Lynn Strong - Hold Still

Maya could not remember now how she’d gotten to talking that day about Ellie, the drugs, the boys, the Trouble. It had felt like all that she could offer. She’d meant to make herself vulnerable somehow and maybe more available for Caitlin. She wanted Caitlin to see how lucky she was to know so clearly who she was. She hadn’t meant for it to all feel so exploitative. This was her daughter, after all. But nothing that she seemed capable of giving Ellie then was helping; she thought at least she could help Caitlin. She’d gone into greater depth than she ever had about her daughter to anyone. She knew Caitlin would listen. She told herself she was showing Caitlin what a gift it was to be herself and know so much.

When she was done, though, she was no longer able to look directly at the girl in front of her. When she got home she didn’t look Ellie in the face either. She’d used one to help the other. She was pretty sure that neither would turn out better as a result.

“She’s. .” Maya says to Caitlin, not sure, still, how to say what Ellie is. She can lie or she can tell her everything. She wonders how Caitlin will react, if she won’t be surprised. She watches her, cooking, maybe starting to fill up with a child of her own, asking earnestly about this girl who was so rude to her. Maya takes the last sip of her wine and tells Caitlin everything.

“The atmospheric conditions have to be conducive to formation, in this case, summer and warm water.” This is not how five-year-olds should talk, but Jack’s reading from Weather.com as rain comes down in torrents and bangs loudly on the tin roof of the house. He has his laptop on his lap and refuses to look up at her. “Instead of the visible compactness of the hurricane, the satellite view of the tropical depression can often just resemble a large group of thunderstorms. But rotation can usually be perceived when looking at a group of pictures from satellites.” He has unlimited access to the Internet, and this is what he spends his time on. It’s been raining the past three days, since two days after Ellie’s arrival. It’s a tropical depression. Annie has promised the end is close. “Wind speed up to thirty-nine miles an hour.” She’s also explained this is one of Jack’s “things.” He looks everything up and recites the facts he finds. It is, Annie says, “his way of trying to feel more in control of life.”

“Any higher than thirty-nine the depression is upgraded to a tropical storm.” He wears a hooded sweatshirt and purple shorts. He sits and scrolls, his feet up on the couch. He articulates his words very slowly and carefully. “Organized circulation and lower pressure are the first signs it has formed.”

For the hundred millionth time since she got here, Ellie watches Jack and thinks about her mom. She’s all over this place and worse than ever, because here is where Ellie’s always loved her mother most.

Magic happened to her mom in Florida. She was this other, happier, steadier person, so different from the person she was in New York. She woke them early in the morning to go sailing or watch the waves break. She didn’t mind that their dad often didn’t come with them. She cooked big elaborate breakfasts. Breakfast was the only meal that she could cook. She let Ben and Ellie stay up late watching movies, though she hardly ever let them watch TV at home. After a long day at the beach and everyone freshly showered, they’d all sit together, ordering a pizza and dozing through the sun-drenched afternoon.

One summer: Ben was six and El was eight; storms threatened often, hurricanes, tornadoes, big whirling masses of green and gray and orange coming at them on the TV screen. They seldom actually hit. Ellie learned then about low- and high-pressure systems, the eyes and tails of storms. Each time Ellie worried, and her mom stocked them up on water and canned foods and filled the bathtubs. Each time, she had some guy from down the road come and help her put up shutters. Usually their dad wasn’t there. This time they’d already heard the storm was missing them. Ellie sat close to her mom, and Ben was out back somewhere kicking around a ball, though it was dark and the ground was still soaking wet from that afternoon’s rain. The guy on the TV said the storm had turned within hours of the eye hitting, and Ellie’s mom explained to her again how the eye was the still and quiet that sat right in the center of the worst part of the storm. They sat and Ellie watched her mom’s breathing, slow again, as she wrapped a sweater around her chest and legs.

And then the switch that happened sometimes in her mother. She was strong again, and looked over at El and smiled. “You want to see something amazing?” her mom asked. Ellie could never in her life say no to the face her mom made then. She called to Ben out in the back and he came running. He was flushed and asked if they knew if the storm was going to come.

“Missed us,” said their mom. And she shook her head at Ben for asking with so much excitement. She found it wonderful, El knew, nearly everything her brother was. “Let’s go out,” her mother said.

Ben looked at Ellie, then back at their mother. Ellie smiled at him. If Mom wanted to go out, they would. They packed into the rental — their mom always splurged on a convertible on the trips when their dad didn’t come. She rolled down the top even though the clouds were out and the wind was blowing, even though it was already very dark. Almost immediately Ellie worried her mom would be too cold with the top down. But she was smiling. Her hair was long then, and though she mostly wore it up, that night it was down and twisted in the wind.

El sat up front and Ben got in back without anyone asking. When it was the two of them with their dad, it was the other way around. Their mom turned on her music, Jackson Browne this time, whom Ellie knew by the way her mom’s neck curved and softened as she sang along. They drove the six or seven minutes to the water. Ellie watched her mom, her hand over the side of the car and hanging, her sunglasses on her head to keep her hair from getting in her face. They crossed a bridge to get out to the ocean, and Ellie watched the chop of water underneath them, thick and frothy, rock the boats both moored and docked.

They parked and walked barefoot over the boardwalk and out onto the sand. The beach was empty of people, but it was a mess of stuff left over. The storm had come close enough that the tides had risen, dumping all sorts of debris out on the beach. Mounds of seaweed — it looked living — glistened in the dark. The sand was wet even far up by the boardwalk, and her mom pointed out the lines on the wooden poles where the water had reached. Ellie touched the line along one of the poles — it hit just above her head — the wood still wet and dark and slick. The ocean, though, was quiet now. It came in small rolls, trickles of black and gray, to shore.

Ellie’s mom wore shorts and one of their dad’s sweaters. She walked on tiptoes, long freckled legs. Her messy hair hung dark down her back. Her eyes were big and searching . Ellie loved them best when they found her. Her mom caught them both, Ellie and Ben, within her vision. She grinned. She walked closer to the water and stood a minute, letting the trickles splash over her feet. She nodded toward Ben and Ellie. They both followed, though Ben wandered quickly farther out. Her mom took Ellie’s hand and leaned down a foot or two from the shore break. Carefully, her sweater open and her hair fallen forward, she knelt, her shin and then her knee covered in sand. She picked up a mound of seaweed and held it in her hand. Her eyes up again, she shook her head and blew her hair out of her face, holding Ellie close.

“Come here, Benny,” she said. He stopped a minute, then came toward them. He’d gone in past his waist, his shorts and shirt now soaking wet.