When I Ran Away

by Ilona Bannister

  “In what?” Harry asks.

  “Where I keep the fax. Good night. I love you.” Satisfied that he’s settled things, he pulls the covers up to his chin.

  Johnny’s decided to love him. Harry’s taken aback and touched. He doesn’t want to say the wrong thing, doesn’t want to tell my son he loves him because it’s too soon, so instead he says, “And I think you’re a splendid little chap,” as he rubs Johnny’s hair and steals his nose.

  Johnny, confused by Harry’s accent and the unfamiliar phrase, says, “You need to check, Harry, ’cause I don’t think those are real words you just said. G’night.”

  Then Harry wraps his arms around both of us. I shouldn’t have let Johnny get so close so soon but my arms had done all the holding for so long that to have Harry’s arms around us both—I had no idea how strong I’d been until he lifted the weight from me.

  A year went by, a year of laughing and playing and being together; of happiness; a man in Johnny’s life; love in both our lives that we didn’t have before. Although me and Johnny said we loved him all the time, Harry could never say it back. But that was OK, it didn’t matter because he showed us his love every day.

  Then one Saturday morning while we watch Johnny play in the playground there is more than “I love you.” There is, “Gigi, come to London. You and Johnny, come and live with me.”

  This is the part of the movie where Hugh Grant looks up at the woman from under his eyebrows and smiles and his Englishness—his dimple and hint of a laugh under every sentence and puns and understatement and table manners and shirts with real cuff links—they shoot her through the heart and she leaps into his arms.

  But I’ve got a kid and I’m a real person so I say, “Get the fuck out of here,” and shove him.

  He takes my hand. “They want me back in London and I’d like you to come with me.”

  “You’re serious?” I pull my hand away, thrilled and terrified. “Because, if you’re fucking with me, it’s not funny.”

  He pulls me into him. “They’re promoting me, sending me home. I want you to come with me, you and Johnny. But you need to see it first. See if you’re sure. We won’t do it if it’s not right for you.”

  How long is a heartbeat? How long is a breath? A fraction of a second to choose a different life. Before I can stop myself, before I can even think of the words, I’ve said them.

  “If it’s with you then it’s right.” Harry pulls me to him. I close my eyes and breathe him in. I’m not sure what I’m doing.

  I do it anyway.

  4

  champagne, smoke, diet coke

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

  Luckily, it’s impossible to drown in a European half bathtub. I found this out when I woke up in water, shivering and pale. Added bonus, though, the cold water constricted my muscles so my thighs looked, just for a minute, not good, but not horrifying. I fell asleep curled in a ball because that’s the only way to sit in half a bathtub and it was painful to stand up, especially around my middle, where my scar’s still red and raised. I grabbed my rented towel and, of course, it was half the size it should have been. I pulled on my clothes and got under the covers. It took me a long time to stop shivering.

  I check the time. Noon. I order a pizza and two bottles of red wine. You can’t get wine delivered with your pizza at home. Another check in the pro column for life in the U.K. Dammit. Shit. A sudden pang of regret and anxiety. I forgot to pack Johnny’s bag for soccer camp today. I can see the shin guards where I left them, lying at the bottom of the stairs. Of course, Harry wouldn’t have remembered. That’s fair enough, since his wife just walked out on him. No snack either. Three days in a row that I forgot. An image of Johnny searching through his bag at break time, hungry, tired, knowing that there’s nothing in his bag while his friends pull out evenly cut carrot sticks and digestive biscuits. He loves those, kept asking me to buy them and I didn’t get why he wanted stomach medicine until he showed them to me in the store. That’s got to be, hands down, the worst name ever for a cookie.

  I can’t do anything about it now. I don’t even feel guilty. In these last months I’ve disappointed Johnny so many times in so many ways that he doesn’t get upset anymore. He’s just accepted my shitness and hugs me anyway. Like those baby monkeys taken from their mothers in that experiment you learn about in high-school biology. And the baby monkeys, looking for a mother, any mother, kept trying to hug the wire monkey covered in a towel, kept sitting with her, clinging to her, loving her, even though she never responded. Even though a towel could never be fur.

  I look down at the phone. There’s a red dot over my email app. Harry.

  You’re not answering my texts. Have you blocked me? I’m so worried, where are you? I’m calling everywhere looking for you. Please tell me you’re safe. It’s been hours. If you don’t want to tell me where you are please just tell me you’re safe. Please call. I love you. P.S.: I can’t find Rocky’s medicine.

  The TV’s still on. The Housewives have left for their Boca Raton weekend getaway. Nicole says, “I want to hear birds chirping, I want to see sunshine all the time, I want to feel the warmth on my face, on my boobs…” It’s been a cold, hard winter in Jersey.

  I hit reply. Watch the cursor blink.

  I’m waiting to feel something. Panic or hysteria, regret, sadness or longing, rage. I thought that’s what would happen, some great outpouring of pain that would prove to me how much I love them. Some involuntary impulse to get on a plane and never come back, or to go back to the house and pull my babies close to me and vow to start over. I thought something would happen if I walked out and left.

  But I’m calm and my heartbeat is steady.

  I watch the ladies order tequila by the pool. Then they go grocery shopping in five-inch heels for that night’s dinner. Later they get wasted and compare nipple covers for their strapless tops, a must-have for looks where you can’t wear a bra. It gets heated when Dina wants to bring up the rumor to the twins about Rino and his mother-in-law and the fact that Amber knows and that they don’t trust her. But Nicole doesn’t want to hear it. I wonder if Rocky’s screaming with tiredness right now and if Johnny’s hungry. I wonder these things and feel nothing.

  Not true.

  Relief; I feel relief that I’m not there.

  And resentment.

  Because this email—is this about making sure I’m OK? Or is it about making sure I come home and handle all the shit he doesn’t know how—doesn’t want—to do? Is this insecurity in his messages about me? Or is it about him, having to handle two kids on his own, figure shit out, make shit up, just fucking getting shit done any way it can get done?

  It’s the P.S., the friggin’ P.S. I’m in here having a breakdown and he’s asking me where Rocky’s medicine is. I bet he’s patting himself on the back thinking he’s amazing for even remembering that Rocky needs medicine. He can’t even, not even now, he can’t even open his eyes and fucking LOOK FOR IT. “OK, get it together, Jeej,” I have to say out loud when I find myself screaming at the blinking cursor.

  I start typing:

  It’s in the fridge asshole that’s where you keep liquid antibiotics and our kids have needed antibiotics at least four times in the past year and every time they have been in the fridge and they have not been camouflaged as lunch meat or apples every single time they have been there in a translucent bottle full of fluorescent yellow liquid and you live in our house and you are the father of these children and you should know that and the fridge is a discrete area it’s not hard to find something in a fridge especially not ours since it’s empty most of the time because you never help me because you are incapable of entering a supermarket or maybe that’s just what you expect the help to do oh wait WE DON’T HAVE ANY HELP ITS JUST ME YOU MOTHERFUC—

  I delete
it. The intimate management of shit and dirt and food and children is of little interest to him. Of so little interest that he doesn’t even know it exists for him to have no interest in.

  When I was pregnant and still working I would set my alarm to get up early so I could vomit twice and still get to work on time. One morning, while I was lying on the bathroom floor, just to feel the cold tiles on my face before I puked again, Johnny poked his head around the door.

  “Jeej, are you alright?” he said, head tilted upside down to see me better. Sweet boy.

  “Yes, baby, go get ready for school, I’ll be OK.”

  “OK, but Jeej, do you have a shoebox? Remember I need a shoebox today.”

  Oh, fuck. The fucking shoebox. “Um, go ask Harry to find one, OK?” I croak from the floor. Johnny needs a shoebox, a glass jar, a cardboard tube, or a historical costume every week. The school seems to think that we have a huge surplus of shoeboxes and jam jars that we keep on a magical shelf with our bottomless box of cardboard tubes next to the closet full of child-sized Roman emperor’s capes and pharaoh’s headdresses because God forbid they learn anything without appearing in full costume and dragging a bag of garbage to school.

  The point was I had done everything the night before. Packed the waterproofs with the rain boots in a named plastic bag for forest school; signed the homework diary; checked the spelling sheet; packed karate uniform and after-school pre-karate snack; labeled the water bottle; tested him on his five-times table. I did a nit check with a metal comb because somebody in the class has friggin’ lice again. After he went to bed I finished three client letters and emailed a brief to counsel. I knew I’d be throwing up in the morning so I did everything the night before. Everything except finding the fucking shoebox.

  While I washed my face between rounds of vomiting, Harry came into the bathroom, in boxer shorts and a dress shirt, tying his tie and checking his shave in the mirror. “Pukes, Johnny needs a shoebox,” he said. Pukes was his new nickname for me. I vomited on his business socks.

  “My God, are you alright, darling?” Harry said, alarmed.

  “I’m fine. Find him a box. And change your socks.”

  Twenty minutes later I pulled on a black dress, put on my sneakers and put my work shoes in my bag. I did the best I could with my makeup but it was hard to cover the spray of red dots from the broken blood vessels left around my eyes from the vomiting. Harry had left for work and Johnny was standing at the door waiting for me. His shoes were on the wrong feet and he’d skipped a button so his shirt was crooked. His teeth were brushed but his hair wasn’t, but I had to let that go. He had his school bag with all his stuff; I had my work bag with my plastic bags for emergency puking on the train, water, foundation and a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, the only thing I could keep down.

  “OK, baby, where’d Harry put the shoebox?” I asked Johnny, ready to walk us out the door. He pointed to the table: “It’s there, Jeej. I’m not sure it’s right though.”

  On the table was the extra-large cardboard box that we used to move our bedding from the States. I knew because it was written in marker on the side: Bedding. It was fifty times the size of a shoebox. The presence of the box on the table meant that upstairs in the loft, everything that had been stored in this box was now in a huge pile on the floor.

  Johnny, already skilled in British understatement, said, “I think that’s a bit too big, Jeej.” I would’ve screamed if my throat wasn’t so raw. Instead I sighed, opened a kitchen cabinet, took out a box of cannelloni shells and emptied them into a bowl.

  “Jeej, what’re you doing?” Johnny asked, peering over the counter.

  “Gettin’ shit done, Johnny.”

  “Language, Jeej, £1 in the jar, please.”

  “Sorry, remind me later, will this be OK?” I held the empty pasta box up, an acceptable substitute.

  “That’s good, thank you, Jeej.”

  I wasn’t angry about the box. Or the mess in the loft. Or the insanity of waking up early to vomit and dealing with every last tiny detail of Johnny’s life and then working ten hours every day in a haze of nausea and Doritos and Coke. I wasn’t angry at how unfair it was—I was angry because I knew a woman would never hand me a half-ton of cardboard when I asked for a shoebox. I was angry that Harry wasn’t a woman.

  That’s still the problem. He hasn’t been trained since before he could speak to intuit the needs of others. He hasn’t been shown how to push against the pulsing muscle of his heart to make room for everyone who needs a space in it. When he does try I say his attempts are inadequate. I don’t accept his limitations. But he doesn’t admit he has them. He doesn’t do what I would do. He doesn’t apologize for his presence, take up as little room as possible. Every time he pretends to step up but doesn’t and every time I’m disappointed. But neither of us explains and neither of us changes.

  We used to say thank you and please. We used to try to be what the other one needed and wanted. I thought we were special. I thought we wouldn’t take each other for granted like all the other couples I knew because we’d lost each other for so long.

  I used to love him, I used to think he saved my life, I used to think he took care of me, I used to…lots of things.

  I hit reply.

  I am terrified of the pain I feel. It’s paralyzing me. I’m afraid that I’ll hurt them. I won’t mean to but I will. That I already have. I’m afraid that I can’t get better, that I will always be like this, brittle and cracked and empty. I used to love you but I don’t remember how to now. You used to love me too but I’m sick and I know you’re afraid of me and you can’t look at me anymore. I need your help, I need your hel—

  Delete, delete, delete, delete. I delete that. If I say that then he’ll have to do something. And what if the something he does is leave me. Because I’m not who he thought I was. Because the kids are better off without me. Or what if he says he’ll stay if I promise to get better but I can’t. And I don’t, ever, and I’m always like this. Or what if I tell him and he decides to…What if I tell him and he knows but then he does nothing at all?

  I start typing.

  Amoxicillin in the fridge. Yellow bottle. If he missed the breakfast dose don’t double up just make sure you give it to him on time at lunch and at 4.

  Press send.

  London, October 2013

  The tub is huge, deep, with claw feet. The floors and walls are white marble tile. Gold taps. Gold-frame mirror. This bathroom is nicer than any apartment I’ve ever lived in. I slip into the hot water and try to remember how this feels in case I never stay somewhere this nice again. The wedding floats around in my head.

  There were chandeliers and champagne. Just like the weddings you see in the movies about English people. Every other guy looked like Benedict Cumberbatch. And I was doing OK. I didn’t understand seventy percent of what anyone said to me and I did a lot of fake laughing but everyone was nice, said nice things about New York; complimented my dress even though a banana yellow mini wasn’t right for a black-tie wedding, I now knew. But everybody drank so much so fast that it didn’t matter. And Harry held my hand the whole time, explained the references I didn’t get, gave me all the gossip about the people I had met, and I thought, OK, we can do this.

  Then, a loud booming voice and a big hand on Harry’s shoulder and we were face-to-face with Hannah and one of the beefier Benedicts, more like a Daniel Craig, who gave Harry a huge bear hug. Hannah stood there being beautiful. Her dress was long-sleeved, fitted black lace over a nude slip. Racy and restrained. I looked like Tweety Bird next to her.

  “Hannah, Rupert, this is Gigi,” Harry said as Rupert lunged toward me for two violent cheek kisses, unsteady on his feet. Hannah put out her hand and let only the fingertips touch slightly when we shook. Clearly still a bitch.

  I was about to say, “Yes, we met once, that time in New York,” but she cut me
off and said, “Lovely to meet you, are you enjoying London?” and stared straight into my eyes, telling me to play along.

  “I, um…” And before I could answer, Rupert slurred, “Yes, I’ve heard about you, Jenny, Harry doesn’t stop talking about you, lovely to meet you. Anyway, I know this is a wedding but we’re also celebrating ourselves tonight, aren’t we, Hannah?”

  “Oh, Rupert, honestly, don’t make a fuss, it’s not the right place,” she said with a smile and an eye roll, covering up something he was close to revealing.

  “We’re expecting! She’s up the duff! What do you think of that, Hazza, I finally did it! Where’s the champagne—ah! Thank you, sir,” Rupert said, accosting a waiter and taking his whole tray of champagne flutes.

  “Expecting…expecting.” Harry said it twice. He was looking at her when he said it, for only a few seconds, but I saw it. Something unfinished between them. Something unresolved in his voice.

  “Well, aren’t you going to congratulate us?” Hannah said with a sparkling smile as she touched his arm, which is OK if you’re friends, which is what he told me they were. Except that then her hand ran down the length of his forearm. All the way down to the wrist. It took only a second. A second for me to know he loved her. And that he lied to me.

  “Sorry, I…Well done, you two, fantastic, great news, great news,” and Harry’s voice trailed off. He managed to smile, to look like this was alright. But I could see that it wasn’t. Then he said, “Yes, well, have you seen the bride and groom? We should be getting on and saying hello, shouldn’t we, terribly rude of us, Gigi hasn’t met them yet,” Harry’s hand on my back trying to move me away from Hannah and Rupert, but there was no way to make a quick getaway in the crowded room, not with Rupert forcing glasses into our hands.

  “Not yet, don’t go, a toast is in order, don’t you think? Let me sort everyone out.” Another look passed between Hannah and Harry as Rupert handed each of them a glass. Then Rupert drained his drink and fumbled his reach for the next one, spilling champagne on my dress while I watched the man I thought was mine try not to drown in some old regret.