"You left tracks in the dew."
"Oh." She looked at him closely, examining him, and although he wanted to, Larry didn't drop his eyes. "I don't want you to be angry with us. I suppose that sounds ridiculous after Joe just tried to kill you, but Joe isn't responsible."
"Is that his real name?"
"No, just what I call him."
"He's like a savage in a National Geographic TV show."
"Yes, just like that. I found him on the lawn of a house - his house, maybe, the name was Rockway - sick from a bite. A rat bite, maybe. He doesn't talk. He growls and grunts. Until this morning I've been able to control him. But I... I'm tired, you see... and..." She shrugged. Marsh-mud was drying on her blouse in what could have been a series of Chinese ideograms. "I dressed him at first. He took everything off but his underpants. Eventually I got tired of trying. The minges and mosquitoes don't seem to bother him." She paused. "I want us to come with you. I guess there is no way to be coy about it, under the circumstances."
Larry wondered what she would think if he told her about the last woman who had wanted to come with him. Not that he ever would; that episode was deeply buried, even if the woman in question was not. He was no more anxious to bring up Rita than a murderer would be to drag his victim's name into parlor conversation.
"I don't know where I'm going," he said. "I came up from New York City, the long way around, I guess. The plan was to find a nice house on the coast and just lie up there until October or so. But the longer I go, the more I want other people. The longer I go, the more all of this seems to hit me."
He was expressing himself badly and didn't seem to be able to do better without bringing up Rita or his bad dreams about the dark man. "I've been scared a lot of the time," he said carefully, "because I'm on my own. Pretty paranoid. It's like I expected Indians to just swoop down and scalp me."
"In other words, you've stopped looking for houses and started looking for people."
"Yes, maybe."
"You've found us. That's a start."
"I do believe you found me. And that boy worries me, Nadine. I have to be up front about that. His knife's gone, but the world is full of knives just lying around waiting to be picked up."
"Yes."
"I don't want to sound brutal..." He trailed off, hoping she would say it for him, but she said nothing at all, only looked at him with those dark eyes.
"Would you consider leaving him?" There it was, spat out like a lump of rock, and he still didn't sound like much of a nice guy... but was it right, was it fair to either of them, to make a bad situation worse by burdening themselves with a ten-year-old psychopath? He had told her he was going to sound brutal, and he supposed he had. But they were in a brutal world now.
Meanwhile, Joe's odd seawater-colored eyes bored into him.
"I couldn't do that," Nadine said calmly. "I understand the danger, and I understand that the danger would be primarily to you. He's jealous. He's afraid that you might become more important to me than he is. He might very well try to... try to get at you again unless you can make friends with him or at least convince him you don't mean to..." She trailed off, leaving that part vague. "But if I left him, that would be the same as murder. And I won't be a party to that. Too many have died to kill more."
"If he cuts my throat in the middle of the night, you'll be a party to that."
She bowed her head.
Speaking so quietly that only she could hear (he didn't know if Joe, who was watching them, understood what they were talking about or not), Larry said, "He probably would have done it last night if you hadn't come after him. Isn't that the truth?"
Softly she replied: "Those are things that might be."
Larry laughed. "The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come?"
She looked up. "I want to come with you, Larry, but I can't leave Joe. You will have to decide."
"You don't make it easy."
"These days it's no easy life."
He thought about it. Joe sat on the soft shoulder of the road, watching them with his seawater eyes. Behind them, the real sea moved restlessly against the rocks, booming in its secret channels where it had infiltrated the land.
"All right," he said. "I think you're being dangerously softhearted, but... all right."
"Thank you," Nadine said. "I will be responsible for his actions."
"That will be a great comfort if he kills me."