Runaway

Shipton, but the image of that woman had faded, and finally Juliet had to recognize that she was really only a convenience.
    All pictures of Penelope were banished to her bedroom, with sheaves of drawings and crayonings she had done before they left Whale Bay, her books, and the European one-cup coffee-maker with the plunger that she had bought as a present for Juliet with the first money she had made in her summer job at McDonald’s. Also such whimsical gifts for the apartment as a tiny plastic fan to stick on the refrigerator, a wind-up toy tractor, a curtain of glass beads to hang in the bathroom window. The door of that bedroom was shut and in time could be passed without disturbance.
    Juliet gave a great deal of thought to getting out of this apartment, giving herself the benefit of new surroundings. But she said to Christa that she could not do that, because that was the address Penelope had, and mail could be forwarded for only three months, so there would be no place then where her daughter could find her.
    “She could always get to you at work,” said Christa.
    “Who knows how long I’ll be there?” Juliet said. “She’s probably in some commune where they’re not allowed to communicate. With some guru who sleeps with all the women and sends them out to beg on the streets. If I’d sent her to Sunday school and taught her to say her prayers this probably wouldn’t have happened. I should have. I should have. It would have been like an inoculation. I neglected her
spirituality.
Mother Shipton said so.”
    When Penelope was barely thirteen years old, she had gone away on a camping trip to the Kootenay Mountains of British Columbia, with a friend from Torrance House, and the friend’s family. Juliet was in favor of this. Penelope had been at Torrance House for only one year (accepted on favorable financial terms because of her mother’s once having taught there), and it pleased Juliet that she had already made so firm a friend and been accepted readily by the friend’s family. Also that she was going camping—something that regular children did and that Juliet, as a child, had never had the chance to do. Not that she would have wanted to, being already buried in books—but she welcomed signs that Penelope was turning out to be a more normal sort of girl than she herself had been.
    Eric was apprehensive about the whole idea. He thought Penelope was too young. He didn’t like her going on a holiday with people he knew so little about. And now that she went to boarding school they saw too little of her as it was—so why should that time be shortened?
    Juliet had another reason—she simply wanted Penelope out of the way for the first couple of weeks of the summer holidays, because the air was not clear between herself and Eric. She wanted things resolved, and they were not resolved. She did not want to have to pretend that all was well, for the sake of the child.
    Eric, on the other hand, would have liked nothing better than to see their trouble smoothed over, hidden out of the way. To Eric’s way of thinking, civility would restore good feeling, the semblance of love would be enough to get by on until love itself might be rediscovered. And if there was never anything more than a semblance—well, that would have to do. Eric could manage with that.
    Indeed he could, thought Juliet, despondently.
    Having Penelope at home, a reason for them to behave well—for Juliet to behave well, since she was the one, in his opinion, who stirred up all the rancor—that would suit Eric very well.
    So Juliet told him, and created a new source of bitterness and blame, because he missed Penelope badly.
    The reason for their quarrel was an old and ordinary one. In the spring, through some trivial disclosure—and the frankness or possibly the malice of their longtime neighbor Ailo, who had a certain loyalty to Eric’s dead wife and some reservations about Juliet—Juliet had discovered that Eric had slept with Christa. Christa had been for a long time her close friend, but she had been, before that, Eric’s girlfriend, his
mistress
(though nobody said that anymore). He had given her up when he asked Juliet to live with him. She had known all about Christa then and she could not reasonably object to what had happened in the time before she and Eric were together. She did not. What she did object to—what she claimed had broken her heart—had happened after that. (But still a long time ago, said Eric.) It had