes watching her. She was so startled—as much by the knowledge that he h...
“Joe… I mean Leo…”
She put a hand on her chest above the swell of her breasts as if to quell the crazy beating of her heart. But her heart was not ready to slow yet, hand or no hand. Catching sudden sight of him was bad; catching sight of him dressed and acting the way he had been when she had first made his acquaintance in New Hampshire...
“You scared the dickins out of me,” she finished weakly.
Joe said nothing.
She walked slowly over to him, half expecting to see a long kitchen knife in one of his hands, as in days of yore, but the hand which was not at his mouth was curled blamelessly in his lap. She saw that his body had been milked of its tan. The old scars and bramble-scratches were gone. But the eyes were the same… eyes ...
“What are you doing here?”
Joe said nothing.
“Why aren’t you with Larry and Lucy-mom?”
No reply.
“You can’t stay here,” she said, trying to reason with him, but before she could go on, she found herself wondering how long he had already been here.
This was the morning of August 24. She had spent the previous two nights at Harold’s. The thought that he might have been sitting in that chair with his thumb corked securely in his mouth for the last forty hours came to her. It was a ridiculous idea, of course, he would have to eat and drink (wouldn’t he?), but once t...
(Joe? Leo?)
his previous self had been neatly and completely disposed of. Now he was back. And he was here.
“You can’t stay here,” she said. “I just came back to get some things. I’m moving out. I’m moving in with a… with a man.”
Oh, is that what Harold is? some interior voice mocked. I thought he was just a tool, a means to an end.
“Leo, listen—”
His head shook, faintly but visibly. His eyes, stern and glittering, fixed upon her face.
“You’re not Leo?”
That faint shake came again.
“Are you Joe?”
A nod, just as faint.
“Well, all right. But you have to understand that it really doesn’t matter who you are,” she said, trying to be patient. That crazy feeling that she was in a time-warp, that she was back to square one, persisted. It made her feel unreal and frightened. “That part of our lives—the part where we were together and on our ...
But his strange eyes remained fixed upon hers, seeming to deny this.
“And stop staring at me,” she snapped. “It’s very impolite to stare at people.”
Now his eyes seemed to become faintly accusatory. They seemed to suggest that it was also impolite to leave people on their own, and more impolite still to withdraw one’s love from people who still needed and depended on it.
“It’s not as if you’re on your own,” she said, turning and beginning to pick up the books she had dropped. She knelt clumsily and without grace, her knees popping like firecrackers as she did so. She began to stuff the books into the packsack willy-nilly, on top of her sanitary napkins and her aspirin and her underthin...
“You have Larry and Lucy. You want them, and they want you. Well, Larry wants you, and that’s all that matters, because she wants all the things he does. She’s like a piece of carbon paper. Things are different for me now, Joe, and that’s not my fault. That’s not my fault at all. So you can just stop trying to guilt-tr...
She began trying to buckle the packsack’s clasps but her fingers were trembling uncontrollably and it was hard work. The silence grew heavier and heavier around them.
At last she stood up, shrugging the packsack onto her shoulders.
“Leo.” She tried to speak calmly and reasonably, the way she used to speak to difficult children in her classes when they had tantrums. It just wasn’t possible. Her voice was all in jigs and jags, and the little shake of his head which greeted her use of the word Leo made it even worse.
“It wasn’t Larry and Lucy,” Nadine said viciously. “I could have understood that, if that was all it was. But it was really that old bag you gave me up for, wasn’t it? That stupid old woman in her rocking chair, grinning at the world with her false teeth. But now she’s gone, and so you come running back to me. But it w...
Joe said nothing.
“And when I begged Larry… got down on my knees and begged him… he couldn’t be bothered. He was too busy playing big man. So you see, none of this is my fault. None of it! ”
The boy only stared at her impassively.
Her terror began to return, burying her incoherent rage. She backed away from him to the door and fumbled behind her for the knob. She found it at last, turned it, and jerked the door open. The rush of cool outside air against her shoulders was very welcome.
“Go to Larry,” she muttered. “Goodbye, kiddo.”
She backed out awkwardly and stood on the top step for a moment, trying to gather her wits. It suddenly occurred to her that the whole thing might have been a hallucination, brought on by her own guilt feelings… guilt at abandoning the boy, guilt at making Larry wait too long, guilt at the things she and Harold had don...
“Tapping, ever tapping at my chamber door,” she whispered aloud without thinking, and that made her utter a horrid, croaking little giggle, probably not much different from the sounds ravens actually made.
Still, she had to know.
She went to the window beside the front steps and looked into the living room of what had once been her house. Not that it had ever been hers, not really. When you lived in a place and all you wanted to take out of it when you left would fit in one packsack, it had never really been yours to begin with. Looking in, she...
Nadine fled, stumbling, almost falling over the low wire wickets which protected the flower bed to the left of the window where she had looked in. She flung herself onto her Vespa and got it started. She drove with reckless speed for the first few blocks, slaloming in and out of the stalled cars which still littered th...
By the time she reached Harold’s, she had gotten herself under some kind of control. But she knew it had to end quickly for her here in the Zone. If she wanted to keep her sanity, she must soon be away.
The meeting at Munzinger Auditorium went well. They began by singing the National Anthem again, but this time most of them remained dry-eyed; it was simply a part of what would soon become ritual. A Census Committee was voted routinely with Sandy DuChiens in charge. She and her four helpers immediately began going thro...
The elective period of the Free Zone Committee was brought up, and after some extravagant suggestions (ten years was one, life another, and Larry brought down the house by saying they sounded more like prison terms than those of elective office), the yearly term was voted in. Harry Dunbarton’s hand waved near the back ...
Bellowing to make himself heard, Harry said: “Even a year may be too much. I have nothing at all against the ladies and gentlemen of the committee, I think you’re doing a helluva job”—cheers and whistles—“but this is gonna get out of hand before long if we keep gettin bigger.”
Glen raised his hand, and Stu acknowledged him.
“Mr. Chairman, this isn’t on the agenda, but I think Mr. Dunbarton there has an excellent point.”