Runaway (23 page)

“He got away,” said Dana.

Gretchen and Mrs. Travers and even Mavis had come hurrying out of the house, thinking the cry came from one of the children.

“She’s got a bloody foot,” said Dana. “There’s blood all over the ground.”

Janey said, “She cut it on a shell. Dana left those shells here, she was going to build a house for Ivan. Ivan her snail.”

Then there was a basin brought out, water to wash the cut, a towel, and everyone was asking how much it hurt.

“Not too bad,” said Grace, limping to the steps, with both little girls competing to hold her up and generally getting in her way.

“Oh, that’s nasty,” Gretchen said. “But why weren’t you wearing your shoes?”

“Broke her strap,” said Dana and Janey together, as a wine-colored convertible, making very little sound, swerved neatly round in the parking space.

“Now, that is what I call opportune,” said Mrs. Travers. “Here’s the very man we need. The doctor.”

This was Neil, the first time Grace had ever seen him. He was tall, spare, quick-moving.

“Your bag,” cried Mrs. Travers gaily. “We’ve already got a case for you.”

“Nice piece of junk you’ve got there,” said Gretchen. “New?”

Neil said, “Piece of folly.”

“Now the baby’s wakened.” Mavis gave a sigh of unspecific accusation and she went back into the house.

Janey said severely, “You can’t do anything without that baby waking up.”

“
You
better be quiet,” said Gretchen.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t got it with you,” said Mrs. Travers. But Neil swung a doctor’s bag out of the back seat, and she said, “Oh, yes you have, that’s good, you never know.”

“You the patient?” Neil said to Dana. “What’s the matter? Swallow a toad?”

“It’s her,” said Dana with dignity. “It’s
Grace.
”

“I see. She swallowed the toad.”

“She
cut her foot
. It’s bleeding and bleeding.”

“On a clamshell,” said Janey.

Now Neil said “Move over” to his nieces, and sat on the step below Grace, and carefully lifted the foot and said, “Give me that cloth or whatever,” then carefully blotted away the blood to get a look at the cut. Now that he was so close to her, Grace
noticed a smell she had learned to identify this summer working at the inn—the smell of liquor edged with mint.

“It sure is,” he said. “It’s bleeding and bleeding. That’s a good thing, clean it out. Hurts?”

Grace said, “Some.”

He looked searchingly, though briefly, into her face. Perhaps wondering if she had caught the smell, and what she thought about it.

“I bet. See that flap? We have to get under there and make sure it’s clean, then I’ll put a stitch or two in it. I’ve got some stuff I can rub on so that won’t hurt as bad as you might think.” He looked up at Gretchen. “Hey. Let’s get the audience out of the way here.”

He had not spoken a word, as yet, to his mother, who now repeated that it was such a good thing that he had come along just when he did.

“Boy Scout,” he said. “Always at the ready.”

His hands didn’t feel drunk, and his eyes didn’t look it. Neither did he look like the jolly uncle he had impersonated when he talked to the children, or the purveyor of reassuring patter he had chosen to be with Grace. He had a high pale forehead, a crest of tight curly gray-black hair, bright gray eyes, a wide thin-lipped mouth that seemed to curl in on some vigorous impatience, or appetite, or pain.

When the cut had been bandaged, out on the steps—Gretchen having gone back to the kitchen and made the children come with her, but Mrs. Travers remaining, watching intently, with her lips pressed together as if promising that she would not make any interruptions—Neil said that he thought it would be a good idea to run Grace into town, to the hospital.

“For an anti-tetanus shot.”

“It doesn’t feel too bad,” said Grace.

Neil said, “That’s not the point.”

“I agree,” said Mrs. Travers. “Tetanus—that’s terrible.”

“We shouldn’t be long,” he said. “Here. Grace? Grace, I’ll get you to the car.” He held her under one arm. She had strapped on the one sandal, and managed to get her toes into the other so that she could drag it along. The bandage was very neat and tight.

“I’ll just run in,” he said, when she was sitting in the car. “Make my apologies.”

To Gretchen? To Mavis.

Mrs. Travers came down from the verandah, wearing the look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her, and indeed irrepressible, on this day. She put her hand on the car door.

“This is good,” she said. “This is very good. Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”

Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence, a weepy gladness leaking out of her eyes. And a faint crust showing at the corners of her mouth, like sugar.

The hospital was in Carleton Place, three miles away. There was a highway overpass above the railway tracks, and they took this at such speed that Grace had the impression that at its crest the car had lifted off the pavement, they were flying. There was hardly any traffic about, she was not frightened, and anyway there was nothing she could do.

Neil knew the nurse who was on duty in Emergency, and after he had filled out a form and let her take a passing look at Grace’s
foot (“Nice job,” she said without interest), he was able to go ahead and give the tetanus shot himself. (“It won’t hurt now, but it could later.”) Just as he finished, the nurse came back into the cubicle and said, “There’s a guy in the waiting room to take her home.”

She said to Grace, “He says he’s your fiancé.”

“Tell him she’s not ready yet,” Neil said. “No. Tell him we’ve already gone.”

“I said you were in here.”

“But when you came back,” said Neil, “we were gone.”

“He said you were his brother. Won’t he see your car in the lot?”

“I parked out back. I parked in the doctors’ lot.”

“Pret-ty tric-ky,” said the nurse, over her shoulder.

And Neil said to Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?”

“No,” said Grace, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she was having her eyes tested.

Once more she was helped to the car, sandal flopping from the toe strap, and settled on the creamy upholstery. They took a back street out of the lot, an unfamiliar way out of the town. She knew they wouldn’t see Maury. She did not have to think of him. Still less of Mavis.

Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her, the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.

Her memory of this day remained clear and detailed, though there was a variation in the parts of it she dwelt on.

And even in some of those details she must have been wrong.

First they drove west on Highway 7. In Grace’s recollection, there is not another car on the highway, and their speed approaches the flight on the highway overpass. This cannot have been true—there must have been people on the road, people on their way home that Sunday morning, on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families. On their way to church or coming home from church. Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages or the edges of towns, and for the many curves on the old highway. She was not used to driving in a convertible with the top down, wind in her eyes, wind taking charge of her hair. That gave her the illusion of constant speed, perfect flight—not frantic but miraculous, serene.

And though Maury and Mavis and the rest of the family were wiped from her mind, some scrap of Mrs. Travers did remain, hovering, delivering in a whisper and with a strange, shamed giggle, her last message.

You’ll know how to do it
.

Grace and Neil did not talk, of course. As she remembers it, you would have had to scream to be heard. And what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like. The fortuitous meeting, the muted but powerful signals, the nearly silent flight in which she herself would figure more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, flesh nothing now but a stream of desire.

They stopped, finally, at Kaladar, and went into the hotel—the old hotel which is still there. Taking her hand, kneading his fingers between hers, slowing his pace to match her uneven steps. Neil led her into the bar. She recognized it as a bar, though she had never been in one before. (Bailey’s Falls Inn did not yet have a license—drinking was done in people’s rooms, or in a rather ramshackle so-called nightclub across the road.) This was just as she would have expected—an airless darkened big
room, with the chairs and tables put back in a careless way after a hasty cleanup, a smell of Lysol not erasing the smell of beer, whisky, cigars, pipes, men.

There was nobody there—perhaps it wasn’t open till afternoon. But might it not now be afternoon? Her idea of time seemed faulty.

Now a man came in from another room, and spoke to Neil. He said, “Hello there, Doc,” and went behind the bar.

Grace believed that it would be like this—everywhere they went, there would be somebody Neil knew already.

“You know it’s Sunday,” the man said in a raised, stern, almost shouting voice, as if he wanted to be heard out in the parking lot. “I can’t sell you anything in here on a Sunday. And I can’t sell anything to her, ever. She shouldn’t even be in here. You understand that?”

“Oh yes, sir. Yes indeed, sir,” said Neil. “I heartily agree, sir.”

While both men were talking, the man behind the bar had taken a bottle of whisky from a hidden shelf and poured some into a glass and shoved it to Neil across the counter.

“You thirsty?” he said to Grace. He was already opening a Coke. He gave it to her without a glass.

Neil put a bill on the counter and the man shoved it away.

“I told you,” he said. “Can’t sell.”

“What about the Coke?” said Neil.

“Can’t sell.”

The man put the bottle away, Neil drank what was in the glass very quickly. “You’re a good man,” he said. “Spirit of the law.”

“Take the Coke along with you. Sooner she’s out of here the happier I’ll be.”

“You bet,” Neil said. “She’s a good girl. My sister-in-law. Future sister-in-law. So I understand.”

“Is that the truth?”

They didn’t go back to Highway 7. Instead they took the road north, which was not paved, but wide enough and decently graded. The drink seemed to have had the opposite effect to what drinks were supposed to have on Neil’s driving. He had slowed down to the seemly, even cautious, rate this road required.

“You don’t mind?” he said.

Grace said, “Mind what?”

“Being dragged into any old place.”

“No.”

“I need your company. How’s your foot?”

“It’s fine.”

“It must hurt some.”

“Not really. It’s okay.”

He picked up the hand that was not holding the Coke bottle, pressed the palm of it to his mouth, gave it a lick, and let it drop.

“Did you think I was abducting you for fell purposes?”

“No,” lied Grace, thinking how like his mother that word was.
Fell
.

“There was a time when you would have been right,” he said, just as if she had answered yes. “But not today. I don’t think so. You’re safe as a church today.”

The changed tone of his voice, which had become intimate, frank, and quiet, and the memory of his lips pressed to, then his tongue flicked across, her skin, affected Grace to such an extent that she was hearing the words, but not the sense, of what he was telling her. She could feel a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin. But she thought to say, “Churches aren’t always safe.”

“True. True.”

“And I’m not your sister-in-law.”

“Future. Didn’t I say future?”

“I’m not that either.”

“Oh. Well. I guess I’m not surprised. No. Not surprised.”

Then his voice changed again, became businesslike.

“I’m looking for a turnoff up here, to the right. There’s a road I ought to recognize. Do you know this country at all?”

“Not around here, no.”

“Don’t know Flower Station? Oompah, Poland? Snow Road?”

She had not heard of them.

“There’s somebody I want to see.”

A turn was made, to the right, with some dubious mutterings on his part. There were no signs. This road was narrower and rougher, with a one-lane plank-floored bridge. The trees of the hardwood forest laced their branches overhead. The leaves were late to turn this year because of the strangely warm weather, so these branches were still green, except for the odd one here and there that flashed out like a banner. There was a feeling of sanctuary. For miles Neil and Grace were quiet, and there was still no break in the trees, no end to the forest. But then Neil broke the peace.