When I Ran Away - Softcover

Bannister, Ilona

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593081765 ISBN 13: 9780593081761

Verlag: Anchor Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A rich, bighearted debut that takes us from working-class Staten Island in the wake of the September 11th attacks to moneyed London a decade later, revealing a story of loss, motherhood, and love.

"A wise, bighearted, triumphant story." —Emily Giffin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lies That Bind

As the Twin Towers collapse, Gigi Stanislawski flees her office building and escapes lower Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry. Among the crying, ash-covered, and shoeless passengers, Gigi, unbelievably, finds someone she recognizes--Harry Harrison, a British man and a regular at her favorite coffee shop. Gigi brings Harry to her parents' house, where they watch the television replay the planes crashing for hours, and she waits for the phone call that will never come: the call from Frankie, her younger brother.

Ten years later, Gigi, now a single mother consumed with bills and unfulfilled ambitions, meets Harry, again by chance, and they fall deeply, headlong in love. But their move to London and their new baby--which Gigi hoped would finally release her from the past--leave her feeling isolated, raw, and alone with her grief. As Gigi comes face-to-face with the anguish of her brother's death and her rage at the unspoken pain of motherhood, she must somehow find the light amid all the darkness. Startlingly honest and shot through with unexpected humor, When I Ran Away is an unforgettable first novel about love--for our partners, our children, our mothers, and ourselves--pushed to its outer limits.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ILONA BANNISTER grew up on Staten Island and lived in New York City until she married a Brit and moved to London. Ilona Bannister, a dual qualified U.S. attorney and UK solicitor, practiced immigration law in the UK before taking a career break to raise her two young sons and unexpectedly found herself writing fiction. When I Ran Away is her first novel.
 

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1

Ash

A Wednesday in August 2016, 7 a.m. London

Harry’s shoes are by the door. Not in the closet, next to the door, but abandoned, right in front of it. Harry leaves them there the way you leave your bed unmade in a hotel room because you know housekeeping will deal with it later. The shoes by the door tell a truth about him. About us.

Back in the beginning, back in New York, when the dimple in his chin and his accent got me every time, there was the day I found him lying on my fire escape, covered in glass with blood on his shirt, wearing his shoes on his hands like two big pot holders. I said, “Harry, what the hell did you do?”

“I heard Johnny screaming and you were gone for bloody ages, I thought he wasn’t safe, so I tried to get in, but . . . it went rather badly,” he said to me, and to the super, and to the guy from downstairs who almost called the cops when he saw Harry break the window to my apartment.

I said, “Safe? He was locked in a bathroom in a locked apartment, that’s like the safest he could ever be in Brooklyn. You didn’t have to climb the fire escape and break the window and knock yourself out—”

“But I wanted you to know you could trust me to do the right thing—”

“Well, you sure fucked that one up, buddy.”

And then we all laughed. Because even though Harry put his sneakers over his hands to punch the window he still got cut up on his arm and he fainted and hit his head and that’s when I learned that Harry can’t handle the sight of blood. And also how much he loved me and Johnny.

What had happened was that the bathroom doorknob fell out of the door, the way it had a thousand times before, and Johnny got locked in. And I was just about to use the screwdriver as a handle to get him out like I always did when Harry walked in with the Chinese food. Except he had dropped a container in the hallway and there was fried rice everywhere. So I went to give him the broom in the hall but then the apartment door shut behind us. Click.

Now Johnny was double-locked in the bathroom and the apartment with me and Harry and the fried rice in the hall with no key. So I said to Harry, “Let me go get the super, he has an extra key, give me five minutes.” But if you’ve ever tried to find a New York super you know that he’s never where you think he’s going to be and I was gone for a little while and then Johnny started screaming. Harry didn’t know, though, that he was just doing that because he liked the sound of his voice bouncing off the bathroom tiles. He didn’t know much about kids yet. So Harry took things into his own hands and decided to break in to save Johnny. Of course, all he did was give himself a concussion and ruin his shoes. And break my window.

Anyway, we got Johnny out of the bathroom and wrapped up Harry’s arm and put ice on his head and the three of us ate cold Chinese while the super boarded up the window. Then we put Harry in a cab and he left in his socks because one sneaker had glass all stuck in the fabric and the other one was covered in blood. But later when Johnny had gone to bed and I was cleaning up I saw that he had lined up his school shoes next to Harry’s messed-up sneakers next to my work shoes in the little closet by the front door. All in a line, like a family. A little family of shoes.

Johnny did that, of course, because he’s always known where to put his shoes. I taught him that shoes go in a certain place and that’s where he puts them. But Harry—despite our years together, and our life with Johnny, and New York and London, and now the baby—he just leaves them by the door, the way you leave your bed unmade in a hotel room because you know housekeep— I’ve already said that. It’s hard to keep track of your thoughts when you’re leaving your husband and you trip over his shoes because he left them by the door again.

We’re so far from heroic gestures on fire escapes now. Our beginning was a long time ago. Now there’s a patch of my heart that’s an open sore, like an ulcer pulsing on the ventricle, or the aorta, or whatever the fuck you call it. And now there’s no heart left for the baby. I thought I could make room but I can’t. Johnny and Harry took all the heart space I had. And now there’s not enough.

The pain is nothing new. The grief and shock and anger, as familiar as my name. But when I became a mother the pain multiplied and grew and stretched my skin and bent my back as far as it would go because the pain a mother feels is not just hers. She feels everyone’s pain; she picks it up for her kids, she carries it for the family, she takes it from her parents when they’re too old to bear it. She cries when she sees the crying mothers on the news; she tears up when she sees a kid in a wheelchair in the supermarket; she sobs when that Save the Children ad comes on; she has to leave the room when the old man’s wife loses the baby in Up and that’s just a fucking cartoon. Because more than the pain of the person who’s hurting she feels the pain of his mother. Of all the mothers. They feel hers too.

But what the fuck do I know?

I know this. This is why it’s hard to love me and hard for me to love. And why I love so hard when I do. Because this is what I carry. And last night Harry left his shoes by the door again and that’s where I found them this morning so I pick them up, I open the door and I hurl them across the street as hard as I can. One lands in the middle of the road and the other one lands on the neighbor’s BMW, setting off the car alarm. And Harry’s yelling at me now, and Johnny’s screaming too and the baby’s crying and all of them plus the car alarm—they’re shattering my skull from the inside and it’s time to go.

So I leave them and I start walking.

Manhattan to Staten Island, September 2001

We want to know more than we want to survive. We want to know what death looks like before we run away from it. But we don’t know that about ourselves until it’s happening. Until we see it we don’t know that we’re the kind of people who run toward death; the kind of people who don’t run away even when it’s coming for us.

The edge of Manhattan vibrates. Hundreds of people, all of us silent. All of our hearts stop at once. A pause, a moment of quiet, a shared understanding, wordless and bone deep. There is a sound—a drone, long and low, not of our world. We hear it, and then we run. Not toward the terminal doors, to the boat, to safety. We turn around and run to the huge windows, built stories high for the view of lower Manhattan at a time that we would never know again, when our city stood untouchable, piercing the sky. We run to the windows to see the sun blotted out and the City vanish under the smoke and horror, ash and tragedy. We run to the wall of glass, put our hands on the windows, hundreds of pairs of hands reaching for the panes, palms outstretched, like we could stop it. The need to know, the need to put out our hands—so much stronger than the instinct to survive.

On the boat I sit down across from a woman covered in white dust, all over her suit and her hair. She doesn’t brush it off. She doesn’t know it’s there. She’s shaking, no shoes, no bag, just wearing a suit and nylon hose. She takes the life jacket from under her seat and puts it on, trembling and silent. Other people do it too because maybe the Staten Island Ferry’s the next thing to blow up.

I get up and go to the back of the boat where the doors are open to see if the City’s still there but...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anchor Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593081765
• ISBN 13: 9780593081761
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar