Runaway

beaten up. And everybody would find out and it would be bad for our business.”
    Sylvia gently smiled.
    “Is this a time to think about that?”
    Then Carla actually laughed. “I know,” she said, “I’m insane.”
    “Listen,” said Sylvia. “Listen to me. If you had the money to go, would you go? Where would you go? What would you do?”
    “I would go to Toronto,” Carla said readily enough. “But I wouldn’t go near my brother. I’d stay in a motel or something and I’d get a job at a riding stable.”
    “You think you could do that?”
    “I was working at a riding stable the summer I met Clark. I’m more experienced now than I was then. A lot more.”
    “You sound as if you’ve figured this out,” said Sylvia thoughtfully.
    Carla said, “I have now.”
    “So when would you go, if you could go?”
    “Now. Today. This minute.”
    “All that’s stopping you is lack of money?”
    Carla took a deep breath. “All that’s stopping me,” she said.
    “All right,” said Sylvia. “Now listen to what I propose. I don’t think you should go to a motel. I think you should take the bus to Toronto and go to stay with a friend of mine. Her name is Ruth Stiles. She has a big house and she lives alone and she won’t mind having somebody to stay. You can stay there till you find a job. I’ll help you with some money. There must be lots and lots of riding stables around Toronto.”
    “There are.”
    “So what do you think? Do you want me to phone and find out what time the bus goes?”
    Carla said yes. She was shivering. She ran her hands up and down her thighs and shook her head roughly from side to side.
    “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I’ll pay you back. I mean, thank you. I’ll pay you back. I don’t know what to say.”
    Sylvia was already at the phone, dialling the bus depot.
    “Shh, I’m getting the times,” she said. She listened, and hung up. “I know you will. You agree about Ruth’s? I’ll let her know. There’s one problem, though.” She looked critically at Carla’s shorts and T-shirt. “You can’t very well go in those clothes.”
    “I can’t go home to get anything,” said Carla in a panic. “I’ll be all right.”
    “The bus will be air-conditioned. You’ll freeze. There must be something of mine you could wear. Aren’t we about the same height?”
    “You’re ten times skinnier.”
    “I didn’t use to be.”
    In the end they decided on a brown linen jacket, hardly worn—Sylvia had considered it to be a mistake for herself, the style too brusque—and a pair of tailored tan pants and a cream-colored silk shirt. Carla’s sneakers would have to do with this outfit, because her feet were two sizes larger than Sylvia’s.
    Carla went to take a shower—something she had not bothered with in her state of mind that morning—and Sylvia phoned Ruth. Ruth was going to be out at a meeting that evening, but she would leave the key with her upstairs tenants and all Carla would have to do was ring their bell.
    “She’ll have to take a cab from the bus depot, though. I assume she’s okay to manage that?” Ruth said.
    Sylvia laughed. “She’s not a lame duck, don’t worry. She is just a person in a bad situation, the way it happens.”
    “Well good. I mean good she’s getting out.”
    “Not a lame duck at all,” said Sylvia, thinking of Carla trying on the tailored pants and linen jacket. How quickly the young recover from a fit of despair and how handsome the girl had looked in the fresh clothes.
    The bus would stop in town at twenty past two. Sylvia decided to make omelettes for lunch, to set the table with the dark-blue cloth, and to get down the crystal glasses and open a bottle of wine.
    “I hope you’re hungry enough to eat something,” she said, when Carla came out clean and shining in her borrowed clothes. Her softly freckled skin was flushed from the shower, and her hair was damp and darkened, out of its braid, the sweet frizz now flat against her head. She said she was hungry, but when she tried to get a forkful of the omelette to her mouth her trembling hands made it impossible.
    “I don’t know why I’m shaking like this,” she said. “I must be excited. I never knew it would be this easy.”
    “It’s very sudden,” said Sylvia. “Probably it doesn’t seem quite real.”
    “It does, though. Everything now seems really real. Like the time before now, that’s when I was in a daze.”
    “Maybe when you make up your mind to