Runaway

she phoned up the school and you weren’t there so she wondered if you were sick and here is a present to cheer you up. She says she bought it for you anyway, nobody lost it. What does that mean? It was going to be a birthday present when you turned eleven in March but she wants you to have it now. Where did she get the idea your birthday was in March? Your birthday is in June.”
    “I know that,” said Lauren, in the exhausted, childish, sulky voice she had now fallen back on.
    “You see?” said Eileen. “She’s got everything wrong. She’s crazy.”
    “She knew your name, though. She knew where you were. How did she know that if you didn’t adopt me?”
    “I don’t know how the hell she knew, but she is wrong. She has got it all wrong. Look. We’ll get out your birth certificate. You were born in Wellesley Hospital in Toronto. We’ll take you there, I could show you the exact room—” Eileen looked at the note again and crumpled it in her fist.
    “That bitch. Phoning the school,” she said. “Coming to our house. Crazy bitch.”
    “Hide that thing,” said Lauren, meaning the chain. “Hide it. Put it away.
Now.
”
    Harry was not so angry as Eileen.
    “She seemed a perfectly okay person anytime I talked to her,” he said. “She never said anything like this to me.”
    “Well, she wouldn’t,” said Eileen. “She wanted to get at Lauren. You have got to go and have a talk with her. Or I will. I mean it. Today.”
    Harry said he would. “I’ll straighten her out,” he said. “Absolutely. There won’t be any more trouble. What a shame.”
    Eileen made an early lunch. She made hamburgers with mayonnaise and mustard on them, the way Harry and Lauren both liked them. Lauren had finished hers before she realized that it had probably been a mistake to show such an appetite.
    “Feeling better?” said Harry. “Back to school this afternoon?”
    “I still have got a cold.”
    Eileen said, “No. Not back to school. And I am staying home with her.”
    “I don’t absolutely see that that’s necessary,” said Harry.
    “And give her this,” said Eileen, pushing the envelope into his pocket. “Never mind, don’t bother looking at it, it’s just her stupid present. And tell her no more of that kind of thing ever or she’ll be in trouble. No more ever. No more.”
    Lauren never had to go back to school, not in that town.
    During the afternoon Eileen phoned Harry’s sister—whom Harry wasn’t speaking to, because of criticisms the sister’s husband had made about his, Harry’s, way of living his life—and they talked about the school that the sister had gone to, a girls’ private school in Toronto. More phone calls followed, an appointment was made.
    “It’s not a matter of money,” Eileen said. “Harry has enough money. Or he can get it.
    “It’s not just this happening, either,” she said. “You don’t deserve to have to grow up in this crappy town. You don’t deserve to end up sounding like a hick. I’ve been thinking of this all along. I was only putting it off till you got a bit older.”
    Harry said, when he came home, that surely it depended on what Lauren wanted.
    “You want to leave home, Lauren? I thought you liked it here. I thought you had friends.”
    “Friends?” said Eileen. “She had that woman. Del-
phine.
Did you really get through to her? Did she get the message?”
    “I did,” said Harry. “She did.”
    “Did you give her back the bribe?”
    “If you like to call it that. Yes.”
    “No more trouble? She understands, no more trouble?”
    Harry turned on the radio and they listened to the news through dinner. Eileen opened a bottle of wine.
    “What’s this?” Harry said in a slightly menacing voice. “A celebration?”
    Lauren had learned the signs, and she thought she saw what there was to be gone through now, what price there was to be paid for the miraculous rescue—the never having to go back to school or go near the hotel, perhaps never to have to walk in the streets at all, never to go out of the house in the two weeks left before the Christmas holidays.
    Wine could be one of the signs. Sometimes. Sometimes not. But when Harry got out the bottle of gin and poured half a tumbler for himself, adding nothing to it but ice—and soon he wouldn’t even be adding ice—the course was set. Everything might still be cheerful but the cheerfulness was hard as knives. Harry would talk to Lauren, and Eileen would talk to Lauren, more than