Miss You Already

For the most part, though, she avoided the freeways and kept to smaller roads, undivided highways that became the main streets of small towns, lined with fast-food takeouts and gas stations, small dress shops and bakeries and banks, then a garage or two, a big grocery store, and she’d be out in the country again, fields of corn or freshly cut alfalfa on either side. She ate by the edge of the road, pulling over on a wide shoulder near a river, perhaps—anything with a bit of a view and a patch of clear ground to stretch her legs. She kept the little fridge stocked with her favourite foods and she’d pop the roof, stand at the stove to make a proper meal, with coffee and dessert. The first few nights she stayed at campsites, but she found the noise unsettling. So many families, children whining and screaming; whether in pleasure or pain, the sound had the same effect on her: she just wanted it to stop. It was one thing she and David had agreed on. They liked sex for what it was, not as a means to an end.

We’re too selfish to be parents, he’d say.

Speak for yourself, she’d toss back, poking him in the ribs.

By the second week, she was watching the roadsides for old logging trails and hydro cuts, gravel pits and cul-de-sacs hidden behind overhanging trees. She’d nestle the van into position early in the evening while there was still some light, but even so, in the beginning she slept poorly, waking to shrill night whistles and faint rustlings in the underbrush, her heart suddenly huge and wild in her chest.

It was a Monday late in August when she pulled up to the curb in front of 3226 Stuart Street. There was no doubt this was the place. The Magees was spelled out in fancy wrought-iron letters over the garage door. That sort of punctuation always bothered her, the way it raised the question: The Magee’s what? But it was a good house, a compact brick bungalow cosseted with nestling shrubs, the lawn supplanted with a mosaic of flowering mosses, tufted grasses. The curtains on the windows were drawn. No mail was sticking out of the box. No newspaper on the stoop.

Now that she was there, she wasn’t sure exactly what to do. She hadn’t planned that far. It seemed enough to sell the house, buy the van, circle the cities on the map. Perhaps she should have called ahead. But then, what if they refused her?

She drove around the block and parked at the end of the street, some distance from the house. She made herself a tuna sandwich, read a few chapters of a novel, a slight story of lost love. She’d never been much of a reader, especially of romances, but they suited her now, the high drama of madeup lives. When she grew restless from waiting, she pulled out David’s shirt and held it to her cheek, rubbing the fabric against her skin, hardly aware of what she was doing.

The shadows were long by the time a car pulled into the driveway at the Magees’. The garage door slid open and swallowed the car so quickly Mary Ann didn’t see who was driving, but it was getting late. She’d have to take her chances.

A man answered her knock. He stood waiting for her to speak, a briefcase dangling from his hand. For the first time since she got the news on that rainy Sunday morning, she felt herself give way.

You don’t know me, she began, thinking, Yes you do, I can see you do.