See Jane Run
By Fewthistle

They had the perfect life. They had the perfect jobs. They lived in the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood. They shopped at the right stores, ate at the right restaurants, drove the right cars. Perfect, or at least that's what their friends thought. The right friends, of course, who from the sanctuary of their expensive homes, smiled and shook their heads with wonder, wonder laced with envy, at the perfect life of the perfect couple.

Inside the perfect house, the décor just the right combination of comfort and style, harmony reigned. There were no late night arguments, no raised voices, no shattered glass or shattered dreams. Life went on exactly as it should.

They rose early, drove their expensive cars to their high paying jobs, worked ten, eleven, twelve hour days. They met at restaurants that served dishes laden with tofu and sprouts and wasabi sauce. By ten, they were tucked into their seven hundred count Egyptian cotton sheets, heads filled with case numbers and prescription forms. The next day was exactly like the day before.

Jane was a lawyer, Richard, a pediatrician. She spent her days making even more money for already cash heavy corporations. He spent his treating the children of the great unwashed, toiling for Medicaid dollars.

Somehow, in their coupled consciousness, they balanced out. She helped the rich get richer. He helped the poor raise another generation of poor to work in the factories, and assembly lines, and stores of the undeserving rich.

If Jane suffered from pangs of conscience, she did so silently, listening with seeming attentiveness as Richard regaled her with the kind heroics of his day, the illnesses cured, the fevered brows soothed. The stain of mascara on Richard's shirt from the tears of a grateful mother evoked no more than a perfunctory nod of approval from her side of the table.

Still, the cursory thought that the efforts of her days resulted in nothing more than a brief handshake and the flooding coffers of some multi-national corporation slipped fleetingly through her mind.

She never voiced those thoughts aloud, those treasonous thoughts that stole ever more frequently from some dark recess of her mind to lay like a blemish against her picture perfect life. After all, most people would kill for her life.

She had everything she had ever wanted, a great job, a lovely home. Most importantly, she had this sweet, wonderful, generous man who sat across from her, smelling of cologne, and antiseptic, and the faint, lingering scent of a child's fear.

A perfect life. And yet, as she sat there in the muted blue lighting of their favorite restaurant, a stunning swell of panic rose in her, leaving in its wake only vestiges of the complacency that had allowed her to stroll through the ruin of the world without ever looking down, a blindfolded figure walking a tightrope, fiercely unaware.

With a contorted twist of her neck, she tried to make her mind a blank page, just as her yoga instructor Xian had taught her. “Brush aside all negative thoughts, sweep them away as dust before a broom.” For weeks now that admonition had been as successful as holding back a raging flood with a baby's safety gate.

Richard knew nothing of her turmoil. He accepted without question the smiles that never quite reached her eyes, the nods and murmured, “Umm-hmms and really, dears, and I agrees”. Anything that would maintain the gentle comforts and cadences of his life. Days filled with squalling children, sticky and less than sweet smelling, left him with a desperate longing for his tranquil home and the calming blue of his wife's eyes.

He rarely noticed that lately there had been something else in those blue depths, like a barely noticeable leak of deadly chemicals into his water-supply, a trace of uncertainty, a faint discoloring of fear.

Occasionally he saw a shadow slide stealthily across those eyes, like the suggestion of a fish on the sandy, shallow bottom as it glides swiftly past. He put it down to exhaustion or lingering traces of the flu she had been fighting for weeks, anything but what it was.

So their days went on, one following on top of another, barely distinguishable from the day before. Different screaming child, same illness; different corrupt corporation, same corporate crime. Jane began to develop sleep problems.

She would wander the house in the early hours of the morning, turning on lights, searching randomly through drawers, pulling out cancelled checks, stacks of paid bills, old Christmas cards, some of the signatures illegible.

In the kitchen she found cookbooks, stuffed with recipes that she had always meant to try and never got around to. One three am, she lined up the utensils in the drawer, smallest to the largest, then at five am pulled them all out and arranged them alphabetically.

The discord of her nights began to show. Her face, always fashionably thin, took on a decidedly wan, gaunt appearance. The sixty dollar an ounce concealer failed to quite cover the rings of bruised purple below her eyes.

Richard accepted without question her excuses about job stress and too much coffee. Acceptance was the cornerstone to their complacent existence. Questions brought up issues, and problems, caused arguments, and disruptions. Take everything at face value, see only the surface, and life was so much more pleasant. Ignorance truly was bliss in the perfect home, for the perfect couple.

One night, lying in the darkness, listening to the gentle wheeze of Richard's snoring, Jane closed her eyes, willing sleep to come. As she lay there, it came to her. Just two words. Not really a sentence, more of a phrase. “She ran.”

“She ran.” It repeated in her head, incomplete, foreboding. She tried to clear her mind, imagined the words on a white board, imagined herself erasing them, leaving behind nothing but an empty space. Satisfied, she rolled over on her side, again willing herself to sleep.

“She ran.” Jane's eyes flew open. Finally, at three, after unsuccessfully willing the phrase to leave, she got up, showered, made coffee. When Richard strolled into the kitchen at seven, Jane had already been at work two hours.

Still, throughout the day, and the next, and the next, try as she might, she could not rid her mind of those two words. She saw them everywhere, heard them in snatches of conversation. They mixed themselves into the harmony line of her favorite songs.

Jane decided that the only way to free herself of those damn words was to finish the sentence. She began scribbling it in the margins of reports, on her desk calendar, on the backs of envelopes and the edges of magazine pages, all with different endings.

“She ran….to him….for the bus…from the robber….around the park…fast…slow…steadily…haltingly…up the street…down the block…for office…..against the grain….up the stairs…determinedly…………away.”

The last one was the one she kept coming back to, time and again. “She ran away.”

Jane wasn't exactly sure where “away” was, or how one went about getting there. “Away” had always seemed to be a very specific location, one for which a map had not been provided to her.

Once, on her daily walk, she wandered along the edges of the cemetery, finding some strange solace in the even rows of flat white stones, fallen dominoes upon which were inscribed the born when, died when of hundreds of peaceful souls untroubled by billing hours and contracts and depositions and two word phrases. Or so it seemed to Jane.

She had paused to tie the lace of her two hundred dollar running shoes when she glanced up at the stone nearest her right foot.

“Marvin Bolger. Born May 7, 1923. Died November 24, 1993.”

Beneath the who and whens were two words. “Gone away.”

Jane stared at the stone, a slightly dusky white against the green of the surrounding grass and murmured the phrase out loud.

“Gone away.”

Gone away where? Where precisely was “away”? She was tempted to ask the late Mr. Bolger, but doubted she'd get a satisfactory answer.

She considered telling Richard about the situation, but then, what could she say, that she was obsessed by two words, that she was hearing voices, that she was having a nervous breakdown? None of those fit into their perfect lives and so she simply pretended nothing was wrong and Richard happily accepted that.

She began to fear going to bed. It was there, in the tranquil, perfectly controlled temperature of their bedroom, beneath the soft weight of an imported down comforter, that the words truly possessed her. They glowed like the lights of Vegas behind her eyelids, bright red neon, sometimes in fancy cursive, sometimes in bold, block letters, but always there.

She imagined that she could see them even with her eyes open, in the shadow of the streetlight that fell across the floor and wall, in the reflection of the glass covering her wedding picture, even in the swirls and dots of the stucco ceiling.

She tried to convince herself that, if she could just find the perfect ending to the phrase, it would stop; that she would be free of it, that she could sleep again, have a normal life again.

Richard quickly learned to ignore the pieces of paper, the backs of Starbucks receipts, the margins of the newspaper, the sticky notes and bits of calendars, the napkins stained with coffee rings, all bearing Jane's indecipherable scrawl, each beginning with, “She ran…”. Questions could only complicate matters. Jane would work it out. He had complete faith.

She started to miss meetings. Her perfect face looked pale and out of focus. Her perfect clothes were wrinkled, even stained on occasion. The once immaculate interior of her Lexus was littered with bottomless piles of paper and napkins and trash, most covered in smudged blue ink. She was no longer the envy of their perfect friends.

One day, exhausted from screeching children and overprotective parents, Richard came home to find the front door unlatched. The television was on in the living room, the lights on in the bedroom. He called for Jane, searched the house for her, phoned her friends, her parents. Nothing.

Sinking disconsolately onto the couch, Richard heard the crinkle of paper beneath him. Lifting up slightly, he removed a torn out page from Cosmopolitan from the cushion of the sofa. On one side was a quiz: “How To Find the Perfect Lover”.

On the other side of the page was an advertisement for Ralph Lauren. Along the edge of the page, just above the head of a perfect blonde model and her perfectly bronzed mate, Jane had written in careful block letters, “She ran out on her life.”