Hold Still (10 page)

Maya leaned in then and hugged her. She held her tight and let her cry.

For two weeks after that, Annie came and sat in Maya's classroom every day. It took the administration that long to realize where she'd been. Finally, Maya was called in for a meeting. She knew very well from the outset the trouble she might be getting herself into. She just hadn't thought to care.

“This is serious,” said Mrs. Skinner. Her face was pleading. She'd gotten her this job, fast-tracked Maya's temporary teaching certificate. She'd been telling everyone what a talent Maya had with the kids. “There are rules,” she said.

She'd convinced Annie's parents to let her speak to Maya alone first.

Maya could feel the fluorescence of Annie's mother's dress straight through the door.

“The mother's threatening to sue.” Mrs. Skinner was wearing a dark blue suit and her hair was slicked back tightly into a bun. She reached up and brushed back a nonexistent errant hair. “These aren't people you want to mess with, Maya,” she said.

A file was created. Annie was pulled from her class. At the end of the semester, the teacher Maya had been filling in for decided to come back.

Maya applied to grad school. Within two months, she was making plans to head back to New York in the fall. She'd never meant to be in Florida and now she had a reason to leave again. In the meantime, it felt fine to let Annie come over to her father's house. She figured Annie was lying to her parents, but Maya didn't ask. She was too hungry for Annie's company, too happy to have her there. They sat out on the dock watching the sun go down and the alligators sunning themselves on the shore on the opposite side of the creek and talked about life and books and whatever it was they hoped to be someday.

Annie was still skipping school often, just barely getting through. She'd been in a car accident out by the beach in the middle of the afternoon and totaled her brand-new car. Her parents sent her to a new therapist every couple weeks, each time expressing frustration, firing the therapist violently, angry that after that small span of time their daughter still didn't seem to be fixed.

“The last one just let me talk for a really long time, then told me I was probably born to the wrong family.”

Annie laughed, so did Maya.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?” Annie asked.

“Did you ask her?”

Annie shrugged, raising her eyebrows, her eyes rolling up in her head. “We ran out of time.”

“Did you tell your parents that one?”

“They prefer the ones who recommend the meds.”

Maya looked down at the bottle of Riesling she'd opened, which they were sharing. It didn't feel wrong, though later, looking back, she'd worry for both her and Annie then.

There were times when Maya felt infinitely older. The five years that separated them were major, transformative years. They were supposed to be. Except Maya had spent most of them all wrapped up in books. So, now, with Annie challenging her, engaging with her outside the classroom, she didn't always feel like she was the one who might know what to do.

“I think they figure the sicker I am, the better, you know? If whatever's wrong with me is really bad, then when I'm finally fixed, I'll be that much closer to the person they wish I was.”

Across the creek, something slithered in and under. They heard what might have been the slap of a heavy scaly tail.

“For a while, I had headaches,” Maya said. “I don't remember how I did it. I think one day I mentioned my head hurt. You know, in the way thirteen-year-old girls mention things.” Of course, it hadn't been so long ago for either of them that they'd been thirteen. “And my dad got worried, I guess. He wanted me to see specialists. He loved projects; he could find the newest, the best, the farthest away. He took me to a friend of a friend's doctor who'd been recommended and they'd ask how much does it hurt, when, where. They would ask me to describe in detail the extent of the pain. And I started to get confused if I'd ever felt anything, you know? They would show me that pain scale, with the ten faces that represent different gradations of pain. I almost always picked
the middle one.” She looked over at Annie, who had grabbed the wine and refilled her glass. She handed the bottle to Maya, who then did the same. “We went to acupuncturists and therapists. He got me this bed with magnets in it that was supposed to help. And every time, I would search for some vaguely appropriate approximation of the pain. It never felt like lying, really, but it was all basically made up. No one ever found anything. It was just the thing we did for a while: we went to doctors and they took pictures of and asked questions about my brain. He'd ask me sometimes, years later. But I don't know, you know? I've always had a hard time figuring out what's real and what's just in my head.”

“You think I'm making it up?”

Maya stared at Annie. She'd somehow gone off track. “Of course not,” she said. She reached toward her, held her shoulder. “I'm sorry. I was just—I was trying to tell you, it's weird, you know? The way people love and try to understand all our different versions of not-rightness. I don't think it makes much sense most of the time.”

When Maya finally left a few months later, it was summer, before classes started. She was antsy in Florida, ready for the city—the water only worked on her for finite bits of time. Annie came to the house and cried and helped her pack. They would talk always after that. Sometimes months would pass. Sometimes they wouldn't see one another for years. But they were constants for one another, when neither of them had had much constant before that.

“I reconciled myself to not having a mother a long time ago,” says Annie. Maya's hardly moved since she picked up the phone. It's snowing outside Ellie's window, tiny blustery flakes. “Long before
my actual mom died,” Annie says. “I figured most people had it a lot worse than me. She just wasn't the type to nurture. And when I thought of a person that I could count on for those sorts of phone calls, I always thought of you. I liked that we'd chosen one another, that we could be peers as well as whatever we'd started as. But I don't know. I guess there are things that connect us to the people who gave birth to us, to the people that we gave birth to.” She stops a minute. Maya chokes back a sob.

“I'm not going to pursue charges, Maya. I don't want her to be locked up her whole life.” Maya's knuckles ache, they hold so tightly to her phone. “She didn't . . .” Annie says. “We're all culpable, Maya, you and me much more than her.”

Summer 2011

E
llie's last day in New York, she comes home to the sound of her mom in her office, rifling through papers, doing whatever it is she does with all her books. She thinks of listening to the lock turn when she and Ben were small. It's an old door. There was no mistaking the sound of the large bolt creaking. And they all had to pretend their mom hadn't done it on purpose, that she wasn't terrified suddenly of her own kids. Sometimes, when their dad was home, when Ben and Ellie were upstairs and he didn't think that they could hear him, he would yell straight through the door. He'd hiss awful things at her. “You pathetic child,” he'd say. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” They never heard the things their mom said back to him. Though Ellie guessed that she was silent. Whatever her mom felt or thought, she pulled it in, like Ellie, rather than throw it back out into the world.

“El.”

She jumps. They've hardly spoken since the trip was scheduled.
Ellie has a plane ticket for the next morning. She still can't believe how quickly her mom has managed to do away with her.

“Come in here?” her mother says.

Ellie stays still at the threshold of her mom's office. She looks at all the shelves, full to overflowing, the papers a mess over her desk.

Her mom turns her chair so that she's facing Ellie. Ellie looks along the shelves, then briefly at her mom. She is only accidentally pretty, Ellie's mother. She wears her hair pulled back most of the time and hardly any makeup. A lot of the time, she sort of looks just like a mom. She looks tired and her skin is worn from all that sun she got growing up in Florida, the hours she spends running almost every day all year. But then Ellie will catch her from a certain angle, she'll be smiling just a little, or her nose will scrunch in approval, usually over something Benny says, and Ellie will think she has a very lovely mother, she'll wish they were the sort of mom and daughter that she could tell her this.

“When you were really little,” her mom says. She crosses her arms over her chest.

Ellie wants to stop her. She doesn't want some lesson or consolation. But when she turns to see her mom's face, looking straight ahead and tight from jaw to temple, she stays quiet and lets her talk. “When you were just born,” her mom says. “You slept every night on my chest for months.” Her mom smiles, looking down into her shirt. “Just your skin and my skin and that tiny diaper. I thought everything good in the whole world had something to do with what it felt like to hold you like that.” Ellie's not sure she wants to hear this. She's not sure where to fit it in with all her other thoughts about her mom. “But then, you know, you got bigger and your dad was going a little crazy with you in the bed every night. I wasn't really sleeping. And someone told us.” She feels her
mom smile again. “It's amazing how easily we took advice from almost anyone. It felt like the whole world must know more about how to parent than we did. But someone told us wherever you were at five to six months, wherever you were sleeping, was where you'd be your whole childhood, so I agreed to move you to the crib.” Her mom has a rounder nose and her eyes are smaller than Ellie's. But they're the exact same color, dark with tiny flecks of green around the edge. She shakes her head again, looks down. “The idea of being away from you, of not feeling you breathing every night, it scared me,” her mom says. Ellie doesn't mean to, but she laughs and looks at her. Both of them smile shyly. Ellie looks back down at her boots. “I got up at night six or seven times. Sometimes I never slept. I must have, but I don't remember any sleep. I'd just sit in your room on this little stool I brought from the kitchen and watch your chest move. You were so tiny still. Sometimes I'd place my hand on your chest just to be sure.” Her mom shakes her head. “Anyway.” She grabs a book off of her desk, then sets it down. “Your dad was worried that I wasn't sleeping. You know, I wasn't being
productive at work
, I'm sure.” She stops. Ellie watches as she turns from this thought of her dad back to her. “So, the next appointment with the doctor, he comes and tells him what I'm doing.” Her mom's shoulders tense and she takes hold of both sides of her chair, leaning forward. She looks at her daughter. “I was so angry, you know? Like he'd betrayed me somehow. Like no one on earth could understand this need I felt to be sure every second that you stayed alive. And I'd been unsure of the doctor to begin with. I wanted a woman. I wanted only to be surrounded by women after you were born. But he was a good guy. He'd been dealing with new mothers for many, many years. I remember he touched me. It was somehow exactly as he should. He held my arm in this extremely paternal way. I was so
young then.” Her mom's shoulders curve so that her chin comes toward her chest, but she raises her eyes, still looking at her. “I was twenty-eight. Which must have felt old then. But with him holding my arm and me close to tears with fear, he said, very firmly, but very simply, ‘They want to live.'”

Ellie's mom stands up and walks toward her. Ellie holds tight to each of her elbows, her arms still crossed over her chest. Her mom stands close to her and grabs hold of her arm.

“I want to trust you, Ellie,” she says. She smells like this room, dark and shut in. “I want to not feel like an idiot for trusting you.”

Ellie leans closer to her mother. “I . . .” She feels like she might vomit. “I want that too,” she says.

Winter 2013

M
aya gets to class early. She sits on the desk in the small old whitewashed room with the radiator clanking beside her, the barely used blackboard hanging anachronistically behind. She's grateful for its sameness, how certainly it asserts itself as just like every other room in which she's taught. She's assigned “Cathedral” for this class. She's been craving Carver as a sort of antidote to all the blur and complication of her life.

She watches all the girls carefully: the hopeful ponytails, the defiant extra bits of weight spread through their bellies and their hips. She wants to take them each aside and place her hand up on their arms and tell them to cherish this time, their freedom. They will squander it, she knows, mostly. They will be silly, worry too much, sleep with the wrong boys. At least they're trying, though. At least they're not locked up already, trapped inside a consequence from which there might not be escape.

She opens her book and reads the first few pages. She has made a class packet, all the stories, poems, and essays bound together in a red construction-paper-covered book, but she brings her own
copies when she teaches. She likes looking at all the different notes and comments she's made to herself over the years.

Charles comes in just after her. He carries a big coffee and a handful of books, a WNYC tote bag. He wears his thick round glasses, a long unbuttoned wool black coat. His beige shirt is covered in lines of pink and blue paisley. He does this often, shirts like this that make no sense.

“Morning,” says Charles. She brightens at the sight of him, at the idea of being the one who knows what to do.

She wants to be able to just listen to him, to sit back and maybe learn. She has sent along her own notes on Carver, notes she put together mostly straight from the text she now holds in her hand. He emailed a long outline of plans for every minute of the seventy-minute period, some of which was scripted. Maya'd skimmed it, smiling, sure he'd end up using very little of what he'd written down.