Runaway

real estate office. Willard’s house is still the same, more or less. He had a stroke a few years ago but made a good recovery, though he has to walk with two canes. When he was in the hospital Robin saw quite a lot of him. He talked about what good neighbors she and Joanne had been, and what fun they had playing cards.
    Joanne has been dead for eighteen years, and after selling the house Robin has moved away from old associations. She doesn’t go to church anymore, and except for those who become patients in the hospital, she hardly ever sees the people she knew when she was young, the people she went to school with.
    The prospects of marriage have opened up again, in a limited way, at her time of life. There are widowers looking around, men left on their own. Usually they want a woman experienced at marriage—though a good job doesn’t come amiss either. But Robin has made it clear that she isn’t interested. The people she has known since she was young say she never has been interested, that’s just the way she is. Some of the people she knows now think she must be a lesbian, but that she has been brought up in an environment so primitive and crippling that she can’t acknowledge it.
    There are different sorts of people in town now, and these are the people she has made friends with. Some of them live together without being married. Some of them were born in India and Egypt and the Philippines and Korea. The old patterns of life, the rules of earlier days, persist to some extent, but a lot of people go their own way without even knowing about such things. You can buy almost any kind of food you want, and on a fine Sunday morning you can sit at a sidewalk table drinking fancy coffee and enjoying the sound of church bells, without any thought of worship. The beach is no longer surrounded by railway sheds and warehouses—you can walk on a board-walk for a mile along the lake. There is a Choral Society and a Players Society. Robin is still very active in the Players Society, though not onstage so much as she once was. Several years ago she played Hedda Gabler. The general response was that it was an unpleasant play but that she played Hedda splendidly. An especially good job as the character—so people said—was so much the opposite of herself in real life.
    Quite a number of people from here go to Stratford these days. She goes instead to see plays at Niagara-on-the-Lake.
    Robin notes the three cots lined up against the opposite wall.
    “What’s up?” she says to Coral, the nurse at the desk.
    “Temporary,” says Coral, in a dubious tone. “It’s the redistribution.”
    Robin goes to hang her coat and bag up in the closet behind the desk, and Coral tells her that these cases are from Perth County. It’s some kind of switch on account of overcrowding there, she says. Only somebody got their wires crossed and the county facility here isn’t ready for them yet, so it’s been decided to park them here for the time being.
    “Should I go over and say hello?”
    “Up to you. Last I looked they were all out of it.”
    The three cots have their sides up, the patients lying flat. And Coral was right, they all seem to be sleeping. Two old women and one old man. Robin turns away, and then turns back. She stands looking down at the old man. His mouth is open and his false teeth, if he has any, have been removed. He has his hair yet, white and cropped short. Flesh fallen away, cheeks sunken, but still a face broad at the temples, retaining some look of authority and—as when she last saw it—of perturbation. Patches of shrivelled, pale, almost silvery skin, probably where cancerous spots have been cut away. His body worn down, legs almost disappearing under the covers, but still some breadth in the chest and shoulders, very much as she remembers.
    She reads the card attached to the foot of his bed.
    Alexander Adzic.
    Danilo. Daniel.
    Perhaps that is his second name. Alexander. Or else he has lied, taken the precaution of telling a lie or half a lie, right from the start and nearly to the end.
    She goes back to the desk and speaks to Coral.
    “Any info on that man?”
    “Why? Do you know him?”
    “I think I might.”
    “I’ll see what there is. I can call it up.”
    “No hurry,” Robin says. “Just when you have time. It’s only curiosity. I better go now and see my people.”
    It is Robin’s job to talk to these patients twice a week, to write reports on them, as to how their delusions or