When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister (best books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

and—ah—a sudden shot of pain across my middle. The ends of my wound pulling against each other, like one of those straw finger traps you get as a kid in Chinatown. I close my eyes though it will be only for half-sleep, my body on constant alert for Rocky’s breathing, Johnny’s cries, even though I don’t answer them with love, only automatic instinct. Love will come back some other day.

I close my eyes. I feel the hospital bed under me with my arms wrapped in wires, the needle lodged in the top of my hand. I feel the rocking back and forth. But tonight the bed’s floating in New York Harbor and seagulls fly past while I look at the Manhattan skyline, the way it used to be.

8 tears, tea, rubber A Wednesday in August 2016, 4:45 p.m. London, Grand Euro Star Lodge Hotel, Room 506

I hit reply to write back to Harry but I’ve spent fifteen minutes staring at the cursor waiting for my heart to slow down. This is one of the things that happens to me. My heart races at random moments when I don’t think I’m panicking but my body decides that I am. Also the trouble swallowing. Not when I’m eating, but when I’m doing something ordinary, like waiting for the light to change so I can cross the street and suddenly I can’t remember how to swallow. I try again and again and I can’t and then suddenly I remember how and I’m flooded with relief. I wonder sometimes if my body does that just to get me the relief part. Also the claustrophobia. I don’t want to talk about that, though, because just the thought of it makes me breathless.

He’s waiting for me to answer. I expected him to understand me, to intuit this, to just know me and realize what was happening. But that was expecting too much, that he would do for me what I would have done for him. Um, excuse me, Gigi, but you haven’t asked him about work since the baby was born. You haven’t asked him how he’s doing for months. You haven’t…

OK, don’t do that. Don’t start with the list of all the reasons that I’m a shitty wife. No, I haven’t done any of those things. No. Because it’s my turn, my turn to be the center and if he’s not going to get it and he’s not going to try then I’m going to…

Leave? How’s that working out?

OK, OK. Fuck.

Cursor’s still blinking. I want to write to Harry that it’s hard for me to think, that the steady stream of alcohol, hormones and sleep deprivation make it hard for me to find the words to respond when people talk to me. I trip over phrases, forget the names of things. Thoughts come that I can feel but not articulate. My mind is always blank. No, not blank. That’s not right. The opposite of blank.

My mind is flooded, overflowing with lists and needs and wants and musts. Dental appointments, school assemblies, vaccinations, birthday parties for children in the class that I don’t know but that I must buy presents for and Johnny must attend. Shopping lists, dinners, electric meter readings, homework to finish, holes in school uniforms and outgrown shoes to replace. Parking permits, TV license renewal. Decisions, tiny microdecisions every minute of the day that must be made about food, sleep, clothes, morality, what laundry detergent to buy since the last one made Rocky break out in hives. The temperature of bath water, the moment to cross the street, the grams of sugar in snacks, the minutes of screen time, whether a knock on the head is bad enough to go to the emergency room again, whether he should take a vitamin, whether I call the doctor because I don’t know what croup sounds like and he could die if I do the wrong thing—every decision requiring my thought and approval. Thousands of bucks stopping with me.

And worries. And questions. Has he moved up a reading level and if he hasn’t then why not? How do I know if Rocky’s allergic to eggs? Is Johnny’s bike helmet the wrong size? How do I make them like books and vegetables? Does he need glasses? What’s a cricket box and where do I get one? Will the baby die in his sleep if I turn the monitor off just this once so I don’t have to listen to the crackle and hum of it all night? Did I explain homelessness right when we walked by the man under the railway bridge? Did I explain that girls and boys are equal but it’s not OK to tackle girls on the playground no matter what the mothers of girls say about how they’re “not girlie”? How do I explain to the mothers of girls that it’s actually more important that he grows up knowing it’s never OK to hit women? Ever. That raising a man is terrifying? Almost as scary as raising a woman.

People see me with my kids and I know that every choice I’ve made is posted on a living billboard. When Rocky cries or Johnny shouts in public or crawls on the floor under the table at the pizza place or gets into a fight at the playground, everyone looks and decides what percentage of blame to assign to me. And when they see me—overweight, tired, unshowered, in baggy clothes, quick-tempered, disorganized, bottle-feeding—that’s not a difficult calculation.

At school, the teachers, young women who aren’t mothers yet, who know everything about kids except for how to raise them, make helpful suggestions that carefully withhold judgment and barely conceal it. They tell me Johnny needs a math tutor, and to control his impulses better, and to use an inside voice, and a reading assessment because he’s behind the other kids. And then they say to me—when I stand in front of them, out of breath, rocking the baby, trying to keep him quiet