Runaway

didn’t I go with you? A summer drive. What strength does it take to ride in a car? Daddy’s always saying I haven’t the strength.”
    “You came to meet me.”
    “Yes I did,” said Sara. “But he didn’t want me to. I had to throw a fit.”
    She reached around to pull up the pillows behind her head, but she could not manage it, so Juliet did it for her.
    “Drat,” said Sara. “What a useless piece of goods I am. I think I could handle a bath, though. What if company comes?”
    Juliet asked if she was expecting anybody.
    “No. But what if?”
    So Juliet took her into the bathroom and Penelope crawled after them. Then when the water was ready and her grand-mother hoisted in, Penelope decided that the bath must be for her as well. Juliet undressed her, and the baby and the old woman were bathed together. Though Sara, naked, did not look like an old woman as much as an old girl—a girl, say, who had suffered some exotic, wasting, desiccating disease.
    Penelope accepted her presence without alarm, but kept a firm hold on her own duck-shaped yellow soap.
    It was in the bath that Sara finally brought herself to ask, circumspectly, about Eric.
    “I’m sure he is a nice man,” she said.
    “Sometimes,” said Juliet casually.
    “He was so good to his first wife.”
    “Only wife,” Juliet corrected her. “So far.”
    “But I’m sure now you have this baby—you’re happy, I mean. I’m sure you’re happy.”
    “As happy as is consistent with living in sin,” Juliet said, surprising her mother by wringing out a dripping washcloth over her soaped head.
    “That’s what I mean,” said Sara after ducking and covering her face, with a joyful shriek. Then, “Juliet?”
    “Yes?”
    “You know I don’t mean it if I ever say mean things about Daddy. I know he loves me. He’s just unhappy.”
    Juliet dreamed she was a child again and in this house, though the arrangement of the rooms was somewhat different. She looked out the window of one of the unfamiliar rooms, and saw an arc of water sparkling in the air. This water came from the hose. Her father, with his back to her, was watering the garden. A figure moved in and out among the raspberry canes and was revealed, after a while, to be Irene—though a more childish Irene, supple and merry. She was dodging the water sprinkled from the hose. Hiding, reappearing, mostly successful but always caught again for an instant before she ran away. The game was supposed to be lighthearted, but Juliet, behind the window, watched it with disgust. Her father always kept his back to her, yet she believed—she somehow
saw
—that he held the hose low, in front of his body, and that it was only the nozzle of it that he turned back and forth.
    The dream was suffused with a sticky horror. Not the kind of horror that jostles its shapes outside your skin, but the kind that curls through the narrowest passages of your blood.
    When she woke that feeling was still with her. She found the dream shameful. Obvious, banal. A dirty indulgence of her own.
    There was a knock on the front door in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody used the front door—Juliet found it a bit stiff to open.
    The man who stood there wore a well-pressed yellow shirt with short sleeves, and tan pants. He was perhaps a few years older than she was, tall but rather frail-looking, slightly hollowchested, but vigorous in his greeting, relentless in his smiling.
    “I’ve come to see the lady of the house,” he said.
    Juliet left him standing there and went into the sunroom.
    “There’s a man at the door,” she said. “He might be selling something. Should I get rid of him?”
    Sara was pushing herself up. “No, no,” she said breathlessly. “Tidy me a bit, can you? I heard his voice. It’s Don. It’s my friend Don.”
    Don had already entered the house and was heard outside the sunroom door.
    “No fuss, Sara. It’s only me. Are you decent?”
    Sara, with a wild and happy look, reached for the hairbrush she could not manage, then gave up and ran her fingers through her hair. Her voice rang out gaily. “I’m as decent as I’ll ever be, I’m afraid. Come in here.”
    The man appeared, hurried up to her, and she lifted her arms to him. “You smell of summer,” she said. “What is it?” She fingered his shirt. “Ironing. Ironed cotton. My, that’s nice.”
    “I did it myself,” he said. “Sally’s over at the church messing about with the flowers. Not a bad job, eh?”
    “Lovely,”