THE RUNAWAYS

by M. E. Raines

I MET HER at the Copley Square subway stop in Boston. We exchanged cursory greetings. Then, with no warning, she grabbed my hand, turned, and charged toward the stairs. It made me laugh. I stumbled along behind her, climbing from the dank underground into the golden autumn sunlight. When I caught up to her, our footsteps immediately fell into a familiar, easy sync.
        It had been more than 50 years since I had last seen her, and yet she had the same exhilarating effect on me that she’d always had. She made me come to life. Over the years there were many other women with whom I’d tried to establish the same effortless rapport, but the result was, at best, a shallow wish-it-were-so-I’ll-pretend-it-is imitation, and more often than not a miserable failure. Being a musician, I have always been keenly aware of the rhythm between two sets of footsteps. With these other romances, I’d had to shift my stride in some way to compensate for our lack of compatibility–often needing to truncate or, in the case of one Amazonian beau, elongate my steps and the cadence of my pace to match theirs. Walking with her after so many years was not only smooth. It was like rejoining a lost part of myself...a lighter, braver, happier part of myself.
        She’d found me when she accidentally stumbled across a YouTube of one of my performances. She had immediately looked up my manager and contacted him. He was, as usual, off-putting. Even though he grumbled at her, he reluctantly caved in to her request and forwarded her cell number to me. I understood. She has always been hard to resist. When I called her rather nervously, our conversation was swift because she was headed out the door. She let me know that she was going to be in Boston, but beyond that, there was no time for such exchanges as, “What are you doing now? Are you married? Do you have kids? Where do you live?” Our chat had consisted only of making quick arrangements to reunite at the subway stop near her hotel, which was solely her idea, because everything was always her idea. She hung up right after we had made these casual plans to meet. I didn’t have a chance to ask her to text me when she arrived or to offer any details about how I look now, such as, “I’ll be the one wearing a gray wool coat with a rose in the top buttonhole.”
        It seemed stupid not to have planned more carefully. After all, it had been a long time–over half a century!–since we had last seen one another. And I am normally an extremely detail-oriented man. That has often been a stumbling block in my life, irritating those around me, but on the plus side, it was a contributing factor to the discipline it took for me to become a reasonably well-known concert pianist, the rare classical musician who is actually able to make a living at it.
        Sitting gingerly on the grimy blue plastic seat of the subway while being tossed from side to side (which was a weirdly nostalgic sensation, since I hadn’t been on a subway in decades), as the train rounded its final corner, I worried about that lack of detail in our hasty plans to meet. I have always been a worrier. How in the world would we find one another? What if she were standing in front of me and I completely overlooked her and went back home? What if she was late? And if so, how long should I wait for her before giving up? Or what if I approached the wrong woman and inappropriately embraced a stranger who would accuse me of sexual impropriety, resulting in my picture as a pervert on the nightly news?
        Another worry was that that the stench of the subway would permeate my clean clothes and displace the subtle but elegant aftershave I had splashed on my cheeks. I looked deceptively casual, dressed in khakis and a shirt that gave the impression of being more informal than its price tag would indicate. It had taken a long time for me to groom myself and to settle on what to wear so that I would appear reasonably attractive, yet blithely indifferent. My costume was intended to disguise how deeply, even obsessively, I cared about this meeting.
        There was no need to worry. I recognized her wide forehead and round squirrel cheeks the moment I stepped off the train. She still had the same lopsided grin. And I realized with relief that she had no problem spotting me because she knew exactly what I looked like from watching me on YouTube. We smiled at one another and then, immediately after saying hello, she grabbed my hand, as I said earlier, bolted energetically toward the stairs, and led me, trailing after her, into the  late afternoon light. Just like that. So many decades had passed, and we had scarcely spoken, but I immediately felt the familiar sensations of being in her energy field. It was a good feeling, like skinny-dipping in the clear, warm water of a friendly swimming hole. It had always been so. I became different when I was with her. I became better.
        The last time I’d seen her was the day that she moved away from the house next door to mine. She was seven, only a few months older than me. Up until then, we had been inseparable. Wearing that same lopsided smile that was on her face now, minus a few baby teeth, she had given me a clumsy goodbye hug. In response, I’d bashed her arm gently with my fist. She grabbed the spot, faking pain, and pretended that it had hurt her. I laughed. She always could make me laugh. Then she climbed into her family’s turquoise Nash station wagon and they drove away. I was sad for a long time after that.
        Back then, she was about my height. Now, walking on the Boston sidewalks, while I wasn’t all that tall, she seemed scarcely to have grown. The top of her head barely reached my shoulder. When I looked down, I noticed her pink scalp showing in patches underneath her thinning gray hair. I found that strangely reassuring.
        I had long since become quite portly. And bald. Over the years, I would sometimes imagine what she might look like as a grown-up. In my mind, she easily blossomed into a busty female with a charming figure, the kind who could get away with wearing clinging low-cut dresses and skimpy swimsuits. Even at seven, you see, she had turned me on a little bit. We sometimes played doctor and examined one another very closely.
        My lusty imaginings of her adult appearance proved to be completely wrong. Like me, with age her body had shifted and expanded, so her tummy protruded more than a little–actually, not too differently from the way it had when we were children. It amazed me that her hair, despite thinning, was still cut in the same style: short and messy and billowing with loose curls. I used to see those curls as sleepy unkempt kittens that were just on the verge of waking up and pouncing. The only difference with her hair was that then the kittens had been dark and plump, and now they were gray and far less puffy, with those bits of pink showing through. As for me, I’d lost most of my hair except for a few ridiculous and wayward wisps on the sides of my head. I kept those wisps. Shaving one’s head was for younger men. Even when I’d had hair, it’d never been either very thick or attractive, but I still wanted to keep what little I had. I hated having gone bald.

 

WE FIRST MET when we were around four years old. My parents had planted me in a playpen in our garage, which they had placed in front of the family car. They then opened the wide garage door and went back into the house, leaving me there alone. They did this often. It was their version, I guess, of allowing me to be outdoors by myself. My parents were kind of freaky, although nothing they did seemed out of the ordinary to me at the time. I was used to this imprisonment and I was content to hum music and play with a few toys until my jailers decided that it was time to bring me back indoors.
        On that day, seeing the open garage door, she had wandered over from her yard next door, stepped inside, and stood there, staring at me. I looked up at her and her head full of kittens. It was like an angelic visitation. I wasn’t even sure at first that she was real.
        “Why don’t you get out of that thing,” she finally said. It was a demand rather than a question.
        I stared at her, confused.
        She was determined to spring me. “Stand up and come out. I want to play with you.” Then she reached a chubby little hand toward me to help.
        It had never occurred to me to do such a thing, but I felt obliged to cooperate with her command. Clamoring over the edge of the playpen with its varnished wooden spindles, especially with her hand grasping mine, wasn’t easy. I have never been agile. The heavy miniature prison cell almost overturned when I made my first timid attempt, but after a few more tries, I succeeded.
        We walked to the garage doorway where we stood side by side for a few moments, tracing the iridescent oil stains on the concrete with the toes of our sneakers. Mine were red. Hers were blue. She was chewing bubble gum and blew a little bubble, which she promptly popped. I gazed at her in envious fascination.
        “How do you do that?” I asked.
        “You don’t know how?”
        I shook my head.
       “You’re supposed to blow bubbles. That’s why it’s called bubble gum.” At that, she pulled a still-wrapped piece of pink gum out of her pocket and gave it to me. This gesture permanently cemented my adoration of her. Even now, I can taste that peculiar fruity-ish taste that belongs only to bubble gum.
        “You got to chew it a lot first. To get it soft.”
       I was obedient. We began to chaw noisily together, and as we did so, we started to giggle for no reason at all, which was to become our habit. Then she demonstrated how to blow a bubble–well, as best as a four-year-old can. Under her tutelage, I soon learned this very important childhood skill. We were now officially chums.
        As I eagerly practiced blowing bubbles, she wandered around the garage for a bit, fingering the snow shovel, lifting and banging shut the little metal door to the gas cap a few times, and squatting down to trace the numbers on our car’s license plate. Then, looking bored, she said, “We have to get out of here.”
        “Okay,” I said. She grabbed my hand to lead me outdoors. With some trepidation on my part, we stepped from the shelter of the garage into the sunshine. I looked nervously back over my shoulder at the safety of my playpen.
        “Let’s get way way way out of here.” She thought for a moment. “I know what we can do. We can run away from home! Lulu and Tubby did that once.” Lulu and Tubby were characters in a popular comic book called Little Lulu that was about a little girl. Every child back then knew who Little Lulu was, even four-year-olds like us.
        The thought of running away from home worried me. “If we run away, where are we going to go to?” I asked.
        She thought for a moment. “California,” she said. She had no idea where California was, or that it was a state, or what a state was. She had heard her parents say the word, though. It was a good-sounding word, and she knew that it was a place.
       I pondered this for a moment. “Do they have pianos there?” This was a supremely important question.
        “I don’t know,” she said.
       “Because if they don’t have pianos, I’m not going.” My eventual destiny was already beckoning me. Whenever I sat at the piano and tried to play, my parents actually encouraged me. I was something of a child prodigy, able to pick out tunes and harmonies even at the tender age of four. They never spanked me when I was at the piano. It was my safe place.
       “Well, okay. We won’t run away, then. Some day we will, but not today.” She looked at me with that lopsided grin and a twinkle in her eye. “Today we will just be lost.”
        “But where will we go?” I asked, worried.
     “The woods. Lost children always are found in the woods,” she said, beginning to stride from the driveway to the sidewalk with confidence.
        “Okay,” I said. I didn’t exactly know what being lost meant, except perhaps for Hansel and Gretel, and they had found a gingerbread house. Maybe there would be candy. It sounded pretty good to me.
        Our street had a dead end. There were about half a dozen trees there. I knew from Hansel and Gretel that forests had trees. So the end of our block must be a forest. As if she were reading my mind, she turned and headed toward them. They were only a few houses away.
        At first she trotted ahead of me, but I caught up to her. This was to be the first of many times to follow that we walked side by side in perfect sync. I felt light-headed. When we got to the trees, we wandered around them and for a while pretended that we were lost children. Then we made up some delicious laughter-filled now-forgotten games, playing in the way that four-year-olds do. But lunchtime was approaching and we were both getting hungry. I also knew that if my parents found me out of the playpen, I would get a spanking. So she went back to her house, and I returned to the garage. It was easier climbing back into the playpen than it had been getting out.
        This was the beginning of the best relationship in my life.

I LOOKED DOWN now at her gray kitten curls and pink scalp in wonder. We found a coffee shop and went in, where we sat across from one another in a booth that had high wooden sides and red fake-leather seats. I loved being with her again. It was as if no time whatsoever had passed.
        We talked. She told me how much she loved my music, and said that she’d often thought about me throughout the years, as I had thought of her. I learned that she had been married, and was only recently divorced. Despite having had plenty of my own affairs (but never with anyone whose stride matched mine), I felt absurdly jealous. A man who wasn’t me had married her, lived with her, and made love to her.
        As for me, I had long since learned to channel my passion into my music. That was my life. There were no romances any longer, if you could have even called them that. Most of my past affairs had been with women who’d played in the symphonies where I had been the guest performer. I’d also had–and still had–a few nutty groupies and stalkers who, it seemed, were into Grieg and Rachmaninoff, although I was not remotely interested in touching them.
        Coffee now replaced bubblegum as our primary choice of oral distraction. I listened, transfixed, as, while sipping her brew, she shared stories of her pursuits of a number of unfulfilling career paths. None of them had stemmed from necessity, for her marriage and subsequent divorce settlement had kept her fixed financially for pretty much the rest of her life. But she seemed to yearn for some kind of professional identity. I could see how it would be hard for her to find a job that matched the vibrant enthusiasm of her spirit.
        For a while, she said, she had made jewelry which she had tried to sell at craft fairs and on Etsy, but with little success. She proudly lifted a gaudy necklace of beads and gemstones from her chest that was an example of her past creations. Then, shoving it across the formica table, she gifted me with a bizarre-looking keychain that she had crafted. I smiled and nodded pleasantly, but I realized that she was not talented enough to flourish in jewelry, or keychain making, or in any of the arts, for that matter. If she had possessed a true artistic flair, she would have been better dressed and done something with her hair. Instead, she was frankly kind of frumpy. I didn’t mind. She looked fine to me. Despite my silent criticism, it was a pleasurable conversation. And, as always, we periodically broke out into joyous laughter for no reason at all.
        She shared that after the jewelry-making gig, she had worked for a while as a tour guide and jeep driver in Sedona, and sold essential oils on the side. The tedium of jabbering at the tourists while driving over the same trails day after day, month after month, wore on her. She wound up wrecking the jeep one afternoon, which put a quick end to that career. She told it in a funny way, but I suspected that although she was a great person to walk next to, and quite probably an amusing guide, she was almost certainly an awful driver.
        She said that she was now into photography, and pulled out her phone to show me a few of the photos that she had taken. They were not very good, but instead were as off-base as the necklace she wore. Photography to me is like peeking into someone’s windows and watching a party that they are having. She should more rightly be the person partying, I thought, not the one on the outside looking in.
        “I envy you,” she told me with a sigh. “You have always known what you were going to be.”
        As we finished our coffee, she suddenly said, “I’m on my way to France. Paris. My plane leaves Logan Airport tomorrow. That’s why I’m in Boston.” She impulsively grabbed my hands. “Hey, why don’t you come with me? I’ll buy the ticket! C’mon! Run away with me!”
        I stared at her in shock.
        “They have pianos in France, you know,” she laughed.
        “But...but it’s impossible,” I said, shaking my head and feeling more than a little distress at her sudden invitation. “My manager has me booked solidly for the next three years. Three years! France isn’t even on the concert schedule.”
        “So what? Ditch the schedule. Come with me!”
        I felt pangs of yearning for this improbable and impossible temptation. The turntable of my mind began to spin. I had stopped getting spankings from my parents when I was about 12, but I’d known my manager almost since that time, and he had ways of scolding me that were nearly the equivalent. I didn’t dare disappoint him. He was old now, and the one who’d been responsible for most of my success as a concert pianist. Ditching the bookings and running away would also be a sure way of getting spanked from another source: my wallet. I adamantly refused to live off the money of her former husband. I shook my head. The idea of running away with her was not just impractical; it was absurd. We scarcely knew one another.
        I said no. A sad and unexpected sense of emptiness gripped me right after I said it.
        It was getting late. I walked her to her hotel room, where we suddenly kissed. This surprised both of us. I liked it, but I soon pulled away and we did not go further than that. It wasn’t that her body and gray curls were unattractive to me. I was tempted. But why bother, when she was already determined to disappear from my life again, after such a brief reunion? She seemed disappointed when I left.
        The next day I put my keys on the keychain she’d given me, picked her up at her hotel, and drove her to the airport, where I gave her a long goodbye hug. I resisted punching her in the arm. Then I found a place to park where I could wait and watch her plane take off. At least, I think it was her plane. I wasn’t sure. I cried anyway.

SAD ENDING

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, after a concert that was particularly poignant due to my sorrow at losing her again, I succumbed and had sex with one of my groupies. She gave me herpes.

 

HAPPY ENDING

IT TOOK A few weeks, but I finally cancelled my upcoming concerts and bought a ticket to Paris. I told my manager over the phone. He was furious. I thanked him for the years of success, fired him, and then hung up on him. It felt good, like escaping from yet another prison, this one built on money.

        If you are lucky enough to have someone who makes you feel lighter, braver, and happier than you have ever been, someone who makes you come to life, you should go for it. She and I lived happily ever after.

 

ACTUAL ENDING

BOTH ENDINGS ARE true. She helped me out of my prison and into the light, and all that ensued and continues to this day has been quite sweet.

        On my first night in Paris, I told her about the herpes. She laughed. “Oh, that? No big deal. Everybody has herpes.”

        Her jewelry, to my astonishment, became trendy and popular with the Parisians. The keychain she’d given me, which I still have, is worth quite a bit of money.

        Also, I discovered that the Europeans, unlike Americans, are absolutely wild about classical music and concert pianists. And they have lots and lots of pianos there, just as she promised.

The End

© M. E. Raines, 2022

If you liked this story, you just might enjoy a collection of short stories by this author entitled THE MAN IN THE GPS AND OTHER STORIES

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