“Are you fucking kidding me with this? What the hell is this supposed to be?” Ma fumes from the step.
“Harry, I’m sorry, excuse my mother, she’s not a people person. You know what, Ma, I’m glad you’re OK, we’re going now. We’re going to Sharon’s. Tell Frankie I’m over there.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, Gigi, is that you? Donna, I’m waiting for my sandwich!” My dad shuffles up to the screen door in a sleeveless white undershirt and sweatpants. He’s wearing old-man fake-leather slides, with the straps that cross in an X. The kind you buy at the supermarket or in the bins outside the 99-cent store. Except for my dad’s work shoes, my parents don’t buy real shoes anymore. They only go to King of Liquors, ShopRite and sometimes the Chinese takeout, and you don’t need real shoes for that.
“Come in, come in, what the hell happened, Gigi, Jesus Christ, are you alright, who’s this guy? What happened to you, son, you look terrible. They fell, you know, the towers collapsed. Those sons of bitches. Are you alright, were you there?” He says “collapsed” and I feel it—the sound, the cloud, the ash. Our near miss. I look at my dad. His thinning hair is gelled stiff and combed back from his big face. He’s got two homemade tattoos from his army days, one on each arm. They’re just blurry blue splotches now—an American eagle on the left arm and a heart on the right. It’s been years since you could read “Donna” scrawled inside it.
I force myself to speak to get that sound out of my head: “I don’t know, Dad. I just ran. What happened?”
My dad opens the screen door to usher us in but when he looks up into the distance his face goes gray, like his hair. He’s looking at what’s left of the million-dollar view he used to have. I turn around to see the clouds of smoke pouring out of the skyline. Our view of Manhattan, our American Dream wallpaper. Gone.
My dad says, “Gigi, c’mon, it’s over. Don’t look.”
“They’re both gone?”
“Yes, lollipop. Don’t look. Are you alright? Donna, where’s my sandwich? Jesus Christ, Gigi, get in the house already.”
I grab Harry’s hand to go inside. My dad goes on: “Kids, come in, come in. Now who is this?” We walk into the living room.
“Dad, this is Harry. I know him from, um, we work together,” I say, glancing at Harry so he knows to just go with it. “I found him on the boat and he needed a place to go.”
I nudge Harry toward a seat and I look at the living room of my childhood. Brown shag carpeting, olive-green sofas with worn upholstery and Ma’s ironic choice of coffee table—“country oak” with hearts carved out on the legs. And, of course, the wood-laminate paneling. It’s in every room of the house.
There’s a hatch in the wall between the kitchen and the living room. Always handy—an easy way for Ma to pass Dad his sandwiches and yell at us and be sure that we could hear her. Dad moved the TV so she could see it through the hatch from the kitchen. But today there’s only the planes crashing over and over. The towers collapsing into dust on repeat.
“ ‘Found him on the boat,’ she says, I can’t believe you bring perfect strangers here to the house like this,” Ma shouts through the hole in the wall.
“Jesus, Ma, Manhattan…I got no fucking shoes on. Please, today can you give me a break?”
“Donna, just make the goddam sandwich! Alright, kids, you OK on that couch? Sorry, what’d you say your name is, son?” I can see the beads of sweat on Dad’s top lip. He turns to Harry.
“I’m Harry, it’s very kind of you to have me here. It’s been quite an ordeal this morning.”
“Nice to meet you, I’m Jaroslaw Stanislawski, you can call me Jerry. You met my lovely wife, Donna. What’s your name again?”
“Harry.”
“Oh, like one of those princes? Right? Prince William and the other one’s Harry?”
“Uh, well, I suppose…”
“You know him? Nice guy?”
“No, I don’t know any royals, he’s still quite young, just a lad really, we just share the name.”
“Oh my God, Dad, of course he doesn’t know Prince Harry. Do you fucking personally know Giuliani?”
“He’s from England. How do you know he doesn’t know Prince Harry, you ever aksed him?” Aksed. It took me years to learn to say “ask” with an s, only after my first boss told me he wouldn’t let me on the phone with clients until I could say it right.
“No, I didn’t ask him, because not every British person knows the Royal Family, Dad.”
“And how do you know I don’t know Giuliani? What, you think he’s too good for me to know? What, you come around here so much you think you know my associates?”
“No, you’re right. I forgot. You’re totally a City Hall insider.”
“Why’re you yelling? We have a guest. Anyway, excuse my daughter, Harry, we tried our best, but what can you do? You know, nature-nurture,” and he smacks Harry’s knee and laughs his wheezing smoker’s laugh and Harry laughs too, out of politeness, or disbelief.
“You have a lovely home,” Harry says, lying. I don’t know him too well but I’m pretty sure he’s never seen a completely laminate-paneled living room. “Is this all, um, real wood?” he asks.
“No, laminate. Isn’t that amazing how real it looks? So where in England you from, anyway?”
“London.”
“Well, well, well. Let’s drink to that. Donna, get this man a gin and tonic! That’s what you drink over there, right?”
It’s clear that my dad’s already been at the red wine and Coke. He must have started early, probably after the first plane hit.
“He’s British! Donna, pretend you’re educated! Get out the good china, the British are coming!” He half laughs and half yells to the kitchen, where Ma is putting bologna on white bread and pulling bright yellow cheese slices off plastic sheets. Harry’s looking at her through the hatch and I can tell that he’s never seen cheese in that format. If he opened the kitchen cabinet, he would’ve found the spray cheese in a can. But that’s only for special occasions. To make rosettes on Ritz crackers as appetizers before Thanksgiving dinner.
“Just a cup of tea would be lovely, thank you.” Poor Harry.
“Very fancy, OK, Donna, get this man some tea. Do we have tea?”
“What is this, the fucking United Nations? I got coffee, that’s what I got. Oh, wait, I have Sanka. You want a Sanka?”
They’re terrified. The sandwiches and the Sanka, the yelling and the jokes. This is too big and all they can do is keep repeating their lines from before it happened. Dad’s going to do his stand-up routine and Ma’s going to clean the kitchen because if we all keep doing what’s normal then everything will be OK. Except that this massive tragedy is unfolding right outside the window and the planes are crashing every ninety seconds on TV. And now I’m here with this guy from the coffee place and my parents are so crazy that even if I wanted to cry, or scream, or just process what happened, I can’t. I have to follow the script too so they don’t lose their shit. When my hands start to shake I just put them in my lap until they stop.
The news gets worse. The Pentagon, the crash in Pennsylvania, it all blends together. Harry plays cards with my dad. It’s strange that he’s here but it helps because my parents are trying to act normal. But I shouldn’t have brought him. It seemed right in the moment but now all the City’s bridges are locked down and the ferry’s not taking passengers into Manhattan so he can’t get off Staten Island. I don’t know what we’re going to do with him. I need a drink. I find some jeans and a T-shirt in a box under my teenage bed and I get one of Frankie’s old shirts for Harry.
“Ma, have you heard from Frankie yet?” I ask my mother.
“No.”
“There probably won’t be cell service now for a while. Did he go to work today?”
“How should I know
, what am I, friggin’ Tom Brokaw with your breaking news?” She brings out more sandwiches and drinks and goes back to the kitchen, keeping herself busy with last night’s dishes.
Ma was hurt that Frankie moved out to live with Matty a couple months before. It was time, he was nineteen. He worked at Foot Locker in the mall and delivered pizzas at night. He still came by every day before he went to the pizzeria. Brought Ma her favorite donuts. But he grew up and she wouldn’t forgive him.
“He’s probably on his way home. I’ll try him again.” I dial his cell. Still nothing, not even a ring. But he didn’t work in the City and he never called anyway. They’re probably closing the mall so I bet he left work to go hang out with Michelle, his girlfriend, and smoke a joint and they probably would be here any minute. Right?
Right?
The phone in the kitchen rings. Once, twice, three times. Ma puts one hand on the receiver and waits. She keeps her hand there and doesn’t pick up until suddenly she does and answers, “Yeah,” not “hello” but “yeah,” as if she’s in the middle of a conversation. She walks over to the sink, the extra-long phone cord spiraling behind her. She holds the phone against her ear with her shoulder and keeps drying the glass in her hand.
A pause. The silence of held breath just before the exhale into the inevitable. “Yeah,” she says again, gasping. She drops the phone and the glass at the same time. Her knees buckle, she falls. The glass shatters into a million diamonds on the linoleum. My father runs to her. Blood and glass. “Donna? Donna!? Donna!!! Donna?” Over and over Dad just keeps yelling her name; first like a question, then a threat, then a plea. Like if he could just get loud enough it would undo this, whatever it is.
My heart stops. I pick the phone up off the floor. “Hello?”
“Gigi…” Matty, crying. He can’t find Frankie. Then there are other words. Interview. High up, ninety-something floor. Voicemail on Michelle’s phone. Did he come home?
Did he come home?
The phone’s attached to the wall in the kitchen and I catch my reflection in the glass of the frame of Frankie’s high-school graduation photo. That’s how much she loved him. She put his picture in a frame.
Harry at my shoulder, hand on my elbow. “Gigi?”
“Hold on, Matty.” My voice is steady. The shrieking in my head isn’t coming out of my mouth. I hold the phone to my chest the way you do when you tell someone to hold on. As if this is a normal call, as if I’m going to ask everyone to be quiet in the background and then I’m going to get back on the phone and say, “Sorry about that, anyway…”
I look at Harry and he looks at me. “My brother,” I say. Over Harry’s shoulder, through the kitchen doorway, I can see the window and the smoking hole in the skyline. I can’t move. Matty’s sobs are audible even with the phone pressed to me. I stay still, gripping the receiver, staring at the glass in Frankie’s picture frame. I’m not looking at Frankie, though. He’s gone. I’m looking at me to check if I’m still here. If now is real.
Broken glass grinding under my mother’s weight; my father still yelling her name. If I move, if I take my eyes away from the picture, if I put down the phone, it will be the start of after. Acid burning the back of my throat. My heart beating in my mouth. I don’t know if I’m breathing, the air’s too hot. Our lives divided now, in this minute, into before and after. If I keep my eyes on his face in the frame can we stay in before?
Everything’s moving too fast and everything’s moving too slow. I’m underwater. I want to ground myself to the earth, into the earth. But there’s nothing to hold on to. Everything spins. The sound of rushing blood fills my ears. Is it mine or Frankie’s?
Harry gently takes the phone from me. I think he wants to move me, make me sit down, but I keep hold of the wall. Stay focused on the glass in the frame. I find words: “Help my mother.”
When I look away from the photo I see Harry with my parents. This morning he was going to work but now he’s dusting broken glass off my mother’s knees. He helps my dad, unclenches his hand from the edge of the kitchen counter and brings him to a chair. Cleans the cuts on my mother’s arm with a dish towel. I keep hold of the wall. Harry finds the whiskey and some coffee mugs and pours my parents a drink. They sob. For a long time. I keep my palms against the wall.
It’s a minute later or an hour later when Ma says, screams, “What do we do? We have to do something! What do we do?” She’s asking the air; she’s asking God.
“We don’t know, we don’t know that it’s true, that he was there. Right? Eugenia, right!” My father pleads with me, shouting; wet, bloodshot eyes searching me for an answer. “Leave a message, tell him to call us,” Dad says, once, twice, a hundred times, not understanding that the cell phones aren’t working; that I can’t leave a message; that if Frankie were alive he would be here with us by now watching this shit on TV; that his son will never answer the phone again because his son is dead. But still, for my dad, I dial Frankie’s number again and again from the kitchen phone, knowing that it won’t ring and that he won’t pick up.
There’s nothing to do. There’s no hospital to go to, no ambulance to call, no rescue to make, we can’t do any of the things that you do in a disaster to make yourself feel useful, less impotent in the face of fate. We can’t go to the City, everything’s on lockdown. This isn’t a fire in someone’s house where we could stand outside and watch them pull Frankie out on a stretcher, or see him walk out covered in soot and coughing. This isn’t a car accident on Hylan Boulevard that we could drive to, or an ER we could meet him at and run alongside his gurney. There’s nothing, nothing, there is nothing. Nothing to do but wait for the phone to never ring with his voice on the other end of the line. My dad drinks from the mug with Garfield wearing a Santa hat and my mom holds the one that says Exxon. One was a Christmas gift long ago, the other a freebie for filling the tank. Before.
It’s a minute later or an hour later that Harry puts me in a chair at the kitchen table with my back to the hatch so I can’t see through it to the window. He shuts off the TV. Sweeps up the glass, cleans the drops of blood off the floor. He says to my parents, “I’m sorry.”
Dad says, “I know, son. Do you think maybe you could try to call and leave him a message? Here, I’ll give you the number…” and Ma says nothing.
Then Harry goes outside so that me and Ma and Dad can stare at the walls in private. We don’t speak. The fridge hums. A bird chirps outside. I hold Dad’s hand across the table. I listen to my parents’ breathing. Every few minutes, one of us bursts into tears, as though it’s the first time we’ve heard the news, and then we stop. We wait for grief and fear to tell us what to do next.
Finally, Matty and Michelle are at the door. She’s high and hysterical, clutching the cell phone that Frankie bought her. Michelle. I’ll remember her as she is now, in tight jeans and snakeskin high heels; nails newly done in red; her wavy dark hair straightened; her big Louis Vuitton on one shoulder; her name in gold script hanging from a chain around her neck, a diamond dot over the “i.” All done up to see Frankie. Ready to celebrate his interview and everything to come. The plans they made yesterday, before. Now she’s cradling the phone, his last words in her hand; her heart broken in her chest.
Harry sees them in. On autopilot Matty shakes Harry’s hand, then pulls him in for the one-handed bro hug, ignoring Harry’s hesitation. The sight of Matty feels like hands tightening around my neck. Feels like not wanting to live but having to. Matty, in crisp jeans and a white T-shirt with the sleeves tight around his biceps, thick gold chain, Yankees cap on backwards, pristine white Nikes. He smells like a cologne factory. He could be Frankie. They have the same chain. I’m sure Frankie put his on this morning. I’m sure we’ll never get it back.
Matty and Michelle go to my parents. They kneel at the feet of their kitchen chairs. Matty holds on to my dad and Michelle cries into my mother’s la
p while Ma strokes her hair in a way that she has never stroked mine. I take Michelle’s phone and try again and again to get to her voicemail but there’s still no signal. Michelle said she got his message before the planes hit and the phones went dead so she knew he was there. I throw the phone on the coffee table, and we all stare at it, knowing he’s in there, locked in this little plastic box, and that we can’t reach him.
“What did he say, Mish, tell me again what he said?” my dad asks her, for the fourth, fifth, tenth time.
She croaks, her voice swollen with grief, “He said, ‘Mishy, this is gonna be good.’ He said the guy was nice and he couldn’t believe the view. And that he was gonna take me up there one day. To see the top of the world, he said,” she repeats again for him. “ ‘Top of the fuckin’ world,’ he said,” and she sobs. And my dad cocks his head and listens like something in those words will give us a clue to where Frankie is really hiding.
But I just see Frankie slipping his phone into his pocket, turning around, putting out his hand for a strong, firm handshake with some other unnamed faceless man who is also about to die. I see him standing on top of the world minutes before I started running far below him, a few streets away.
Later I sit next to Ma. She holds the phone and I tell her he loves her because it’s too soon for the past tense. I put a hand on Matty’s shoulder. His white T-shirt, the curve of the muscle under the cotton; I cry out, but it feels like the sound came from someone else’s body.
Time keeps moving without us. Everything happens at once. Nothing happens at all. Harry quietly hands each of us a mug without making eye contact, not wanting to intrude on our grief. He puts one in my hand. All I can do is smell the whiskey fumes. I can’t swallow. It’s too strange to be living. To be breathing, drinking, crying. Involuntary actions are now deliberate. Step One. Breathe in. Step Two. Breathe out. Step Three. Blink.
When I Ran Away Page 2