Runaway

behind these scrawled words there was an angry-looking, wrinkled-up, almost teary creature with thin hair blowing back from her cheeks and forehead. Dry-looking pale reddish-brown hair. Always go lighter than your own color, the hairdresser had said. Her own color was dark, dark brown, nearly black.
    No, it wasn’t. Her own color now was white.
    It happens only a few times in your life—at least it’s only a few times if you’re a woman—that you come upon yourself like this, with no preparation. It was as bad as those dreams in which she might find herself walking down the street in her night-gown, or nonchalantly wearing only the top of her pajamas.
    During the past ten or fifteen years she had certainly taken time out to observe her own face in a harsh light so that she could better see what makeup could do, or decide whether the time had definitely come to start coloring her hair. But she had never had a jolt like this, a moment during which she saw not just some old and new trouble spots, or some decline that could not be ignored any longer, but a complete stranger.
    Somebody she didn’t know and wouldn’t want to know.
    She smoothed out her expression immediately, of course, and there was an improvement. You could say then that she recognized herself. And she promptly began to cast around for hope, as if there was not a minute to lose. She needed to spray her hair so it wouldn’t blow off her face like that. She needed a more definite shade of lipstick. Bright coral, which you could hardly ever find now, instead of this nearly naked, more fashionable, and dreary pinkish brown. Determination to find what she needed at once turned her around—she had seen a drugstore three or four blocks back—and a desire not to have to pass by Adam-and-Eve again made her cross the street.
    If this had not happened, the meeting would never have taken place.
    Another old person was coming along the sidewalk. A man, not tall, but upright and muscular, bald to the crown of his head, where there was a frill of fine white hair, blowing every which way just as hers did. An open-necked denim shirt, old jacket and pants. Nothing that made him look as if he was trying to resemble the young men on the street—no ponytail or kerchief or jeans. And yet he could never have been mistaken for the sort of man she had been seeing daily for the last couple of weeks.
    She knew almost right away. It was Ollie. But she stopped dead, having a considerable reason for believing that this could not be true.
    Ollie. Alive. Ollie.
    And he said, “Nancy!”
    The expression on her face (once she got over a moment of terror, which he didn’t seem to notice) must be pretty much the same as the expression on his. Incredulity, hilarity, apology.
    What was the apology about? The fact that they had not parted as friends, that they had never been in touch with each other in all these years? Or for the changes that had taken place in each of them, the way they had to present themselves now, no hope for it.
    Nancy had more reason to be shocked than he had, surely. But she would not bring that up for a moment. Not until they got their bearings.
    “I’m just here overnight,” she said. “I mean, last night and tonight. I’ve been on a cruise to Alaska. With all the other old widows. Wilf is dead, you know. He’s been dead for nearly a year. I’m starving. I’ve been walking and walking. I hardly know how I got here.”
    And she added, quite foolishly, “I didn’t know you lived here.” Because she hadn’t thought of his living anywhere. But she hadn’t been absolutely sure of his being dead, either. As far as she could make out, Wilf hadn’t had any news of that kind. Though she could not get much out of Wilf, he had slipped out of reach, even during the short time she had been on that jaunt to see Tessa in Michigan.
    Ollie was saying that he didn’t live in Vancouver, he too was in town just briefly. He had come for a medical thing, at the hospital, just a routine sort of thing. He lived on Texada Island. Where that was, he said, was too complicated to explain. Enough to say that it took three boats, three ferries, to get there from here.
    He led her to a dirty white Volkswagen van, parked on a side street, and they drove to a restaurant. The van smelled of the ocean, she thought, of seaweed and fish and rubber. And it turned out that fish was what he ate now, never meat. The restaurant, which had no more than half a dozen little tables,