Eileen’s disappearance from X-ville

Eileen Dunlop’s disappearance from X-ville is the culmination of a plan formed in the days before Christmas: rather than kill herself or remain trapped at home, she would leave without warning and make her absence look like a mystery. The account gives the escape both a practical outline and an emotional purpose. Eileen planned a route out of town, but she also wanted her father to feel the loss of a daughter whose life he had failed to value. Only in retrospect does she identify the last Sunday in X-ville as the threshold she had crossed without knowing it.

The decision to leave

At twenty-four, Eileen worked as a secretary at Moorehead, a private juvenile correctional facility that she regarded as a prison for children. She describes herself as having little hope of being wanted or loved, and her fixation on Randy had made rejection feel like a threat to life itself. The possibility of suicide appeared to her as a set of available means, but she distinguishes those thoughts from an intention to die. She feared the hell her father would invoke, did not believe in heaven, and says that she was not going to kill herself. Running away offered another possibility: New York City represented distance, anonymity, and distraction from the life she could no longer stand.

That alternative was not yet an action. Eileen told herself she could leave once she found the courage, and imagined a future departure rather than a particular moment of resolve. The difference matters: her disappearance is not presented as a sudden decision made on the road, but as a scheme taking shape alongside the misery and uncertainty of her everyday life. She could picture escape before she could bring herself to carry it out.

The last Sunday in X-ville

On the Sunday she would later recognize as her last in town, Eileen drove to the X-ville library and found its red door locked. The small library occupied an old meeting house, and its lone librarian kept hours according to her own schedule. Eileen knew the books by their spines and remembered marks on their pages; after the library was closed, she pushed her returns through the slot. She recalls a hopeful quality in the late-December morning, though the feeling did not alter her plans. Instead, she decided to drive to Boston.

The retrospective narration makes the ordinary choice carry a weight that Eileen did not feel at the time. She imagines what she might have done had she known she would soon be gone: quietly packed in the attic, mourned her youth at the kitchen table, or resisted the house physically. None of those imagined gestures occurred. She got on the highway without understanding that this was the last Sunday she would spend in X-ville. The contrast between the significance assigned to the day afterward and its apparent ordinariness then is central to the event: the departure is recognized first as a fact of memory, not as a conscious farewell.

The drive also brought her close to other points of departure without taking her to them. She considered stopping at her former college but could not summon the courage. She had spent a little over a year there before being pulled out halfway through her sophomore year and brought back to X-ville to tend to her mother. Eileen describes that return as an obligation rather than an affectionate homecoming. On the Boston drive, the closed library, the abandoned college stop, and the open road mark different distances she had considered but had not yet crossed.

The escape scheme

By Monday, Eileen had developed a more specific plan. She wore new blue stockings and her mother’s clothes, locked her father’s shoes in the trunk of the Dodge, and drove to Moorehead. Her imagined route required layers of clothing: a gray coat, wool socks, snow boots, mittens, gloves, a hat, a scarf, trousers, a skirt, and a dress. She thought she could manage an hour in the car with its windows closed before risking the rest of the journey with them open. She had previously nearly fallen asleep at the wheel when the windows were up, and once had veered into a snowbank; that earlier near-accident made the problem of driving in cold weather part of the escape’s practical calculation.

Her destination was New York City, 257 miles south of X-ville, but the route she imagined first led about three hours northwest across state lines to Vermont. She planned to abandon the Dodge in Rutland, a place she had read about in a book on railroads, then walk to the railway station and take a train south. An empty suitcase would let her carry the clothes she planned to remove once aboard. She expected to take only the clothes she needed and money she had been saving in the attic. The plan’s elaborate sequence—bundle up, drive, leave the car, reach the station, change clothes, and continue by train—shows how thoroughly she tried to turn an untested desire into a workable departure.

Eileen also considered taking books from the X-ville library and never returning them. In her reasoning, they could serve as keepsakes and as clues that might unsettle anyone looking for her. She imagined investigators finding nothing obviously wrong and her father insisting that she would not simply have left him. These imagined responses reveal that concealment was as important to her as reaching a new place: she wanted no one to know she had chosen to disappear.

Meaning and aftermath

Eileen’s desired effect on her father was more complicated than simply escaping his authority. She feared that if he understood she had run away, he would humiliate her and dismiss her decision. Instead, she wanted him to believe she might have died in a ditch, been kidnapped, or been lost in an avalanche. She imagined him grieving, searching through her possessions, and recognizing too late that he had not treated her as someone valuable. Her plan was therefore an escape from X-ville and an imagined test of whether her absence could make her father acknowledge her importance. The account does not establish that he reacted as she hoped; that imagined grief belongs to Eileen’s intention, not to a confirmed aftermath.

The last-days narrative also preserves small memories whose significance is emotional rather than logistical. On Monday at Moorehead, a church group’s surplus holiday sweaters meant that a navy vest, knit with an orange crucifix and marked small, ended up on Eileen’s desk as a present from the warden. She wondered whether the gift meant that he liked her, then shut it in a drawer. She explicitly notes that some memories may seem irrelevant but help create the mood of her recollection. The vest does not advance the escape plan, yet its presence among these memories shows how ordinary objects and passing fantasies remain embedded in the account of leaving.

Eileen later states that she was gone by Christmas morning and identifies the events she recounts as the last days she spent in X-ville. Her opening declaration that she would run away within a week thus joins the practical plan to its outcome: she did disappear, although the Sunday drive itself did not announce that ending to her. The narrative holds together the woman who could map a route out of town and the woman who, on the last Sunday, simply got on the highway without knowing it was her last.