Runaway

there’s no surname but they’ve got the address right. I suppose they could look that up.”
    Dear Juliet, I forgot which school it was that you’re
teaching at but the other day I remembered, out of the
blue, so it seemed to me a sign that I should write to you.
I hope you are still there but the job would have to be
pretty awful for you to quit before the term is up and anyway you didn’t strike me as a quitter.
    How do you like our west coast weather? If you think
you have got a lot of rain in Vancouver, then imagine
twice as much, and that’s what we get up here.
    I often think of you sitting up looking at the stairs
stars. You see I wrote stairs, it’s late at night and time I
was in bed.
    Ann is about the same. When I got back from my trip
I thought she had failed a good deal, but that was mostly
because I was able to see all at once how she had gone
downhill in the last two or three years. I had not noticed
her decline when I saw her every day.
    I don’t think I told you that I was stopping off in
Regina to see my son, who is now eleven years old. He
lives there with his mother. I noticed a big change in
him too.
    I’m glad I finally remembered the name of the school
but I am awfully afraid now that I can’t remember your
last name. I will seal this anyway and hope the name
comes to me.
    I often think of you.

I often think of you

I often think of you ZZZZZZ

    The bus takes Juliet from downtown Vancouver to Horseshoe Bay and then onto a ferry. Then across a mainland peninsula and onto another ferry and onto the mainland again and so to the town where the man who wrote the letter lives. Whale Bay. And how quickly—even before Horseshoe Bay—you pass from city to wilderness. All this term she has been living amongst the lawns and gardens of Kerrisdale, with the north shore mountains coming into view like a stage curtain whenever the weather cleared. The grounds of the school were sheltered and civilized, enclosed by a stone wall, with something in bloom at every season of the year. And the grounds of the houses around it were the same. Such trim abundance— rhododendrons, holly, laurel, and wisteria. But before you get even so far as Horseshoe Bay, real forest, not park forest, closes in. And from then on—water and rocks, dark trees, hanging moss. Occasionally a trail of smoke from some damp and battered-looking little house, with a yard full of firewood, lumber and tires, cars and parts of cars, broken or usable bikes, toys, all the things that have to sit outside when people are lacking garages or basements.
    The towns where the bus stops are not organized towns at all. In some places a few repetitive houses—company houses—are built close together, but most of the houses are like those in the woods, each one in its own wide cluttered yard, as if they have been built within sight of each other only accidentally. No paved streets, except the highway that goes through, no sidewalks. No big solid buildings to house Post Offices or Municipal Offices, no ornamented blocks of stores, built to be noticed. No war monuments, drinking fountains, flowery little parks. Sometimes a hotel, which looks as if it is only a pub. Sometimes a modern school or hospital—decent, but low and plain as a shed.
    And at some time—noticeably on the second ferry— she begins to have stomach-turning doubts about the whole business.
    I often think of you
    I think of you often
    That is only the sort of thing people say to be comforting, or out of a mild desire to keep somebody on the string.
    But there will have to be a hotel, or tourist cabins at least, at Whale Bay. She will go there. She has left her big suitcase at the school, to be picked up later. She has only her travelling bag slung over her shoulder, she won’t be conspicuous. She will stay one night. Maybe phone him.
    And say what?
    That she happens to be up this way to visit a friend. Her friend Juanita, from the school, who has a summer place— where? Juanita has a cabin in the woods, she is a fearless outdoor sort of woman (quite different from the real Juanita, who is seldom out of high heels). And the cabin has turned out to be not far south of Whale Bay. The visit to the cabin and Juanita being over, Juliet has thought—she has thought—since she was nearly there already—she has thought she might as well . . .
    Rocks, trees, water, snow. These things, constantly rearranged, made up the scene six months ago, outside the train window on a morning