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

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 lap 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.

Harry refills drinks, gets tissues, but the sky is changing now, the day has passed in spite of us and he whispers to me, “Gigi, this is time for your family now, I should go. Unless you need anything? Unless I can do anything else? I’ve written down the numbers for places you can call for help, they gave them on TV. They said it’s quite difficult now, they don’t have much information.”

“I, I, could…” But I can’t speak. I mean to say something but I don’t know what. He reaches out to touch me, pat my arm or hold my hand, but then he doesn’t. He nods at me, looks down, turns away. Harry says goodbye to my parents and Matty and Michelle, says the right things, I can see by the way they hug him, the way my dad says thank you, the way Ma nods her head, grabs his hand and squeezes it wordlessly.

He walks to the front door and I follow him. Outside, I stand on the landing and he stands a step below me. I look only at his face, trying not to see the City still smoking behind him. “I’m sorry, Gigi. I’m so sorry.” He means it. He doesn’t try to hug me. I would freeze and turn to a pile of dust if anyone touched me. Somehow he knows this.

As he walks down the steps in Frankie’s old shirt, hands in his pockets, I stop him. Stand two steps above him. I use the edge of my T-shirt to clean the smudge of dust still on his forehead. “You missed…” I mean to say You missed a spot, but that would have been me before, trying to lighten the darkness. Our eyes lock instead. Then I watch him turn and walk away.

As Harry walks down the block, Sharon, Danielle, and Stacy, my oldest friends, run towards Ma’s house and brush past him as though he isn’t there. Danielle’s crying, Stacy’s trying not to, saying my name over and over, arms outstretched to me. I’m quickly enfolded in their perfume and big hair and love and sorrow on the steps of my childhood home. Matty must have let them know. They loved Frankie like their own little brother. They hug me and smooth my hair, hold me by the elbow, try to take my weight as their own, but I’m stiff, numb, and they don’t know that their embraces are like a steel brush on my skin. I watch Harry walk away as I say to the girls, “Frankie’s gone,” and this is only the first time of the hundreds of times that I will say the words. He’s gone.

The girls hold me, arms around my waist as we go up the steps to the front door. I stop before I open it. I don’t look back because I don’t have to. I know Harry’s still there, watching me, sad for me. For all of us.

A couple days later when we finally get to the City to make the rounds of the hospitals, Manhattan is covered in flyers of the smiling dead. And by then we’ll know it’s thousands. For days—weeks, months—afterwards, there will be calls to hospitals, hotlines, police. We’ll tell them Frankie’s missing. And day after day he won’t come home. He won’t come through the door telling us a crazy story about how he escaped and almost didn’t make it. Because he didn’t.

But tonight, Ma will hide the phone from a drunk Michelle and keep it for herself, and sleep with it