Runaway

man he met in one of these towns—a doctor who is known to look after touring people and to oblige them sometimes by performing services that are beyond the usual. He has told the doctor that he is concerned about his wife, who lies on her bed and stares at the ceiling for hours at a time with a look of hungry concentration on her face, and goes for days without saying a word, except what is necessary in front of an audience (this is all true). He has asked himself, then the doctor, if her extraordinary powers may not after all be related to a threatening imbalance in her mind and nature. Seizures have occurred in her past, and he wonders if something like that could be on the way again. She is not an ill-natured person or a person with any bad habits, but she is not a normal person, she is a unique person, and living with a unique person can be a strain, in fact perhaps more of a strain than a normal man can stand. The doctor understands this and has told him of a place that she might be taken to, for a rest.
    He is afraid she will ask what the noise is that she can surely hear as she presses against him. He does not want to say
papers
and have her ask, what papers?
    But if her powers have really come back to her—this is what he thinks, with a return of his nearly forgotten, fascinated regard for her—if she is as she used to be, isn’t it possible that she could know what was in such papers without ever laying her eyes on them?
    She does know something, but she is trying not to know.
    For if this is what it means to get back what she once had, the deep-seeing use of her eyes and the instant revelations of her tongue, might she not be better off without? And if it’s a matter of her deserting those things, and not of them deserting her, couldn’t she welcome the change?
    They could do something else, she believes, they could have another life.
    He says to himself that he will get rid of the papers as soon as he can, he will forget the whole idea, he too is capable of hope and honor.
    Yes. Yes. Tessa feels all menace go out of the faint crackle under her cheek.
    The sense of being reprieved lights all the air. So clear, so powerful, that Nancy feels the known future wither under its attack, skitter away like dirty old leaves.
    But deep in that moment some instability is waiting, that Nancy is determined to ignore. No use. She is aware already of being removed, drawn out of those two people and back into herself. It seems as if some calm and decisive person—could it be Wilf?—has taken on the task of leading her out of that room with its wire hangers and its flowered curtain. Gently, inexorably leading her away from what begins to crumble behind her, to crumble and darken tenderly into something like soot and soft ash.

ALICE MUNRO
    RUNAWAY
    Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published more than ten collections of stories as well as a novel,
Lives of Girls and Women.
During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and its Giller Prize, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in
The New Yorker
,
The Atlantic Monthly
,
The Paris Review
, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO
    Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

The Love of a Good Woman

Selected Stories

Open Secrets

Friend of My Youth

The Progress of Love

The Moons of Jupiter

The Beggar Maid

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

Lives of Girls and Women

Dance of the Happy Shades

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, NOVEMBER 2005
    Copyright
©
2004 by Alice Munro
    Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

    “Runaway,” “Chance,” “Soon,” “Silence,” and “Passion” previously appeared in
The New Yorker.

    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

    Grateful acknowledgment is