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

nineteen years old, skinny and sweet at his first job. I remember Frankie, this one time I watched him at Foot Locker, when an old lady made him get ten boxes of sneakers and then didn’t buy any. How he laughed when she left instead of getting mad.

I turn to the copy guy. “I’m sorry. You didn’t want to hear all that. It’s been a rough night. I’m gonna get outta your hair in a minute.” The young man backs away, relieved that I’ve released him. I hope he doesn’t remember this encounter ten years from now and then decide not to propose.

I rub my eyes. I sit down on the floor, lean my head against the copier, try to finish this paperwork, not surprised that this is how my wedding turned out. I knew it was going to be a quick City Hall job but I hoped that some small part of it would be memorable and not because of the “And then she called me Gonorrhea” way that we’ll always laugh about whenever we tell the story. I mean the bar—I’ll never forget that, even though we had to leave before the end. But for my wedding night I wanted a beautiful moment, something pure to keep for when we’re old that’s just for us. Instead I have Robert in Ridgewood, standing in his boxer shorts with a cat on his shoulder holding my baby’s passport. That’s alright. At least I got a new last name out of it that people can pronounce.

All I have left to do is go through Harry’s statement, line by line, and look for any mistakes, replace the pages if he messed up.

I turn the page. Stop short.

One day in Battery Park I saw a young woman and a small boy on the path ahead of me. The little boy fell over and cried and the young woman quickly scooped him up and covered him with kisses. In a flash he took off running as she gave chase. It was a lovely scene; very ordinary but very happy. But then she suddenly tripped and fell over quite spectacularly, landing face down upon the pavement. I wanted to go to her aid but then I recognised her and stopped where I stood.

It was Gigi lying on the ground laughing. She did not try to get up quickly to recover, or to pretend that nothing had happened. I watched as she laughed and the little boy laughed too as he tried with all his might to help her off the ground. Realising that she had become a spectacle, she stood up, lifted her head high and said to the passers-by, “New York, thank you, you’ve been great,” and she took several bows as her little boy applauded. The stony-faced New Yorkers softened as they passed and could not help but smile.

It was the Gigi I had left more than ten years before, grief-stricken on the steps of her family home. And I was humbled, for like the city, she too was still standing and had begun to live again. I did not know if she would remember me, or if the sight of me, so tied as it would be to the memory of that worst of days, would upset her. But I knew that if I did not approach her then I would spend the rest of my life in a purgatory of “what if.” For, truly, how could I not love her? A woman who had gone to the edge of life and back, and who could still laugh, or, at least, who laughed so that her child would laugh freely, unaware of the pain she carried.

He saw me fall. He never told me. He was too polite to mention it that day. Too kind to draw attention to my lack of grace. Too possessive of this memory to ever share it until he thought he had to write it on this piece of paper to keep me with him. I hold the paper to my chest. Copy guy Johnny rolls a desk chair over to me. He hands me a cold Diet Coke.

“I found this in the back and I thought maybe you needed it. Um, congratulations on getting married, I mean, the guy seems alright.”

I take the can gratefully, wishing I could tell this boy’s mother what a nice kid she raised.

“Yeah, he is,” I say. “He’s beautiful.”

5 glue A Wednesday in August 2016, 12:30 p.m. London, Grand Euro Star Lodge Hotel, Room 506

I light a cigarette and open the window. There’s a scraggly city pigeon on the ledge. Not a fat, middle-class, wood pigeon who only pecks respectably around the back gardens of houses with newly renovated extensions. She’s the kind of pigeon I used to ride the Staten Island Ferry with. She hangs out on building ledges, by the Tube station, on the tracks of the Overground—where the action is. A badass city pigeon with a missing foot. You know how that happens? Human hair. Urban pigeons build their nests with shit they find in the street and sometimes they use human hair, which gets caught around their feet like a tourniquet so that while the pigeons sit on their eggs they feel their feet rotting off their bodies from lack of circulation. Then the chicks hatch and grow up and leave. And the mother pigeon just limps and hops and crash-lands for the rest of her life. So, I guess things could be worse.

I take another drag and exhale. The last time I smoked was the night before my custody of Johnny was finalized. He was eighteen months old. I smoked my last two Camel Lights on the fire escape of my apartment in Brooklyn, looking down at St. John’s Place: the bodega and the laundromat; the old trees and wide sidewalks; the brownstone spectrum from derelict to gentrified. I’d already quit by then because I didn’t want to be that lady pushing the