Pauline Dakin - Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood

I T WAS DUSK , late February of 1988. The air was cold and clear as I stepped out of my car in the parking lot of the highway gas station. A crescent moon to the southwest was perfectly outlined in the darkening sky. At its tip winked a bright, large star, perhaps a planet. The horizon still glowed a deep magenta. My mothers aging blue Toyota Tercel was parked nearby, under a light. Wed agreed to meet here, in the small farming community of Sussex, New Brunswick. She would drive from Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was doing her theology degree, and I would drive from Saint John, New Brunswick, where I was working as a reporter at the local newspaper, The Telegraph-Journal.

As I approached our rendezvous, I saw the lights of a motel just off the highway, a few hundred metres from the gas station. Id driven by the large, lit-up block letters of the Blue Bird Motel many times.

I walked over to Moms car and got in, said hello, leaning across for a hug. She held me just a beat longer, tighter than normal. As she pulled back, her smile was sad, almost apologetic. She handed me a note and an empty envelope. She put one finger over her lips, hushing me, although I wasnt speaking. She pointed at the note. Puzzled, I unfolded it and read, in her distinctive handwriting: Dont say anything. Take all your jewellery off and put it in the envelope. Dont talk until we get out of the car again. I will explain.

I sat staring at the note. I could hear my pulse as silence descended between us like a wall. My mother suddenly felt like a stranger whose intentions were unclear. Why this bizarre drama? I looked at her for a long moment, then slowly took off my rings. The small diamond cluster my father had given me for my sixteenth birthday. A square-cut peridot, my birthstone, that was a Christmas present from his third wife, Thora. I pulled the long, heavy chain that held an antique-style watch out of my shirt front and over my head. A gift from Mom the Christmas I was fifteen. It all went into the envelope. I passed it to her. She licked the flap, sealed the envelope, and set it on the console between our seats. As she put the car into gear and eased onto the now-darkening winter road, I braced myself for what was to come. We drove the short distance in silence.

EARLIER THAT WEEK , Mom had called me at work. We usually talked in the evening, but I was glad to hear from her. Shed moved to Halifax the previous year to go back to school and I missed her and our day-over debriefs.

Can you talk for a minute? shed asked.

Sure, I answered. I have an interview, but I dont have to leave for twenty minutes.

Around me the newsroom of The Telegraph-Journal and its sister paper, The Evening Times-Globe, buzzed with the usual background chatter of the police scanner and clatter of the old teletype printers spewing wire copy and photographs. It was a relatively quiet news day, but I was aware that could change at any moment. Two years earlier Id witnessed a newsroom responding to the first word of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. It was the only time in my years at the paper I ever heard the order to stop the presses and it left a strong impression of how quickly life can go off the rails, without any warning or any chance to prepare. Normal one moment, irreversibly changed the next.

I was sitting at my desk now, one in a row set sideways to a bank of windows that looked across mud flats near an inlet.

Whats up? I asked.

I could hear Mom inhale deeply. She was bracing herself to begin. My interest increased.