cowt 11 sett 2 M2: a very short story (the stand, lucy & leo, larry/lucy, pg13)

[janie_tangerine]

 Sometimes, she looks at them and cries.

 

She wishes it was because she was happy, and thing is, she is, she is and she loves them more than she had thought she could love another human being except — except for Larry and Leo, she supposes, though it’s different.

 

It’s just —

 

It’s that they don’t look like her.

 

She told a few people that. They just looked at her as if she was seeing things. They are what, a year old?, they always tell her. You can’t know that. And you miss him still. Lucy, really, they do look like you, they really do.

 

Yeah, no. She asked Leo once, too.

 

“Hey,” she asks, “there is no wrong answer to this, but they’re all Larry, aren’t they?”

 

Leo had stared at her for a moment, looking embarrassed, and then —

 

“They are,” he had agreed, “but — they’re yours, too.”

 

She had thanked him, and then looked back at them, sleeping next to each other in the two cribs Stu put together for her before he left with Frannie and who knows if they’ll ever be back, though Lucy honestly hopes they do, and —

 

Thing is.

 

She didn’t want them to look like her, either.

 

Larry told her that he honestly didn’t care for naming their child after his father or his grandfather or whoever, at most he could have named him after Bruce Springsteen if it was a boy but he hadn’t thought about it for a girl, either, so she could just choose and he’d vet it or not, except that Larry isn’t here to vet anything anymore and it was two and one is a boy and one is a girl and so she named the first one Bruce and the girl she named Nicole because no other boy has been born here lately and she thinks someone should honor Nick Andros as much as people like to not think about him these days. Everyone except Tom.

 

Tom loves Nicole best, of course he does. She finds it heartwarming.

 

But that’s not the point.

 

The point is that they both have their father’s brown hair and eyes, and she can see him in the shape of their mouths and nose and she hopes someone can teach them to play when they’re older, maybe Leo can, she never could manage a chord or two, and no she won’t teach them Baby Can You Dig Your Man, almost no one dares singing that either these days, too, but she just hopes they’ll be able to make their own music because no child of Larry Underwood’s shouldn’t, not when it was such a crucial part of him.

 

She wishes she had him longer.

 

She doesn’t wish she had been Nadine Cross, because at the end Larry chose her, didn’t he, homelier, not-as-flashy, plainer Lucy Swann, and then went and died when the hand of God touched Las Vegas and left her with his babies and at least he left something of himself behind for her to remember him by.

 

She always cries when she looks at them and thinks she won’t ever see him anymore, not until the Hand of God comes for her, too.

 

And maybe she’s a hypocrite, but she does sing Baby Can You Dig Your Man as she rocks them to sleep when that happens and she pulls them close to her chest, either one or both, and she thinks, it was such a short time, such a short story, ours, I wish we had more time, I wish I wish I wish I wish, but what is it good for, wishing when she can’t certainly change reality?

 

Nothing. 

 

Doesn't matter.

 

What matters is that she has them and she has Leo and she dreams at night that Larry comes to her and holds her tight and kisses her and makes love to her until she’s crying and holding him back with nails grasping at her skin, close close close, and tells him she doesn’t want him to go and he replies that they’ll see each other for good, just not now, and that it had to happen but now she can live her life and the world will be a better place, and when she wakes up she’s crying again even as she smiles a tiny bit, and —

 

I wish we had so much more time, she thinks as she looks at the twins sleeping against each other in the crib. But I’ll have to make sure I never forget what little we had.

 

And if one of those days she goes downstairs, finds Leo having breakfast and he tells her that Larry did give him the draft of some songs he had started to write again before having to leave, and that one was about them, and that he thinks he named it a very short story but what lyrics he had written said it had been his best, then who can blame her for tearing up again?

“I could finish it,” Leo says. “I think. Maybe. At least the music. Would you like that?”

 

“Yes,” she smiles back at him. “Yes, I would like that very much.”

 

So maybe he also left her a song.

 

She thinks she can live with that.

 

Until they see each other again.

 

 

End.