Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  The conversation has fragmented. Charles sits close to Caitlin, on the edge of his chair, leaning toward her, his legs crossed. The color rises in Caitlin’s cheeks and she looks impossibly young, lovely, even. Her eyes look larger with her hair pulled off her face and she smiles easily, not thinking about the shape her face is making, not considering the things she says before she speaks. Alana has moved to the bed again to feed the child. Maya, holding a rag and a large green pot, watches as Alana cups her breast with her right hand, and cradles the child in the crook of her left arm. Vivian has a dark shock of hair and wears a yellow purple-polka-dotted onesie. Her hand is wrapped around her mother’s pinkie as she nuzzles into her and latches on.

  Bryant sits back in his chair and sips the scotch he brought. A book, Maya thinks, a book. It’s more than a child because it might outlive one, because it will stay still once it’s out in the world. But then the book has no chance to ever be anything other than the thing it is right now.

  “You didn’t have to do this.” Caitlin spreads both her arms, smiling. She’s close to Maya, suddenly, and Maya starts, setting down the pot.

  “I wanted to,” Maya says.

  “Well …” Caitlin looks down. She takes the pot and places it on top of the refrigerator. “Not much room,” she says.

  “I didn’t know you and Charles were so close,” Maya says. This is wrong. Not what she meant to talk about. Caitlin’s hair has wilted and a sweat-wet chunk of it sticks to the right side of her face.

  Caitlin stands very close to Maya. She’s picked up the dishrag and starts drying as Maya washes the last dishes from the sink. Their fingers touch as Maya passes her a white ceramic plate.

  “I was sort of in love with him awhile,” Caitlin says.

  Maya pulls a pan from the stove and lets the water scald her as she scrubs. She remembers the day in her office, Caitlin’s unraveling, all the tears, the way that Maya’d talked and talked to calm her down.

  “I was in love with an idea of him that’s probably not real.”

  “You dated?” Maya wonders how this sounds. She thinks she feels Caitlin harden at the shape of Maya’s words.

  “No. No,” Caitlin says.

  The man she’d spoken of then had been tactful in his disinterest. Caitlin had felt worse, in fact, she’d told Maya, for the delicacy with which he’d declined. Maya watches the thickness of Caitlin’s ankles underneath her smock dress, the awkward way her shoulders slump as she curves her toweled hand around a pan.

  “I’m more of an admire-boys-from-afar, live-life-vicariously-through-books-and-other-people kind of girl anyway,” Caitlin says.

  Maya smiles. She wants to take care of her again, to hold her close, to straighten her shoulders and wipe the hair out of her face.

  Caitlin shakes her head. “We’re better as friends.”

  Maya’s quiet, grabs another dirty dish. It’s possible that Caitlin doesn’t remember that day, could hardly recall all the things they’ve shared.

  “I’ve been making people up my whole life,” says Caitlin. She smiles this smile Maya thinks of as specifically hers. Caitlin’s cheeks rise in gorgeous mounds as her lips turn up. She’s put on mascara for the occasion—it’s clumped into the corners of her eyes, and there’s a faint smudge of black on her left cheek, her whole face damp from sweat. Maya wants to wet her thumb under the sink and brush her fingers over Caitlin’s face. She runs her hands over her own face instead and loosens her hair from its clip. She pulls it back tight against her head and higher, and tries not to glance back at Charles, who, she knows, is watching them.

  “Maya,” says Caitlin. She grabs her arm, which surprises both of them.

  Maya stays still, the sponge warm and wet in her hand.

  “You should go to her,” she says.

  Maya’s not sure whom she means at first. She backs away.

  “You have to get her out,” Caitlin says.

  Maya turns briefly toward the sink and sets the sponge down. She’s not used to this from anyone but Stephen. Ellie, she thinks, Ellie, like a shock straight through her brain. She looks down at Caitlin’s toes; she nods.

  “I’m sorry,” Caitlin says. She crosses, then uncrosses her arms. “It’s not my business,” she says. “I’m sorry,” she says again.

  Maya still can’t speak, grabs hold of the counter, finds her wine.

  Caitlin shakes her head, maybe wanting to start over. “I wanted …” she says. “It was important to me.”

  “Honey,” Maya interrupts her. She needs to take control again.

  “It means a lot to me, you being here.”

  Caitlin grabs Maya again, this time with both hands, below the elbows, their faces very close. Maya squeezes back. They stand, not quite embracing, not quite willing to let go.

  “I can’t wait to read it, sweetie,” Maya says. “I’m so very proud of you.”

  Summer 2011

  It’s a long time before Annie speaks to her. They’ve been home and both Jack and Ellie have showered. Ellie has stayed alone in her small room. She avoided looking at herself as she walked by the full-length mirror, put on long cotton pants and an oversized sweatshirt, though it’s still a hundred degrees, thick and humid, just outside her room. She has sat quietly on her bed and tried to keep her mind from whirring. She’s tried to read the book her mom sent, but then failed and stared up at the ceiling as she listened to Annie cook, Jeffrey come home. The hours pass in which they must eat, then put Jack to bed. No one comes to invite Ellie to join. She hears murmuring, loud for a minute, then quieter, then the whole world is silent for a long, long while.

  Annie knocks on Ellie’s door.

  She looks like she’s been crying. She’s still wearing the crisp linen pants and silk shirt she wears when she goes into the restaurant, and Ellie feels useless and absurd, so small. She sits back in the corner of the bed. Annie sits across from her. She’s brought her a plate of food, the fish and pasta Ellie’d listened to her cook. Ellie takes it and sets it down beside her on the bed. She says thank you and peels off a small piece of fish. Annie firms her lips.

  “I lost him once,” says Annie. Ellie looks down at her feet, where there are still grains of sand from when they sat out on the beach after they’d been brought to shore. She’d left her flip-flops on the boat. She and Jack drove home barefoot in bathing suits, with the towels wrapped around them that the boy with the hat and peeling nose had given them before he went out in a rubber-rimmed dinghy to try to save the boat. “I was at the grocery store and he was wandering behind me. You know how he gets distracted.” She shakes her head. Ellie stays still. “I was alone with him all the time then.” Her memory takes her far from Ellie now and Ellie doesn’t mind it. “And it doesn’t matter how much you love him, you know? He still drove me insane. It was one of those days, and I was counting the seconds till Jeff would be home to relieve me. I didn’t even need anything at the grocery store, but I couldn’t be alone with him anymore. And then all of a sudden he was gone, and I couldn’t breathe, because it felt like I’d wished it, you know? I went to that kiosk thing and had them call for him. He was three and knew his name—he thought it was cool, being called over the loudspeaker—and we found him right away. But those seconds …” She looks up at Ellie then and Ellie leans away, startled to be sitting so close.

  Ellie wraps her arms around her shoulders. She burrows her chin into her chest.

  “I want us to be good for each other, Ellie,” she says. She angles herself closer to Ellie and reaches toward her, her hand resting lightly on her knee. “I want this all to work.”

  Ellie wants to respond properly, to give her whatever it is she needs. She uncrosses her arms, then crosses them again.

  “Listen,” Annie says. She looks searchingly at Ellie, right in the eyes, and Ellie wonders if she’s checking if she’s stoned. “It’s our fault.” It takes Ellie a minute to realize the “our” isn’t she and Annie. It isn’t Ellie or her mom. “We kept him so isolated …” Ellie’s
slowly catching up with Annie, whose voice falls a little. Her hand stays on Ellie’s knee. “I didn’t think it mattered when he was really small. It might not have.” She looks older, less sure. “There are probably plenty of kids who don’t see other kids when they’re little who acclimate fine to socializing later on. But he was brought up in the restaurant. It’s the problem with having kids so late; it all feels so precious, you know? You’ve worked so hard for it. Even when I did just want a break, it felt ungrateful, spending any time away from him. I don’t know how I expected preschool to go well. But you know.” She stops a minute and takes her hand back. “You think just loving is enough no matter what. I thought my love had this sort of primacy over every other person’s. But then all those kids I’d pitied when they were two in those carts they’d push around downtown with gaggles of little children, those kids just laughed that first morning I took him, and greeted one another happily, while Jack screamed and kicked and refused to let go of my shirt.” As she says this she holds her shirt, which has come untucked near the bottom, rubbing her thumb along the edge. It’s a thin, nearly translucent silk, light blue against the tan curve of her hand. “We thought that it’d get better. Lots of kids throw fits. But the kid has a will like nothing you’ve ever seen.” She lets go of her shirt and grabs hold of her own knee, harder than she held Ellie’s. “The first week we were back to get him every day before noon. And the worst part.” Annie shakes her head. “It was only then I began to think of spending time with him as some kind of burden. Because I had made peace with him being away from me for a few hours every morning. And then to not get that after all. I’d signed up for unlimited yoga.” She points her eyes to the floor. “I’d made plans to see friends I hadn’t spent more than an hour with in years. I didn’t want to give it up.” She holds her hands, palms up, in front of her, then sets them in her lap. “After two more weeks they recommended we try to transition him more slowly. Jeff and I took turns shadowing him for a couple of weeks. But every time we tried to leave: the same thing. And you know they tell you to let him just work it out himself. That that’s the best way.” She looks up. She looks past Ellie’s right ear, at the wall behind the bed. “I could feel the teacher’s judgment from across the room every time I went to him when he cried. But the idea that I could do something to stop it and I didn’t, I know it’s not that simple but it felt that simple then. Finally they told us either he would be placed in special ed until they found a full-time aide or we’d have to find another place.” She stops a minute. She looks Ellie, briefly, in the face. “Jeff’s a therapist, you know? You think rational thought should get you somewhere. We tried to talk to him about it, but my whole body would tense up even thinking about the word school. We decided to take another year and do homeschool. We had a woman come three days a week, and one of us was always there. And he was a dream as long as we didn’t leave. I started to feel as if I would never have a moment free again. The past four years began to fold in on themselves and taunt me with all the things I hadn’t been able to do. We got him a therapist. Who gets a therapist for a four-year-old? But the school recommended her. We stopped going when she started trying to give us diagnoses. Spectrums, medications. I wasn’t ready yet to call him something other than himself. We worked on smaller increments of separation. None of the help we got ever lasted long. He’d throw the tantrums and they seemed to be getting worse. By the end of the last school year, we couldn’t even do school at home anymore. I found someone on the Internet who said live-in help might be the best option. But the idea of a stranger in our house … I don’t know. And your mom said you needed to get out of New York for a while. And I remembered you when you were little. You were such a perfect little kid, the way you always were with Benny. I thought maybe you and Jack could do each other good. He’s wonderful, really. He just …” She holds her hands in front of her again, palms out, then holds them to her face. “We all have shit, right?” She speaks through the gaps between her fingers, then places them back on her lap. For the first time since she started speaking, she holds Ellie’s gaze. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but he likes you,” she says. “You understand him, I think. I think you might understand each other. This can be good for both of you.”

  Annie looks down at Ellie’s half-eaten dinner. She nods toward the plate, looks up. “But Ellie,” she says, “I am going to ask you to be careful.”

  Ellie picks up another piece of fish and slowly chews it. She wraps her arms around her shins and tries hard not to look away from Annie. If only she were someone else.

  “I’m going to beg you to love my son as much as I do. I want you to know I trust you and I want you to be okay too.”

  Ellie wipes her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I …” She wants to promise she’ll be good.

  Winter, 2013

  The new family has left them, the baby tucked back close to her mother, Bryant going dutifully behind. It’s just Maya, Charles, and Caitlin, and no one seems sure of what to say next. Maya dumps her wine glass in the sink and grabs her coat. “I guess,” she says.

  Charles nods. “Yeah,” he says, “me too.”

  Maya blanches, avoiding eye contact with Caitlin.

  “Sure,” Maya says. “Okay.”

  “Oh,” Caitlin says. “You’re sure?”

  Charles holds her coat out for her. “I’ll walk you,” he says.

  Maya grabs hold of Caitlin before her coat’s back on. “Okay,” she says, without looking at him, her head now safely nestled into Caitlin’s neck.

  “I didn’t mean …” says Caitlin.

  “I’m so proud of you,” Maya says again.

  Maya and Charles are just outside the apartment. It’s dark out and music pulses from the buildings across the street.

  “A book,” Maya says. “It’s wonderful.”

  She must clear her head of thoughts of Ellie. She walks quickly, snow crunching underneath her feet.

  Charles nods, his hands dug into the pockets of his coat. “It is,” he says.

  “You knew already?”

  “I had an idea.”

  “You two are close?” She watches the light in front of them change to green.

  You have to go to her, she thinks.

  She feels Charles nod next to her. “We’re friends,” he says.

  They pass a small community garden; patches of snow spot the dirt on the other side of the chain-link fence. They’re quiet awhile and Maya watches the packs of kids walking through Tompkins Square Park clutch their cigarettes with ungloved hands. She fixates on a small girl walking next to a thin boy, laughing, her fingertips are red and chapped, the nails bitten down.

  “I used to live down here,” she says.

  “Really?” She thinks he looks skeptical, like maybe she’s remembered wrong.

  “Years ago,” she says. She smiles briefly. The girl drops her cigarette and stamps it with the toe of her boot. “I wasn’t always this old,” Maya says.

  He starts to correct her, but she holds up her hand.

  “It wasn’t this cool then.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s like Disneyland.” They’re on Saint Marks and Third Avenue. Fluorescent lights and tattoo parlors, shops selling scarves and gloves and cheap jewelry jut out into the street, three designer yogurt shops within a single block. The smells are exhaust, falafel, and something curried, cigarettes every other breath. Beautiful young people, lithe limbs, firm everything, tourists clutching their maps and their bags. There are still the kids in ratty clothing, errant piercings, sitting with their backs against buildings, with their pit bulls and their dirty hair. But even they look like props now. Maya wouldn’t be surprised to discover they take the subway home every night to Park Slope or Boerum Hill.

  Maya rubs the nylon of her coat pocket between her thumb and forefinger as she burrows her hands in more deeply. A pack of laughing girls walks by; a couple leaning into one another almost bumps into Charles.
/>   Ellie, Ellie, Ellie, Maya thinks.

  “Auden,” says Charles, nodding toward a brownstone to their left.

  Maya turns to him.

  “He lived there.”

  “Right,” she says. She should be the one who knows.

  “He had to walk to the liquor store across the street to pee.”

  He stands up straighter as he says this. He’ll be a great teacher, she thinks again, the way his whole body changes as soon as he thinks he has something he might offer to someone else.

  “The plumbing froze, and he had to walk across the street to use the toilet.”

  They pass the subway Maya would take to go back to Brooklyn. She has no idea where Charles lives. It seems they have agreed on something without agreeing to it. There’s still the possibility to deny any agency in whatever they’re about to do.

  “He used to go to that church on Ninth Street,” he says. “He gave the manuscript of The Age of Anxiety to a friend so he could sell it for an operation he couldn’t afford.”

  “Nice guy,” Maya says.

  Charles smiles, turning toward her. “I’ve always thought.”

  They cross Broadway, still heading west, and Maya dips her chin to her chest as the wind picks up. Her shoulder brushes Charles’s. The sidewalk gets more crowded, then thins out again; it’s icy in places—she’s drunker than she realized—and she almost grabs hold of Charles as her feet begin to slip.

  Charles leads Maya into a bar off West Fourth. The streets no longer run in a grid, and West Fourth runs perpendicular to itself for a while.