Runaway

preparatory breath.
    “No, Nancy.”
    All this time she had been waiting for him to say one true word. All this afternoon or maybe a good part of her life. She had been waiting, and now he had said it.
    No.
    It might have been taken as a refusal of the offer she had not quite made. It could have struck her as arrogant, insufferable. But in fact what she heard was clear and tender and seemed at the moment as full of understanding as any word that had ever been spoken to her.
No.
    She knew the danger of anything she might say. The danger of her own desire, because she didn’t really know what sort of desire it was, what it was for. They had shied away from whatever that was years ago, and they would surely have to do so now that they were old—not terribly old, but old enough to appear unsightly and absurd. And unfortunate enough to have spent their time together lying.
    For she had been lying too, in her silence. And for the time being, she would go on lying.
    “No,” he said again, with humility but without embarrassment. “It wouldn’t turn out well.”
    Of course it wouldn’t. And one reason was that the first thing she was going to do when she got home was write to that place in Michigan and find out what had happened to Tessa, and bring her back to where she belonged.
    The road is easy if you know enough to travel light.
    The piece of paper Adam-and-Eve had sold to her remained in her jacket pocket. When she finally fished it out—back home, after not having worn that jacket again for nearly a year—she was bewildered and irritated by the words that were stamped on it.
    The road wasn’t easy. The letter to Michigan had come back unopened. Apparently no such hospital existed anymore. But Nancy discovered that there were inquiries you could make, and she set out to make them. There were authorities to be written to, records to be unearthed if possible. She did not give up. She would not admit that the trail had gone cold.
    In the case of Ollie, she was maybe going to have to admit it. She had sent a letter to Texada Island—thinking that address might be enough, there must be so few people there that any of them could be found. But it had come back to her, with one word written on the envelope.
Moved.
    She could not bear to open it up and read what she had said. Too much, she was sure.
    FLIES ON THE WINDOWSILL
    She is sitting in Wilf’s old recliner in the sunroom of her own house. She does not intend to go to sleep. It is a bright afternoon late in the fall—in fact, it is Grey Cup day, and she is supposed to be at a potluck party, watching the game on television. She made an excuse at the last moment. People are getting used to her doing this sort of thing now—some still say they are worried about her. But when she does show up old habits or needs reassert themselves and she sometimes can’t help turning into the life of the party. So they stop worrying for a while.
    Her children say that they hope she has not taken to Living in the Past.
    But what she believes she is doing, what she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.
    She doesn’t believe she is sleeping when she finds herself entering another room. The sunroom, the bright room behind her, has shrunk into a dark hall. The hotel key is in the door of the room, as she believes the keys used to be, though this is not something she has ever encountered in her own life.
    It is a poor kind of place. A worn-out room for worn-out travellers. A ceiling light, a rod with a couple of wire hangers on it, a curtain of pink and yellow flowered material that can be pulled around to hide the hanging clothes from view. The flowered material may be meant to supply the room with a note of optimism or even gaiety, but for some reason it does the opposite.
    Ollie lies down on the bed so suddenly and heavily that the springs give out a miserable whine. It seems that he and Tessa get around by car now, and he does all the driving. Today in the first heat and dust of spring it has made him extraordinarily tired. She cannot drive. She has made a good deal of noise opening the costume case and more noise behind the thin plank partition of the bathroom. He pretends to be asleep when she comes out, but through the slits of his eyelids he sees her looking into the dresser mirror, which is speckled in spots where the backing has flecked away. She is wearing the yellow satin