Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  Now Park Slope is more sought-after than parts of Manhattan. Their street is lined with Subarus and SUVs. Maya’s always been a little bit embarrassed by just how much she loves this. Academics are supposed to laugh in the face of creature comforts, but she’s grateful to Stephen for this: their lovely tree-lined lives, the ability to keep the house in Florida, vacations she would never have dreamed of till meeting him. Now the nicer, more progressive rehab in which they’ve locked their daughter this past year.

  They have the garden in the back that Stephen maintains and Maya’s office window overlooks. When the kids were little they would sit out in the dirt as Stephen weeded or trimmed the bushes. Sometimes they’d use the smaller shovels he bought them and help him put in a new tree or plant. He wore khaki pants that were frayed at the bottoms and old boat shoes—he would never not be Upper West Side, Collegiate prep, Princeton, and Oxford—but he’s always been more interesting than that. And Maya would sit in her office, surrounded by the walls of bookshelves, all her work laid before her, and think this must be what people meant when they said joy.

  She’s only a block from their house when she sees him. She’s headed toward the bridge instead of the park. The park’s only three and a half miles around and that seldom feels long enough for Maya now. He sits on a stoop, elbows resting on his knees, head lolling forward. She feels her breath catch in her throat; the stretch of muscle from her shoulders to her neck begins to tense.

  She says her son’s name.

  He pauses too long before he looks at her.

  His eyes are glazed and his clothes the same that he was wearing at dinner. She sits on the step below him and looks into his face.

  She thinks maybe he’s not sure it’s her, can’t figure how or why he’s out here. She wonders where he could have been. She rests her hand on his calf. There’s something sweet coming off him; weed, she thinks. She wishes he were small enough that she could pick him up and bring him to his bed.

  “Benny, what are you doing out here?” she says.

  “I went out,” he says.

  “Out.” Her cheek is even with his knee and she rests it briefly on the denim of his pants. “With whom?”

  “Friends,” he says. Like she doesn’t know the boys he’s been friends with since he was barely walking, kicking a ball in Prospect Park. Even this way, he has always been more predictable than El.

  “I was in the city,” he says. He keeps his head down as he talks to her. “What does it fucking matter anyway?”

  In the past year, she has spoken to him mostly once a week. She calls on Sunday afternoons when she knows he’s expecting her and they talk anywhere from ten minutes to an hour. Their conversation is hardly ever of much consequence. She knows he writes to Ellie too, but he never brings her up with Maya. Maya never asks. He tells her about class or friends or soccer. Sometimes they catch on something sure—something that he read that caught his interest, a movie they both saw, a moment in the news that feels both ripe for conversation and neutral enough to level back and forth.

  “I went out drinking with some kids from high school and then smoked their awful weed.”

  Maya holds tight to her knees and doesn’t answer. He’s nineteen years old. She hasn’t felt she had any right to scold her son since he was twelve.

  “I’m fine, Ma,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

  A few times, waiting up for Ellie when Ben was still in high school, Maya caught him stumbling in just before curfew, cursing as he pulled off his shoes or let his coat drop to the floor. She considered confronting him then, making him stand very close to her so she could smell his breath. She considered enforcing some system of punishment that she and Stephen could hold fast to. But it always seemed to her even his attempts at rebellion were laced somehow with good.

  “I know,” she says. She looks up at him. His head lolls back and his eyes are closed, his mouth half open. He has a little Ellie in the fullness of his lips. “Benny …” She wants to give him something solid, something that will keep him safe.

  She turns toward him. “I’m sorry, Benny,” she says.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry.” His words fall into one another. He’s so large from far away, but up close he might as well be ten years old.

  “Well, what do you want me to say, then?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. Something angry. Something that shows me I’m not the only one who’s noticed that we’ve basically all turned to shit.”

  “That’s not true, Benny.”

  “Well, what’s left, then?”

  “Us,” she says. “All of us are here.” She stops, folds her hands into her lap to keep them from reaching for him. “The rest we’ll figure out. We’re still luckier than most.”

  “Than Annie?” he says. “Jack?”

  “Yeah, Benny. We’re luckier than both of them.”

  “But are we? If it’s our fault? How could we be better off?”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It’s all our faults.”

  Maya stops.

  “El knew you didn’t tell her.”

  “Didn’t tell her what?”

  “You didn’t tell Annie. She didn’t know how fucked up Ellie was.”

  This is true, but Maya hasn’t thought of it so clearly. She told Annie that Ellie was in trouble. She’d thought their kids could help each other all at once.

  “You shouldn’t have let her go,” her son says. “We should have told them.”

  Her son stands up. How tall he is, it shocked her even as she watched it happen, how even physically he was so much firmer than the thing she’d always been.

  “I’m going to bed,” he says.

  She should go after him. She should walk him up the stairs and tuck him in.

  She stays seated on the step until he’s unlocked the door, and she thinks she hears it click, nearly a full block away, as he goes in.

  Summer 2011

  “Fancy job, huh?” Dylan says. He reaches toward his ear, but there’s no hair there. He looks briefly as if he’s not sure what to do. He runs his hand along the back of his neck instead. “You like it?” he says.

  Ellie’s not sure if he means the job or his new hair.

  She nods, looking around for Joseph. She spends almost every afternoon with him in the backyard of his apartment share in Bushwick, talking, doing nothing, but he knows hardly anything about Ellie’s life.

  “You miss it, though, right? You miss me?”

  She misses looking forward, looking toward. She misses knowing something different, other, better might be coming, even if most of the time it was just a flat line of not quite feeling for hours that stretched on.

  “Fuck off, Dylan,” she says. She wishes she were brave enough to punch him in the face.

  He grins and she tries not to look directly at him, but she also doesn’t want to have to look at Joseph now. She turns so she’s facing the window that looks out on the street. She sees her mom—hair pulled back, dark blue sheath, black flats—as she walks slowly across Third Street, trying to keep her shit together. She’s nowhere close to either crosswalk, is nearly hit by a town car and must stop short. She has her too-big bag over her shoulder, was probably headed up to campus to finish grades or use the library. It’s summer but she still goes up a couple times a week. There’s a 2 train five blocks from their apartment that’s a straight shot to campus, but almost every day her mother goes to work Ellie sees her walk past the coffee shop to the R, which means two transfers and at least half an hour more.

  “What are you doing?” Ellie’s mom says. She’s through the door and the bag has fallen to her elbow. Her arms are tan and thin from all the running. She has freckles spread across both shoulders and tiny dark blue flowered earrings in her ears. Ellie watches her mom wince as she pulls her bag back up onto her shoulder. There are like ten books that she won’t go anywhere without, and Ellie’s dad always yells at her for carrying too much stuff.

  Dylan’s back straightens and hi
s face gets hard and happy as he sees her. “Prof,” he says.

  It’s possible that Ellie’s mother mutters, Fuck.

  “Can you tell me what you’re doing here?” she says to Dylan.

  Her mom is frantic, nervous. Ellie wants to ask to hold her bag.

  “This is not part of the agreement, Elinor,” she says. Her parents have set down rules as of a few months ago. There was an incident. Ellie disappeared. But she was fine when they found her. They found a single-track mark and freaked out. (She might have been too fucked up to remember to hide it; she might have forgotten where she lived for a day or two, but what her parents seem incapable of understanding is that fucking off sometimes does not make one an addict, that there are whole gradations of just trying to have a little fun that don’t end in tragedy and homelessness.) But now Ellie has to be home by ten and has to keep this job or there will be Consequence. She has to begin to Make Some Efforts Toward Figuring Out Her Life. She’s not supposed to have any contact with Dylan. Otherwise, the deal is, she has to leave or go to rehab. Except she knows the idea of rehab scares them more than it does her. The idea of Stephen and Maya Taylor, Vaunted Columbia Professors, Generous Thoughtful Caring Brilliant, having to attend visiting hours and explain to their colleagues where their fuckup daughter’s off to now will probably keep Ellie free of any kind of “program” for at least another couple of years.

  Secretly, Ellie finds something kind of thrilling about the new restrictions. She likes appointed times and rules and structure, even when these are mostly things she likes to break apart. It’s still better to decide things, still better to know there are places she’s supposed to be.

  “It’s not like I told him to come,” Ellie says. She should have said it better, nicer. She never means to sound so angry, but she does.

  “I just came by to tell Ellie about school,” says Dylan.

  Education’s her mom’s kryptonite.

  “Really?” Like magic: her mom softens. Ellie isn’t sorry for her anger anymore.

  Dylan grins and looks suddenly smaller than Ellie remembers. He has a whitehead on his left earlobe.

  “About to start my third year at NYU,” he says.

  “Right,” says her mom. “Ellie …” But she stops.

  Ellie doesn’t do much of anything, just this shitty coffee shop, hanging out with Joseph, lying on the couch or on her bed, listening to her mom’s old records, staring at the ceiling, when she’s home. When she doesn’t have work and can’t be in the house any longer she rides the subway back and forth for hours. She brings headphones sometimes, but mostly she just likes to sit and watch the people, to walk the long transfer at Fourteenth Street from the 2 to the L, then back again. She looks purposefully ahead of her and walks quickly, as if she has somewhere she’s meant to be.

  She feels Joseph behind them, watching. It’s the lull after the morning rush and the shop is empty. A woman comes in behind Dylan and her mom and orders tea, a muffin. Joseph nudges Ellie out of the way; Ellie grabs the tongs, a paper bag, and hands the girl her muffin, as her mom and Dylan linger, neither of them willing to be the first to go.

  “Well …” says Ellie’s mom. Her hand clutches so tight to her bag, Ellie wonders briefly if the strap might break. “I’ll see you tonight?”

  “Sure,” says Ellie. She winces and keeps half her eye on Joseph as Dylan grins back and forth between her and her mom. Her mom’s whole body jerks and shifts as she hoists the bag, holding it with both hands as she shoulders her way out.

  Ellie watches her brown leather boots hit the pavement one and then the other as she walks with Joseph to his house. The toes are squared. The leather’s scuffed nearly to white across the front. It’s too hot for boots, but she likes wearing them. She likes the sound they make against the pavement, the feel of hard heel against concrete, the clack and then the echo that it makes when she’s indoors.

  They get on the G train and ride in silence. Ellie leads Joseph through the gate along the side of the apartment and back into the yard. Three lawn chairs sit around a pit in which they sometimes build a fire. Joseph and his roommates have parties out here every weekend, and every weekend Ellie says no when Joseph asks if she might like to come. There’s a small film of rainwater from the day before across the seats of both the lawn chairs, and Joseph wipes the seat of Ellie’s chair with the bottom of his shirt. Ellie nods thanks and sits. Joseph reaches into the back pocket of his shorts and pulls out a bag of lovely-smelling sticky leaves and crumbles bits onto a sheet of rolling paper. He rolls the joint and licks the thin edge, presses carefully with his index finger and his thumb. He lights it, puckering and pinching, then puff-puffing, his eyes closed, his head lolling back.

  Ellie holds her breath.

  “So, who was that dude?” he says. He leans forward again, the joint still in his hand. “Your mom was pissed?”

  She’d somehow convinced Dylan to leave just after her mom. He’d promised to call her, leaned across the counter, and she hadn’t pulled away as he kissed her lightly on the lips.

  Ellie nods.

  Joseph pulls on the joint a second time. “You look like her.”

  Ellie shakes her head. “Not really.” People used to say this all the time when she was little, but not now. Ellie’s small like her mom, with dark hair and eyes and features that look shocked and too sharp most of the time, but somehow they wear these things too differently for most people to notice how similar they are. Ellie seldom has the courage to look too long or too closely at either her own reflection or her mom.

  “I realized, watching you, I don’t know anything about you, you know? When I’ve spent all this time going on and on about my shit.” Ellie noticed early on with Joseph, if she was very quiet and very still, if every once in a while she asked a question, he would keep talking and she could just listen, take him in.

  He’s twenty-six, recently finished law school. He’d never meant to go, though. He works at the coffee shop, plays music, ignores his student loans.

  Ellie’s favorite thing about Joseph is that they have so far not so much as touched.

  “Oh, you know,” Ellie says. “Just aimless teenage shit.”

  He nods toward the joint, more for decorum’s sake than anything. Ellie has so far, each time he’s offered, managed to say no.

  “And your fancy ivy-covered parents don’t care you’re not in school?”

  “They just …” The joint burns as he rests his elbow on the armrest of his lawn chair. The rolling paper crackles and smoke lingers just above his hand.

  “No one’s that nonjudgmental.”

  Her parents have learned to be quite good, actually, at lowering the bar. “I had some issues,” Ellie says.

  “That dude, yeah?” Joseph finally takes another hit.

  “Dylan. Yeah, sort of.”

  “How bad?”

  Ellie wants to ask for the joint in order that she might be free to tell him something small and honest. She wants to stay completely sober, tell him the whole thing from start to finish, and have him still want to sit and talk to her.

  “You know,” she says.

  “Not really.” Joseph shakes his head. There’s an ashtray in the center of the table, and he grabs it, stamping out the joint and letting it rest. “I know you’re too cute to sit around all day and listen to me whine.”

  She feels her face turn red and wishes that he hadn’t said this. “I’m … that’s not true,” she says.

  “One thing?” he says.

  She leans closer toward the table: the little bit of weed that’s left.

  Ellie nods toward the joint. “I used to like that sort of thing too much.” This isn’t quite right—she wishes she were something as straightforward as a drug addict—but she wants to see this version of herself on him.

  “You should have told me,” he says.

  “It’s not …” She looks down and shrugs. “It’s just weed,” she says.

  Ellie burrows her boots into the dirt until th
e toes are completely covered; she waits for whatever will come after this. She sees Dylan standing at the counter, her mom frantic. She imagines her mom sitting in her office now, doing everything she can not to call or text Ellie. The yard next to Joseph’s has a large maple tree that leans heavily, and its branches brush above Joseph and Ellie’s heads. She grabs hold of one of the leaves and rips it off the branch. She tears it into brittle strips between her fingers, and, as Joseph watches, Ellie doesn’t speak.

  Joseph angles his chair close to hers and Ellie doesn’t back away. She knows there’s a moment when she could sit back with her arms across her chest and today could end the way the other days have. But, as he leans in close and lets his index finger linger on her knee, Ellie just stays very still and doesn’t speak.

  Winter 2013

  Maya stands and runs. She heads straight to Bergen, down toward Court Street, past Atlantic, brownstone, brownstone, brownstone, big park, courthouse, crossing over the Brooklyn Bridge. One foot, then the other: it’s the simplest thing she does all day. She never listens to music and she almost always runs alone. She likes the sporadic snippets of the city’s sounds before it’s fully risen. A baby screaming through an open window, a car horn, a garbage truck backing up the wrong direction on a one-way street. She likes the smells, exhaust and baking bread, the unidentified chemicals as she crosses the Gowanus. The water is so thick with waste that the trash doesn’t float, half submerged: it just sits solidly on top.

  It’s the sort of morning that she loves and lets herself hold tight to, the air just cold and dry enough to catch sharp inside her lungs. The inclines change incessantly. She’s up and down and then her arms are swinging harder. Her body doesn’t give her what it used to. She’s slower now, but no less determined to push and push. Her legs are long, almost as long as Stephen’s, though he’s at least six inches taller than her—their hips hit at nearly the same point—and they stretch out far in front of her, the ball of each foot hits the pavement, her knee bends, her foot rises nearly to her ass. The pedestrian path on the bridge is wood and creaks beneath her feet as they land, spring up, and land again. Her breath slows and steadies as she looks past the bridge to all the water underneath.