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

“Where am I going now?” he asks.

“Staten Island. Do you know anybody there?” I ask.

“I don’t believe so, other than you, if that counts?”

“Sure,” I say, but I’m not sure if he answered “yes” or “no.” He uses a lot of words.

“That’s very kind. I’m Harry.”

“I’m Gigi.”

“That’s a nice name.”

I don’t know what else to say so I say, “My real name is Eugenia Stanislawski.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” I get the joke but I don’t laugh. Instead I think this guy’s a fucking inappropriate asshole because this isn’t a time for jokes or flirting but at least I got somebody to talk to so I say, “Is this real?”

He says, “Hold my hand.” So I do.

Harry and I go to the same tiny coffee shop across the alley from the back entrance of my office building. I would run over for a break and he’d be in there sometimes. I thought he was cute but he was always in a pink shirt or a three-piece suit and polka-dot socks or something so I figured he was gay. Then I heard him order coffee and I realized he was British. So then I thought, well, too bad he’s gay ’cause that accent was sexy. Then last Friday he was two people ahead of me on the line and he turned around with two coffees and handed me one and he said, “I believe it’s light and sweet, is that right? Have a lovely day.” He walked off before I could say thank you and I thought to myself, Now that is some classy European shit right there. And that ass ain’t too bad either.

But that was Friday and today is Tuesday and now we’re on the Staten Island Ferry. We’re looking at the water and holding hands, not because of the coffee but because we need to hold on to something. We’re not looking at the City. I feel the tears I haven’t cried yet when I suddenly get a picture in my head of all the paper. Office paper, copier paper, reams of paper swirling around outside my office window this morning. I work on the tenth floor so it was strange to see that much paper up so high. I watched it fly past the window when Sharon called my office to tell me she saw the news and that I had better get out of my building. I watched the towers burning from the corner of Wall Street for a minute before I took off my heels to run down Broadway with the wave of people.

I can see it now, the paper flying by the window, and it was theirs, the people who went to work that day—their reports and accounts and files—it fluttered out of their offices like a flock of doves when the planes hit. And the ash. On Harry’s shoes, covering that woman, that’s not just the tower that fell down, there were people in there. That’s the people too. The ash and the paper, they fell like snow. Landed like sledgehammers.

“Gigi, what do we do now?” Harry asks because the boat’s docking.

“Follow me,” I say. It feels like the decent thing to do, to take him home with me. I take him out through the bottom deck, bypassing the terminal. Staten Islanders know that the bottom level is the fastest way to leave the boat if you don’t mind the piss-and-old-beer-salty-swamp smell of New York Harbor. As we leave the boat to cross the parking lot and I see the chaos surrounding the terminal—people in every direction, crying, yelling, laughing, smoking, making calls on cell phones that don’t work—it doesn’t feel right to leave him there.

The late summer sun is blazing, glorious, oblivious. A girl, early twenties, in her pajamas, twirling around in circles, people leaving a wide berth around her. I tap her on the shoulder and say, “You need help, honey?”

She says, “I moved here last week. I was sleeping. I was sleeping.” Before I can say anything else she runs off into the crowd.

Harry and I walk up the hill off Richmond Terrace to my parents’ house. There’s a clear view of Manhattan from here. But I know the City’s burning behind our backs so I don’t turn around. I don’t want to know what it looks like.

When we get to the house my mom’s outside smoking on the steps. My mom and the house both look like they’ve seen better days except they haven’t. That’s what they’ve always looked like—pissed off, shabby, and disappointed. My mother’s wearing pink terry-cloth bedroom slippers, men’s basketball shorts, and her favorite T-shirt. It’s fuchsia, XXXL, with not much room to give, and it says Livin’ la Vida Loca. My brother, Frankie, gave it to her for Christmas the year the song came out. We all thought it was hysterical because my mother—in her late fifties with a gray buzz cut, a smoker’s rasp and a deep distaste for other people’s happiness—was not exactly Ricky Martin’s key demographic. But she loved this shirt. It was a good conversation starter. At the deli where she was a regular, Dominic, the meat guy, would always say, “Hey, Donna, how you livin’?”

And she would go, “La vida loca, baby!” And they would both laugh until they coughed. Even though that joke didn’t make any sense.

She’s on better terms with the meat guy than she is with me. Every time I come home since I left when I was seventeen a part of me hopes it will be different and the rest of me knows it won’t be. I should’ve known that a disaster of unprecedented fucking proportions wouldn’t suddenly make her Mrs. Cunningham.

I take a deep breath. “Hi, Ma.”

“I haven’t seen you in, what, a year, and today you drop by?”

“Ma, Manhattan just exploded.”

“So it takes some bomb for you to come see us? Hang on, let me roll out the red carpet. Our daughter has returned from the City.”

“I’m