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

microwave curry in front of him, a lo-cal risotto for me.

“This looks great, Gigi, thank you.” It’s disgusting but he’s too tired to care. “Anything else of note happen today?” He digs into the fluorescent-yellow rice.

How do I answer?

Actually, it was me. I cracked the window when I threw Johnny’s truck at it.

Or:

I started drinking at eleven this morning because the sight of myself in the cafe window made me cry.

Or:

Johnny’s teacher told me that he went to the headmaster’s office today because he punched that little shit who keeps bullying him because I told him to.

Or:

I’m so homesick my body aches.

Or:

Please help me. I’m in so deep I can’t get out.

But I don’t say any of those things. Instead I go with “You know that old drunk on the bench who I thought was dead? Turns out he’s not.”

Harry says, looking at me, fork in midair, “Well, that is good news.” We eat in silence. Forks clanging on plates.

After dinner we sit on opposite ends of the sofa. Harry says, “Oh, the new season of Game of Thrones is out,” and he flips through the channels to find it. I say, dismissively, “Dragon porn,” and I curl up thinking I’ll catch a nap on the sofa for an hour before Rocky wakes up.

Harry is silent for a moment until he says, looking at the TV, “Newt rom-com.”

I sit up and scramble until I think of “Mouse thrillers.” I smile, remembering when we played Last Letter Game that time we were stuck at JFK for six hours.

Then Harry says, “Scorpion drama,” and I start to laugh; we both do.

I blurt out, “Armadillo horror!”

He yells, “Rat art house!”

I stammer, “Eel comedy!”

He shouts, “Yellow-billed loon…yellow-billed loon…uh…um…dammit, I’m out.”

I say, “Get outta here, what’s a yellow-billed loon?”

He says, “It’s an Arctic bird.”

I say, “Oh my God, you’re an Arctic bird.” We laugh. It’s nice. It used to be easier.

I move down the sofa to be closer to him, because I think I want to say, I think I’ll try to say—but then, Rocky’s cries come over the monitor. Khaleesi, the mother of dragons, makes a breathless speech on-screen. Harry watches her. Our moment is over. He doesn’t move to go upstairs and I’m too tired to ask him to, knowing the argument it will start. I go give Rocky his bottle. And cry.

London, April 2016; Baby, 4 months old

How does she open that window? Can I ask her to open it, no, that’s weird it’s raining how does she open it if I really had to could I break it? Go to the bathroom until it’s over. What do I do with the baby? No, don’t go to the bathroom. You’ll get trapped in there. Don’t go anywhere just pretend nothing’s happening.

Gigi? C’mon now. Get your shit together.

I can’t, I can’t. My hands are numb my hands are numb that means I’m not breathing.

Of course you’re breathing, Gigi.

I’m not breathing there’s no air.

Of course there’s air, Gigi.

Don’t drop the baby don’t drop the baby.

Jesus Christ, Gigi.

Here it comes, rising lava climbing, climbing, back of knees, waist, spine, between the shoulder blades, back of neck, the heat, the heat, I can’t…

Gigi, count!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8 and…

“And you, Gigi? Cake?” Sukie asks me, breaking the trance of the panic. She can’t tell I’m immersed in hot lava on her sofa.

Try to answer. If you can answer you can breathe.

I sputter, stutter, find words somewhere in the back of my throat. “Um, no, no, thanks, it looks great but I’m on a diet.” I swallow, hard. Push the lava down. Focus, look at them, listen, listen to every word, count…So I do. I try to focus even though my eyes feel like they’re melting under the heat. We’re in Sukie’s big Victorian house. We’re all holding our babies. Sitting on overstuffed sofas around a cream-colored coffee table. The table looks old, like it came from Sukie’s great-aunt’s barn. Its paint is distressed. Like me.

Fiona, a living stick figure in an outfit that highlights the flatness of her post-partum stomach, says, “Oh, I need to be on a diet too—I’ve never eaten so much cake!” All the ladies laugh. They nod and agree about how ravenous breastfeeding makes them, how they eat constantly, how they’re going to keep breastfeeding as long as possible so they can keep eating cake. Ha, ha, ha, they laugh with that laugh they all got from their John Lewis wedding registries, along with the set of matching Le Creuset cookware.

I’m coming down from the wave now. It lasts only a few minutes but always feels like hours. It started in the hospital the night he was born. I thought it was probably all the drugs I was on. But it hasn’t stopped. It gets me in confined spaces. Distraction helps. For instance, I’m keeping my mind busy wondering if Fiona made that diet joke because, even though I’m the fattest girl in the room, she doesn’t think I’m that fat. So she doesn’t think that joke will offend me because I’m one of them. But I know that, really, she’s just sparked a skinny-girl conversation and they’re all just ignoring me while they eat the cake that I don’t. At least none of them noticed the wave. Most people are too self-absorbed to notice a woman drowning on land anyway.

Count.

Four blondes, two brunettes including me. Sometimes I forget which blonde has which baby, they’re all so similar, but one of them’s Australian so that helps. There’s a Geordie, Tracy, who I thought was Irish or Scottish at first, I knew it was a different accent, but then she said something about growing up in Newcastle. So I said, “Oh, do you have an ass tattoo like Cheryl?” But no one laughed. I thought it showed that I knew who Cheryl Cole was and that I could join in on British pop-culture conversations but it didn’t come out right. It was the wrong thing to say. Tacky.