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

and exhausted as he throws himself on the bed in Harry’s room, face-first. He cries into the duvet, his shoulders shaking with every intake of breath. I hold in my tears and rub his back until his sobs slow down. Harry quietly pulls out the old trunk of his toys that Rebecca saved and lays them out on the floor. After a while, Johnny looks up and sniffles, “What’s that?”

“Oh,” Harry says, “these are just some of my old things, I thought you might like them. This one’s called Crossbows and Catapults. Do you want to see how it works? There are toy soldiers and some Lego too,” and Johnny slowly peels himself off the bed, wipes his nose on his sleeve and joins Harry on the floor, crisis over as abruptly as it began. Harry and I look at each other knowing we have a lot to talk about later.

I lay back on the bed while Harry and Johnny play, making my way through a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-chip cookies that Danielle sent me from home. I always bring a stash of comfort food to Rebecca’s. I look around the imposing bedroom of burgundy embossed wallpaper and gilded mirrors, bedside tables with ornately carved legs. I feel a longing, almost a craving, for our old apartment in Brooklyn.

“Jeej, I won, I won,” Johnny says, and crawls up on the bed to me; his face is still tearstained and swollen, but the hurt look has gone away.

“I’d better go down now and smooth things over,” Harry says, kissing me on the forehead.

“Yeah, you better make sure her tablecloth’s alright,” I say.

“Look, I know she’s not easy to deal with,” he says, sitting on the bed.

“No, she’s not. And could you tell her to stop calling me Eugenia?”

“She’s just formal, you know that. At least she didn’t call you fat this time,” he said, elbowing me, trying to make me laugh, remembering the time that she had said I looked “well” three times in five minutes, “well” being the middle-class code word for fat. But I didn’t find it funny today.

Harry’s going to go down there and she’s going to drink sherry and Damon’s going to drink port and Harry’s going to nod and agree with all her criticisms and find the words to appease her. He’ll validate her concerns about the wine stain and notice that she won’t ask whether Johnny’s OK but he won’t point that out. He’ll assure her that she’s right about everything and that her constant phone calls are no bother. Mothers and sons. I wonder what I’ll be like when Johnny brings someone home. I wonder if refusing to share your son and hating his partner are an inevitable part of aging, like cataracts and cellulite. Well, there’s no way I’m going down there. Wish I could sneak some wine up here.

I turn to Johnny to say, “Are you alright, baby boy?” but he’s fallen asleep. I pull the covers around him, kiss his closed eyes and find myself exhausted and wired at the same time. I snoop around the room. I open the desk drawers and the closet, I examine the shelves, “looking for something to read,” but also because I’m hoping I find some secret shit that I can judge Rebecca for. Like a drawer full of expired psych meds or proof she kept of her second husband’s affair.

Instead, on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, wedged next to an ancient encyclopedia, I find the photo album, the old photos stuck in with black corners. Harry as a two-year-old covered in mud. Rebecca and Richard, Harry’s dad, young and gorgeous in their wedding photo. Rebecca in an all-white tennis outfit looking like a British Jane Fonda. Richard, in a lab coat, with baby Harry on his knee holding a fat science book upside down, pretending to read. Rebecca, holding Harry on a smooth, slim hip, all big sunglasses and Charlie’s Angels waves.

Richard was a scientist who made a lot of money from inventing a special lens for telescopes. He didn’t inherit his money, he earned it, which at that time was rare for a rich man in England. Harry told me that he worked constantly and wasn’t interested in any of the stuff that came with the money—cars, holidays abroad, tailored clothes, black-tie dinners, the races, the theater. Nothing, that is, except Rebecca. You could see in the photos that she was the kind of rich and beautiful girl who knew that rich men wanted to possess her and so she made herself easy to possess; it was probably her best, maybe only, option. And she was good at it. She still is. She did it today as she served the family lunch in stilettos and full makeup. She does it when she calls on a Sunday morning or Friday night when we just sat down to dinner, when she knows that it’s our time with Harry. Appearing delicate and frail, knowing how to look like she needs protection because in her world men don’t stick around unless you make them feel like they can rescue you.

There’s a photo of Harry with Richard wrapped in big coats, cheeks flushed, holding a toboggan, the tree behind them weighed down with snow. He was Harry’s best friend, I can see it.

Johnny stirs in his sleep. I turn to the last page of the album and pull out a loose photo tucked in the back cover. Rebecca, looking serious and unamused at someone to her right. Someone we can’t see because they’ve been cut out of her photo. Or maybe she’s been cut out of theirs. There’s a crisp white cotton man’s shirt and a slip of forearm; a lock of unruly curly hair in the corner. And I feel a sudden stab of sadness when I realize what this is.

One night in Harry’s apartment in New York, I opened the drawer of his bedside table looking for a pen and I found a picture of