The Long Way Home

Today the train felt both familiar and foreign. Peter wasn’t there.

In the reflection of the window she noticed Myrna staring at her. Clara turned to face her friend.

“What is it?”

“Do you want Peter back?”

It was the question Myrna had been wanting to ask for a while, but the time had never seemed right. But now it did.

“I don’t know.”

It wasn’t that Clara couldn’t answer that question, but that she had too many answers.

Waking up alone in bed, she wanted him back.

In her studio, painting, she didn’t.

With her friends in the bistro, or over dinner with them, she didn’t miss him at all.

But eating alone, at the pine table? In bed at night? She still sometimes spoke to him. Told him about her day and pretended he was there. Pretended he cared.

And then she turned out the light, and rolled over. And missed him even more.

Did she want him back?

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “I asked him to leave because he stopped caring for me, stopped supporting me. Not because I’d stopped caring for him.”

Myrna nodded. She knew this. They’d talked about it through the past year. Their close friendship had grown closer and more intimate as Clara opened up.

All the stuff stuffed down, all the stuff that women were not supposed to feel, and never, ever show, Clara had showed Myrna.

The neediness, the fear, the rage. The terrible, aching loneliness.

“Suppose I’m never kissed on the lips again?” Clara had asked one afternoon in midwinter, as they ate lunch in front of the fire.

Myrna knew that fear too. She knew all of Clara’s fears because she shared them. And admitted them to Clara.

And over the course of the year, as the days grew longer, their friendship deepened. As the night receded, the fear had also receded. And the loneliness of both women had ebbed away.

Do you want Peter back?

Myrna had asked Clara the question she was afraid to ask herself.

In the window, imposed over the endless forest, Myrna could see her ghostly self.

“Suppose something’s happened to him?” Clara spoke to the back of the seat in front of her. “It would be my fault.”

“No,” said Myrna. “You asked him to leave. What he did after that was his choice.”

“But if he stayed in Three Pines he’d be fine.”

“Unless he had an appointment in Samarra.”

“Samarra?” Clara turned to look at her friend. “What’re you talking about?”

“Somerset Maugham,” said Myrna.

“Are you having a stroke?” Clara asked.

“Maugham used the old fable in a story,” Myrna explained. “I spend my days reading, remember. I know all these obscure things. I’m lucky I don’t work in Sarah’s bakery.”

Clara laughed. “I just want to find him, to know he’s all right. And then I can get on with my life.”

“With or without him?”

“I think I’ll know when I see him.”

Myrna tapped Clara’s hand lightly. “We’ll find him.”

Once in Toronto they checked into the Royal York hotel. Myrna had a shower and when she came out she found Clara on her laptop.

“I’ve marked the major art galleries on the map,” said Clara over her shoulder, nodding to the map open on the bed. “We can do them tomorrow.”

Myrna rubbed her wet hair and sat on the bed, studying the map with its Xs and circles.

“I thought we should start with Peter’s brother and sister,” said Clara. “Thomas’s office is just up Yonge Street. We have an appointment at four. Marianna is meeting us for a drink in the hotel bar at five thirty.”

“You’ve been busy,” said Myrna. She got up to look at the page Clara was reading on her laptop. “What’s so interesting?”

And then she stopped.

At the top of the page were the words “W. Somerset Maugham.”

“A servant goes into the marketplace in Baghdad,” Clara read off the screen, her back to her friend. “There he bumps into an old woman. When she turns around, he recognizes her as Death.”

“Clara,” said Myrna. “I didn’t—”

“Death glares at him and the servant, frightened, runs away. He goes straight to his master and explains that he met Death in the market and that he needs to get away, to save himself. The master gives him a horse and the servant takes off, riding as fast as he can for Samarra, where he knows Death won’t find him.”

“I don’t know why I mentioned—”

Clara made a subtle movement with her hand, and Myrna fell silent.

“Later that day the master is in the marketplace and he too meets Death,” Clara continued reading. “He asks her why she frightened his servant and Death explains that she hadn’t meant to scare him. She was just surprised.”

Clara turned around and stared at Myrna. “You finish the story. You know it.”

“I should never have said—”

“Please,” said Clara.

Finally Myrna, in a soft voice, spoke.

“Death said, I was simply surprised to see him in the market. Because I have an appointment with him tonight. In Samarra.”

*