Runaway

truth. At least by the time they’re your age, they should be. But in this case it has got to be a secret. Okay?”
    Lauren said, “Okay.” Something made her wish, already, that he wouldn’t do this.
    “There’s ashes in there,” Harry said. His voice dropped in a peculiar way when he said
ashes.
“Not ordinary ashes. Cremated ashes of a baby. This baby died before you were born. Okay? Sit down.”
    She sat on a pile of hardcover notebooks that contained Harry’s writing. He raised his head and looked at her.
    “See—what I’m telling you is very upsetting to Eileen and that’s why it has got to be a secret. That’s why you never were told about it, because Eileen cannot stand to be reminded. So now you understand?”
    She said what she had to say. Yes.
    “Okay now—what happened was, we had this baby before we had you. A baby girl, and when the baby was just very tiny Eileen got pregnant. And this was a terrible shock to her because she was just finding out what a terrible lot of work a new baby is and here she was, not getting any sleep and throwing up because she had morning sickness. It wasn’t just morning, it was morning noon and
night
sickness, and she just did not know how she could face it. Being pregnant. So one night when she was just beside herself she somehow got the idea that she had to get out. And she got in the car and the baby in with her in its cot and it was after dark, raining, and she was driving too fast and she missed a curve. So. The baby wasn’t fixed in properly and it bounced out of the cot. And Eileen had broken ribs and concussion and it looked for a while as if we were going to lose both babies.”
    He took a deep breath.
    “I mean, we had lost the one already. When it bounced out of its cot it was killed. But we didn’t lose the one Eileen was carrying. Because. That was you. You understand? You.”
    Lauren nodded, minimally.
    “So the reason we didn’t tell you this—besides the state of Eileen’s emotions—is that it might not make you feel very welcome. Not in the first circumstances. But you just have to believe me you were. Oh, Lauren. You were. You are.”
    He removed his arm from the filing cabinet and came and hugged her. He smelled of sweat and the wine he and Eileen had drunk at dinner and Lauren felt very uncomfortable and embarrassed. The story didn’t upset her, although the ashes were a little ghoulish. But she took his word for it that it did upset Eileen.
    “Is that what you have the fights about?” she said, in an offhand way, and he let her go.
    “The fights,” he said sadly. “I suppose there could be something about that underlying. Underlying her hysteria. You know I feel bad about all that stuff. I really do.”
    When they went out on their walks he occasionally asked her if she was worried, or sad, about what he had told her. She said, “No,” in a firm, rather impatient, voice, and he said, “Good.”
    Every street had a curiosity—the Victorian mansion (now a nursing home), the brick tower that was all that was left of a broom factory, the graveyard going back to 1842. And for a couple of days there was a fall fair. They watched trucks ploughing one by one through the dirt, pulling a platform loaded with cement blocks which slipped forward, causing the trucks to fishtail, and halt and have their distance measured. Harry and Lauren each picked a truck to cheer for.
    Now it seemed to Lauren that all of that time had a false glow to it, a reckless silly sort of enthusiasm, that did not take any account of the weight of dailiness, or reality, that she had to carry around once school began and the paper started coming out and the weather changed. A bear or a moose was a real wild animal brooding over its own necessities—it was not some kind of thrill. And she would not now jump up and down and scream as she had done at the fairgrounds, cheering for her truck. Somebody from school might see her and think she was a freak.
    Which was close to what they thought anyway.
    Her isolation at school was based on knowledge and experience, which, as she half knew, could look like innocence and priggishness. The things that were wicked mysteries to others were not so to her and she did not know how to pretend about them. And that was what separated her, just as much as knowing how to pronounce L’Anse aux Meadows and having read The
Lord of the Rings.
She had drunk half a bottle of beer when she was five and puffed on a joint when she was