Runaway

the bits and pieces of information she’d picked up, her random appetite and quick assimilation, were now to come in handy. And she cultivated a self-deprecating, faintly teasing manner that usually seemed to go over well. On camera, few things fazed her. Though in fact she would go home and march back and forth, letting out whimpers or curses as she recalled some perceived glitch or fluster or, worse still, a mispronunciation.
    After five years the birthday cards stopped coming.
    “It doesn’t mean anything,” Christa said. “All they were for was to tell you she’s alive somewhere. Now she figures you’ve got the message. She trusts you not to send some tracker after her. That’s all.”
    “Did I put too much on her?”
    “Oh, Jul.”
    “I don’t mean just with Eric dying. Other men, later. I let her see too much misery. My stupid misery.”
    For Juliet had had two affairs during the years that Penelope was between fourteen and twenty-one, and during both of these she had managed to fall hectically in love, though she was ashamed afterwards. One of the men was much older than she, and solidly married. The other was a good deal younger, and was alarmed by her ready emotions. Later she wondered at these herself. She really had cared nothing for him, she said.
    “I wouldn’t think you did,” said Christa, who was tired. “I don’t know.”
    “Oh Christ. I was such a fool. I don’t get like that about men anymore. Do I?”
    Christa did not mention that this might be because of a lack of candidates.
    “No, Jul. No.”
    “Actually I didn’t do anything so terrible,” Juliet said then, brightening up. “Why do I keep lamenting that it’s my fault? She’s a conundrum, that’s all. I need to face that.
    “A conundrum and a cold fish,” she said, in a parody of resolution.
    “No,” said Christa.
    “No,” said Juliet. “No—that’s not true.”
    After the second June had passed without any word, Juliet decided to move. For the first five years, she told Christa, she had waited for June, wondering what might come. The way things were now, she had to wonder every day. And be disappointed every day.
    She moved to a high-rise building in the West End. She meant to throw away the contents of Penelope’s room, but in the end she stuffed it all into garbage bags and carried it with her. She had only one bedroom now but there was storage space in the basement.
    She took up jogging in Stanley Park. Now she seldom mentioned Penelope, even to Christa. She had a boyfriend—that was what you called them now—who had never heard anything about her daughter.
    Christa grew thinner and moodier. Quite suddenly, one January, she died.
    You don’t go on forever, appearing on television. However agreeable the viewers have found your face, there comes a time when they’d prefer somebody different. Juliet was offered other jobs—researching, writing voice-over for nature shows—but she refused them cheerfully, describing herself as in need of a total change. She went back to Classical Studies—an even smaller department than it used to be—she meant to resume writing her thesis for her Ph.D. She moved out of the high-rise apartment and into a bachelor flat, to save money.
    Her boyfriend had got a teaching job in China.
    Her flat was in the basement of a house, but the sliding doors at the back opened out at ground level. And there she had a little brick-paved patio, a trellis with sweet peas and clematis, herbs and flowers in pots. For the first time in her life, and in a very small way, she was a gardener, as her father had been.
    Sometimes people said to her—in stores, or on the campus bus—“Excuse me, but your face is so familiar,” or, “Aren’t you the lady that used to be on television?” But after a year or so this passed. She spent a lot of time sitting and reading, drinking coffee at sidewalk tables, and nobody noticed her. She let her hair grow out. During the years that it had been dyed red it had lost the vigor of its natural brown—it was a silvery brown now, fine and wavy. She was reminded of her mother, Sara. Sara’s soft, fair, flyaway hair, going gray and then white.
    She did not have room to have people to dinner anymore, and she had lost interest in recipes. She ate meals that were nourishing enough, but monotonous. Without exactly meaning to, she lost contact with most of her friends.
    It was no wonder. She lived now a life as different as possible from the life of the