Runaway

can.
    But she had not protected Sara. When Sara had said,
soon I’ll
see Juliet,
Juliet had found no reply. Could it not have been managed? Why should it have been so difficult? Just to say
Yes.
To Sara it would have meant so much—to herself, surely, so little. But she had turned away, she had carried the tray to the kitchen, and there she washed and dried the cups and also the glass that had held grape soda. She had put everything away.

SILENCE

    On the short ferry ride from Buckley Bay to Denman Island, Juliet got out of her car and stood at the front of the boat, in the summer breeze. A woman standing there recognized her, and they began to talk. It is not unusual for people to take a second look at Juliet and wonder where they’ve seen her before, and, sometimes, to remember. She appears regularly on the Provincial Television channel, interviewing people who are leading singular or notable lives, and deftly directing panel discussions, on a program called
Issues of
the Day.
Her hair is cut short now, as short as possible, and has taken on a very dark auburn color, matching the frames of her glasses. She often wears black pants—as she does today—and an ivory silk shirt, and sometimes a black jacket. She is what her mother would have called a striking-looking woman.
    “Forgive me. People must be always bothering you.”
    “It’s okay,” Juliet says. “Except when I’ve just been to the dentist or something.”
    The woman is about Juliet’s age. Long black hair streaked with gray, no makeup, long denim skirt. She lives on Denman, so Juliet asks her what she knows about the Spiritual Balance Centre.
    “Because my daughter is there,” Juliet says. “She’s been on a retreat there or taking a course, I don’t know what they call it. For six months. This is the first time I’ve got to see her, in six months.”
    “There are a couple of places like that,” the woman says. “They sort of come and go. I don’t mean there’s anything suspect about them. Just that they’re generally off in the woods, you know, and don’t have much to do with the community. Well, what would be the point of a retreat if they did?”
    She says that Juliet must be looking forward to seeing her daughter again, and Juliet says yes, very much.
    “I’m spoiled,” she says. “She’s twenty years old, my daughter—she’ll be twenty-one this month, actually—and we haven’t been apart much.”
    The woman says that she has a son of twenty and a daughter of eighteen and another of fifteen, and there are days when she’d pay them to go on a retreat, singly or all together.
    Juliet laughs. “Well. I’ve only the one. Of course, I won’t guarantee that I won’t be all for shipping her back, given a few weeks.”
    This is the kind of fond but exasperated mother-talk she finds it easy to slip into (Juliet is an expert at reassuring responses), but the truth is that Penelope has scarcely ever given her cause for complaint, and if she wanted to be totally honest, at this point she would say that one day without some contact with her daughter is hard to bear, let alone six months. Penelope has worked at Banff, as a summer chambermaid, and she has gone on bus trips to Mexico, a hitchhiking trip to Newfoundland. But she has always lived with Juliet, and there has never been a six-month break.
    She gives me delight,
Juliet could have said.
Not that she is
one of those song-and-dance purveyors of sunshine and cheer and
looking-on-the-bright-side. I hope I’ve brought her up better than
that. She has grace and compassion and she is as wise as if she’d been
on this earth for eighty years. Her nature is reflective, not all over the
map like mine. Somewhat reticent, like her father’s. She is also
angelically pretty, she’s like my mother, blond like my mother but
not so frail. Strong and noble. Molded, I should say, like a caryatid.
And contrary to popular notions I am not even faintly jealous. All
this time without her—and with no word from her, because Spiritual
Balance does not allow letters or phone calls—all this time I’ve been
in a sort of desert, and when her message came I was like an old
patch of cracked earth getting a full drink of rain.
    Hope to see you Sunday afternoon. It’s time.
    Time to go home, was what Juliet hoped this meant, but of course she would leave that up to Penelope.
    Penelope had drawn a rudimentary map, and Juliet shortly found herself parked in front of an old church—that is, a