Runaway (29 page)

“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 either of them usually talked to her. Now and then they would speak to each other, in almost a normal way. But there would be a recklessness in the room that had not yet been expressed in words. Lauren would hope, or try to hope—more accurately, she used to try to hope—that somehow they would stop the fight from breaking out. And she had always believed—she did yet—that she was not the only one to hope this. They did, too. Partly they did. But partly they were eager for what would come. They never overcame this eagerness. There had never been one time when this feeling was in the room, the change in the air, the shocking brightness that made all shapes, all the furniture and utensils, sharper, yet denser—never one time that the worst did not follow.

Lauren used to be unable to stay in her room, she had to be where they were, flinging herself at them, protesting and weeping, till one or the other would pick her up and carry her back to bed, saying, “All right, all right, don’t bug us, just don’t bug us, it’s our life, we have to be able to talk.” “To talk” meant to pace around the house delivering precise harangues of condemnation, shrieks of contradiction, until they had to start flinging ashtrays, bottles, dishes, at each other. One time Eileen ran outside and threw herself down on the lawn, tearing up chunks of dirt and grass, while Harry hissed from the doorway, “Oh, that’s the style, give them a show.” Once Harry bolted himself in the bathroom, calling, “There’s only one way to get out of this torment.” Both of them threatened the use of pills and razors.

“Oh God, let’s not do this,” Eileen had said once. “Please, please, let’s stop doing this.” And Harry had answered in a high whining voice that cruelly imitated hers, “You’re the one doing it—
you
stop.”

Lauren had got over trying to figure out what the fights were about. Always about a new thing (tonight she lay in the dark and thought it was probably about her going away, about Eileen’s making that decision on her own) and always about the same thing—the thing that belonged to them, that they could never give up.

She had also got over her idea that there was a tender spot in both of them—that Harry made jokes all the time because he was sad, and Eileen was brisk and dismissive because of something about Harry that seemed to shut her out—and that if she, Lauren, could only explain each of them to the other one, things would get better.

Next day they would be muted, broken, shamed, and queerly exhilarated. “People have to do this, it’s bad to repress your feelings,” Eileen had once told Lauren. “There’s even a theory that repressing anger gives you cancer.”

Harry referred to the fights as rows. “Sorry about the row,” he would say. “Eileen is a very volatile woman. All I can say, sweetie—oh God, all I can say is—these things happen.”

On this night Lauren actually fell asleep before they had really begun to do their damage. Before she was even sure they would do it. The gin bottle hadn’t yet made an appearance when she went away to bed.

Harry woke her up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, honey. Could you just get up and come downstairs?”

“Is it morning?”

“No. It’s still late at night. Eileen and I want to talk to you. We’ve got something to talk to you about. It’s sort of about what you already know. Come on, now. You want your slippers?”

“I hate slippers,” Lauren reminded him. She went ahead of him down the stairs. He was still dressed and Eileen was still dressed too, waiting in the hall. She said to Lauren, “There’s somebody else here that you know.”

It was Delphine. Delphine was sitting on the sofa, wearing a ski jacket over her usual black pants and sweater. Lauren had never seen her in outdoor clothes before. Her face sagged, her skin looked pouchy, her body immensely defeated.

“Can’t we go in the kitchen?” Lauren said. She didn’t know why, but the kitchen seemed safer. Somewhere less special, and with the table to hold on to if they all sat around it.

“Lauren wants to go in the kitchen, we’ll go in the kitchen,” Harry said.

When they were sitting there, he said, “Lauren. I’ve explained that I told you about the baby. About the baby we had before you and what happened to that baby.”

He waited until Lauren said, “Yes.”

“May I say something now?” said Eileen. “May I say something to Lauren?”

Harry said, “Well certainly.”

“Harry could not stand the idea of another baby,” said Eileen, looking down at her hands in her lap under the tabletop. “He couldn’t stand the idea of all the domestic chaos. He had his writing to do. He wanted to achieve things, so he couldn’t have chaos. He wanted me to have an abortion and I said I would and then I said I wouldn’t and then I said I would, but I couldn’t do it and we had a fight and I got the baby and got in the car, I was going to go to some friends’ place. I wasn’t speeding and I certainly was not drunk. It was just the bad light on the road and the bad weather.”

“Also the way the carry-cot was not fastened in,” said Harry.

“But let that go,” he said. “I was not insisting on an abortion. I might have mentioned getting an abortion, but there was no
way I would have made you. I didn’t talk about that to Lauren because it would be upsetting for her to hear. It’s bound to be upsetting.”

“Yes, but it’s true,” Eileen said. “Lauren can take it, she knows it wasn’t like it was
her.
”

Lauren spoke up, surprising herself.

“It was me,” she said. “Who was it if it wasn’t me?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t the one wanted to do it,” Eileen said.

“You didn’t altogether
not
want to do it,” said Harry.

Lauren said, “Stop.”

“This is just what we promised we would not do,” said Harry. “Isn’t this what we promised we would not do? And we should apologize to Delphine.”

Delphine had not looked up at anybody while this talk was going on. She had not pulled her chair up to the table. She didn’t seem to notice when Harry said her name. It wasn’t just defeat that kept her still. It was a weight of obstinacy, even disgust, that Harry and Eileen couldn’t notice.

“I talked to Delphine this afternoon, Lauren. I told her about the baby. It was her baby. I never told you the baby was adopted because it made everything seem worse—that we adopted that baby, and then the way we screwed up. Five years trying, we never thought we’d get pregnant, so we adopted. But Delphine was its mother in the first place. We called it Lauren and then we called you Lauren—I guess because it was our favorite name and also it gave us a feeling we were starting over. And Delphine wanted to know about her baby and she found out we had taken it and naturally she made the mistake of thinking it was you. She came here to find you. It’s all very sad. When I told her the truth she very understandably wanted proof, so I told her to come here tonight and I showed her the documents. She never wanted to steal you away or anything like that, just to make friends with you. She was just lonely and confused.”

Delphine yanked down the zipper of her jacket as if she wanted to get more air.

“And I told her we still had—that we never got around to or it never seemed the right time to—” He waved at the cardboard box that was sitting right out on the counter. “So I showed her that too.

“So tonight as a family,” he said, “tonight while everything is all wide-open, we are going to go out and do this. And get rid of all this—misery and blame. Delphine and Eileen and me, and we want you to come with us—is that all right with you? Are you all right?”

Lauren said, “I was asleep. I’ve got a cold.”

“You might as well do as Harry says,” said Eileen.

Still Delphine never looked up. Harry got the box from the counter and gave it to her. “Maybe you should be the one to carry it,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Everybody is all right,” Eileen said. “Let’s just go.”

Delphine stood there in the snow, holding the box, so Eileen said, “Should I?” and took it respectfully from her. She opened it up and was going to offer it to Harry, then changed her mind and held it out to Delphine. Delphine lifted out a small handful of ashes, but didn’t take the box to pass it on. Eileen took a handful and gave the box to Harry. When he had got some ashes he was going to hand the box on to Lauren, but Eileen said, “No. She doesn’t have to.”

Lauren had already put her hands in her pockets.

There wasn’t any wind, so the ashes just fell where Harry and Eileen and Delphine let them drop, into the snow.

Eileen spoke as if her throat was sore. “Our Father which art in Heaven—”

Harry said clearly, “This is Lauren, who was our child and
whom we all loved—let’s all say it together.” He looked at Delphine, then Eileen, and they all said, “This is Lauren,” with Delphine’s voice very quiet, mumbling, and Eileen’s full of strained sincerity and Harry’s sonorous, presiding, deeply serious.

“And we say good-bye to her and commit her to the snow—”

At the end Eileen said hurriedly, “Forgive us our sins. Our trespasses. Forgive us our trespasses.”

Delphine got into the back seat with Lauren for the ride into town. Harry had held the door open for her to get into the front seat beside him, but she stumbled past him into the back. Relinquishing the more important seat, now that she was not the bearer of the box. She reached into the pocket of her ski jacket to get a Kleenex and in doing so dragged out something that fell on the floor of the car. She gave an involuntary grunt, reaching down to locate it, but Lauren had been quicker. Lauren picked up one of the earrings she had often seen Delphine wear—shoulder-length earrings of rainbow beads that sparkled through her hair. Earrings she must have been wearing this evening, but had thought better to stuff away in her pocket. And just the feel of this earring, the feeling of the cold bright beads slithering through her fingers, made Lauren long suddenly for any number of things to vanish, for Delphine to turn back into the person she had been at the beginning, sitting behind the hotel desk, bold and frisky.

Delphine did not say a word. She took the earring without their fingers touching. But for the first time that evening she and Lauren looked each other in the face. Delphine’s eyes widened and for an instant there was a familiar expression in them, of mockery and conspiracy. She shrugged her shoulders and put the earring in her pocket. That was all—from then on she just looked at the back of Harry’s head.

When Harry slowed to let her out at the hotel, he said, “It would be nice if you could come and have supper with us, some night when you’re not working.”

“I’m pretty much always working,” Delphine said. She got out of the car and said, “Good-bye,” to none of them in particular, and stumped along the mushy sidewalk into the hotel.

On the way home Eileen said, “I knew she wouldn’t.”

Harry said, “Well. Maybe she appreciated that we asked.”

“She doesn’t care about us. She only cared about Lauren, when she thought Lauren was hers. Now she doesn’t care about her either.”

“Well, we care,” said Harry, his voice rising. “She’s ours.”

“We love you, Lauren,” he said. “I just want to tell you one more time.”

Hers. Ours
.

Something was prickling Lauren’s bare ankles. She reached down and found that burrs, whole clusters of burrs, were clinging to her pajama legs.

“I got burrs from under the snow. I’ve got
hundreds
of burrs.”

“I’ll get them off you when we get home,” Eileen said. “I can’t do anything about them now.”

Lauren was furiously pulling the burrs off her pajamas. And as soon as she got those loose she found that they were hanging on to her fingers. She tried to loosen them with the other hand and in no time they were clinging to all the other fingers. She was so sick of these burrs that she wanted to beat her hands and yell out loud, but she knew that the only thing she could do was just sit and wait.