Lynn Strong - Hold Still

Maya almost laughs out loud. It’s such an adolescent word. “A douche, huh?”

The bartender tops off her wine without her asking. She can’t imagine how she’ll make it home.

“Oh, you know what I mean. He’s one of those guys who only feels comfortable with women. And only women who appreciate his genius.” He says the last part in a lower voice, his glasses falling lower on his nose, and gulps his beer. “He always kind of hated Cait.” He pushes up his glasses. “I worry about Lana now.”

“He seems to really love her.”

Charles gulps his beer. “Of course he loves her,” he says. “She’s twenty-eight and gorgeous and she worships him.”

“And now she’s had his kid.”

He raises his hand, nods toward his beer as the bartender approaches. “Now that,” he says.

“Do you think he’d leave her?”

“He wrote a story about her. Caitlin found it in some literary journal, right after they met. It wasn’t about her, because they hadn’t met yet when he wrote it, I guess he could have seen her before that, but it was about a girl that looked just like her. They’re both from out West and the main character and the girl shared that too. It’s this incredibly depressing twenty pages about him buying her lipstick at Barneys and popping Ativan in her mouth all day. I’m not sure he has any clue who she actually is.”

“But we’re all only just the people other people think we are.”

“Maybe,” he says. He shakes his head, hands the bartender his empty glass, and sips his new one. “Fuck,” Charles says. “I hope not.”

They both go quiet.

“What do you think I am?” he says.

Briefly, she hears Caitlin’s words.

Maya drains her wine glass. She’s quiet, just drunk enough, her eyes still angled toward the floor “Exactly what I need.”

The boards are old. A milky, sand-speckled gray across their fronts, they have chunks of wax solidified to them. They’re heavy, big, and long — like standing on tables, Cooper tells them — instead of the slippery short boards being used by the kids already out offshore. He’s a busboy at Annie’s restaurant, a treat, Annie said, surf lessons for both Ellie and Jack

It’s getting better, slowly. Jack talks to her sporadically. She’s careful, listening. He does his searches, “research,” that mostly involve Google and Wikipedia, and she listens carefully as he reads her the information he finds, about storms, more about sailing (though she’s promised herself that she will never go again), tides and seasons, currents and storm patterns. He looks up bugs and New York, because Ellie told him that’s where she’s from and now he wants to go there. He asks her about Bloomberg and Cuomo, MoMA, Broadway, Central Park. His dream, he says, is to go to the Museum of Natural History. Not for the dinosaurs, that’s the thing everyone wants to see, he says. He wants to see the space exhibit. He’s interested in what still exists that has yet to be understood. Ellie has promised they’ll go together someday soon.

The weather’s been cooperating, at least until three or four in the afternoon each day, when the the sky seems so filled up with all the moisture that it crashes open in loud violent storms that Ellie loves, even if they trap them in the house for hours.

They spend an hour with Cooper in the sand before going into the water. Ellie and Jack giggle at first, failing to pop from belly to feet as seamlessly as Cooper’s shown them. Instead, they each manage it in three steps, planted palms, then knees, then feet, and far too slowly. Cooper keeps pushing them to get it right.

“One. Two. Three!” he says over and over. He’s tall, the color of an almond, with white-blond hair that’s long and pulled back at the base of his neck. He’s filled with confidence, demonstrating, more at ease on the board than he seems on land. He stands behind Ellie a moment. He holds her waist and lifts her. One. Two. Three. And finally she does it, one seamless motion, up onto her feet. And Jack claps, grinning, as Ellie stands.

Ellie reddens right up to her ears, Cooper’s hands still on her, Jack happy, proud. Cooper lets go of Ellie and does the same with Jack, standing behind him, and he’s up. Ellie claps and cheers.

“All right,” says Cooper. He carries both their boards out to the water. He instructs them in paddling, positions Ellie far enough back that her board won’t nose-dive, but close enough to the front that she has control. He sets Jack up closer to the front of his board, then Cooper pulls himself behind him. Jack holds on tight with both hands as Cooper paddles them out.

Ellie likes the weight of the floating board right from the start, the sound of the slap of water, the force with which she must push down to get beneath the waves. It’s a struggle getting past the break, and she wonders at how easily Cooper gets Jack out. He places his hands on either side and tips the nose of the board beneath the waves before they break over him, Jack grinning, laughing the whole way. They come up farther out and hardly scathed, shaking their heads free of water as they do, Jack emulating Cooper, water pooling at their backs, hair slick against their heads. But each time Ellie tries this, she doesn’t have the weight or strength to get the board under the whole wave. Each time it pushes her back and she falls off, twirling, fighting, forced to swim again after her twisting, flipping board. It takes her twice as long to get out to where the others sit, the noses of their boards flipped up over the water, their legs circling beneath them, ready to launch.

“Nor!” cries Jack, when she finally reaches them; the sun’s thick on his face. He looks so strong and firm and certain, Ellie thinks of Ben, her mom, swimming, swimming, feeling strong.

She was eight and Ben was six. It was almost time to go, their last day in Florida, and Ellie had begged her mom for one more swim before they left. Her mom had already pulled on her pants and sweater, and Ellie told her she didn’t need her to come in. She was old enough, a strong enough swimmer; she knew her mom was always cold. She’d swum out, on her own and happy. She’d looked back once and waved. She didn’t plan it; she’d simply wanted to feel the wave crash on her. Her legs scissored, kicked, and she’d felt safe and strong. The wave wasn’t huge and she thought it would be fun to fight against it. She watched, still, as it grew and curved. She breathed in once, kicked faster, and she kept her eyes open as the wave came down. She pushed the air hard from her nose and then the force of it took hold of her, like someone pushing, like Ben tackling her but softer, fuller, somehow both more completely and less real. The side of her thigh brushed quick against the sand floor and she felt each grain as it ran over her. She tried to grab hold of the current, to push up and over, like she did when the water was calm. But it had and held her. And she flailed a moment longer, then went limp. She let her body fall into the curves of water, let it shape her, turn her, twist her. She opened her eyes and saw her arms before her — blurry, pale, and crooked — and she felt safe and strong and warm. It must only have been seconds before her mom’s hands were around her. Her mom’s hands, which she knew just like her own hands. Her mom’s sweater was all soaking wet and sandy and her mom was crying as she carried Ellie back to shore. She wrapped Ellie up, peeled off her sweater, and Ellie felt her mom’s chest thump hard against her back. She covered them in all the extra towels, tiny grains of sand stuck to their arms and legs. Salt and sand bits rolled around in Ellie’s mouth. And her mom kept holding tight to her and rubbing her hands up-down, up-down Ellie’s arms. And Ellie started to get very hot, too hot, but she stayed still and let her mom hold her, because she thought if she was hot, maybe her mom was finally not cold.