Runaway (25 page)

She asked if he was awake enough to drive now.

“Wide-awake. Bright as a dollar.”

He told her to slip her foot out of its sandal, and he felt and pressed it here and there before saying, “Nice. No heat. No swelling. Your arm hurt? Maybe it won’t.” He walked her to the door, and thanked her for her company. She was still amazed to be safely back. She hardly realized it was time to say good-bye.

As a matter of fact she does not know to this day if those words were spoken, or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continual, changing pressures that it seemed more than two arms were needed, that she was surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he was telling her she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stamp himself on her and go.

Early in the morning, the manager knocked on the dormitory door, calling for Grace.

“Somebody on the phone,” he said. “Don’t bother, they just wanted to know if you were here. I said I’d go and check. Okay now.”

It would be Maury, she thought. One of them, anyway. But probably Maury. Now she’d have to deal with Maury.

When she went down to serve breakfast—wearing her canvas shoes—she heard about the accident. A car had gone into a bridge abutment halfway down the road to Little Sabot Lake. It had been rammed right in, it was totally smashed and burned up. There were no other cars involved, and apparently no passengers. The driver would have to be identified by dental records. Or probably had been, by this time.

“One hell of a way,” the manager said. “Better to go and cut your throat.”

“It could’ve been an accident,” said the cook, who had an optimistic nature. “Could’ve just fell asleep.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Her arm hurt now as if it had taken a wicked blow. She couldn’t balance her tray but had to carry it in front of her, using both hands.

She did not have to deal with Maury face-to-face. He wrote her a letter.

Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go
.

She wrote back five words.
I did want to go
. She was going to add
I’m sorry
, but stopped herself.

Mr. Travers came to the inn to see her. He was polite and businesslike, firm, cool, not unkind. She saw him now in circumstances that let him come into his own. A man who could take charge, who could tidy things up. He said that it was very sad, they were all very sad, but that alcoholism was a terrible thing. When Mrs. Travers was a little better he was going to take her on a trip, a vacation, somewhere warm.

Then he said that he had to be going, many things to do. As he shook her hand good-bye he put an envelope into it.

“We both hope you’ll make good use of this,” he said.

The cheque was for one thousand dollars. Immediately she thought of sending it back or tearing it up, and sometimes even now she thinks that would have been a grand thing to do. But in the end, of course, she was not able to do it. In those days, it was enough money to insure her a start in life.

T
hey drove out of town around midnight—Harry and Delphine in the front seat and Eileen and Lauren in the back. The sky was clear and the snow had slid off the trees but had not melted underneath them or on the rocks that jutted out beside the road. Harry stopped the car by a bridge.

“This’ll do.”

“Somebody might see us stopped here,” Eileen said. “They might stop to check out what we’re up to.”

He started to drive again. They turned onto the first little country road, where they all got out of the car and walked carefully down the bank, just a short way, among black lacy cedars. There was a slight crackle to the snow, though the ground underneath was soft and mucky. Lauren was still wearing her pajamas under her coat, but Eileen had made her put on her boots.

“Okay here?” Eileen said.

Harry said, “It’s not very far off the road.”

“It’s far enough.”

This was the year after Harry had quit his job on a newsmagazine because he was burned out. He had bought the weekly newspaper in this small town which he remembered from his childhood. His family used to have a summer place on one of the little lakes around here, and he remembered drinking his first beer in the hotel on the main street. He and Eileen and Lauren went there for dinner on their first Sunday night in town.

But the bar was closed. Harry and Eileen had to drink water.

“How come?” said Eileen.

Harry raised his eyebrows at the hotel owner, who was also their waiter.

“Sunday?” he said.

“No license.” The owner had a thick—and, it seemed, disdainful—accent. He wore a shirt and tie, a cardigan, and trousers that looked as if they had grown together—all soft, rumpled, fuzzy, like an outer skin that was flaky and graying as his real skin must be underneath.

“Change from the old days,” said Harry, and when the man did not reply he went on to order roast beef all round.

“Friendly,” Eileen said.

“European,” said Harry. “It’s cultural. They don’t feel obliged to smile all the time.” He pointed out things in the dining room that were just the same—the high ceiling, the slowly rotating fan, even a murky oil painting showing a hunting dog with a rusty-feathered bird in its mouth.

In came some other diners. A family party. Little girls in patent shoes and scratchy frills, a toddling baby, a teenaged boy
in a suit, half-dead with embarrassment, various parents and parents of parents—a skinny and distracted old man and an old woman flopped sideways in a wheelchair and wearing a corsage. Any one of the women in their flowery dresses would have made about four of Eileen.

“Wedding anniversary,” Harry whispered.

On the way out he stopped to introduce himself and his family, to tell them that he was the new fellow at the paper, and to offer his congratulations. He hoped they wouldn’t mind if he took down their names. Harry was a broad-faced, boyish-looking man with a tanned skin and shining light-brown hair. His glow of well-being and general appreciation spread around the table—though not perhaps to the teenaged boy or the old couple. He asked how long those two had been married and was told sixty-five years.

“Sixty-five years,” cried Harry, reeling at the thought. He asked if he might kiss the bride and did, touching his lips to the long flap of her ear as she moved her head aside.

“Now you have to kiss the groom,” he said to Eileen, who smiled tightly and pecked the old man on the top of his head.

Harry asked the recipe for a happy marriage.

“Momma can’t talk,” said one of the big women. “But let me ask Daddy.” She shouted in her father’s ear, “Your advice for a happy marriage?”

He wrinkled up his face roguishly.

“All-eeze keep a foot on er neck.”

All the grown-ups laughed, and Harry said, “Okay. I’ll just put in the paper that you always made sure to get your wife’s agreement.”

Outside, Eileen said, “How do they manage to get that fat? I don’t understand it. You’d have to eat day and night to get that fat.”

“Strange,” said Harry.

“Those were canned green beans,” she said. “In August. Isn’t that when green beans are ripe? And out here in the middle of the country, where they are supposed to grow things?”

“Stranger than strange,” he said happily.

Almost immediately changes came to the hotel. In the former dining room there was a false ceiling put in—paperboard squares supported by strips of metal. The big round tables were replaced by small square tables, and the heavy wooden chairs by light metal chairs with maroon plastic—covered seats. Because of the lowered ceiling, the windows had to be reduced to squat rectangles. A neon sign in one of them said
WELCOME COFFEE SHOP
.

The owner, whose name was Mr. Palagian, never smiled or said a word more than he could help to anybody, in spite of the sign.

Just the same, the coffee shop filled up with customers at noon, or in the later hours of the afternoon. The customers were high school students, mostly from Grade Nine to Grade Eleven. Also some of the older students from the grade school. The great attraction of the place was that anybody could smoke there. Not that you could buy cigarettes if you looked to be under sixteen. Mr. Palagian was strict about that.
Not you
, he would say, in his thick, dreary voice.
Not you
.

By this time he had hired a woman to work for him, and if somebody who was too young tried buying cigarettes from her she would laugh.

“Who are you kidding, baby face.”

But someone who was sixteen or over could collect the money from those who were younger and buy a dozen packs.

Letter of the law, Harry said.

Harry stopped eating his lunch there—it was too noisy—but
he still came in for breakfast. He was hoping that one day Mr. Palagian would thaw out and tell the story of his life. Harry kept a file full of ideas for books and was always on the lookout for life stories. Someone like Mr. Palagian—or even that fat tough-talking waitress, he said—could be harboring a contemporary tragedy or adventure which would make a best seller.

The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities—see the humanity—in everybody you met. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that.
Be aware
.

Lauren made her own breakfast, usually cereal with maple syrup instead of milk. Eileen took her coffee back to bed and drank it slowly. She didn’t want to talk. She had to get herself in gear to face the day, working in the newspaper office. When she got herself sufficiently in gear—sometime after Lauren went off to school—she got out of bed and had a shower and got dressed in one of her casually provocative outfits. As the fall wore on this was usually a bulky sweater and a short leather skirt and brightly colored tights. Like Mr. Palagian, Eileen managed easily to look different from anybody else in that town, but unlike him she was beautiful, with her cropped black hair and her thin gold earrings like exclamation points, and her faintly mauve eyelids. Her manner in the newspaper office was crisp and her expression remote, but this was broken by strategic, vivid smiles.

They had rented a house at the edge of town. Just beyond their backyard began a vacationland wilderness of rocky knobs and granite slopes, cedar bogs, small lakes, and a transitional forest of poplars, soft maples, tamarack, and spruce. Harry loved it. He said that they might wake up one morning and look
out at a moose in the backyard. Lauren came home after school when the sun was already getting low in the sky and the middling warmth of the autumn day was turning out to be a fraud. The house was chilly and smelled of last night’s dinner, of stale coffee grounds and the garbage which it was her job to take out. Harry was making a compost heap—next year he meant to have a vegetable garden. Lauren carried the pail of peelings, apple cores, coffee grounds, leftovers, out to the edge of the woods, from which a moose or a bear might appear. The poplar leaves had turned yellow, the tamaracks held furry orange spikes up against the dark evergreens. She dumped the garbage, and shovelled dirt and grass cuttings over it, the way that Harry had shown her.

Her life was a lot different now from the way it had been just a few weeks ago, when she and Harry and Eileen were driving to one of the lakes to swim in the hot afternoons. Then later in the evenings, she and Harry had gone on adventure walks around the town, while Eileen sanded and painted and wallpapered the house, claiming she could do that faster and better on her own. All that she had wanted Harry to do then was to get all his boxes of papers and his filing cabinet and desk into a ratty little room in the basement, out of her way. Lauren had helped him.

One cardboard box she picked up was oddly light and it seemed to hold something soft, not like paper, more like cloth or yarn. Just as she said, “What’s this?” Harry saw her holding it and he said, “Hey.” Then he said, “Oh God.”

He took the box out of her hands and put it into a drawer of the filing cabinet, which he banged shut. “Oh God,” he said again.