Runaway

and their same looks into the distance and same unfinished sentences referring to accidents and secrets. She enjoyed watching them for a while, but then something that came into her mind began to worry her. Children and grown people too in these stories had often turned out to belong to quite different families from those they had always accepted as their own. Strangers who were sometimes crazy and dangerous had appeared out of the blue with their catastrophic claims and emotions, lives were turned upside down.
    This might once have seemed to her an attractive possibility, but it didn’t any longer.
    Harry and Eileen never locked the doors. Imagine that, Harry would say—we live in a place where you can just walk out and never lock your doors. Lauren got up now and locked them, back and front. Then she closed the curtains on all of the windows. It wasn’t snowing today, but there was no melting. The new snow already had a gray tinge to it, as if it had got old overnight.
    There was no way that she could cover the little windows in the front door. There were three of them, shaped like teardrops, in a diagonal line. Eileen hated them. She had ripped off the wallpaper and painted the walls of this cheap house with unexpected colors—robin’s-egg blue, blackberry-rose, lemon yellow—she had taken up ugly carpets and sanded the floors, but there was nothing she could do about those dinky little windows.
    Harry said that they weren’t so bad, that there was one for each of them, and just at the right height too, for each of them to look out. He named them Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear.
    When the soap opera ended and a man and woman began talking about indoor plants, Lauren fell into a light sleep which she hardly knew was a sleep. She knew that it must have been when she woke up from a dream of an animal, a wintry sort of gray weasel or skinny fox—she wasn’t sure what—watching the house in broad daylight from the backyard. In the dream somebody had told her that this animal was rabid, because it was not scared of humans or the houses where they lived.
    The phone was ringing. She pulled the blanket over her head so she would not hear it. She was sure it was Delphine. Delphine wanting to know how she was, why she was hiding, what did she think about the story she had told her, when was she coming to the hotel?
    It was really Eileen, checking on how Lauren was feeling and the state of her appendix. Eileen let the phone ring ten or fifteen times, then she ran from the newspaper office without putting on her coat and drove home. When she found the door locked she banged on it with her fist and rattled the knob. She pressed her face to the Mama Bear window and shouted Lauren’s name. She could hear the television. She ran around to the back door and banged and shouted again.
    Lauren heard all this, of course, with her head under the blanket, but it took a while for her to realize that it was Eileen and not Delphine. When she did realize that, she came creeping into the kitchen with the blanket trailing behind her, still half thinking the voice might be a trick.
    “Jesus, what is the matter with you?” Eileen said, throwing her arms around her. “Why was the door locked, why didn’t you answer the phone, what kind of game are you up to?”
    Lauren held out for about fifteen minutes, with Eileen alternately hugging her and shouting at her. Then she collapsed and told everything. It was a great relief and yet even as she shivered and cried she felt that something private and complex was being traded away for safety and comfort. It wasn’t possible to tell the whole truth because she couldn’t get it straight herself. She couldn’t explain what she had wanted, right up to the point of not wanting it at all.
    Eileen phoned Harry and told him that he had to come home. He would have to walk, she could not go to get him, she could not leave Lauren.
    She went to unlock the front door and found an envelope, put through the mail slot but unstamped, with nothing written on it but LAUREN.
    “Did you hear this come through the slot?” she said. “Did you hear anybody on the porch, how in the fuck did this happen?”
    She tore the envelope open and pulled out the gold chain with Lauren’s name on it.
    “I forgot to tell you that part,” said Lauren.
    “There’s a note.”
    “Don’t read it,” Lauren cried. “Don’t
read
it.
I don’t want to
hear it.
”
    “Don’t be silly. It can’t bite. She just says