Maya avoids the mirror. She closes herself quickly into an empty stall. She puts down the lid of the toilet and sits, slipping her feet out of her shoes. She stares at her long, unpolished toenails, the little hairs on each toe. Black lines are smudged around her feet from the boots’ leather and her sweat.
She breathes slowly, sits back against the tank. The porcelain clunks once against the wall and Maya keeps her eyes fixed downward. She listens to the girls. They’re talking about someone else now, another girl whom they seem to hate.
“Her dress, though.”
“I know.”
“Like it’s the fucking prom.”
They’re both laughing. One high and sharp. One hoarse.
“She’s really skinny, though. I could never wear a dress that tight.”
“Coke.” Maya hears the toilet flush beside her.
“Really?” The door of the stall opens with a creak.
“I know.” She imagines that they’re looking at one another in the mirror.
“Well, I guess it works.”
Heels clank against the concrete of the floor. Water runs.
“I love that lipstick.” Maya thinks of Ellie’s thick broad lips.
“Here.”
“Thanks.”
Maya looks at the freckles on her knees. She can still make out the lines of her quadriceps from all the mornings up over the bridge. She still has the knot of something certain pulsing thick and tight between her shoulder blades. She’s no longer drunk, but does not feel sober. Her mind pounds hard and crooked from the music and the alcohol. She thinks, briefly, of texting Stephen. But she can’t think what she would say. She thinks maybe instead she will just never leave this bathroom. She will stay here, eavesdropping on young girls, pretending that they’re hers.
“You okay, Ma?”
Her eyes are blurry and she can hardly make out the shape of him. He’s in boxers still and an old tournament T-shirt. Maya sits up and runs her fingers down under her eyes. “Fine,” she says.
She fell asleep still in her dress (Laura’s) in Ellie’s room, without ever checking in with Stephen, without brushing her teeth or washing her face. Now Ben has found her, under the covers with mascara smudged beneath her eyes.
“Where were you last night?”
“Laura,” she says, hoping this explains things.
“Right,” Ben says.
“What’d you do for dinner?” She should’ve been here cooking for him, talking to him, loving him.
“Dad made pasta,” Ben says.
“How was it?” she asks. They were supposed to make up. Stephen was supposed to tell Ben he was sorry, prepare him for Ellie.
“Fine, Mom.”
“Benny …”
“I know. You don’t know what that means.”
“You feel better about things?”
“He’s still pissed.”
She’s quiet. She should have been here. She stares at her son’s face and then looks down.
“I know he just wants … you know, he’s Dad. He wants us to achieve, right? To enact ourselves upon the world.” Ben raises his shoulders and lowers his voice when he says the last part. Maya smiles.
“Benny …” She wants to say something to prove she loves him, to show him she’d still do anything on earth to keep him safe. “You want breakfast?”
“Nah,” he says. “I think I’ll run.”
She doesn’t want to get out of bed with Ben still watching. There’s a large black X on her hand from the doorman at the club. There are still lines of grime along her feet.
He lingers a little longer, toeing the carpet, running his fingers through his nearly nonexistent hair. “Okay,” he says.
“Tonight, maybe?” Maya asks him. “Dinner?”
“Sure,” he says. He looks up at her. Maya holds the comforter up close to her face and breathes in the smell of cigarettes.
She needs to talk to Stephen first, to clear things up, to remind him to be careful with her children.
“Dad and I aren’t coming,” Ben says.
Maya’s only holding on to bits of what he’s saying to her. She sees the pounding music, the caged girl.
“To Florida,” he says. “To get El.”
She will not react here in front of him. She will wait until she sees Stephen to respond properly to this. She must figure out, in the meantime, what responding properly might be.
“It’s fine, Benny,” she says. “If you don’t want to come, it’s fine.”
“I want to,” Ben says. “But Dad …”
She looks out the window of Ellie’s room, down into Stephen’s garden. He could not ever quite make sense of who their daughter was. He understood and responded well to goals. He never fought with Ellie. Instead, he just slowly wandered further from her. She was, he seemed to believe, of Maya’s making, and therefore Maya’s task most of the time.
It was messier than this: He kept trying sometimes. He took Ellie for walks, gave her books, cooked her favorite dinners. He took care of Maya so that she could take care of their girl. He was busy trying to be the consistent, steady parent—organizing, scheduling, keeping their lives going—while Maya flailed and grasped for whatever might finally save Ellie.
“Ma?” says Ben.
“Yeah, Benny.”
“You’re a mess, you know?”
She drops the comforter and smooths the front of it over her lap. “I know, Benny.” She laughs, swinging her legs out of the bed and walking toward him. “I know,” she says.
Summer 2011
It’s Annie’s one day off and Jeffrey is still down the street with clients. Ellie comes back from the beach and walks barefoot into the kitchen. Her feet are speckled with sand and her ears are still half clogged. Her head feels blurry and the skin along her cheeks smarts from the sun. She hasn’t eaten since the morning. She went to swim before anyone else had risen and stayed at the beach until after five. There’s no one in the kitchen and Ellie thinks the place is empty. She’s wearing a T-shirt over her bathing suit, but she’s left her shorts in the car. She makes a sandwich, slathering hummus on the bread and cutting big pieces of the cheddar cheese Jack likes. She’s taken on many of his eating habits as her own. She’s not sure how she knows to do it or what about Annie’s voice signals to her that she’s on the phone with Ellie’s mom. She might have picked up the phone only because she hears Annie on the other end in her bedroom and her fascination with Annie has no end. Because she’s not used to landlines any more. It’s jarring, though, suddenly hearing her mother laughing. She’s someone else when not talking to Ellie. There’s none of the worry, none of the terror muddying up her words. She seems so young and comfortable, talking to Annie about her classes. They chat a while longer. Annie complains about one of the busboys who always comes in stoned. Ellie listens to her mom get quiet. She knows now she’s begun to think of her.
“How is she?” her mom asks; Annie gets quiet. Ellie wonders for the millionth time how much Annie knows.
“She’s such a sweet girl, Maya. She’s really good with Jack.”
Her mom’s silent again and Ellie sees her sitting in her study with her feet up on the desk, holding a book in one hand, the phone held to her ear with her shoulder, rifling through the pages with her other hand as she talks. “Is she?”
“She seems good. I’m not sure what else there is to say. She doesn’t say much about herself and I don’t want to push.”
“Of course,” her mom says. Annie said she didn’t want to tell her mom about the sailing. She didn’t want Maya to worry when there was no need.
“I’d tell you, you know, if there was anything else. But she seems all right. She swims every morning. She’s a sweet girl, Maya.” Ellie thinks she hears her mom set her book down.
“I don’t know who she is.” This is her mom again. Ellie cups the phone more tightly. “When I think about her down there, I can’t think of a person so much as a reason to be afraid.”
Annie whispers someth
ing inaudible to Jack.
“I mean, I remember her as a child. And then I remember all these years of never knowing what to expect. She was always so unpredictable. When I think of missing her, I always think of the little girl I miss. But I’m not sure who she is now. I’m not sure I’d even know what to do with her besides be afraid.”
Ellie still has hold of her sandwich. She’s squeezed the hummus out of the bread and it’s now smeared along her palm.
Her mom continues: “I can’t say that out loud too much. I hate how it feels, even thinking it. But I’ve been relieved since she went to you.”
Ellie stays very still and waits for Annie’s response.
“She’s figuring it out. I really think she is.”
There’s a noise behind her and Ellie almost drops the phone; she sees Jeffrey standing in the kitchen, watching her.
He holds a finger up to his lips and shakes his head. Ellie’s been crying and she hopes that he can’t see it. She has her fist held tightly over the phone’s receiver and she knows that he must know that she’s been listening in. He’s wearing what he wears to work, jeans and a button-down shirt that he usually keeps untucked. He has hold of his hair behind his ear and nods reassuringly at Ellie as she carefully places the phone back in its cradle and walks past him to her room.
The next morning Jeff and Jack come to her door together, early. Ellie’s still in bed. “Nor,” she hears through the slats. It’s the two of them calling her in unison. She’s quick out of the bed. She pulls on shorts and ties her hair up. “Hey, guys,” she says. She comes out the door instead of opening it to them. She thinks Annie must be somewhere close.
“We’re going on a picnic,” Jack says. His hand is wrapped around his dad’s shoulder, he’s high up in his dad’s arms as he talks. “To the beach, Nor,” says Jack. “You have to come.”
Ellie looks down at her bare feet, eyes Jeff’s ankles, then his shins.
“We already made your sandwich,” Jack says.
Ellie feels Jeff smile.
“Sure,” she says.
“I told you we could get her,” Jeff says to his son.
They bring sand toys for Jack, a surfboard, towels, an umbrella under which only Annie sits. Made sloppily by Jack and Jeffrey, wrapped in tinfoil that’s too loose, all the sandwiches are soggy and wet from melted ice that’s leaked through by the time they unwrap them. Jeff takes Jack out on the surfboard, paddling behind him like Cooper’s done the few times they’ve gone out with him. Jeffrey’s easy with his son, strong and confident in the water. Ellie watches Annie, who is smiling, watching them. Annie wears a simple orange one-piece. She’s pulled her hair back and has sunglasses perched atop her head. She has a dimple in her left cheek, but not her right one. She has freckles on her nose and three along her jaw up to her chin.
The waves don’t so much break as roll steadily to shore. Some of them get white and frothy before they trickle in, but mostly the water’s calm. The beach is almost empty. There’s a man fishing by himself about five hundred yards from where they sit, but otherwise they have this space of sand and water to themselves.
“I never thought …” she says to Ellie. She turns toward her briefly, then faces the boys again. “I never thought all this was an option for me, you know?” Her face is almost never bare. She wears a little lipstick, some sort of concealer underneath her eyes, mascara, or a thin line of black at the tips of her lids. Ellie loves the look of her like this, though, completely clean. She squints into the sun. “That’s absurd, right?” Annie says. She pulls down her sunglasses.
Ellie stretches her legs out and buries her feet into the sand, her hands dig in as well. She keeps her eyes fixed on the water. The sand is warm and heavy over her toes and fingers, and she wishes she could do the same with her whole body, straight up to her head.
The surfboard flips out in the water and Jack and Jeffrey fall. Annie leans forward, her knees up by her shoulders, her hands grabbing her ankles, then reaching up to place her sunglasses back atop her head. Dad and son are up as quickly as they went under. Jeff holds Jack up over his head, then sits him back on the board. They both wave to Annie before turning out to start paddling again.
“Should we join them?” Annie says. She’s put her glasses on the towel and stands, holding out her hand to El.
Ellie slowly pulls her hands and then her feet out from under the holes she’s dug and reaches up for Annie’s hand. She places her own sunglasses on her towel and they walk together, almost brushing shoulders, till the water’s deep enough that they both push forward, not walking any longer, and dive down beneath the lumbering waves. They’re close to Jack and Jeffrey, and Annie breaststrokes toward them. Ellie lingers, scissor-kicking, treading water, then heads in the opposite direction of the three of them. She stays under for as long as her need for air will let her, then comes up again, far enough from Jack and Jeff and Annie that she can’t hear the things they say.
She watches Jack swim between his parents. Annie dives down deep and comes up again, her son in her arms. Ellie swims out farther, farther. She thinks maybe if she could stay out here. If she could just stay always two hundred feet from the people that she loves, maybe then she won’t hurt them. Maybe then they’ll all stay safe.
Winter 2013
“Where were you, Maya?” Stephen’s there as soon as Ben has left her. He’s already dressed for work.
“I went dancing,” she says. It’s strange, saying it out loud.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously,” she says.
“With whom?” He is a man with perfect pronouns.
“Laura.”
He nods. As if this is just as he expected. As if, of course, she’ll continue to do all of it wrong.
“Ben tells me you’re not coming?”
He reaches his hand behind his neck and looks past her to the street.
“May—”
She will not let him say her name. “Stephen, you will not not be there.”
“I’m staying here with Ben.”
“We should all go, Stephen.”
He shakes his head at her. “She doesn’t want me there.”
“You don’t know that, Stephen.”
But he does.
“Maya,” he says. This time she lets him talk.
“Daddy,” his daughter said. She was nine; he was in London. She was back in Brooklyn, though he could see her perfectly. She would be sitting in the shelf close to the floor that they kept empty just for her. It took up a corner of the kitchen, just below the phone, and though the phone was cordless—when Ben or Stephen or Maya talked, they often paced or sat comfortably on the couch—Ellie always sat, her thighs up to her chest, inside this small child-sized shelf.
Maya’d been a mess from the moment that he’d met her, hardly functional some days, but the smartest woman he’d ever known. He’d been brought up to believe in that, the intellect. He figured every other part of life could be managed if they both had that.
“Daddy,” their daughter said now. She seldom called him Daddy. She sounded desperate. She seldom called him at all when he was out of town. Ben was at his first sleepaway camp for soccer. It was the first time, for such a long stretch, that it was just Maya and Ellie all alone.
“I can’t take care of her all by myself,” said Ellie.
He should have gone to her immediately. He knew, of course, what she meant. “What’s wrong, El? What’s she doing?”
“She’s just …” She was disappearing. She was folding in on herself.
“El, go get her, baby, put your mother on the phone.”
“She can’t. You can’t. You’ll make it worse,” said Ellie.
“Elinor,” said Stephen. “Now.”
He heard her stay still a minute. He imagined her unfurling her small body, her wrists reaching for her ankles as she rose.
“Can you just come home, though?” she said. “She’ll be fine, I think. We’ll be okay if you come home.”
“
El, I have commitments.”
He should have gotten on a plane.
He should have worked less hard to take care of all the practical endeavors for her. He should have tried to meet her where she so often went. It was absurd, of course: what might have been done differently.
“Elinor, go find your mother, please.”
He yelled at Maya when he finally got her. It was exactly the thing Ellie had begged him not to do. He was far away and feeling helpless. She was the adult. All she had to do was to be present for their nine-year-old.
“Maya!” he said, and she cried without speaking, and he stayed on the phone until she stopped and promised to go outside, to take Ellie to the park. Sometimes, if he just got her outside, she would be better. If he could get her within a close enough proximity to Ellie, she would have to suck it up and be functional again. After this, he only ever left her if Ben was with them. He didn’t trust his wife, but he was unerringly dependent on his seven-year-old son.
He knows that she resents his stridency. She, much of the time, infuriates him. But oddly, maybe obviously, they have largely created these qualities in one another. They’ve spent twenty years nurturing and shaping the exact things in one another they have now grown to resent.
“I can’t come, Maya,” he says. “I called the lawyers. I checked in with the doctors. I’ve kept you steady enough to get you to her. I don’t want Ben to have to be there. I want to take this time to be with him.”
Fall 2011
“Best part of Florida,” says Cooper. “All the old people in pain.”
Ellie keeps her eyes free of the rearview mirror, where she knows for certain Jack’s trying to catch her eye. They’ve had another surf lesson. Then Cooper asked if she wanted to get high. He’s posturing, pretending. He’s not at all the boy he was at the fish restaurant.
Ellie wishes she hadn’t made him this instead.
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