Lynn Strong - Hold Still

Maya stops.

“El knew you didn’t tell her.”

“Didn’t tell her what?”

“You didn’t tell Annie. She didn’t know how fucked up Ellie was.”

This is true, but Maya hasn’t thought of it so clearly. She told Annie that Ellie was in trouble. She’d thought their kids could help each other all at once.

“You shouldn’t have let her go,” her son says. “We should have told them.”

Her son stands up. How tall he is, it shocked her even as she watched it happen, how even physically he was so much firmer than the thing she’d always been.

“I’m going to bed,” he says.

She should go after him. She should walk him up the stairs and tuck him in.

She stays seated on the step until he’s unlocked the door, and she thinks she hears it click, nearly a full block away, as he goes in.

“Fancy job, huh?” Dylan says. He reaches toward his ear, but there’s no hair there. He looks briefly as if he’s not sure what to do. He runs his hand along the back of his neck instead. “You like it?” he says.

Ellie’s not sure if he means the job or his new hair.

She nods, looking around for Joseph. She spends almost every afternoon with him in the backyard of his apartment share in Bushwick, talking, doing nothing, but he knows hardly anything about Ellie’s life.

“You miss it, though, right? You miss me?”

She misses looking forward, looking toward. She misses knowing something different, other, better might be coming, even if most of the time it was just a flat line of not quite feeling for hours that stretched on.

“Fuck off, Dylan,” she says. She wishes she were brave enough to punch him in the face.

He grins and she tries not to look directly at him, but she also doesn’t want to have to look at Joseph now. She turns so she’s facing the window that looks out on the street. She sees her mom — hair pulled back, dark blue sheath, black flats — as she walks slowly across Third Street, trying to keep her shit together. She’s nowhere close to either crosswalk, is nearly hit by a town car and must stop short. She has her too-big bag over her shoulder, was probably headed up to campus to finish grades or use the library. It’s summer but she still goes up a couple times a week. There’s a 2 train five blocks from their apartment that’s a straight shot to campus, but almost every day her mother goes to work Ellie sees her walk past the coffee shop to the R, which means two transfers and at least half an hour more.

“What are you doing?” Ellie’s mom says. She’s through the door and the bag has fallen to her elbow. Her arms are tan and thin from all the running. She has freckles spread across both shoulders and tiny dark blue flowered earrings in her ears. Ellie watches her mom wince as she pulls her bag back up onto her shoulder. There are like ten books that she won’t go anywhere without, and Ellie’s dad always yells at her for carrying too much stuff.

Dylan’s back straightens and his face gets hard and happy as he sees her. “Prof,” he says.

It’s possible that Ellie’s mother mutters, Fuck .

“Can you tell me what you’re doing here?” she says to Dylan.

Her mom is frantic, nervous. Ellie wants to ask to hold her bag.

“This is not part of the agreement, Elinor,” she says. Her parents have set down rules as of a few months ago. There was an incident. Ellie disappeared. But she was fine when they found her. They found a single-track mark and freaked out. (She might have been too fucked up to remember to hide it; she might have forgotten where she lived for a day or two, but what her parents seem incapable of understanding is that fucking off sometimes does not make one an addict, that there are whole gradations of just trying to have a little fun that don’t end in tragedy and homelessness.) But now Ellie has to be home by ten and has to keep this job or there will be Consequence . She has to begin to Make Some Efforts Toward Figuring Out Her Life . She’s not supposed to have any contact with Dylan. Otherwise, the deal is, she has to leave or go to rehab. Except she knows the idea of rehab scares them more than it does her. The idea of Stephen and Maya Taylor, Vaunted Columbia Professors, Generous Thoughtful Caring Brilliant, having to attend visiting hours and explain to their colleagues where their fuckup daughter’s off to now will probably keep Ellie free of any kind of “program” for at least another couple of years.

Secretly, Ellie finds something kind of thrilling about the new restrictions. She likes appointed times and rules and structure, even when these are mostly things she likes to break apart. It’s still better to decide things, still better to know there are places she’s supposed to be.

“It’s not like I told him to come,” Ellie says. She should have said it better, nicer. She never means to sound so angry, but she does.

“I just came by to tell Ellie about school,” says Dylan.

Education’s her mom’s kryptonite.

“Really?” Like magic: her mom softens. Ellie isn’t sorry for her anger anymore.

Dylan grins and looks suddenly smaller than Ellie remembers. He has a whitehead on his left earlobe.

“About to start my third year at NYU,” he says.

“Right,” says her mom. “Ellie. .” But she stops.

Ellie doesn’t do much of anything, just this shitty coffee shop, hanging out with Joseph, lying on the couch or on her bed, listening to her mom’s old records, staring at the ceiling, when she’s home. When she doesn’t have work and can’t be in the house any longer she rides the subway back and forth for hours. She brings headphones sometimes, but mostly she just likes to sit and watch the people, to walk the long transfer at Fourteenth Street from the 2 to the L, then back again. She looks purposefully ahead of her and walks quickly, as if she has somewhere she’s meant to be.

She feels Joseph behind them, watching. It’s the lull after the morning rush and the shop is empty. A woman comes in behind Dylan and her mom and orders tea, a muffin. Joseph nudges Ellie out of the way; Ellie grabs the tongs, a paper bag, and hands the girl her muffin, as her mom and Dylan linger, neither of them willing to be the first to go.

“Well. .” says Ellie’s mom. Her hand clutches so tight to her bag, Ellie wonders briefly if the strap might break. “I’ll see you tonight?”

“Sure,” says Ellie. She winces and keeps half her eye on Joseph as Dylan grins back and forth between her and her mom. Her mom’s whole body jerks and shifts as she hoists the bag, holding it with both hands as she shoulders her way out.

Ellie watches her brown leather boots hit the pavement one and then the other as she walks with Joseph to his house. The toes are squared. The leather’s scuffed nearly to white across the front. It’s too hot for boots, but she likes wearing them. She likes the sound they make against the pavement, the feel of hard heel against concrete, the clack and then the echo that it makes when she’s indoors.

They get on the G train and ride in silence. Ellie leads Joseph through the gate along the side of the apartment and back into the yard. Three lawn chairs sit around a pit in which they sometimes build a fire. Joseph and his roommates have parties out here every weekend, and every weekend Ellie says no when Joseph asks if she might like to come. There’s a small film of rainwater from the day before across the seats of both the lawn chairs, and Joseph wipes the seat of Ellie’s chair with the bottom of his shirt. Ellie nods thanks and sits. Joseph reaches into the back pocket of his shorts and pulls out a bag of lovely-smelling sticky leaves and crumbles bits onto a sheet of rolling paper. He rolls the joint and licks the thin edge, presses carefully with his index finger and his thumb. He lights it, puckering and pinching, then puff-puffing, his eyes closed, his head lolling back.