When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister (best books to read now .TXT) 📗

shout from the backseat of her Honda Civic, the car she’s had since senior year of high school. I’m in the backseat with the baby. He looks so small, and he is, very small for six months. I’m still nervous so I always ride in the back with him, both my hands gripping his car seat, just in case.

Sharon talks to me through the rearview mirror: “I’m going, like, fourteen miles an hour, Jeej. This kid’s gonna have an uphill battle with you. You gonna put bars on the baby room windows, maybe? Maybe you could home-school him too.” I ignore her. I don’t say that I’ve thought about putting bars on the windows. I live in a sketchy part of Brooklyn. And there is no baby room. There’s a crib crammed into my tiny bedroom because until a couple weeks ago I didn’t know there was going to be a baby.

I adjust the baby’s blanket. She’s right, of course. I’m overprotective. Obsessive since the baby came. New moms are like that, but this isn’t the usual situation, and I’m not his mom, not officially, anyway, not yet. I’m jittery, I don’t sleep, and it’s not just because he’s up every three hours. I’m terrified. Of how I’m going to do this alone. Of hurting him by accident because I don’t have the right instincts. Of the day I’m going to have to explain everything to him. Of him growing up and feeling a space in his heart where his mother’s supposed to be that I could never fill, no matter how much I love him.

We pull up to Michelle’s parents’ house. A four-foot-tall statue of Mary greets visitors at the path leading to the front door. Her blue veil is faded, her palms facing out and down, her head cocked to the side with motherly affection, undisturbed by her nose being broken off. She’s missing three fingers of her left hand, where the metal spokes that held the plaster together poke out, sharp and rusty. Behind her, the grass and weeds are high and chaotic in the spaces between the other statues on the lawn—St. Joseph, St. John, St. Theresa. Jesus on the cross, all of his paint worn off almost down to the plaster, except for the red drops of blood on his forehead from the crown of thorns. And the angels—dozens of angels, wings in various states of neglect, eyes worn away by years of wind and rain and snow but still upturned to God.

Gloria Costello, Michelle’s mom, is standing behind the screen door, watching as I pull her grandson from the backseat. She’s expecting us. I start to sweat. My skin feels tight, like I’m wearing another woman’s life and Mrs. Costello can see it.

Michelle and Frankie were supposed to be together forever. They had been sweethearts since they were twelve years old, when the Costellos moved to the neighborhood. Then he died. And part of her died too. Part of all of us died. But it never stopped for Michelle. Pieces of her just kept dying.

We tried, we all tried, to help. But the needles and bottles had gravity on their side in Michelle’s downward spiral. I let her stay with me a few times, once for a couple months. When I’d see her on the block, underdressed for the winter weather, hair pulled back and graying, nails worn down to the sore red nail beds, I would take her to the diner, but she never ate what she ordered. I bought her cigarettes. One time I found her asleep on a bench in the ferry terminal. I gave her my coat and took her to her parents’ place. She fought me the whole way. She didn’t want anyone’s help. She wanted to get high and forget about the life her and Frankie were supposed to have but didn’t.

No one saw her for a long time until she showed up at Ma’s house with a baby in a broken stroller. Ma said she asked her if she wanted coffee and by the time she’d come back from the kitchen with the milk and sugar Michelle was gone, the baby asleep in the stroller barely standing on its busted wheels in the middle of the living room.

Ma waited to call the cops until I got there so that the baby would have someone to go to the hospital with. Dad was driving the bus, Mrs. Costello wasn’t answering the phone, Michelle had left and we had no idea who the father was. So it had to be me. I knew he wasn’t mine, but no one else was there, and once I saw him, when I picked him up and held him, I knew I couldn’t leave him. He was a part of Michelle and she still had a piece of my brother buried deep.

I stayed in the hospital visitors’ lounge that whole weekend. “Excuse me, I’m sorry, can you just tell me if he’s OK?” I would ask doctors and social workers, but they couldn’t do more than nod and say, “He’s OK.” I wasn’t family so they couldn’t give me details and I couldn’t stay with him. There was a sweet young nurse who would let me know once in a while on the sly how he was—dehydration, a bad cough, infected diaper rash, underweight. He was struggling and scrawny but he was going to be alright.

I went to the hospital every day after work for a couple weeks. I kept calling Mrs. Costello. She never answered, but by then we knew Michelle was dead. The cops found her in a motel off the Jersey Turnpike a few days after she’d left Ma’s house. Michelle’s funeral was private. I kept calling, though, until finally the Costellos unplugged their answering machine.

Then I went to check on the baby and he was gone, placed with a foster family. They wouldn’t tell me where or who. I cried in the hospital lobby, then I cried in my