Hold Still (24 page)

“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

“W
here 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

“B
est 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.

The house is only a couple of miles from Annie's. Small and flat-roofed, with grass dying in the front yard, the driveway cracked, stained orange and yellow concrete with weeds growing right up through.

Cooper parks on the street and leads them to the side door that opens into the garage. Ellie tempers the desire to clamp a hand over Jack's eyes. He stops her as Cooper knocks the first time.

“Nor?” His small round face is scared. He holds tight—damp
and cold, his short fingers hardly reaching past the base of her thumb—to Ellie's hand. “I want to go home, Nor,” he says.

She looks down at her feet, tan and slipped in flip-flops, her toes speckled with sand.

“Don't worry,” she says. “Soon, kiddo.” She tries to smile at him but turns back toward Cooper when she can't. He's knocked for a second time and is now looking impatiently, a bit nervously, toward Jack.

He mutters something. The door opens: a very thin old woman in black stretch pants, yellow rubber clogs, and an oversized pink Hello Kitty T-shirt. Ellie stares at the thin veiny skin that covers her hands. The woman winces when she sees Cooper, not greeting any of them, just moving aside so they can come through the door.

Ellie tries to ignore the tingling covering her whole body, the excitement, the knowledge that if she wants, she's only minutes from relief. She keeps hoping for the guilt to override it, for the fear of falling back or the anger at herself. But all she manages is to work hard to temper her body's elation, the knowledge that there's something certain to look forward to.

They enter the garage, which is thick with humidity and the smell of sour chemicals. Large and small pieces of thin glass shapes scatter the floor and the aluminum shelf that runs along the opposite side of the room. The glass is in all sorts of sheer sparkling colors; a single piece flows from red to pink to yellow, shaped like a massive trumpet, narrow at the bottom and rising into a wide round top. It could be a tulip. There are smaller pieces that are more intricate, animals, and twisting crooked shapes. Ellie wants to go to hold one. They seem too delicate, like they would shatter in her hands.

Ellie squeezes Jack's hand.

“You like 'em?” It's the first time the woman's spoken. She's standing close to Ellie. She smells like must and cigarettes, and the mold that grows in sheets left in the wash too long.

“I do,” says Ellie, turning toward her. “They're very beautiful.”

The woman nods. “Thanks, yeah. It's my real passion.”

Cooper looks at her and she shrugs and nudges Ellie, leaning in close so Jack won't hear. Her elbow sticks sharp in Ellie's rib. “And it helps cover the other business I do.”

Meth, thinks Ellie. Fuck. Her fingers itch, but she can't mention it. She's never tried meth, can't admit any agency in this whole thing.

She looks quickly, nervously, at Jack.

The stench of chemicals is making Ellie dizzy. She stares hard at a purple glass alligator, wondering at the tiny perfect scales. She tries to think of how to not get high. She tries remembering how she got here, tries forcing herself to accept that she chose to be standing in this place, that she chose to bring Jack with her, that she is stupid and fucked up.

“But that's not what you all want,” the woman says, looking back at Cooper and then at Ellie; she has not once looked down at Jack. There's a large gray plastic chest of drawers and shelves across the back wall of the garage and the woman very methodically goes through a drawer at waist level that Ellie sees is separated into lots of small glass-covered squares. The woman pulls out a plastic bag and nods toward it, facing Cooper.

She looks at Jack for the first time, “Sciatica, sweetie,” she says, winking. “The boy and I both got it bad.”