Runaway

by Alice Munro

  Then her plans were changed. She went back to Ottawa with Mr. Travers in September. This happened unexpectedly—the weekend dinner was cancelled.

  Maury said that she got into trouble, now and then, with her nerves. “She has to have a rest,” he said. “She has to go into the hospital for a couple of weeks or so and they get her stabilized. She always comes out fine.”

  Grace said that his mother was the last person she would have expected to have such troubles.

  “What brings it on?”

  “I don’t think they know,” Maury said.

  But after a moment he said, “Well. It could be her husband. I mean, her first husband. Neil’s father. What happened with him, et cetera.”

  What had happened was that Neil’s father had killed himself.

  “He was unstable, I guess.

  “But it maybe isn’t that,” he continued. “It could be other stuff. Problems women have around her age. It’s okay though—they can get her straightened around easy now, with drugs. They’ve got terrific drugs. Not to worry about it.”

  By Thanksgiving, as Maury had predicted, Mrs. Travers was out of the hospital and feeling well. Thanksgiving dinner was taking place at the lake as usual. And it was being held on Sunday—that was also as usual, to allow for packing up and closing the house on Monday. And it was fortunate for Grace, because Sunday had remained her day off.

  The whole family would be there. No guests—unless you counted Grace. Neil and Mavis and their children would be staying at Mavis’ parents’ place, and having dinner there on Monday, but they would be spending Sunday at the Traverses’.

  By the time Maury brought Grace down to the lake on Sunday morning, the turkey was already in the oven. Because of the children, dinner would be early, around five o’clock. The pies were on the kitchen counter—pumpkin, apple, wild blueberry. Gretchen was in charge of the kitchen—as coordinated a cook as she was an athlete. Mrs. Travers sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and working at a jigsaw puzzle with Gretchen’s younger daughter, Dana.

  “Ah, Grace,” she said, jumping up for an embrace—the first time she had ever done this—and with a clumsy motion of her hand scattering the jigsaw pieces.

  Dana wailed, “Grandma,” and her older sister, Janey, who had been watching critically, scooped up the pieces.

  “We can put them back together,” she said. “Grandma didn’t mean to.”

  “Where do you keep the cranberry sauce?” said Gretchen.

  “In the cupboard,” said Mrs. Travers, still squeezing Grace’s arms and ignoring the destroyed puzzle.

  “Where in the cupboard?”

  “Oh. Cranberry sauce,” Mrs. Travers said. “Well—I make it. First I put the cranberries in a little water. Then I keep it on low heat—no, I think I soak them first—”

  “Well, I haven’t got time for all that,” Gretchen said. “You mean you don’t have any canned?”

  “I guess not. I must not have, because I make it.”

  “I’ll have to send somebody to get some.”

  “Maybe you could ask Mrs. Woods?”

  “No. I’ve hardly even spoken to her. I haven’t got the nerve. Somebody’ll have to go to the store.”

  “Dear—it’s Thanksgiving,” said Mrs. Travers gently. “Nowhere will be open.”

  “That place down the highway, it’s always open.” Gretchen raised her voice. “Where’s Wat?”

  “He’s out in the rowboat,” called Mavis from the back bedroom. She made it sound like a warning, because she was trying to get her baby to sleep. “He took Mikey out in the boat.”

  Mavis had driven over in her own car with Mikey and the baby. Neil was coming later—he had some phone calls to make.

  And Mr. Travers had gone golfing.

  “It’s just that I need somebody to go to the store,” Gretchen said. She waited, but no offer came from the bedroom. She raised her eyebrows at Grace.

  “You can’t drive, can you?”

  Grace said no.

  Mrs. Travers looked around to see where her chair was, and sat down, with a grateful sigh.

  “Well,” said Gretchen. “Maury can drive. Where’s Maury?”

  Maury was in the front bedroom looking for his swimming trunks, though everybody had told him that the water would be too cold for swimming. He said the store would not be open.

  “It will be,” said Gretchen. “They sell gas. And if it isn’t there’s that one just coming into Perth, you know, with the ice-cream cones—”

  Maury wanted Grace to come with him, but the two little girls, Janey and Dana, were pulling her to come with them to see the swing their grandfather had put up under the Norway maple at the side of the house.

  Going down the steps, she felt the strap of one of her sandals break. She took both shoes off and walked without difficulty on the sandy soil, the flat-pressed plantain, and the many curled leaves that had already fallen.

  First she pushed the children in the swing, then they pushed her. It was when she jumped off, barefoot, that one leg crumpled and she let out a yelp of pain, not knowing what had happened.

  It was her foot, not her leg. The pain had shot up from the sole of her left foot, which had been cut by the sharp edge of a clamshell.

  “Dana brought those shells,” Janey said. “She was going to make a house for her snail.”

  “He got away,” said Dana.

  Gretchen and Mrs. Travers and even Mavis had come hurrying out of the house, thinking the cry came from one of the children.

  “She’s got a bloody foot,” said Dana. “There’s blood all over the ground.”

  Janey said, “She cut it on a shell. Dana left those shells here, she was going to build a house for Ivan. Ivan her snail.”

  Then there was a basin brought out, water to wash the cut, a towel, and everyone was asking how much it hurt.

  “Not too bad,” said Grace, limping to the steps, with both little girls competing to hold her up and generally getting in her way.

  “Oh, that’s nasty,” Gretchen said. “But why weren’t you wearing your shoes?”

  “Broke her strap,” said Dana and Janey together, as a wine-colored convertible, making very little sound, swerved neatly round in the parking space.

  “Now, that is what I call opportune,” said Mrs. Travers. “Here’s the very man we need. The doctor.”

  This was Neil, the first time Grace had ever seen him. He was tall, spare, quick-moving.

  “Your bag,” cried Mrs. Travers gaily. “We’ve already got a case for you.”

  “Nice piece of junk you’ve got there,” said Gretchen. “New?”

  Neil said, “Piece of folly.”

  “Now the baby’s wakened.” Mavis gave a sigh of unspecific accusation and she went back into the house.

  Janey said severely, “You can’t do anything without that baby waking up.”

  “You better be quiet,” said Gretchen.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t got it with you,” said Mrs. Travers. But Neil swung a doctor’s bag out of the back seat, and she said, “Oh, yes you have, that’s good, you never know.”

  “You the patient?” Neil said to Dana. “What’s the matter? Swallow a toad?”

  “It’s her,” said Dana with dignity. “It’s Grace.”

  “I see. She swallowed the toad.”

  “She cut her foot. It’s bleeding and bleeding.”

  “On a clamshell,” said Janey.

  Now Neil said “Move over” to his nieces, and sat on the step below Grace, and carefully lifted the foot and said, “Give me that cloth or whatever,” then carefully blotted away the blood to get a look at the cut. Now that he was so close to her, Grace noticed a smell she had learned to identify this summer working at the inn—the smell of liquor edged with mint.

  “It sure is,” he said. “It’s bleeding and bleeding. That’s a good thing, clean it out. Hurts?”

  Grace said, “Some.”

  He looked searchingly, though briefly, into he
r face. Perhaps wondering if she had caught the smell, and what she thought about it.

  “I bet. See that flap? We have to get under there and make sure it’s clean, then I’ll put a stitch or two in it. I’ve got some stuff I can rub on so that won’t hurt as bad as you might think.” He looked up at Gretchen. “Hey. Let’s get the audience out of the way here.”

  He had not spoken a word, as yet, to his mother, who now repeated that it was such a good thing that he had come along just when he did.

  “Boy Scout,” he said. “Always at the ready.”

  His hands didn’t feel drunk, and his eyes didn’t look it. Neither did he look like the jolly uncle he had impersonated when he talked to the children, or the purveyor of reassuring patter he had chosen to be with Grace. He had a high pale forehead, a crest of tight curly gray-black hair, bright gray eyes, a wide thin-lipped mouth that seemed to curl in on some vigorous impatience, or appetite, or pain.

  When the cut had been bandaged, out on the steps—Gretchen having gone back to the kitchen and made the children come with her, but Mrs. Travers remaining, watching intently, with her lips pressed together as if promising that she would not make any interruptions—Neil said that he thought it would be a good idea to run Grace into town, to the hospital.

  “For an anti-tetanus shot.”

  “It doesn’t feel too bad,” said Grace.

  Neil said, “That’s not the point.”

  “I agree,” said Mrs. Travers. “Tetanus—that’s terrible.”

  “We shouldn’t be long,” he said. “Here. Grace? Grace, I’ll get you to the car.” He held her under one arm. She had strapped on the one sandal, and managed to get her toes into the other so that she could drag it along. The bandage was very neat and tight.

  “I’ll just run in,” he said, when she was sitting in the car. “Make my apologies.”

  To Gretchen? To Mavis.

  Mrs. Travers came down from the verandah, wearing the look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her, and indeed irrepressible, on this day. She put her hand on the car door.

  “This is good,” she said. “This is very good. Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”

  Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence, a weepy gladness leaking 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, “Hello there, Doc,” and went behind the bar.

  Grace believed that it would be like this—everywhere they went, there would be somebody Neil knew already.

  “You know it’s Sunday,” the man said in a raised, stern, almost shouting voice, as if he wanted to be heard out in the parking lot. “I can’t sell you anything in here on a Sunday. And I can’t sell anything to her, ever. She shouldn’t even be in here. You understand that?”

  “Oh yes, sir. Yes indeed, sir,” said Neil. “I heartily agree, sir.”

  While both men were talking, the man behind the bar had taken a bottle of whisky from a hidden shelf and poured some into a glass and shoved it to Neil across the counter.

  “You thirsty?” he said to Grace. He was already opening a Coke. He gave it to her without a glass.

  Neil put a bill on the counter and the man shoved it away.

  “I told you,” he said. “Can’t sell.”

  “What about the Coke?” said Neil.

  “Can’t sell.”

  The man put the bottle away, Neil drank what was in the glass very quickly. “You’re a good man,” he said. “Spirit of the law.”

 
“Take the Coke along with you. Sooner she’s out of here the happier I’ll be.”

  “You bet,” Neil said. “She’s a good girl. My sister-in-law. Future sister-in-law. So I understand.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  They didn’t go back to Highway 7. Instead they took the road north, which was not paved, but wide enough and decently graded. The drink seemed to have had the opposite effect to what drinks were supposed to have on Neil’s driving. He had slowed down to the seemly, even cautious, rate this road required.

  “You don’t mind?” he said.

  Grace said, “Mind what?”

  “Being dragged into any old place.”

  “No.”

  “I need your company. How’s your foot?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It must hurt some.”

  “Not really. It’s okay.”

  He picked up the hand that was not holding the Coke bottle, pressed the palm of it to his mouth, gave it a lick, and let it drop.

  “Did you think I was abducting you for fell purposes?”

  “No,” lied Grace, thinking how like his mother that word was. Fell.

  “There was a time when you would have been right,” he said, just as if she had answered yes. “But not today. I don’t think so. You’re safe as a church today.”

  The changed tone of his voice, which had become intimate, frank, and quiet, and the memory of his lips pressed to, then his tongue flicked across, her skin, affected Grace to such an extent that she was hearing the words, but not the sense, of what he was telling her. She could feel a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin. But she thought to say, “Churches aren’t always safe.”

  “True. True.”

  “And I’m not your sister-in-law.”

  “Future. Didn’t I say future?”

  “I’m not that either.”

  “Oh. Well. I guess I’m not surprised. No. Not surprised.”