Reborn

4

Carol had hoped to hide it from him, but it didn't work. Bill looked up from where he had spread a blanket on the lawn and leapt to his feet.

"Carol? What's wrong?"

Sobbing, she told him about the phone call.

"Damn!" he said. "What is wrong with those people?"

"I don't know! They frighten me!"

"You've got to get the police in on this. Have them watch the house."

"I think you're right. I'll call them after lunch." She looked down at the blanket. "I thought we were going to eat in the gazebo."

"It's warmer out here in the sun."

She dropped to her knees on the blanket and stared at the tuna-fish sandwiches. What little appetite she had before the call was completely gone now.

"How'd they learn I was pregnant? I found out less than two days ago."

Bill seated himself across from her. He didn't seem much interested in eating, either.

"It means they've been watching you."

Carol glanced around at the willows, the house, the empty Sound. Watched! It gave her the creeps. And it made her suddenly glad that Jonah Stevens would be around.

"Aren't they ever going to leave me alone?"

"Eventually, yes. Once all this publicity dies down, they'll find some other ripe target for their paranoia. Until then, maybe you should reconsider Emma's offer to put you up with them. Or maybe you could stay with my folks. They'd love to have you."

"No. This is the only home I have now. I'm staying here."

She was angry that she should even have to consider hiding from these kooks. But she worried about the baby. Could they really want to hurt her baby?

Jim's baby.

"The voice on the phone—I think it was a woman—said I'm carrying the Antichrist."

Bill stared at her. "And you believe that?"

"Well, no, but—"

"No buts, Carol. Either you believe you're carrying a perfectly normal human baby or you don't. Normal baby or supernatural monster—I don't see much middle ground here."

"But Jim's being a clone—"

"Not that again!"

"Well, it bothers me, what they said. What if they're right? What if a clone really isn't a new human being? I mean, it's really just an outgrowth of cells from an already existing human being. Can it have a soul?"

She watched with dismay as Bill's assured expression faltered.

"How can I answer that, Carol? In the two-thousand-year history of the Church, the question has never arisen."

"Then you don't know!"

"I can tell you this much: Jim was a man, a human, an individual. He had a right to a soul. I believe he had one."

"But you're not sure!"

"Of course I'm not sure," he said gently. "That's what faith is all about. It's believing when you can't be sure."

She thought of the awful dreams she had been having, the consummate evil depicted within them. Were those dreams originating in her womb and filtering up to her subconscious? What if they were more than fantasies? What if they were memories'!

"But what if what you believe is wrong? What if Jim had no soul and Satan used him as a passage into… into me!"

She was losing it. She could feel all control slipping away. Then Bill reached over and squeezed her hand.

"I told you about Satan. He's a fiction. So is the rest of this mumbo jumbo. This isn't a horror story, Carol. This is real life. Antichrists get born in works of fiction, not in Monroe, Long Island."

She felt the panic flow out of her. She was acting silly. But right then, surfacing in the midst of the flood of relief, came a fleeting burst of hatred for Bill and for the comfort he had brought her. Why?

She forced a laugh. "Maybe I should stop thinking so much."

Bill smiled and held out the platter of sandwiches to her.

"Maybe you should."

She took one. She felt so much better now. Maybe she could get something down.

5

Time to go.

Lunch, what little they'd eaten, was over. Bill looked at his watch and reluctantly decided that he had better be hitting the road soon. It had been a hectic weekend, a decided change of pace from the routine of St. F.'s. He knew he couldn't survive this kind of stress too often. Who could? But he realized that all the stresses Carol had put him through since his arrival on Friday afternoon were but a sampling of the pressure weighing upon her hour after hour, day after day. Bad enough that Jim had died a week ago today, but then to learn that she was carrying his baby, and now to have some paranoid lamebrain call and tell her she's carrying the Antichrist!

The limitless possibilities for perversity in daily life never failed to astound him.

Time to go.

Bill looked at Carol sitting across the blanket and felt as if he were looking through her sundress. He kept seeing her naked body as she had stood before him on Friday afternoon. Her breasts with their erect nipples, her fuzzy pubic triangle…

Time to go.

It was torture being near her like this. And he was ashamed of the regret he felt for not giving into her on Friday. He tried to push it away, walk on, and leave it behind, but it kept at his heels, nagging at him, tugging on his sleeve.

To his dismay he realized he loved her, had always loved her, but had submerged the feeling in a well of daily prayer and busy work and ritual. Now the old feelings had bobbed to the surface and lay floating between them like a murdered corpse.

If he didn't get out of here soon…

"Time to go," he said.

Carol nodded resignedly. "I guess so. Thanks for staying."

She reached out and grasped both his hands, her touch sending an unwelcome thrill through him. "Thanks for everything this weekend. If you hadn't been there Friday, I might have died."

"If I hadn't been there, maybe you wouldn't have—" He stopped, unable to speak of it. "Maybe nothing would have happened."

She released his hands. "Yes. Maybe."

They got up, Carol taking the sandwich platter and he taking the blanket. As he turned to shake it out downwind he heard her cry out.

"Bill! Look!"

He turned and saw her pointing to a patch of brown grass at her feet.

"What's wrong?"

"That grass! That's where I was sitting! And now it's dead, just like the grass over Jim's grave!"

"Easy, Carol—"

"Bill, something's wrong, I know it! Something's terribly wrong!"

"Come on, will you? It's not even spring yet! Some big stray dog probably emptied his bladder there this winter and it hasn't had a chance to turn green again!"

"That's right where I was sitting!" she said. "Did you see it there before you put the blanket down? Did you?"

Seeing the panic in her eyes, he decided to lie.

"Now that you mention it, yes. I do remember seeing a brown patch there."

The relief on her face made the lie worthwhile. Actually he didn't remember seeing any dead grass there before. But of course, he hadn't been looking for it.

"Let's just do a little experiment, shall we?" he said. "Follow me."

Earlier, while waiting for Carol to come out, he had wandered around the backyard and had noticed a row of geraniums blooming in the greenhouse on the south side of the mansion. He led her now to the steamy glass enclosure. The pungent odor of the red-orange blossoms filled the room.

"Here," he said, pointing out a specimen with particularly long stems. "Wrap your fingers around one of those and hold it for a moment without squeezing."

"Why?"

"Because I want to prove to you that neither grass nor flowers nor anything else dies because of you or Jim or your baby."

Glancing at him uncertainly, she knelt and did as he had told her. Bill sent up a silent prayer that this moment would pass free from another example of life's limitless possible perversities.