She moaned and seemed to be lifting her arms to him. The boat began to drift. Waves lifted it, drove it out. Water on all sides seemed to darken. Jesse climbed awkwardly into the front seat of the boat, where Shelley lay, and gathered her into his arms. He could not stop weeping. Why was he weeping after he had come so far, why was he sobbing so bitterly? She could not escape him any longer. And yet she kept moaning as if in pain, in a delirium, her hands light as moths against the side of his face, beating him away or caressing him, he could not tell. "You won't remember any of the things they did to you," he whispered. His tongue felt swollen and blistered. Shelley's lips were cracked. Caked with something sour. She was sick, dying, he could smell the stench of death about her, and panic rose in him at the thought of her escaping again, her eluding him forever --
     "Why are you dying? Why are you going away?" he whispered.
     The boat bounced and shuddered.
     "Why are you going away from me, all of you, going away one by one . . . " he said, clutching at her, feeling her heat, her dryness, her incredible dryness, the dryness of this body that was straining to get loose from him and to fly out of the world entirely: straining to break its orbit and elude him forever. Where were they all going, these people who abandoned him?--one by one, going away, abandoning him? Was there a universe of broken people, flung out of their orbits but still living, was there perhaps a Jesse there already in that void, the true, pure, undefiled Jesse, who watched this struggling Jesse with pity?
     "All of you . . . everyone . . . all my life, everyone. . . . Always you are going away from me and you don't come back to explain . . .," Jesse wept.
     He embraced her. He clutched at her thighs, her emaciated thighs, her legs. He pressed his face against her knees, weeping.
     The boat drifted most of the night. Near dawn it was picked up by a large handsome cruiser, a Royal Mounted Police boat, a dazzling sight with its polished wood and metal and its trim of gold and blue.

- Joyce Carol Oates, Wonderland
(This was the ending in the 1971 first edition, which was changed in later editions.)