Lynn Strong - Hold Still

“So,” says Laura.

“So,” Maya says.

“Ben still home?”

Maya nods.

“Holding up?”

Maya shrugs. She looks past Laura toward the door.

“He’ll go back soon.”

“Right,” Laura says.

Both of them are quiet. Maya’s mind goes immediately to Jack, to Annie. It’s clear, based on the face her friend makes, that’s where her mind’s gone too. “Any word?” Laura asks.

Maya shakes her head. “She hasn’t brought any charges.” She shuffles the papers on her desk, then grabs her wedding band with her thumb and two fingers and pushes it up and down over her knuckle as they talk.

“That’s good?” Laura says. Maya’s not sure her friend meant this as a question.

“I’m not sure what any of it is.” That they might release Ellie from the lockup that they themselves have inflicted, that Annie might not hold her accountable for her son’s death beyond that, that the state seems not to have enough evidence to bring charges, all of this is both impossible to ponder and terrifying to consider too often or too clearly — it’s terrifying in both directions, because of course Maya wants to have her daughter back, of course she always wants her daughter close, but then she’s not sure who that is, her daughter, she’s not sure what any of them would do if Ellie were to suddenly, after all this time, after all she’s done, appear.

Maya stares at the bare branches out her window. Some days, she worries Stephen will have her committed also. There are days she thinks this might not be the worst idea. When she thinks of this, she thinks Laura would be the one to save her. She’d free her and they’d run off to somewhere warm with water where Ellie would be and everything that’s happened could be taken back somehow and done again.

“Maybe you should go home, sweetie,” Laura says.

“What would I do there?” She keeps her eyes on the papers on her desk. The words blur.

“Honey,” Laura says again.

Someone knocks and Maya jumps and faces Laura, who turns toward the door, flattening her hair down against her head.

“Professor?”

Charles wears a sweater zipped up to his neck. It’s gray over a dark green T-shirt; both look impossibly soft. He’s awkward, bumbling, tall, and very quiet. He’s her teaching assistant, a graduate student, twenty-eight or — nine she figures, younger, possibly.

He studies Tennyson: Someone had blundered! Maya always thinks when she sees him. Someone had blundered! And she hopes it isn’t her or him.

“Come in,” Maya says.

Laura pulls her face back to the shape it always is when facing almost anyone but Maya: warm, a little hard at the edges, ready to laugh or attack in equal measure, sharp and tight around the lips.

“Charles,” says Maya. “Please.”

She nods toward the seat next to Laura, but Charles shakes his head and remains standing.

“I’m good.” He smiles at Laura. “Hi.”

Laura grins, crosses her legs, and turns to face him.

“Hi,” she says.

Charles bites down on his lower lip, which is full and pops out still from underneath his teeth. He has a broad flat nose that scrunches up when he sits with Maya and talks about his thesis. Sometimes she keeps an eye turned toward his nose when she’s teaching, knowing if it’s scrunching she’s said something that has made him think.

She sits up on the edge of her chair and holds the corners of her desk. “How are you?” she asks.

“Fine.” He nods. “Good. I’ve been thinking. . I wanted to tell you.” She watches him reel in whatever it is he means to say as Laura watches him.

Laura leans forward and wraps her hand around her ankle as Charles starts to speak again.

“I think I have some ideas for the fall.”

His dissertation is due next month. Only now does Maya realize how much she’ll miss him when he leaves here. He’s been sitting in the front row of her classroom, at office hours, department meetings, for the past six years.

“Tomorrow?” Maya says. “You ready?” She’s asked him to teach the class of hers for which he’s an assistant. It’s a year-long course, required for all the undergrads in the major, and he’s spent the last semester observing her and grading the papers she assigns.

He nods and repositions his squared-off thick-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose and seems to stand up straight. “Yes,” he says. “I think.”

She smiles at him. “We’ll talk about fall after?”

He looks down at her desk. His hair has grown long in the past couple years and falls down now in his face. Sometimes Maya wonders if he simply hasn’t thought to get it cut, if she might offer to cut it for him, as she’s done for Ben most of his life.

“You’ll be great,” she says.

“Wonderful,” Laura says.

Maya watches Laura’s purple fingernails tap methodically against her shin.

“I’ll email you my plans?”

“If you want,” Maya says. “I trust you’ll do fine.”

He reddens. He’s taller than she’s realized. As he leaves, Maya smiles at the paperback folded and shoved into the back pocket of his pants.

“He’s in love with you!” Laura has uncrossed her legs and almost stands up with the force of her assertion. The door has hardly shut before she speaks.

“Christ, Laura. Of course he isn’t,” says Maya. There have been moments in the past year when she’s worried Charles looks a bit too long at her, listens too intently. In those moments, she wants to run his hands over the wrinkles of her face, to lift her shirt and let him roam the curves of stretch marks on her belly, to finger the thin line of her cesarean scar.

“Oh, sugar. He is.”

“He’s twenty-something,” says Maya.

Laura grabs hold of her left earring, the leaf glints and faintly rustles as she lets go of it. “It’s exactly what you need.”

Her mom’s waiting on the stoop when Ellie gets home from walking. She left Joseph’s before it got dark out. It feels possible she’s been walking days or years. She’s been up and down Broadway, around the bottom of the island. She sat on a bench in Battery Park and stared out long at the water and the wind. She’s come to no conclusions beside the need to keep on moving. Until she felt so tired she could hardly breathe.

Yet somehow she’s managed to get back here. And here’s her mother sitting on the stoop.

“Where were you?” Her mom is wearing running clothes, as if she meant to sprint around all of Brooklyn and Manhattan till she found her, till she could scoop her up and bring her home. Ellie wants to ask her to just please let her sleep and they’ll talk later. That she’s sorry and could they just forget this. Could they please forget every person Ellie’s ever been before.

“Walking,” she says. It’s so strange, being honest. It somehow comes out sounding less like the truth than all the lies she used to tell.

“It’s four in the morning.”

Ellie folds her arms over her chest.

“You don’t have your phone on?”

“It died,” says Ellie, which is also true. Though it was on for long enough for her to see the word mom over and over as it vibrated on Joseph’s desk and then in her shorts pocket. She held it the last few times before the phone died; she liked looking at her mom’s picture as it rang — smiling halfway, sitting alone in her office, averting her eyes from Ellie as she snapped her picture with her phone.

“You understand you’ve broken the agreement?” her mom says.

She’s measured, careful.

Ellie sits and digs her hands into her boots.

“I can’t live like this, okay?” her mom says. “If you live here, you can’t do this anymore.”