Runaway

about.
    “Just a minute, just a minute, you’ll be all right,” she said. He held himself upright, hands pressed down on the counter, head lowered.
    There was no orange juice—she remembered giving Penelope the last of it that morning, thinking she must get more. But there was a bottle of grape soda, which Sam and Irene liked to drink when they came in from work in the garden.
    “Here,” she said. Managing with one hand, as she was used to doing, she poured out a glassful. “Here.” And as he drank she said, “I’m sorry there’s no juice. But it’s the sugar, isn’t it? You have to get some sugar?”
    He drank it down, he said, “Yeah. Sugar. Thanks.” Already his voice was clearing. She remembered this too, about the girl at the school—how quick and apparently miraculous the recovery. But before he was quite recovered, or quite himself, while he was still holding his head at a slant, he met her eyes. Not on purpose, it seemed, just by chance. The look in his eyes was not grateful, or forgiving—it was not really personal, it was just the raw look of an astounded animal, hanging on to whatever it could find.
    And within a few seconds the eyes, the face, became the face of the man, the minister, who set down his glass and without another word fled out of the house.
    Sara was either asleep or pretending to be, when Juliet went to pick up the tea tray. Her sleeping state, her dozing state, and her waking state had now such delicate and shifting boundaries that it was hard to identify them. At any rate, she spoke, she said in little more than a whisper, “Juliet?”
    Juliet paused in the doorway.
    “You must think Don is—rather a simpleton,” Sara said. “But he isn’t well. He’s a diabetic. It’s serious.”
    Juliet said, “Yes.”
    “He needs his faith.”
    “Foxhole argument,” said Juliet, but quietly, and perhaps Sara did not hear, for she went on talking.
    “My faith isn’t so simple,” said Sara, her voice all shaky (and seeming to Juliet, at this moment, strategically pathetic). “I can’t describe it. But it’s—all I can say—it’s something. It’s a— wonderful—
something.
When it gets really bad for me—when it gets so bad I—you know what I think then? I think, all right. I think— Soon.
Soon I’ll see Juliet.
”
    Dreaded (Dearest) Eric,
    Where to begin? I am fine and Penelope is fine. Considering. She walks confidently now around Sara’s bed
but is still leery of striking out with no support. The summer heat is amazing, compared with the west coast. Even
when it rains. It’s a good thing it does rain because Sam
is going full-tilt at the market garden business. The other
day I rode around with him in the ancient vehicle delivering fresh raspberries and raspberry jam (made by a sort
of junior Ilse Koch person who inhabits our kitchen) and
newly dug first potatoes of the season. He is quite gungho. Sara stays in bed and dozes or looks at outdated fashion magazines. A minister came to visit her and he and I
got into a big stupid row about the existence of God or
some such hot topic. The visit is going okay though . . .
    This was a letter that Juliet found years later. Eric must have saved it by accident—it had no particular importance in their lives.
    She had gone back to the house of her childhood once more, for Sara’s funeral, some months after that letter was written. Irene was no longer around, and Juliet had no memory of asking or being told where she was. Most probably she had married. As Sam did again, in a couple of years. He married a fellow teacher, a good-natured, handsome, competent woman. They lived in her house—Sam tore down the house where he and Sara had lived, and extended the garden. When his wife retired, they bought a trailer and began to go on long winter trips. They visited Juliet twice at Whale Bay. Eric took them out in his boat. He and Sam got along well. As Sam said, like a house afire.
    When she read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some past fabricated self. She wondered at the sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories. Then she thought that some shift must have taken place, at that time, which she had not remembered. Some shift concerning where home was. Not at Whale Bay with Eric but back where it had been before, all her life before.
    Because it’s what happens at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you