Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  An errant cousin from Indiana sent a bouquet of irises. Maya had him cremated and took an old surfboard from the garage and paddled him out past the break in the Atlantic and said goodbye to her dad. He was fifty-one. Aneurysm. She’d talked to him on the phone the day before and he’d said his head ached. That was as much advance warning as she got. And then there she was in that house again with no one and nowhere to go, besides the early morning runs barefoot in the sand, followed by long swims. Every morning she thought about not ever coming up out of the water, but then she would, crawling up out of the shore break and over the layer of shells back to her clothes and keys, back to the house that now belonged to her, walking from room to room, waiting for someone to come tell her how to live.

  She drove to the public library just to have a place to go. She sat at one of the tables with people in their sixties and seventies on either side, also reading, sometimes talking to one another, just to be close to other people for some portion of the day.

  It was there she got the job. She ran into her former middle school English teacher, who had since become high school vice principal. Mrs. Skinner had always been generous with Maya, had even gone on a date or two with her dad before coming to her senses and marrying someone much more practical and childless the next year. She was doughy, bleached-blond hair, flouncy shirts, and too-tight pants. They were in a pickle, she’d said to Maya. She said things like that. Two weeks before the start of the school year the AP English teacher had decided to extend her maternity leave. Maya had been an English major. She’d tutored in the drop-in center at school. She’d helped TA her senior year. She had nothing else to do. And just like that she was a long-term sub. Mrs. Skinner fast-tracked a temporary certification that would last her through the year. She did two weeks of teacher training at the community center a few miles from the school. They took personality tests and stood in circles talking about the sorts of learners they were, how that might be translated to communicating their goals to students. She was given a “mentor” in the form of a seventy-year-old freshman English teacher who showed Maya her laminated lesson plans that she’d been using since before Maya was born—The Odyssey, then To Kill a Mockingbird, multiple choice tests every Friday, and grammar diagramming every other week.

  The first day Maya taught, she wore a blazer, regretting it immediately. She kept bumping her chin on the shoulder pads. She was terrified. But something happened once she was in front of that room. It was different than bars or parties, even classrooms, where she was in the back instead of up front in charge. She believed in what she was giving: books, communication, it was the world that saved her once.

  Annie was in her second-to-last class of the day. Eighteen juniors. AP language and composition. Annie stayed separate in the back left corner of the room. Maya had to give vocabulary tests as decreed by the school board. To make them interesting, she did away with multiple choice. Instead, she said the words out loud and the students had to write them, then write the definitions, followed by a sentence in which they used the word in proper context. Agnostic was one of the words. An atheist without a spine, wrote Annie. She wasn’t even right, but Maya didn’t care. It was clever. It made Maya laugh. Annie answered the questions quickly and then drew little cartoons of her classmates next to certain of the words. Lugubrious. Capricious. Mercurial. Diffident. Her cartoons were always coupled perfectly with her peers.

  It was a two-thousand-person high school and mostly Maya was left alone. She couldn’t bear to call any of the teachers by their first names and therefore referred to everyone as Mr. and Mrs., which only made them like her less. She ate lunch alone in her classroom instead of in the teacher’s lounge, where the women (the entire English department was made up of women) microwaved their Lean Cuisines and Hot Pockets and complained about the same cycle of students again and again. Maya felt both older and younger than she ever had. She hadn’t been living in this place, in that house, since she was thirteen. She was in charge of six classes of twenty-plus students each day. Exposing them to literature was a delicious and exciting task and one she felt she’d somehow tricked her way into. Some days the kids were restless and they whined and she hated them and wanted to just get in her car and drive out to the beach and run until her legs ached and then dive into the ocean till her skin was wrinkled and her limbs began to noodle and go limp, to lie out on the sand and go to sleep. But every morning, she got up before the sun and either ran or showered and brewed coffee. Sometimes she made up her lesson plans on the twenty-minute drive to work. And it was the best thing she’d ever done. She saw them see. Not all the time, not even most of it. But she was giving to them, and it didn’t even matter that much whether they took it. It was the giving that felt good.

  At first Annie was a good, if not stellar, student. She always seemed to be halfway somewhere else. But sometime in the end of September, she began to drift more. Twice, Maya had to wake her as she’d fallen asleep in the middle of class. The second time, the same week she’d left all the words blank on a vocab test, Maya called in Annie’s mom and dad.

  “She’s lazy.” Annie’s mother wore a bright pink dress with lines of yellow giraffes. Maya’d never met people like this, couldn’t believe they’d made this girl she liked so much. Rumor was that they’d owned half of South Florida at one point. They still owned a good portion of the Keys.

  “Where did you go to school?” The dad was all business. He’d just opened the restaurant, pure vanity. The mom was a lawyer.

  Maya looked down at her feet. “Harvard?”

  “Right,” he said. “Well, then, you know the standards she should be holding herself to.”

  “Oh, please, Tom, she’s too fucked up for Harvard.”

  “She’s extremely bright,” said Maya, defensive suddenly.

  “Exactly,” said the dad. He nodded at his wife, but she just shook her head, then fiddled through her purse.

  “She’s also very young,” said Maya as the mom applied a thick layer of lipstick.

  “And how old are you?” she asked.

  “I don’t …” Maya held on to the edge of her desk. She’d just turned twenty-two.

  “Emily, please.” He looked at Maya apologetically, leaned forward, pushed the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows, and placed them on his knees.

  His voice lowered. “We’ve taken her to someone.”

  “Total bullshit,” muttered the mother.

  “Emily.” He stopped. He shook his head, as if clearing it from his wife. “He said maybe she’s sick somehow, maybe …”

  “She’s sick with her head up her ass.”

  “He suggested lithium.”

  Maya grabbed the Norton Reader off her desk and held it in her lap.

  “He said bipolar, maybe. Maybe to settle her moods.”

  “Lithium?” Maya only knew it sounded strong.

  “She refuses to take it. But she seems like she responds to you.”

  On the board were the objectives for the day: a summary of the first three acts of Antigone, constructing a firm thesis statement, how to guide your reader carefully.

  “I don’t think I could tell her to take lithium.”

  There were probably rules about this. They maybe talked about some of this at the staff development meetings, except Maya skipped most of them.

  And then right after that, for a week, Annie wasn’t in class. Because she didn’t have any friends, there was no one Maya could ask. She still couldn’t call any of her colleagues by their first names, much less reach out about where Annie might have gone. She did say something one day to the class, casually, while taking roll. “Has anyone heard from Annie?” she said, just after she’d reached her name on the roster, trying to seem nonchalant.

  “Crazy girl?” This was a boy up front, Paul: Annie’d doodled his face next to the word “malapropos” before she’d stopped taking the tests.

  “Someone said she went to Lawnwood,” he said.

  This was the inpatient center two
towns away. When Maya was in middle school one of her classmates was found hung from the ceiling fan in the basement of Lawnwood.

  “Right,” she said.

  The next Monday though Annie was back. Maya was so relieved she almost cried. She almost cried right up to the point when she looked more closely at Annie, and then, immediately, her eyes did begin to pool and she had to turn away. Annie’s face was flat and puffy. Her skin was wan. She wore sweatpants and a large sweater, even though this October was still hot like August or July.

  Maya split the kids into groups and told them to close-read a passage from An American Childhood. She read it out loud before she let them begin to rearrange their desks. She wanted to be sure that Annie heard. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break at you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face?

  She stopped herself before finishing the passage. Annie’s shoulders shook. Maya walked over to her while the others got up, moved chairs and bags and notebooks, set to work. “You okay?” she said. Annie’s hair was spread across her desk; the only sign of life was her foot shaking, tapping the heel of her sandal against one of the desk’s metal legs. Maya reached down and grabbed hold of Annie’s upper arm. It was freezing in the classroom. It was so hot outside, but they pumped the AC through, and the fluorescent lights shone down on the pallor of Annie’s skin. Maya’d been to just enough staff meetings to know that touching was not all right—one of the few contributions her mentor had given her was a flyer about sexual harassment her second day—but she grabbed hold of Annie’s arm again and pushed, trying to get her to raise her head.

  “Annie?” she said again. “You okay?”

  Instead of lifting her head, Annie groaned. She made her body heavy enough that Maya would have had to use both hands to raise her arm. The whole class looked up from their groups. Paul and a girl next to him began to laugh.

  Maya left Annie and walked over to their group. They both stopped laughing. “Back to work,” she said and turned back to Annie, whose head had fallen again on the desk.

  She didn’t want the others gawking, so she left her. She went from group to group, keeping them on task. Annie was out the door before the bell rang. Maya meant to grab her, talk to her, but she’d chickened out. The next period she had free and often left early to go running, but she stayed put awhile, reorganizing her plans for the next day, staring at the desk where Annie had been. And then there Annie was again, walking back through the door. She didn’t have her stuff; just one of the laminated yellow slips of paper the whole school used as passes to walk through the halls during class. Maya started to say her name, but Annie spoke first. “I couldn’t,” she said. “I didn’t want to be there anymore.”

  Maya wondered briefly about the protocol. They weren’t supposed to be alone in any rooms with students when the doors were closed. She pulled a chair up close to her desk and nodded to Annie to sit.

  “Where are you supposed to be?”

  Annie looked at her. This was the wrong question, what every other teacher knew to ask.

  “Pre-calc,” Annie said. “But I can’t.”

  “Okay.” Maya nodded. “What, then? What do you need?”

  “Can I just stay here?” Annie asked.

  Maya nodded. She handed her the bag of chips she’d brought with her sandwich and sat back in her chair. Annie held her hand up to her mouth. “I just …” She crumpled the paper. “I started to feel really sick.”

  Maya figured eventually someone would come to look for her, although someone might have, they just might not have thought to look in Maya’s room.

  “They made me take these drugs,” said Annie. “They said if I didn’t I had to go to the hospital.” She took a napkin off of Maya’s desk and began ripping it into pieces, rolling each into tiny balls with her thumb and index finger as she talked. “But there’s nothing wrong with me. I mean, everything is wrong, but mostly it’s just I’m not who they want.”

  Maya leaned in then and hugged her. She held her tight and let her cry.

  For two weeks after that, Annie came and sat in Maya’s classroom every day. It took the administration that long to realize where she’d been. Finally, Maya was called in for a meeting. She knew very well from the outset the trouble she might be getting herself into. She just hadn’t thought to care.

  “This is serious,” said Mrs. Skinner. Her face was pleading. She’d gotten her this job, fast-tracked Maya’s temporary teaching certificate. She’d been telling everyone what a talent Maya had with the kids. “There are rules,” she said.

  She’d convinced Annie’s parents to let her speak to Maya alone first.

  Maya could feel the fluorescence of Annie’s mother’s dress straight through the door.

  “The mother’s threatening to sue.” Mrs. Skinner was wearing a dark blue suit and her hair was slicked back tightly into a bun. She reached up and brushed back a nonexistent errant hair. “These aren’t people you want to mess with, Maya,” she said.

  A file was created. Annie was pulled from her class. At the end of the semester, the teacher Maya had been filling in for decided to come back.

  Maya applied to grad school. Within two months, she was making plans to head back to New York in the fall. She’d never meant to be in Florida and now she had a reason to leave again. In the meantime, it felt fine to let Annie come over to her father’s house. She figured Annie was lying to her parents, but Maya didn’t ask. She was too hungry for Annie’s company, too happy to have her there. They sat out on the dock watching the sun go down and the alligators sunning themselves on the shore on the opposite side of the creek and talked about life and books and whatever it was they hoped to be someday.

  Annie was still skipping school often, just barely getting through. She’d been in a car accident out by the beach in the middle of the afternoon and totaled her brand-new car. Her parents sent her to a new therapist every couple weeks, each time expressing frustration, firing the therapist violently, angry that after that small span of time their daughter still didn’t seem to be fixed.

  “The last one just let me talk for a really long time, then told me I was probably born to the wrong family.”

  Annie laughed, so did Maya.

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?” Annie asked.

  “Did you ask her?”

  Annie shrugged, raising her eyebrows, her eyes rolling up in her head. “We ran out of time.”

  “Did you tell your parents that one?”

  “They prefer the ones who recommend the meds.”

  Maya looked down at the bottle of Riesling she’d opened, which they were sharing. It didn’t feel wrong, though later, looking back, she’d worry for both her and Annie then.

  There were times when Maya felt infinitely older. The five years that separated them were major, transformative years. They were supposed to be. Except Maya had spent most of them all wrapped up in books. So, now, with Annie challenging her, engaging with her outside the classroom, she didn’t always feel like she was the one who might know what to do.

  “I think they figure the sicker I am, the better, you know? If whatever’s wrong with me is really bad, then when I’m finally fixed, I’ll be that much closer to the person they wish I was.”

  Across the creek, something slithered in and under. They heard what might have been the slap of a heavy scaly tail.

  “For a while, I had headaches,” Maya said. “I don’t remember how I did it. I think one day I mentioned my head hurt. You know, in the way thirteen-year-old girls mention things.” Of course, it hadn’t been so long ago for either of them that they’d been thirteen. “And my dad got worried, I guess. He wanted me to see specialists. He loved projects; he could find the newest
, the best, the farthest away. He took me to a friend of a friend’s doctor who’d been recommended and they’d ask how much does it hurt, when, where. They would ask me to describe in detail the extent of the pain. And I started to get confused if I’d ever felt anything, you know? They would show me that pain scale, with the ten faces that represent different gradations of pain. I almost always picked the middle one.” She looked over at Annie, who had grabbed the wine and refilled her glass. She handed the bottle to Maya, who then did the same. “We went to acupuncturists and therapists. He got me this bed with magnets in it that was supposed to help. And every time, I would search for some vaguely appropriate approximation of the pain. It never felt like lying, really, but it was all basically made up. No one ever found anything. It was just the thing we did for a while: we went to doctors and they took pictures of and asked questions about my brain. He’d ask me sometimes, years later. But I don’t know, you know? I’ve always had a hard time figuring out what’s real and what’s just in my head.”

  “You think I’m making it up?”

  Maya stared at Annie. She’d somehow gone off track. “Of course not,” she said. She reached toward her, held her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I was just—I was trying to tell you, it’s weird, you know? The way people love and try to understand all our different versions of not-rightness. I don’t think it makes much sense most of the time.”

  When Maya finally left a few months later, it was summer, before classes started. She was antsy in Florida, ready for the city—the water only worked on her for finite bits of time. Annie came to the house and cried and helped her pack. They would talk always after that. Sometimes months would pass. Sometimes they wouldn’t see one another for years. But they were constants for one another, when neither of them had had much constant before that.

  “I reconciled myself to not having a mother a long time ago,” says Annie. Maya’s hardly moved since she picked up the phone. It’s snowing outside Ellie’s window, tiny blustery flakes. “Long before my actual mom died,” Annie says. “I figured most people had it a lot worse than me. She just wasn’t the type to nurture. And when I thought of a person that I could count on for those sorts of phone calls, I always thought of you. I liked that we’d chosen one another, that we could be peers as well as whatever we’d started as. But I don’t know. I guess there are things that connect us to the people who gave birth to us, to the people that we gave birth to.” She stops a minute. Maya chokes back a sob.