Runaway

anybody. Every day when she was on her way home from work she had wondered if perhaps Penelope would be waiting in the apartment. Or at least that there would be a letter. And then there had been—that unkind card—and she had torn it open with her hands shaking.
    “It means something,” Christa said. “It lets you know she’s okay. Something will follow. It will. Be patient.”
    Juliet talked bitterly for a while about Mother Shipton. That was what she finally decided to call her, having toyed with and become dissatisfied with Pope Joan. What bloody chicanery, she said. What creepiness, nastiness, behind the second-rate, sweetly religious facade. It was impossible to imagine Penelope’s having been taken in by her.
    Christa suggested that perhaps Penelope had visited the place because she had considered writing something about it. Some sort of investigative journalism. Fieldwork. The personal angle—the long-winded personal stuff that was so popular nowadays.
    Investigating for six months? said Juliet. Penelope could have figured out Mother Shipton in ten minutes.
    “It’s weird,” admitted Christa.
    “You don’t know more than you’re letting on, do you?” said Juliet. “I hate to even ask that. I feel so at sea. I feel stupid. That woman intended me to feel stupid, of course. Like the character who blurts out something in a play and everybody turns away because they all know something she doesn’t know—”
    “They don’t do that kind of play anymore,” Christa said. “Now nobody knows anything. No—Penelope didn’t take me into her confidence any more than she did you. Why should she? She’d know I’d end up telling you.”
    Juliet was quiet for a moment, then she muttered sulkily, “There have been things you didn’t tell me.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Christa, but without any animosity. “Not that again.”
    “Not that again,” Juliet agreed. “I’m in a lousy mood, that’s all.”
    “Just hold on. One of the trials of parenthood. She hasn’t given you many, after all. In a year this will all be ancient history.”
    Juliet didn’t tell her that in the end she had not been able to walk away with dignity. She had turned and cried out beseechingly, furiously.
    “What did she tell you?”
    And Mother Shipton was standing there watching her, as if she had expected this. A fat pitying smile had stretched her closed lips as she shook her head.
    During the next year Juliet would get phone calls, now and then, from people who had been friendly with Penelope. Her reply to their inquiries was always the same. Penelope had decided to take a year off. She was travelling. Her travelling agenda was by no means fixed, and Juliet had no way of contacting her, nor any address she could supply.
    She did not hear from anybody who had been a close friend. This might mean that people who had been close to Penelope knew quite well where she was. Or it might be that they too were off on trips to foreign countries, had found jobs in other provinces, were embarked on new lives, too crowded or chancy at present to allow them to wonder about old friends.
    (Old friends, at that stage in life, meaning somebody you had not seen for half a year.)
    Whenever she came in, the first thing Juliet did was to look for the light flashing on her answering machine—the very thing she used to avoid, thinking there would be someone pestering her about her public utterances. She tried various silly tricks, to do with how many steps she took to the phone, how she picked it up, how she breathed.
Let it be her.
    Nothing worked. After a while the world seemed emptied of the people Penelope had known, the boyfriends she had dropped and the ones who had dropped her, the girls she had gossiped with and probably confided in. She had gone to a private girls’ boarding school—Torrance House—rather than to a public high school, and this meant that most of her longtime friends—even those who were still her friends at college—had come from places out of town. Some from Alaska or Prince George or Peru.
    There was no message at Christmas. But in June, another card, very much in the style of the first, not a word written inside. Juliet had a drink of wine before she opened it, then threw it away at once. She had spurts of weeping, once in a while of uncontrollable shaking, but she came out of these in quick fits of fury, walking around the house and slapping one fist into her palm. The fury was directed at Mother