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 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-trip me."
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 won't play, do you hear me? It won't play! "
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 done, and the much worse things which were waiting. Perhaps there had been no real boy in that house at all. No more real than the phantasms of Poe - the beating of the old man's heart, sounding like a watch wrapped in cotton, or the raven perched on the bust of Pallas.
"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.