Hold Still (2 page)

He takes a piece of the free sample brownie. He swallows without chewing and takes another piece.

She can taste his breath: cigarettes, Mexican Coke, and ginger chews. She can feel the brush of her tongue along the crooked jumble of his bottom teeth.

He still calls her sometimes. Mostly she's able to ignore it: his name flashing over and over on her cell phone as she sits curled under her duvet not able to sleep. But sometimes she answers; sometimes she slides open the phone and lets him talk: she needs too much sometimes to be reminded that he's out there, that there's still someone in the world who's wanting her.

She tries to look at him sternly. “What do you want?” she says.

“Nothing,” Dylan says.

She feels Joseph—short and sweet, her coworker and only friend here, her only friend at all right now—he's right behind her and Ellie wishes Dylan would just leave them. Instead, he leans in close to her: the smell is brownie and the hand-rolled cigarettes he smokes only when there are people around to watch him roll them. The rest of the time he smokes his mother's Parliaments. “You,” he says. “Always, always. Pretty, pretty Ellie.”

She feels her body leaning toward him. She holds tight to the countertop with both her hands.

Winter 2013

“W
here will we go?” Maya says.

“Indian?” says Ben.

“Sure,” says Stephen. “The closer one.”

There's a better place in Crown Heights, but Stephen hates driving the car.

“How was campus?” asks Maya, because Ben's next to her and the silence gapes. They walk down Garfield to Fifth.

“Fine,” says Stephen. “Usual early semester jostling.”

“Things in order?” she says. “What are you teaching again?”

He pulls at a thread on one of his coat's buttons and pretends not to hear her. He's been teaching the same classes every semester for the past ten years.

“What about you, Benny?” she says, turning to him as they keep walking. She loops her arm through his elbow and thinks she feels him wince. Across the street on the next block is the coffee shop Ellie worked the few months before she left. All three of them are silent for a block; Ben and Stephen look back toward Sixth Avenue; Maya looks up at the brown awning with the too-bright white scrawl:
GINNY'S
, it says.

“Calc 2,” Ben says. His voice is flat, disinterested. “Western Political Thought,” he says. This is Stephen's domain and his back straightens.

Stephen starts to speak, but their son stops him.

“It's a requirement,” Ben says.

“Of course,” says Stephen. “Speaks highly of the school, then.”

Ben's in school in Ohio, bucolic, foreign, a soccer scholarship. Maya was jarred, baffled by the choice when it came.

Ben nods, and Maya leans in closer. “What else?”

“Spanish,” he says. It's January and frigid and she wants to tell him to put his hands inside his pockets. She wants to bend down and button up his coat.

“I might have to retake English,” he says, turning to look at her.

Stephen stops and faces them. He takes his hands out of his pockets and folds his arms across his chest. “Retake?” he says, lingering on the first syllable in a tone that Maya knows too well.

Ben turns toward Maya. He curls his hand into a fist.

“It's not a big deal,” he says. “The class was really early in the morning. I just sort of stopped showing up.”

This is her son whom teachers have been calling “gifted” since preschool. Her son for whom there has never been space enough to be a problem too.

“Sort of stopped showing up,” says Stephen. Like he's trying out the feel of this idea. “Does your coach know?”

“It's fine, Dad. I'm covering it.”

“Covering it.” Stephen has been reduced to only able to repeat.

“Fuck off, Dad,” her son says.

“Excuse me?” says Stephen, keeping his voice steady, though he looks like he's been hit.

“I'm starved,” says Ben. “And cold. Can we keep walking?”

Stephen turns and walks ahead of them. Maya holds tight to her son.

They get samosas, tandooris, rogan josh, and spoon rice and creamy sauces on their plates. No one's speaking and Maya's grateful each time the waiter comes to cut into the quiet.

“All right?” he asks. He's older, with a thick, clipped accent. Maya nods, smiling at him, trying to think of what she might say to keep him there. A Bollywood musical plays on low behind them on a large flat-screen TV. Blues and oranges and purples all mixed up with lithe brown limbs. The waiter walks away.

“I heard Kenny Lambert made the Olympic Development Team,” says Stephen.

Maya drops her fork and glares at him. They've agreed not to talk about the soccer. The coach called weeks before to express concern about Ben's “lackluster” involvement at practice in the fall.

A girl on the TV behind Stephen does a back bend, revealing a slick, perfectly flat midriff. Stephen never played or even cared about sports until their son suddenly proved himself a prodigy. By the time Ben was in high school, he was being recruited by a handful of colleges and Stephen knew the stats and names of every high school student in the state.

“Jesus, Maya, what? He's a friend of his.”

“How do you even know this?” Maya asks him. She's caught him a few times, trolling the Internet for scores and statistics, obsessive for the sake of it. Ben's quiet. He lines his water glass with the index finger of his free hand.

The waiter comes and clears Stephen and Ben's empty plates
and they stay silent. It's almost closing time and he's removed his apron. Stephen sips his beer. “I'm interested in what our son is interested in.”

“Kenny's not my friend, Dad,” Ben says. “He's kind of a douche.”

Maya's lips purse toward Ben and he smiles at her. She passes her plate to him and he consumes quickly all she's not been able to.

At three a.m. Maya sits in the nook in the kitchen, her arms wrapped around her shins, in running tights, a sports bra, and a jacket, waiting for morning to get close enough that she can leave. If she can wait till five she'll look less crazy. She's decided it's sufficient to hold out till four. She's dressed quietly in clothes she keeps in Ellie's room. She's always kept socks and shoes close to the door.

Pans hang over the island on which there are six stovetops and lines of spices. Instead of cabinets, they have large oak shelves along the walls, the dishes, pans, and cookware on display. They're embarrassingly wealthy—Stephen's parents. He's the only child and they've inherited everything. They have the brownstone in Park Slope, a block from the park, on Garfield, instead of Manhattan because it was what Maya wanted. Because there was a time in their lives when he made gestures as grand as moving to a side of the East River on which he had never previously set foot because Maya liked the trees.

She pulls on socks and shoes and ties them slowly, bends her left knee, and pulls her shin up against her face, then switches to the right. She laces her fingers and stretches her arms, one and then the other, pulling on her forearms. The lock clicks and the door creaks as she leaves.

Their block is shady, two- and three-family brownstones. They were some of the first gentrifiers, when Ellie was a toddler, Maya full-bellied with Ben. They'd felt a little pioneering, with the squatters and the lesbians still peopling Fourth Avenue, the less-than-stellar public schools they let their children attend the first few years. Maya brought up Sophie and Otto Bentwood at least once a week. (She'd even wanted to take in a stray cat that had loitered in their garden a few winter months the year they moved in. But Stephen was allergic; she'd had to bring her to the shelter instead, knowing full well what would probably happen. She was most shocked by how quickly she'd forgotten about it.)

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

“F
ancy 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.