Lynn Strong - Hold Still

Annie looks down at Ellie’s half-eaten dinner. She nods toward the plate, looks up. “But Ellie,” she says, “I am going to ask you to be careful.”

Ellie picks up another piece of fish and slowly chews it. She wraps her arms around her shins and tries hard not to look away from Annie. If only she were someone else.

“I’m going to beg you to love my son as much as I do. I want you to know I trust you and I want you to be okay too.”

Ellie wipes her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I. .” She wants to promise she’ll be good.

The new family has left them, the baby tucked back close to her mother, Bryant going dutifully behind. It’s just Maya, Charles, and Caitlin, and no one seems sure of what to say next. Maya dumps her wine glass in the sink and grabs her coat. “I guess,” she says.

Charles nods. “Yeah,” he says, “me too.”

Maya blanches, avoiding eye contact with Caitlin.

“Sure,” Maya says. “Okay.”

“Oh,” Caitlin says. “You’re sure?”

Charles holds her coat out for her. “I’ll walk you,” he says.

Maya grabs hold of Caitlin before her coat’s back on. “Okay,” she says, without looking at him, her head now safely nestled into Caitlin’s neck.

“I didn’t mean. .” says Caitlin.

“I’m so proud of you,” Maya says again.

Maya and Charles are just outside the apartment. It’s dark out and music pulses from the buildings across the street.

“A book,” Maya says. “It’s wonderful.”

She must clear her head of thoughts of Ellie. She walks quickly, snow crunching underneath her feet.

Charles nods, his hands dug into the pockets of his coat. “It is,” he says.

“You knew already?”

“I had an idea.”

“You two are close?” She watches the light in front of them change to green.

You have to go to her , she thinks.

She feels Charles nod next to her. “We’re friends,” he says.

They pass a small community garden; patches of snow spot the dirt on the other side of the chain-link fence. They’re quiet awhile and Maya watches the packs of kids walking through Tompkins Square Park clutch their cigarettes with ungloved hands. She fixates on a small girl walking next to a thin boy, laughing, her fingertips are red and chapped, the nails bitten down.

“I used to live down here,” she says.

“Really?” She thinks he looks skeptical, like maybe she’s remembered wrong.

“Years ago,” she says. She smiles briefly. The girl drops her cigarette and stamps it with the toe of her boot. “I wasn’t always this old,” Maya says.

He starts to correct her, but she holds up her hand.

“It wasn’t this cool then.”

“Right.”

“It’s like Disneyland.” They’re on Saint Marks and Third Avenue. Fluorescent lights and tattoo parlors, shops selling scarves and gloves and cheap jewelry jut out into the street, three designer yogurt shops within a single block. The smells are exhaust, falafel, and something curried, cigarettes every other breath. Beautiful young people, lithe limbs, firm everything, tourists clutching their maps and their bags. There are still the kids in ratty clothing, errant piercings, sitting with their backs against buildings, with their pit bulls and their dirty hair. But even they look like props now. Maya wouldn’t be surprised to discover they take the subway home every night to Park Slope or Boerum Hill.

Maya rubs the nylon of her coat pocket between her thumb and forefinger as she burrows her hands in more deeply. A pack of laughing girls walks by; a couple leaning into one another almost bumps into Charles.

Ellie, Ellie, Ellie , Maya thinks.

“Auden,” says Charles, nodding toward a brownstone to their left.

Maya turns to him.

“He lived there.”

“Right,” she says. She should be the one who knows.

“He had to walk to the liquor store across the street to pee.”

He stands up straighter as he says this. He’ll be a great teacher, she thinks again, the way his whole body changes as soon as he thinks he has something he might offer to someone else.

“The plumbing froze, and he had to walk across the street to use the toilet.”

They pass the subway Maya would take to go back to Brooklyn. She has no idea where Charles lives. It seems they have agreed on something without agreeing to it. There’s still the possibility to deny any agency in whatever they’re about to do.

“He used to go to that church on Ninth Street,” he says. “He gave the manuscript of The Age of Anxiety to a friend so he could sell it for an operation he couldn’t afford.”

“Nice guy,” Maya says.

Charles smiles, turning toward her. “I’ve always thought.”

They cross Broadway, still heading west, and Maya dips her chin to her chest as the wind picks up. Her shoulder brushes Charles’s. The sidewalk gets more crowded, then thins out again; it’s icy in places — she’s drunker than she realized — and she almost grabs hold of Charles as her feet begin to slip.

Charles leads Maya into a bar off West Fourth. The streets no longer run in a grid, and West Fourth runs perpendicular to itself for a while.

“I forget how crooked everything gets down here,” Maya says.

He settles a hand against her back.

“So that was. .” She stops herself. “How do you all know each other?”

She doesn’t want to talk about Caitlin. She wants even less to talk about herself.

“Caitlin, I guess,” he says. “Though technically I met her through you.” Maya stiffens, and Charles pulls his hand back as he pulls out a stool for her. They loosen limbs from coats and sidle onto their stools. Charles places his elbows on the bar. “Alana and Caitlin were in some writing group together when Caitlin first moved here. The three of us were inseparable for a while.”

Maya thinks again about that day Caitlin cried to her. Alana: the other girl. “And then Bryant,” she says.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know.” The bartender — thin, full beard, crooked posture, a blue T-shirt, and perfectly cut jeans — pours and delivers Charles’s beer, then slides Maya her wine. “We were that sort of close that’s not sustainable,” he says, nodding thanks to the bartender. “And the strangeness of being three of any group of people; it was bound to get weird or messy if Bryant hadn’t come along.”

“Weird or messy how?” Maya says. She’s asking too much.

“Oh, you know. Jealousy, maybe, or discomfort.”

“But none of you dated?” She sees Alana again, those eyes, her height. Maya feels the heat rising to her cheeks.

“That’s not the only kind of jealousy.”

“Right,” she says. “Of course.”

“But Bryant.”

Maya sips her wine, watches the bartender mix and pour a purple drink.

“He sort of swept Lana away.”

“And you all didn’t mind it.”

“It wasn’t our place to mind.” Maya thinks she hears remorse.

“You and Caitlin are still close, then?”

He shrugs. “All relationships come in and out, right?”

“She loves you.” She didn’t mean to say this. She almost clamps her hand over her mouth.

He holds his beer glass at a diagonal and rubs the label with his thumb. “I’m not sure she knows what that means.”

“She’s pretty brilliant.”

“She’s not spent much of her life in the real world.”

Maya shrugs. She didn’t mean to stay on this as long as she has.

“She’s not. .” He stops himself.

She wants him to say something that proves Maya’s not doing Caitlin wrong.

“Bryant’s a douche,” he says.