Runaway (26 page)

He had hardly ever spoken to her in such a rough and exasperated way. He looked around as if there might have been somebody watching them and clapped his hands on his trousers.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you to pick that up.” He put his elbows on the top of the filing cabinet and leaned his forehead on his hands.

“Now,” he said. “Now, Lauren. I could make up some kind of a lie to tell you, but I am going to tell you the truth. Because I believe that children should be told the 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 six, though she had not liked either one. She sometimes had a little wine at dinner, and she liked that all right. She knew about oral sex and all methods of birth control and what homosexuals did. She had regularly seen Harry and Eileen naked, also a party of their friends naked around a campfire in the woods. On that same holiday she had sneaked out with other children to watch fathers slipping by sly agreement into the tents of mothers who were not their wives. One of the boys had suggested sex to her and she had agreed, but he could not make any progress and they became cross with each other and later she hated the sight of him.

This was all a burden to her here—it gave her a sense of embarrassment and peculiar sadness, even of deprivation. And
there wasn’t much she could do except remember, at school, to call Harry and Eileen Dad and Mom. That seemed to make them larger, but not so sharp. Their tense outlines were slightly blurred when they were spoken of in this way, their personalities slightly glossed over. Face-to-face with them, she had no technique for making this happen. She couldn’t even acknowledge that it might be a comfort.

Some girls in Lauren’s class, finding the vicinity of the coffee shop irresistible but not being brave enough to go in, would enter the hotel lobby and make their way to the Ladies Room. There they would spend a quarter or a half hour fixing their own and each other’s hair in different styles, putting on lipstick that they might have stolen from Stedmans, sniffing each other’s necks and wrists, which they had sprayed with all the free trial perfumes in the drugstore.

When they asked Lauren to go with them she suspected some sort of trick, but agreed anyway, partly because she so disliked going home alone in the ever-shortening afternoons to the house on the edge of the forest.

As soon as they were inside the lobby a couple of these girls took hold of her and pushed her up to the desk, where the woman from the restaurant was seated on a high stool, working out some figures on a calculator.

This woman’s name—Lauren already knew it from Harry—was Delphine. She had long fine hair that might be whitish blond or might be really white, because she was not young. She must often have to shake that hair back out of her face, as she did now. Her eyes, behind dark-rimmed glasses, were hooded by purple lids. Her face was broad, like her body, pale and smooth. But there was nothing indolent about her. Her eyes, now lifted, were a light flat blue, and she looked from one girl to
another as if no contemptible behavior of theirs would surprise her.

“This is her,” the girls said.

The woman—Delphine—now looked at Lauren. She said, “Lauren? You sure?”

Lauren, bewildered, said yes.

“Well, I asked them was there anybody at their school called Lauren,” Delphine said—referring to the other girls as if they were already at a distance, shut out of her conversation with Lauren. “I asked them because of something that was found in here. Somebody must’ve dropped it in the coffee shop.”

She opened a drawer and lifted out a gold chain. Dangling from the chain were the letters that spelled
LAUREN
.

Lauren shook her head.

“Not yours?” said Delphine. “Too bad. I already asked the kids in high school. So I guess I’ll just have to keep it around. Somebody might come back looking for it.”

Lauren said, “You could put an ad in my dad’s paper.” She did not realize that she should have said just “the paper” until the next day, when she passed a couple of girls in the school hallway and heard a mincing voice say
my dad’s paper
.

“I could,” said Delphine. “But then I might get all kinds of people coming in and saying it’s theirs. Lying about what their name was, even. It’s gold.”

“But they couldn’t wear it,” Lauren pointed out, “if it wasn’t their real name.”

“Maybe not. But I wouldn’t put it past them to claim it anyway.”

The other girls had started for the Ladies.

“Hey you,” Delphine called after them. “That’s out of bounds.”

They turned around, surprised.

“How come?”

“Because it’s out of bounds, that’s how come. You can go and fool around someplace else.”

“You never stopped us going in there before.”

“Before was before and now is now.”

“It’s supposed to be public.”

“It is not,” said Delphine. “The one in the town hall is public. So get lost.”

“I wasn’t referring to you,” she said to Lauren, who was about to follow the others. “I’m sorry the chain wasn’t yours. You check back in a day or two. If nobody shows up to ask about it, I’ll figure, hey, it’s got your name on it, after all.”

Lauren came back the next day. She did not care about the chain at all, really—she could not imagine going around with your name hanging on your neck. She just wanted to have an errand to do, someplace to go. She could have gone to the newspaper office, but after hearing the way they said
my dad’s paper
, she didn’t want to do that.

She had decided not to go in if Mr. Palagian and not Delphine was behind the desk. But Delphine was right there, watering an ugly plant in the front window.

“Oh good,” Delphine said. “Nobody’s come and asked about it. Give it till the end of the week, I have a feeling it’s going to be yours yet. You can always come in, this time of day. I don’t work the coffee shop in the afternoons. If I’m not in the lobby you just ring the bell, I’ll be around somewhere.”

Lauren said, “Okay,” and turned to go.

“You feel like sitting down a minute? I was thinking I’d get a cup of tea. Do you ever drink tea? Are you allowed to? Would you rather have a soft drink?”

“Lemon-lime,” said Lauren. “Please.”

“In a glass? Would you like a glass? Ice?”

“It’s okay just the way it is,” said Lauren. “Thank you.”

Delphine brought a glass anyway, with ice. “It didn’t seem quite cooled off enough to me,” she said. She asked Lauren where she would rather sit—in one of the worn-down old leather chairs by the window or on a high stool behind the desk. Lauren picked the stool, and Delphine sat on the other stool.

“Now, you want to tell me what you learned in school today?”

Lauren said, “Well—”

Delphine’s wide face broke into a smile.

“I just asked you that for a joke. I used to hate it, people asking me that. For one thing, I could never remember anything I learned that day. And for another thing, I could do without talking about school when I wasn’t at it. So we skip that.”

Lauren was not surprised by this woman’s evident wish to be friends. She had been brought up to believe that children and adults could be on equal terms with each other, though she had noticed that many adults did not understand this and it was as well not to press the point. She saw that Delphine was a little nervous. That was why she kept talking without a break, and laughing at odd moments, and why she resorted to the maneuver of reaching into the drawer and pulling out a chocolate bar.

“Just a little treat with your drink. Got to make it worthwhile to come and see me again, eh?”

Lauren was embarrassed on the woman’s behalf, though glad to accept the chocolate bar. She never got candy at home.

“You don’t have to bribe me to come and see you,” she said. “I’d like to.”

“Oh-ho. So I don’t, don’t I? You’re quite the kid. Okay, then give me that back.”

She grabbed for the chocolate bar, and Lauren ducked to protect it. Now she laughed too.

“I meant next time. Next time you don’t have to bribe me.”

“One bribe is okay, though. That it?”

“I like to have something to do,” Lauren said. “Not just go on home.”

“Don’t you go visit your friends?”

“I don’t really have any. I only started this school in September.”

“Well. If that bunch that was coming in here is any sample of what you’ve got to pick from, I’d say you’re better off. How do you like this town?”

“It’s small. Some things are nice.”

“It’s a dump. They’re all dumps. I have experienced so many dumps in my time you’d think the rats would have ate off my nose by now.” She tapped her fingers up and down her nose. Her nails matched her eyelids. “Still there,” she said doubtfully.

It’s a dump
. Delphine said things like that. She spoke vehemently—she did not discuss but stated, and her judgments were severe and capricious. She spoke about herself—her tastes, her physical workings—as about a monumental mystery, something unique and final.

She had an allergy to beets. If even a drop of beet juice made its way down her throat, her tissues would swell up and she would have to go to the hospital, she would need an emergency operation so that she could breathe.

“How’s it with you? You got any allergies? No? Good.”

She believed a woman should keep her hands nice, no matter what kind of work she had to do. She liked to wear inky-blue or plum fingernail polish. And she liked to wear earrings, big and clattery ones, even at her work. She had no use for the little button kind.

She was not afraid of snakes, but she had a weird feeling about cats. She thought that a cat must have come and lain on
top of her when she was a baby, being attracted to the smell of milk.

“So what about you?” she said to Lauren. “What are you scared of? What’s your favorite color? Did you ever walk in your sleep? Do you get a tan or a sunburn? Does your hair grow fast or slow?”