Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  “He’ll go back soon.”

  “Right,” Laura says.

  Both of them are quiet. Maya’s mind goes immediately to Jack, to Annie. It’s clear, based on the face her friend makes, that’s where her mind’s gone too. “Any word?” Laura asks.

  Maya shakes her head. “She hasn’t brought any charges.” She shuffles the papers on her desk, then grabs her wedding band with her thumb and two fingers and pushes it up and down over her knuckle as they talk.

  “That’s good?” Laura says. Maya’s not sure her friend meant this as a question.

  “I’m not sure what any of it is.” That they might release Ellie from the lockup that they themselves have inflicted, that Annie might not hold her accountable for her son’s death beyond that, that the state seems not to have enough evidence to bring charges, all of this is both impossible to ponder and terrifying to consider too often or too clearly—it’s terrifying in both directions, because of course Maya wants to have her daughter back, of course she always wants her daughter close, but then she’s not sure who that is, her daughter, she’s not sure what any of them would do if Ellie were to suddenly, after all this time, after all she’s done, appear.

  Maya stares at the bare branches out her window. Some days, she worries Stephen will have her committed also. There are days she thinks this might not be the worst idea. When she thinks of this, she thinks Laura would be the one to save her. She’d free her and they’d run off to somewhere warm with water where Ellie would be and everything that’s happened could be taken back somehow and done again.

  “Maybe you should go home, sweetie,” Laura says.

  “What would I do there?” She keeps her eyes on the papers on her desk. The words blur.

  “Honey,” Laura says again.

  Someone knocks and Maya jumps and faces Laura, who turns toward the door, flattening her hair down against her head.

  “Professor?”

  Charles wears a sweater zipped up to his neck. It’s gray over a dark green T-shirt; both look impossibly soft. He’s awkward, bumbling, tall, and very quiet. He’s her teaching assistant, a graduate student, twenty-eight or -nine she figures, younger, possibly.

  He studies Tennyson: Someone had blundered! Maya always thinks when she sees him. Someone had blundered! And she hopes it isn’t her or him.

  “Come in,” Maya says.

  Laura pulls her face back to the shape it always is when facing almost anyone but Maya: warm, a little hard at the edges, ready to laugh or attack in equal measure, sharp and tight around the lips.

  “Charles,” says Maya. “Please.”

  She nods toward the seat next to Laura, but Charles shakes his head and remains standing.

  “I’m good.” He smiles at Laura. “Hi.”

  Laura grins, crosses her legs, and turns to face him.

  “Hi,” she says.

  Charles bites down on his lower lip, which is full and pops out still from underneath his teeth. He has a broad flat nose that scrunches up when he sits with Maya and talks about his thesis. Sometimes she keeps an eye turned toward his nose when she’s teaching, knowing if it’s scrunching she’s said something that has made him think.

  She sits up on the edge of her chair and holds the corners of her desk. “How are you?” she asks.

  “Fine.” He nods. “Good. I’ve been thinking … I wanted to tell you.” She watches him reel in whatever it is he means to say as Laura watches him.

  Laura leans forward and wraps her hand around her ankle as Charles starts to speak again.

  “I think I have some ideas for the fall.”

  His dissertation is due next month. Only now does Maya realize how much she’ll miss him when he leaves here. He’s been sitting in the front row of her classroom, at office hours, department meetings, for the past six years.

  “Tomorrow?” Maya says. “You ready?” She’s asked him to teach the class of hers for which he’s an assistant. It’s a year-long course, required for all the undergrads in the major, and he’s spent the last semester observing her and grading the papers she assigns.

  He nods and repositions his squared-off thick-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose and seems to stand up straight. “Yes,” he says. “I think.”

  She smiles at him. “We’ll talk about fall after?”

  He looks down at her desk. His hair has grown long in the past couple years and falls down now in his face. Sometimes Maya wonders if he simply hasn’t thought to get it cut, if she might offer to cut it for him, as she’s done for Ben most of his life.

  “You’ll be great,” she says.

  “Wonderful,” Laura says.

  Maya watches Laura’s purple fingernails tap methodically against her shin.

  “I’ll email you my plans?”

  “If you want,” Maya says. “I trust you’ll do fine.”

  He reddens. He’s taller than she’s realized. As he leaves, Maya smiles at the paperback folded and shoved into the back pocket of his pants.

  “He’s in love with you!” Laura has uncrossed her legs and almost stands up with the force of her assertion. The door has hardly shut before she speaks.

  “Christ, Laura. Of course he isn’t,” says Maya. There have been moments in the past year when she’s worried Charles looks a bit too long at her, listens too intently. In those moments, she wants to run his hands over the wrinkles of her face, to lift her shirt and let him roam the curves of stretch marks on her belly, to finger the thin line of her cesarean scar.

  “Oh, sugar. He is.”

  “He’s twenty-something,” says Maya.

  Laura grabs hold of her left earring, the leaf glints and faintly rustles as she lets go of it. “It’s exactly what you need.”

  Summer 2011

  Her mom’s waiting on the stoop when Ellie gets home from walking. She left Joseph’s before it got dark out. It feels possible she’s been walking days or years. She’s been up and down Broadway, around the bottom of the island. She sat on a bench in Battery Park and stared out long at the water and the wind. She’s come to no conclusions beside the need to keep on moving. Until she felt so tired she could hardly breathe.

  Yet somehow she’s managed to get back here. And here’s her mother sitting on the stoop.

  “Where were you?” Her mom is wearing running clothes, as if she meant to sprint around all of Brooklyn and Manhattan till she found her, till she could scoop her up and bring her home. Ellie wants to ask her to just please let her sleep and they’ll talk later. That she’s sorry and could they just forget this. Could they please forget every person Ellie’s ever been before.

  “Walking,” she says. It’s so strange, being honest. It somehow comes out sounding less like the truth than all the lies she used to tell.

  “It’s four in the morning.”

  Ellie folds her arms over her chest.

  “You don’t have your phone on?”

  “It died,” says Ellie, which is also true. Though it was on for long enough for her to see the word mom over and over as it vibrated on Joseph’s desk and then in her shorts pocket. She held it the last few times before the phone died; she liked looking at her mom’s picture as it rang—smiling halfway, sitting alone in her office, averting her eyes from Ellie as she snapped her picture with her phone.

  “You understand you’ve broken the agreement?” her mom says.

  She’s measured, careful.

  Ellie sits and digs her hands into her boots.

  “I can’t live like this, okay?” her mom says. “If you live here, you can’t do this anymore.”

  There’s something sad about the way her mother says this.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy,” Ellie says. Mommy, like if she’s nice enough, acts young enough, the past five years might disappear and they’ll all be better again soon. They stare at one another. Her mom’s exactly the same height as Ellie, but Ellie looks down at her, since she’s seated one step farther up. She wraps her hands around her ankles, still stuffed inside her boots
, and sidles herself closer to her mom.

  “Were you with him?”

  She has an image first of Joseph, his thin, almost hairless body, pale and careful, apologetically descending upon her.

  Dylan, she thinks right after that.

  Ellie shakes her head.

  “All right,” her mom says. They’ve told her they won’t question what she tells them. It’s something she’s pretty sure her mom read in a book. They’ll assume she’s telling the truth and will act accordingly, but if she’s caught in a lie, that’s yet another rule they’ve said will result in her having to go.

  “El, I don’t think you can stay here anymore.”

  Ellie has shoved almost all of both her arms into her boots. She looks across the street, away from her mother. She’s not sure she’ll survive if they really make her go.

  “I called Annie.” This is her mom’s student, from years ago, when her mom taught high school. She lives in Florida, where her mom grew up. “She says you can come down there awhile.” Her mom looks like she might cry. If her mom cries, Ellie can convince her that she has to stay.

  “I think we have to do it,” her mom says. “She has a son …” She doesn’t want to warn Ellie to be careful with him. They are not supposed to Overparent the twenty-year-old fuckup Ellie is.

  “They need help with him. You’ll be near the water.” She isn’t crying. Her mom’s hand comes toward her wrist, but stops before grabbing hold of her.

  “El, why don’t you come with me?”

  Ellie looks up from her sketchpad. She’s been trying to draw the water stain from Dylan’s basement in pencil and charcoal; she used to lie on the floor and stare at it for hours, all blacks and browns and purples, thinking it beautiful, thinking it the most perfect thing on earth. She drew a lot when she was little and still does now sometimes in private, still thinks sometimes in terms of what something would look like if she could hold it still.

  “Where?” She’s been up in her room since she got home hours earlier. She has three missed calls from Joseph and two from Dylan. She’s shoved her phone into a drawer inside a drawer in her dresser so she’s not tempted to call either of them back. She’s heard her mom leave for her run.

  “We need milk and I need a walk,” her father says.

  She has no excuse to offer. She slips on sandals, places a pair of sunglasses on top of her head. They leave the apartment and walk up toward the park. Her dad flips his keys around his finger. Ellie situates the glasses on her nose.

  “So,” her dad says dragging out the o, and she watches his keys almost slide from his finger. They clank quietly as they roll back into his palm.

  “So,” she says.

  “How’s life?” He slips the keys into his pocket and they enter the park.

  “Fine,” she says. “Same.” The world is muted behind her glasses, her dad’s face farther away.

  They walk through the farmers’ market. Her dad eyes the flowers, then the muffins, cakes, and cookies. “Wanna split one?” Ellie asks.

  Her mom seldom allows sugar in the house.

  “Sure,” he says.

  This used to happen often on weekend mornings—especially when her mom escaped into her office for hours at a time, or when she went for runs that seemed to go on for half the day—Ellie and her dad would walk up the street to the farmers’ market, get something sweet, juice or coffee, flowers for his garden that they would plant together. He would plant, and Ellie would sit cross-legged in the dirt.

  They buy milk and a chocolate chip muffin and walk over to a bench facing Long Meadow.

  “Listen,” says her dad. He breaks off a piece of muffin. “I know you’re still figuring things out.”

  When she didn’t go to college, he reacted more aggressively than he had in years. He’d assumed somehow, amid everything, that she’d be together enough by then to get a sweatshirt from some place in New England or the Midwest that they could ship her off to in September. They’d assumed maybe that their own success would somehow finally seep through to her. He’d yelled, over a period of a month. Ellie had sat or stood and let him, staying still and quiet. She’d gotten stoned alone up in her room and didn’t mind much when they said she couldn’t leave the house until she figured out a Plan For Her Life. Most of her friends had gone to college. She seldom had anywhere to go. She refused to attend her high school graduation and only her mother took much issue with this. She could tell, by that point, her dad would rather not have to answer questions about his daughter’s plans for the next year. They’d briefly pushed the idea of her moving out, making her way of things, but her mother couldn’t stomach it, wanted her to steady herself first. And her dad, as much as he presented himself as the stronger parent, was nothing in the face of her mom when she was sure.

  He sits with enough space between them to fit the muffin and the half gallon of milk. “I know you’ve experimented,” he says. A girl is being dragged, both hands clutching the leash, by a small, panting pit bull mix in front of them. The dog is yellow with a white stripe down his back and his legs clench as he tries hard to go after a squirrel ten feet ahead. Ellie holds the muffin and picks off two small pieces. The chocolate melts a little in her hands.

  She thinks of telling him that once she was so high that Dylan had to carry her up the steps of the subway, that she took her shirt off in a cab so she could look at the contours of her shoulders in the rearview mirror while they drove, that Dylan liked it when she was high enough to want to sleep with him, but not so high that she couldn’t be on top. She wants to tell him yesterday she let Joseph fuck her, because it’s the only thing she still knows how to do that is allowed. That Recovery, or whatever it is they’ve decided to call what they’re forcing on her, is bullshit if you don’t feel like you’re getting any better, if you’re not totally sure about what you’re meant to recover from, that she’s scared and now she can’t even convince her mom to be with her any longer, that putting her in charge of someone else’s kid is almost definitely a terrible idea.

  Ellie’s dad pulls his ankle onto his knee, sits back farther on the bench, and stretches his arm out along the backrest, careful not to graze Ellie as he does.

  “There’s this part,” he says. “In Beyond Good and Evil.” Her dad traveled a lot—to conferences, guest lectures—when she and Ben were little. They helped him in the garden. He helped with homework and cooked most of the meals. But it has always been their mom who Parented. Her mom Parented so much sometimes that Ellie couldn’t breathe.

  “Seriously, Dad?” She picks herself another piece and watches as the girl with the pit bull pulls a handful of dog treats from her bag and is able, only briefly, to distract the dog from the squirrel.

  “Just bear with me, okay?”

  She folds her legs up on the bench.

  “There’s this part where Nietzsche talks about being young and saying yes to everything.” He looks over at her. She licks a piece of chocolate off her lip. “I spent a lot of time in that phase, I think, the yes phase. You know. I was an only child. I wanted to do well, to prove I was worthy of …” He stops. He breaks himself another piece of muffin. “Anyway, then Friedrich says that there’s another phase.” Her dad has always spoken of philosophers by their first names; Ellie’s always liked this, as if he knows them, as if all of them are friends. “A phase in which he said no to everything. Exhausted maybe by all that yes. Maybe exhausted by what it has or hasn’t brought. A lot of people do, they reach a certain age and they get angry; they start rejecting everything that came before them, as a way of asserting themselves more certainly on the world. I think about that now, when I watch you. I’m not sure I ever hit that stage, not like you.” He stops a minute and she feels his eyes on her. She picks at a small splinter of wood on the corner of the bench. “I respect it, you know,” he says. “I respect your saying no. I think it takes courage to be willing to make people mad or not do what they ask of you.” She watches him try to get it just right. He doesn’t want to make
her angry. He wants her to listen. He wants to give her something that might make her better than she is. “I never had courage like that,” her dad says. “But it’s too destructive, I think, the way you’re doing it.” Ellie’s lost sight of the pit bull. She watches a very pregnant woman walk slowly past. “So then,” her dad says, “he says eventually he realized the saying no to everything was just as much youth as the yes, because neither of these things were thoughtful. Neither of them was actually choosing what to be.”

  Ellie nods, handing her dad the last bite of muffin. She wants to sidle closer to him and let him tell her exactly how she might make everything better. She’s not sure she’s willing to concede.

  Winter 2013

  “You want company?”

  Maya turns around. It’s four-thirty in the morning. Ben wears shorts and running shoes, a long-sleeved dark red shirt. He stands halfway up the steps. She’s so grateful now that they were never the type of family to cover their walls in photos of each other, of their friends. Now, as she stares up toward her son, she catches sight of the massive Neil Welliver print Stephen got her years ago. Cora’s Sky, it’s called, and she’s always been comforted by the broad swaths of oranges and blues.

  Maya smiles. “Sure.” She double-knots her second shoe.

  Ben bounds down the steps.

  “I’m going to be too slow for you,” she says.

  He shrugs. “I’m not in training for anything.”

  “Well, no pressure to stay close.”

  He shakes his head, pulls his arms up, fingers laced, and places his palms behind his head. They walk out of the apartment and Maya locks the door.

  “Park or bridge?” says Ben.

  “Your call,” she says.

  “Bridge.” And Maya’s so grateful for his choosing the longer, her preferred, route, she almost wraps her arms around her son.

  They take her usual route down Bergen. The city smells like trash, exhaust, and bacon. She watches him hold his long legs in check.

  “She used to come into my room sometimes,” he says. His head keeps facing straight.

  Maya’s breath catches a few seconds. She sees Ben’s feet clip in even closer as her pace has briefly slowed. She stretches her legs out once and then another couple times before he speaks again.