Lynn Strong - Hold Still

Ellie smelled the seaweed that her mother held and wanted to ask if they could take it home.

“Watch,” their mom said, once Ben was beside her. She whispered. And Ben and Ellie leaned in very close.

Ellie’s mother shook the seaweed. It was dark brown and black, wet and shining. As it shook, Ellie got drops of salt water on her face and in her eyes. She watched Ben pinch his eyes shut and his lips puckered. It was there, though, when Ellie looked back down at the plant. Light, like a hundred tiny Christmas tree bulbs popping up out of it. Alive , thought El, and stopped breathing as she watched.

Ellie feels Annie somewhere close but doesn’t turn to find her. Either Jeff or Annie is always there somewhere when she’s with Jack. She wonders if they’ll ever trust her to be with him without them. It’s July and the sort of hot that Ellie had forgotten. She’d been so looking forward to the swimming; but all this time inside these past few days has begun to wear on her. She’s getting itchy, anxious, crazy. They keep all the doors open and she can feel his parents listening as she plods through her first attempts with Jack. She asks awkward unsure questions. And Jack is on and on with this stuff he finds on the Internet.

As welcoming as he was the first day, he seems to be pulling away from her instead of opening up. Annie has mentioned something about separation issues. Ellie’s not sure what this means. He always knows where his parents are, and the farther they are, the less likely he is to speak to Ellie. He likes bugs and she’s never been squeamish. She felt him suppress a smile her first full day, when she asked to hold one of the scorpions. He has two iguanas, countless lizards, an ant farm, and an assortment of spiders and beetles he’s caught himself and placed in jars. He has a small Jack-sized table set up in the corner where he dissects the ones that he finds already dead.

He leaves the computer now and goes back to his bugs, administering to each of them in some five-year-old version of efficiency, opening cages and jars, changing water pans and dropping food. Ellie flips through a book of stories that her mother sent down with her. Deborah Eisenberg. Her mom marked a story called “Rosie Gets a Soul.” Rosie, of course, is an addict, but Ellie’s read the whole thing since she got here. Against her will, certain bits of it— she’s had her hands full just standing upright. Just trying to work up some traction. Just dealing with the fact of herself, which pops up in front of her every day when she awakes, like some doltish puppet. So certain other worrisome items have slid off the agenda— have lodged themselves inside her brain.

“We should go somewhere,” she says to Jack.

He looks up at her, suspicious. She wonders if he can tell somehow what she’s thinking. “Annie,” she calls loudly, pretending that she doesn’t know how close she is. Annie comes to the entrance to Jack’s room.

“What’s up?”

“I think we need to get out of here.”

Annie holds the doorframe hard with her right hand and grabs hold of a wisp of hair come loose from her ponytail with her left.

“Sure,” she says.

Ellie has briefly lost her confidence, but she keeps talking. Either she’ll take Jack or she’ll go alone, but she has to get out.

“What do you think, Jack?” Annie asks.

He seems nervous. He has a beetle crawling over his hand and up onto his forearm. He places it carefully back in its jar and walks toward his mom. “We all go?”

Annie looks down at her watch. “I have to go in to work soon, baby.” She and Jeff usually pass the baton of watching Ellie watch Jack. Jeff comes home at three-fifteen and Annie leaves about twenty minutes after. She whispers something to Jack that Ellie strains to hear.

“Why don’t the two of you go?” She nods down at the book that Ellie’s been lugging around. “Why not Barnes & Noble? It’s close and you can get another book.”

“Me too?” Jack says. He has shelves across one wall of his room with the usual children’s picture books as well as piles and piles of species catalogues for all the bugs.

“If you’re very good,” his mom says.

She turns to Ellie, fishes twenty dollars from her pocket. “Only one,” she says to both of them. “And only if you’re nice to Ellie the whole time.”

The rain still comes down hard and Ellie can’t remember the last time she’s driven. She only got her license so she could drive when they’re down here. The wipers swish one-two as the water rushes to fill the windshield, and there are a couple seconds each time when Ellie can’t see the road at all. They have Jeffrey’s old Bronco. Ellie thinks she might smell weed, something smoky and illicit settled deep in the canvas seats. She thinks maybe when they get back, once Annie and Jack and Jeffrey are all safely in bed, she could search underneath the seats for some remnants. She wouldn’t smoke it. She just wants to know what’s available in case.

“You okay?” Ellie says, catching Jack’s eye in the rearview mirror. But Jack just looks down at the book he’s brought and doesn’t speak. He’s strapped into his booster and looks taller than he is.

She lets him go in front of her when they get there. She’s forgotten an umbrella and they run through the parking lot, Jack jumping through two massive puddles, water splashing up into Ellie’s face and covering Jack’s shorts, splattering the back of his shirt as they head toward the double doors. He seems so sure — so much surer than she’s ever been — she doesn’t think twice about letting him off alone. She heads to the literature section and searches for more Deborah Eisenberg. The book she has is the only one they carry, and she wanders farther through the alphabet, coming to Woolf. She opens To The Lighthouse . Her mother never leaves the house without this book, a book Ellie’s never read. She opens to a random page and begins reading. For a while, she sinks down deep:

They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let its sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness — because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.

She reaches for her cell phone in her pocket. She almost calls her mom. She wants to read this paragraph out loud to her. Her mom probably has it memorized, but she thinks maybe if Ellie calls to give it to her, it will be something both of them can keep.

She’s forgotten Jack until she remembers. It’s been half an hour. Briefly, on and off until she finds him, she feels a rush of tight hot panic through her shoulders, straight up to her teeth. But then he’s there in front of her. He’s cross-legged on the floor in the Science section, immersed in a book on scorpions. “You know, there’s a scorpion in Laos — my mom’s been there — it’s called the Heterometrus laoticus . It’s black in the daylight, but it glows blue under UV light.” Ellie nods. She’s so relieved to see him, she’s almost interested in whatever it is he’s babbling about. “Scientists don’t know if it’s sun protection or if it’s meant to alert them if the night’s too bright for them to go out without being eaten by some predator.”

“Sure,” Ellie says. She’s still thinking about the Woolf, her mom; her mind catches on the words night and predator .