Lynn Strong - Hold Still

“I’ve been wanting—”

She stops him. “Oh, honey,” she says. “Don’t.”

She’s been too hard. The “honey.” He steps back from her and his face closes off.

She walks quickly back to her office. She’s hot. It’s twenty-three degrees, but she holds her coat over her arm. She’s left him there, Charles. She feels twelve years old.

She brushes past a colleague, then another, nods, cannot broach a smile. She thought she’d remembered the lock, but her office door is open; she goes in.

He’s sitting in her desk chair. She stops and thinks he knows, then realizes that he can’t.

She breathes out long.

He holds up his key ring. “I forgot I had a key.” He looks more closely at her.

“You okay?”

She’s fine. She’s been silly. Nothing even happened. Everything is fine.

Her husband’s legs cross at the ankles, stretched out beneath her desk. His shoes have tassels that hang above his toes. “Maya?”

“Fine.” She attempts a smile. “What do you need?”

He looks at her. Careful. He cocks his head, his eyes rolling down her length.

“I was in class.” Her vowels are all wrong. She watches Stephen swallow hard a wince. He sits up straight in her desk chair. He wears a dark blue blazer, a yellow shirt, no tie. He’s hung his coat up on the rack near the door to Maya’s office. She still holds hers over her arm.

“I know Maya. You sure you’re okay?”

“Just cold out.”

He leans forward, motioning toward her. “You forgot to put on your coat.”

She sits down across from him. She’s not sure she’s ever been on this side of her desk.

“Maya, listen.” He’s trying to be careful with her. His voice is like balancing an egg out on a spoon. “Her doctor called.”

There are options here that she feels she might be privy to. Crawling underneath the desk, for example, holding tight to Stephen’s tassels as he talks to her about these things she’d rather try not to look directly at.

“You have to stop with the letters, Maya.” He’s acting as if there has not been a fight. As if, if he works very hard to help direct her toward actions that are good and reasonable, he should be forgiven for not loving his wife or his children as he should.

“It’s the only way we’re allowed to communicate with her.”

She’s only written two. She has both of them memorized, runs over and over them now to see if maybe she’d gotten at least some of what she means and needs to tell her daughter right.

“Maya.” He’s gaining strength now, the words are leveling. Her name’s a word he’s said confidently and just like this so many million times. “He thinks you should be seeing someone.”

“How does he know to be worried about me?”

“You know they read the letters. They screen everything.”

She must have been told this. But Stephen would have been the one to tell her. She was still refusing to speak to the doctors those first few months.

“You didn’t even tell me you were writing her.”

“I have to tell her everything I can,” Maya says. “I’m trying to give her something, Stephen, to help her. I keep thinking, maybe if I shape things properly. .” She tries not to think when she writes to her. Her hope is that something greater than what she’s tried to give all these years will slip through these almost unconscious utterances, that something whole is passing through and into Ellie, helping fill her up again.

“He says you’re enabling.”

“What kind of asshole doctor tells on me to my husband, instead of calling me?”

“You can’t give him the impression we’re negligent,” he says. He’s trying so hard to be steady. He rubs the curve of the left side of his collar with his thumb. “He’s concerned that you’re not fully competent to make decisions without me.”

“This is serious? Like I’m some hysteric? We need to find her someone else to see.”

“I’m worried about you, Maya.”

She looks past him through her one small window. The snow has started up again. “We have to get her another doctor. A woman.”

“This man is supposed to be one of the best, Maya. He’s why we sent her there. .”

“Well, he’s not, obviously. Obviously. .” She stops. She picks a few stray flakes of snow off her coat. “I’m trying to figure out how to love her again.” She almost whispers this.

Her husband’s voice gets firmer, quieter. He crosses his arms and wheels the chair in closer to the desk and shakes his head. “You think you can make it better? What she did?”

She sees the curve of Charles’s waist below his shirt.

He looks across the desk at her, then around at all her books. He opens the copy of Mrs. Dalloway and starts flipping through it. It’s the copy that he gave her, years ago, her birthday, twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth — she can’t believe she can’t remember — it was one of the first birthdays she had after they’d met. He’d forgotten. She’d been hurt, though she’d never thought herself a woman who cared much about birthdays. And then, late at night, he’d shown up at her apartment with this book, a book of which, he knew, she had probably five copies already, because, he’d said, he was certain she’d love it.

“You know what, Maya? The thing you hate about me? Whatever it is about me that’s so reprehensible to you. It’s something you created. We created it together. I had no choice but to become the stolid, cold one. There wasn’t any room for me to be anything else.”

That day: “Mommy”—Maya hadn’t heard Ellie’s voice in months. They’d communicated through short missive emails. Text messages, the punctuation of which hurt Maya’s eyes. For less than a second Maya’d thought, She’s coming back to me. My girl .

But then, quickly, violently, this thought dissolved. Ellie was in the car, Jeffrey’s, the Jeep they’d given her to use. She was pulled over on the side of the road. She was afraid to go back to their house. But no one was there and she had to get her things. She had no wallet. No clothes, besides the underwear she’d been wearing when it happened, the wet shirt and T-shirt lost somewhere. Underwear, thought Maya. Why underwear? And she knew, of course. She understood what she, herself, had done, sending her daughter there. Inflicting her daughter on that boy. Telling Annie bits, but not enough, not warning her properly of what Ellie might be capable of. They’d given her scrubs at the hospital, Ellie said. Maya had an image of her. The flat hot roads of Florida, scrub grass, lines of houses that all looked the same. Ellie small and crying, shoulders bare, dark hair matted to her head, going under, maybe not coming back up.

“El,” she said. But she couldn’t help her, wasn’t sure she could stand to hear what her daughter had done.

But she listened to the first part of the story. The whole of it unfurled over her like a cold wet stretch of cotton wool, and she thought briefly she was about to vomit in the sink. She looked out onto Stephen’s garden. It was fall and the leaves on the maple tree were just turning, half green still, with reds and yellows creeping in. She felt Stephen come up behind her, and Maya handed the phone to him without saying anything to either him or Ellie. She walked slowly to her office. She closed the door, and turned the old heavy bolt into its place. She sat up on the couch with her legs pulled in until she was as small as she thought she could be. She rocked slowly back and forth and tried not to breathe or think.

The lawyer Stephen called said to get her into rehab. They needed to show that she was sorry. That she was ill and working to be cured. She wasn’t reckless: she was sick. But Maya didn’t know, she wasn’t sure, what was the difference, and what was sick and what wasn’t, and what did calling her daughter sick do but make her something that needed to be fixed? And even if there was a sort of comfort in imagining that fixing her was an option, it also felt as if it was all too fundamentally a part of her to not have consequences beyond getting well. But they would do things ; they would listen to the lawyers and they wouldn’t go to her. Maya wasn’t sure she could. Every time she thought of her daughter those first few weeks, she thought just after that of Annie. She thought of the little girl, sitting at her desk and looking small and sad. She thought of the woman who’d done her this great favor. The woman to whom she’d not told the whole truth about her girl.