Lynn Strong - Hold Still

“You. .” says Annie, when Ellie comes into the living room before Cooper gets there. She’s ecstatic, Annie, about Ellie going out with Cooper, like it’s affirming something about Ellie’s normalcy.

Ellie wears a sundress, no bra. It’s the first time she’s worn a dress since coming here.

“You look nice,” Jeffrey finishes for his wife. His eyes are on her then, as he gets up from the couch, one leg folding to the floor and then the other, marking his place in a large hardcover book.

Cooper comes in shortly after. They all watch his headlights through Annie’s vegetation, then hear the slap of his sandals as he comes to the door. Ellie’s never been on a date that she can think of. She’s been out with Dylan a thousand times. She’s gotten stoned and accidentally slept with other boys. But Cooper’s hair’s still wet from his shower and he looks sweet and young as he hugs Annie, then stands awkwardly, shaking Jeffrey’s hand.

“Where you guys going?” Jeffrey asks him. Annie glares at him. He’s almost always the quieter of the two of them.

“I don’t know,” Cooper says. “I was going to leave that to her.” He nods toward Ellie.

“Bad move, man,” says Jeff.

Annie hits her husband on the shoulder.

“What?” he says. He laughs. “The guy should take the reins.”

Ellie watches Cooper’s face get red and wishes she could pity him. Instead, she’s slightly grossed out by how young and small he looks.

She grabs his arm. “We’ll figure it out,” she says, not looking at Jeffrey, wishing they were closer to the water now, to make Cooper seem more sure again.

“You’re close with Annie, huh?” says Ellie. They’re at some chain restaurant in a strip mall. The lighting’s an awkward too-dark orange and they sit across from one another in a booth against the wall.

“She likes to collect strays,” Cooper says.

Ellie nods.

“The kid’s been really hard for her, though. All his problems. She has less time for us.”

“It was nice of you to take us out, though.”

“She knows I need the money.” Their food has come, and he drops his fork briefly after saying this. “I mean, I’m glad I did.”

Ellie laughs. She wishes they could go outside again, go back to the ocean. She could swim out as far as she wanted and she wouldn’t have to speak to anyone, to think of anyone, ever again.

“I went to New York once,” says Cooper. The silence has gone on too long and Ellie’s stopped making an effort. “It was awful,” he says. “I don’t know how anyone could live in that place.”

“You’re serious?” says Ellie. She can’t imagine this, has never even heard it. She doesn’t know it’s true until she says it: “It’s the only place I feel like it might one day be okay to be whatever I might be.”

There were a few months, when she was twelve, when she went to an art teacher in DUMBO. She stopped showing up after always just going and began to wander around. She’d fallen deeply in love with the city then. It was winter when she started, cold, with mounds of dirty snow piled on the sidewalks. She’d burrow her hands into her pockets and dig her face into her scarf, a wool cap pulled down over her ears: she’d walk and walk. She’d discovered parts of New York she’d never known then. It was one of the great thrills of the city, how impossible it was to know. How there would always be another street or block she hadn’t yet encountered. How there would always be large stretches of space where no one knew her.

Sometimes she went into the bookstores she knew her mother liked, the tiny one with dark wood paneling on West Tenth Street, where their mom used to drag her and Ben when they were kids. She fingered the spines of books she knew her mom liked, like she had when she was little. She sat in the back, on a wooden bench close to the end of the alphabet in the fiction section, sometimes taking out books and reading tiny snips of sentences, before placing them carefully back.

Ellie had refused to read for pleasure at a certain age, probably around the same time she began skipping her art lessons and walking around. She’d liked it, she remembered, liked it now that she’d returned to it, but there was something dangerous about letting her mom see her too often with a book. The way she looked so hopeful, the way she seemed to want to make something of Ellie’s choices, to shape her, form her, show her, if only she could get hold of her long enough.

She’d thought, eventually, her mom would catch her in there wandering, skipping her hour sessions in DUMBO. Her art teacher, Catherine, would call and tell on her. But she was never caught and nothing ever came of it. She told her mom she wasn’t into art any longer, and she still found time sometimes to wander around.

When she was older, sometimes, after Dylan got her stoned, she’d do the same thing, but this time she tended to interact with other people more. She’d go into bars and let men hit on her. She’d gone home twice with men who must have been twice, if not more, her age, one with a big apartment in the Financial District with shiny silver fixtures in the kitchen and the bathroom. Ellie’d let that guy have her on his sink. He’d wiped it with a Clorox wipe right after, Ellie standing in the too-bright light, cold, with all her clothes off, the guy rubbing, eyes intent on the silver till it shone. The other guy had lived in a tiny studio in Fort Greene with a roof deck. She’d snuck out after he fucked her — he’d come too quickly, she’d been relieved by this, his quick apology and then his passing out; she’d almost laughed at his awkward limbs and crooked nose, which had all looked so powerful and ominous when he’d been standing across the bar from her. She’d sat out on the deck for hours, finally climbing down the fire escape to avoid having to go back inside and see him standing up again.

She craved a sort of violence in all this time that she spent wandering. She wanted the city, someone deep inside it, something further underneath, to come up and shock her into a sort of certainty, to tear her open, break her, in order that she might have something she could work to fix.

“It’s just loud and dirty,” Cooper says. “And no real water.”

“It’s an island,” Ellie says.

Cooper looks down into his food again. “Well, sure, but you can’t surf a river.”

Ellie laughs. “I guess you can’t.”

It’s still light out when they pull back into Annie’s. Ellie’s relieved to get out of the car. She wants to be alone in her little room with her Deborah Eisenberg. She wants to get Jack out of bed early the next morning and spend the day in the water just the two of them.

She doesn’t see Jeff at first when she comes in through the side door. Later, she’ll tell herself he might not have been there at all. It could have been Annie, or a shadow from the trees, outside her door then, except she saw the same dark blue cover of the book he’d been reading when Cooper had come to pick her up.

She closes the door to her room but doesn’t lock it.

Cooper had offered, without her saying anything, her body somehow signaling, on the drive home to get her high if she were ever in need while she was here. She’d demurred, her eyes fixed out the window, the quiet empty streets still disturbing to her; she’d wanted to ask him to drive her back to the East River instead.

“Fucking Brooklyn,” Laura says.

She’s come to take Maya to dinner, to distract her from what’s about to happen, to fortify her as only Laura can. Maya’s called the doctors, bought the tickets. She’ll be with her girl so soon.

“You’re changing,” Laura says, eyeing Maya’s pants and baggy sweater. Stephen’s convinced Ben to go with him to get the vegetables and meat for dinner. Maya lets Laura lead her back into her room. They stand before her full-length mirror. Maya unbuttons and takes off her jeans. “That thing too,” says Laura, nodding toward Maya’s big black sweater. She’s located wine glasses, pours each of them a drink.