Runaway

out of her eyes. And a faint crust showing at the corners of her mouth, like sugar.
    The hospital was in Carleton Place, three miles away. There was a highway overpass above the railway tracks, and they took this at such speed that Grace had the impression that at its crest the car had lifted off the pavement, they were flying. There was hardly any traffic about, she was not frightened, and anyway there was nothing she could do.
    Neil knew the nurse who was on duty in Emergency, and after he had filled out a form and let her take a passing look at Grace’s foot (“Nice job,” she said without interest), he was able to go ahead and give the tetanus shot himself. (“It won’t hurt now, but it could later.”) Just as he finished, the nurse came back into the cubicle and said, “There’s a guy in the waiting room to take her home.”
    She said to Grace, “He says he’s your fiancé.”
    “Tell him she’s not ready yet,” Neil said. “No. Tell him we’ve already gone.”
    “I said you were in here.”
    “But when you came back,” said Neil, “we were gone.”
    “He said you were his brother. Won’t he see your car in the lot?”
    “I parked out back. I parked in the doctors’ lot.”
    “Pret-ty tric-ky,” said the nurse, over her shoulder.
    And Neil said to Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?”
    “No,” said Grace, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she was having her eyes tested.
    Once more she was helped to the car, sandal flopping from the toe strap, and settled on the creamy upholstery. They took a back street out of the lot, an unfamiliar way out of the town. She knew they wouldn’t see Maury. She did not have to think of him. Still less of Mavis.
    Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang— acquiescence simply rippled through her, the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.
    Her memory of this day remained clear and detailed, though there was a variation in the parts of it she dwelt on.
    And even in some of those details she must have been wrong. First they drove west on Highway 7. In Grace’s recollection, there is not another car on the highway, and their speed approaches the flight on the highway overpass. This cannot have been true—there must have been people on the road, people on their way home that Sunday morning, on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families. On their way to church or coming home from church. Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages or the edges of towns, and for the many curves on the old highway. She was not used to driving in a convertible with the top down, wind in her eyes, wind taking charge of her hair. That gave her the illusion of constant speed, perfect flight—not frantic but miraculous, serene.
    And though Maury and Mavis and the rest of the family were wiped from her mind, some scrap of Mrs. Travers did remain, hovering, delivering in a whisper and with a strange, shamed giggle, her last message.
    You’ll know how to do it.
    Grace and Neil did not talk, of course. As she remembers it, you would have had to scream to be heard. And what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like. The fortuitous meeting, the muted but powerful signals, the nearly silent flight in which she herself would figure more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, flesh nothing now but a stream of desire.
    They stopped, finally, at Kaladar, and went into the hotel— the old hotel which is still there. Taking her hand, kneading his fingers between hers, slowing his pace to match her uneven steps. Neil led her into the bar. She recognized it as a bar, though she had never been in one before. (Bailey’s Falls Inn did not yet have a license—drinking was done in people’s rooms, or in a rather ramshackle so-called nightclub across the road.) This was just as she would have expected—an airless darkened big room, with the chairs and tables put back in a careless way after a hasty cleanup, a smell of Lysol not erasing the smell of beer, whisky, cigars, pipes, men.
    There was nobody there—perhaps it wasn’t open till afternoon. But might it not now be afternoon? Her idea of time seemed faulty.
    Now a man came in from another room, and spoke to Neil. He said,