Free Runaway by Alice Munro Page B

to anybody. (Actually she did tell it, a few years later, to a woman named Christa, a woman whose name she did not yet know.)
    But she wanted very much to tell somebody something. She got out her notebook and on one of its ruled pages began to write a letter to her parents.
    We have not yet reached the Manitoba border and
most people have been complaining that the scenery is
rather monotonous but they cannot say that the trip has
been lacking in dramatic incident. This morning we
stopped at some godforsaken little settlement in the
northern woods, all painted Dreary Railway Red. I was
sitting at the back of the train in the Observation Car,
and freezing to death because they skimp on the heat up
there (the idea must be that the scenic glories will distract
you from your discomfort) and I was too lazy to trudge
back and get my sweater. We sat around there for ten or
fifteen minutes and then started up again, and I could see
the engine rounding a curve up ahead, and then suddenly
there was a sort of Awful Thump . . .
    She and her father and her mother had always made it their business to bring entertaining stories into the house. This had required a subtle adjustment not only of the facts but of one’s position in the world. Or so Juliet had found, when her world was school. She had made herself into a rather superior, invulnerable observer. And now that she was away from home all the time this stance had become habitual, almost a duty.
    But as soon as she had written the words
Awful Thump,
she found herself unable to go on. Unable, in her customary language, to go on.
    She tried looking out the window, but the scene, composed of the same elements, had changed. Less than a hundred miles on, it seemed as if there was a warmer climate. The lakes were fringed with ice, not covered. The black water, black rocks, under the wintry clouds, filled the air with darkness. She grew tired watching, and she picked up her Dodds, opening it just anywhere, because, after all, she had read it before. Every few pages she seemed to have had an orgy of underlining. She was drawn to these passages, but when she read them she found that what she had pounced on with such satisfaction at one time now seemed obscure and unsettling.
    . . . what to the partial vision of the living appears as the
act of a fiend, is perceived by the wider insight of the
dead to be an aspect of cosmic justice . . .
    The book slipped out of her hands, her eyes closed, and she was now walking with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of these beautifully even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the name of these ice tiles, and she answered with confidence,
iambic pentameter.
But they laughed and with this laughter the cracks widened. She realized her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situation, but she could not grasp it.
    She woke and saw the same man, the man she had followed and pestered between the cars, sitting across from her.
    “You were sleeping.” He smiled slightly at what he had said. “Obviously.”
    She had been sleeping with her head hanging forward, like an old woman, and there was a dribble at the corner of her mouth. Also, she knew she must get to the Ladies Toilet at once, hoping there was nothing on her skirt. She said “Excuse me” (just what he had last said to her) and took up her case and walked away with as little self-conscious haste as she could manage.
    When she came back, washed and tidied and reinforced, he was still there.
    He spoke at once. He said that he wanted to apologize.
    “It occurred to me I was rude to you. When you asked me—”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “You had it right,” he said. “The way you described him.”
    This seemed less an offering, on his part, than a direct and necessary transaction. If she did not care to speak he might just get up and walk away, not particularly