Lynn Strong - Hold Still

The snow melts between Maya’s fingers. She lays her coat on her lap, places her palms on her thighs. She looks past him at the lines of books along each wall, the spines solid, darkly colored, mostly hardbacks. “I talked to Annie,” she says to him.

Stephen stiffens, sits up straight. “You can’t talk to her, Maya. The lawyer was very clear,” he says.

“I will absolutely talk to her if she’ll talk to me.”

Stephen shakes his head. “Maya, this isn’t negotiable.”

“She’s not contesting the release, Stephen. She’s not going to press charges. .”

Stephen’s silent a long time and Maya stands, not sure where she’s going. She walks over to the window, fixes her eyes on a single snowflake, and watches as it falls.

She feels his body tense, then slowly loosen.

“We can request another doctor,” he says. “If she’s released we’ll have to find her someone new up here.” He sets the book down on her desk and stands and walks toward the coat rack. “If she’s released.” He comes closer to her. He looks past her shoulder, his chin almost at the middle of her head. “If she’s released, we’ll find a way to help her here.”

He’s not terrible, her husband, Maya thinks. She burrows each of her hands beneath her thighs. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

Outside, a couple walks by under an umbrella. It’s too small to share, but they try valiantly. Maya watches as one of the spokes gets caught in the boy’s hair. Maya thinks of all the different ways they’ve failed to help their daughter until now.

“You think you’ll always hate me?” asks her husband.

This is the last thing she expected. She keeps her eyes fixed on the snow. “Oh, Stephen. I don’t. You know I don’t.”

“But you’re angry.”

She thinks how to answer this honestly. She is angry, but it’s no longer so specific an anger as to be directed just at him.

“I’m angry at everything, maybe,” she says. “Mostly myself.”

She reaches over the desk and closes the books, shuffles the papers into a pile. He hates disorder. She’s never sure what she might uncover when she clears her desk.

“Maya.” He stands and steps closer to her. He holds her wrist, halts her rearranging. He stays hovered over her, and she can almost taste his breath.

She stiffens underneath his grasp, those nerves, the shoulders, then the clavicle. She can’t remember the last time that they touched. They’ve brushed past one another. They’ve accidentally fallen close to one another when Maya’s managed to sleep the night through in their bed, but this is only the second time she can recall, since before they sent Ellie down to Florida, when her husband’s purposefully reached for her.

“You’re so thin,” he says. His voice is soft now, quiet; the taste of him so close to her is the same as it was twenty years before.

She could have been better for him. She has, also, not reached for him in all these months. She’s thought of it. Sometimes the impulse almost blinds her, the need to touch him, grab hold of his face, but she is a master of tempering these impulses. The more she’s felt the need to touch some part of him, the farther she has stayed away.

“Why don’t we get something to eat?” he says. He lets go of her, steps back. Maya almost asks him to stay put.

She’s still holding her coat and slips it on and buttons it. Stephen takes his from the rack and does the same. The snow’s still falling on the cobbled concrete, then through the gates and, cars speeding past, honking, wipers running, on Broadway, so close to one another as they walk that Maya’s shoulder almost touches Stephen’s upper arm.

“So, Ben,” her husband says. “You think he’ll be okay?” It seems they’re done with Ellie for the day.

Twice, she almost takes his hand — Maya crosses her arms over her chest.

“It must be so much for him,” she says. “I think he needs a break.”

“I guess it won’t. .” He grabs her elbow to stop her from stepping into the crosswalk. An SUV speeds past.

“It’s nothing that he can’t undo,” she says. They wait for the walk signal, Stephen’s hand still on her arm. “He can try out other things. .”

They go into a diner, some self-conscious attempt at a Manhattan college hangout. Maya orders a plate of french fries and a glass of wine. They’re silent till the food comes. Maya tries a single fry, then pushes her plate toward her husband, sips her wine. Stephen takes large bites of a chicken sandwich and picks at Maya’s fries.

“I’ve been rereading Zarathustra ,” he says.

Of course , she thinks, we’re returning to these things.

“You know the part with the dwarf?”

Maya nods, though she barely remembers. She read it years ago, lugging around the portable Nietzsche just after she met Stephen. She’d slogged her way through the lot of it, Beyond Good and Evil, The Anti-Christ , even some of the letters to Wagner. She and Stephen had had some interesting, what felt then like life-changing, conversations and she’d thought, Yes. This . But, really, she had hardly made sense of most of Zarathustra . She remembers something jarring about the part with the dwarf. He jumped on Zarathustra’s shoulder and poured lead in his ear.

“I’ve always hated that part,” Stephen says. “I always thought it couldn’t be as straightforward as it felt. Even with the aphorisms, maybe because I’ve built my life on asking questions.” He shakes his head. “We have this need to make everything mean five or six different things.”

He passes her plate back toward her and nods toward the french fries. He pours ketchup on the side of the plate and hands her a freshly dipped fry as he speaks.

She eats, chewing slowly, her husband watching, the salt and grease mixed with the ketchup almost pleasurable along her tongue.

“I think part of the reason I focused on the Germans is because it all seemed so endless, every word they said had been driven all these different ways.

“Martin,” he says. He smiles at her.

She shakes her head to make clear she doesn’t know which Martin.

“Heidegger,” he says. “God bless him, I don’t think he knew what he meant half the time. Sometimes I think that’s his whole point.”

He hasn’t even meant to, but she watches him turning back into the man she knew. The man with whom she chose to build a life.

“But I’ve decided to fall in love with the dwarf now. I want it to be that simple. I need something that just means what it says. I think it was the moment, maybe Friedrich was tired, but he was just playing straight for once. Things jump on our backs and overwhelm us, they pour into us and drown everything else out. For him it was this idea of the eternal recurrence, which, though you mustn’t ever tell anyone, I really never understood. I mean, yes, things repeat, time is crooked, I think that makes sense, but the idea that it’s a circle seems to me not quite accurate, and part of me wishes it was, because. .”

He stops. She stares at him. He holds his sandwich in midair but doesn’t move to put it down. Because then maybe they could do it all again.

She loves him, she thinks. She was right to marry him.

Maya — twenty-three — she sat outside Avery Library with her book. The weather had fallen into biting early winter cold, but she was desperate for the air and bundled up.

“He’d be proud,” said Stephen, nodding toward her.

Maya jumped at the sound of him. He seemed grown-up, confident. He wore glasses with thick rims, a thin dark blue wool coat that looked smooth and costly. He wore a bag slung across his chest and had dark hair cut close to his head.