Runaway

say.”
    “What’s that? What would I say?”
    “You’d say, what else is there to do? Or something like that.”
    “That’s true,” he said. “That’s about what I’d say. Well, then you’d try to tell me why I was wrong.”
    “No,” said Grace. “No. I wouldn’t.”
    When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought she was serious, but now she saw that she’d been trying to impress him with these answers, trying to show herself as worldly as he was, and in the middle of that she had come on this rock-bottom truth. This lack of hope—genuine, reasonable, and everlasting.
    Neil said, “You wouldn’t? No. You wouldn’t. That’s a relief. You are a relief, Grace.”
    In a while, he said, “You know—I’m sleepy. Soon as we find a good spot I’m going to pull over and go to sleep. Just for a little while. You don’t mind that?”
    “No. I think you should.”
    “You’ll watch over me?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good.”
    The spot he found was in a little town called Fortune. There was a park on the outskirts, beside a river, and a gravelled space for cars. He settled the seat back, and at once fell asleep. Evening had come on as it did now, around suppertime, proving that this wasn’t a summer day after all. A short while ago people had been having a Thanksgiving picnic here—there was still some smoke rising from the outdoor fireplace, and a smell of hamburgers in the air. The smell did not make Grace hungry, exactly—it made her remember being hungry in other circumstances.
    He went to sleep immediately, and she got out. Some dust had settled on her with all the stopping and starting of her driving lesson. She washed her arms and hands and her face as well as she could at an outdoor tap. Then, favoring her cut foot, she walked slowly to the edge of the river, saw how shallow it was, with reeds breaking the surface. A sign there warned that profanity, obscenity, or vulgar language was forbidden in this place and would be punished.
    She tried the swings, which faced west. Pumping herself high, she looked into the clear sky—faint green, fading gold, a fierce pink rim at the horizon. Already the air was getting cold.
    She’d thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now.
    What she had seen was final. As if she was at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and knowing it was all there was.
    It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else.
    She went back to the car and tried to wake him up. He stirred but wouldn’t waken. So she walked around again to keep warm, and to practice the easiest way with her foot—she understood now that she would be working again, serving breakfast, in the morning.
    She tried once more, talking to him urgently. He answered with various promises and mutters, and once more he fell asleep. By the time it was really dark she had given up. Now with the cold of night settled in some other facts became clear to her. That they could not remain here, that they were still in the world after all. That she had to get back to Bailey’s Falls.
    With some difficulty she got him over into the passenger seat. If that did not wake him, it was clear nothing could. She took a while to figure out how the headlights went on, and then she began to move the car, jerkily, slowly, back onto the road.
    She had no idea of directions, and there was not a soul on the street to ask. She just kept driving to the other side of the town, and there, most blessedly, there was a sign pointing the way to Bailey’s Falls, among other places. Only nine miles.
    She drove along the two-lane highway at never more than thirty miles an hour. There was little traffic. Once or twice a car passed her, honking, and the few she met honked also. In one case it was probably because she was going so slowly, and in the other, because she did not know how to dim the lights. Never mind. She couldn’t stop to get her courage up again in the middle of the road. She could just keep going, as he had said. Keep going.
    At first she did not recognize Bailey’s Falls, coming upon it in this