The Stand

chump.”

“I can understand that,” Stu said, thinking of how much Fran wanted her baby.

“The doctor said even if it was the superflu, maybe two immune people could make an immune baby,” Ralph said hopefully.

“The chances that the natural father of Fran’s baby was immune are about one in a billion, I guess,” Stu said. “He sure isn’t here.”

“Yeah, I guess it couldn’t hardly be, could it? I’m sorry to have to put this on you, Stu. But I thought you’d better know. So you could tell her.”

“I don’t look forward to that,” Stu said.

But when he got home he found that someone else had already done it.

“Frannie?”

No answer. Supper was on the stove—burnt on, mostly—but the apartment was dark and quiet.

Stu came into the living room and looked around. There was an ashtray on the coffee table with two cigarette butts in it, but Fran didn’t smoke and they weren’t his brand.

“Babe?”

He went into the bedroom and she was there, lying on the bed in the semigloom, looking at the ceiling. Her face was puffy and tear-streaked. “Hi Stu,” she said quietly.

“Who told you?” he asked angrily. “Who just couldn’t wait to spread the good news? Whoever it was, I’ll break their damn arm.”

“It was Sue Stern. She heard it from Jack Jackson. He’s got a CB, and he heard that doctor talking with Ralph. She thought she better tell me before someone else made a bad job of it. Poor little Frannie. Handle with care. Do not open until Christmas.” She uttered a little laugh. There was a desolation in that sound that made Stu feel like crying.

He came across the room and lay down beside her on the bed and stroked her hair off her forehead. “Honey, it’s not sure. No way that it’s sure.”

“I know it’s not. And maybe we could have our own babies, even so.” She turned to look up at him, her eyes red-rimmed and unhappy. “But I want this one. Is that so wrong?”

“No. Course not.”

“I’ve been lying here waiting for him to move, or something. I’ve never felt him move since that night Larry came looking for Harold. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“I felt the baby move and I didn’t wake you up. Now I wish I had. I sure do.” She began to cry again and put an arm over her face so he wouldn’t see her doing it.

Stu took the arm away, stretched out beside her, kissed her. She hugged him fiercely and then lay passively against him. When she spoke, the words were half muffled against his neck.

“Not knowing makes it that much worse. Now I just have to wait and see. It seems like such a long time to have to wait and see if your baby is going to die before it’s spent a day outside of your body.”

“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 had been sitting there all the time as by the actual sudden sight of him—that her heart took a high, frightened leap in her chest and she screamed. The paperbacks she had been about to stuff into her packsack tumbled to the floor in a flutter of pages.

“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 was even worse. It was too much of a return, as if some irrational god had suddenly bundled her viciously through a time- warp and condemned her to live the last six weeks all over again.

“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 that could haunt you. Whatever had been in them, a little more each day, since he had come to the fire to listen to Larry play the guitar, was now utterly gone. His eyes were as they had been when she first met him, and this filled her with a creeping sort of terror.

“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 the thought/image had come, it would not leave. That sense of creepiness came over her again, and she realized with something like despair how much she herself had changed: once she had slept fearlessly next to this little savage, at a time when he had been armed and dangerous. Now he was without weapons, but she found herself in terror of him. She had thought

(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 own—that part is gone. You’ve changed, I’ve changed, and we can’t change back.”

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 underthings—plain cotton underthings, quite different from the ones she wore for Harold’s frantic amusement.

“You have Larry and Lucy. You want them, and they want you. Well, Larry wants