Hold Still (20 page)

Ellie wraps her arms around her shoulders. She burrows her chin into her chest.

“I want us to be good for each other, Ellie,” she says. She angles herself closer to Ellie and reaches toward her, her hand resting lightly on her knee. “I want this all to work.”

Ellie wants to respond properly, to give her whatever it is she needs. She uncrosses her arms, then crosses them again.

“Listen,” Annie says. She looks searchingly at Ellie, right in the eyes, and Ellie wonders if she's checking if she's stoned. “It's our fault.” It takes Ellie a minute to realize the “our” isn't she and Annie. It isn't Ellie or her mom. “We kept him so isolated . . .” Ellie's slowly catching up with Annie, whose voice falls a little. Her hand stays on Ellie's knee. “I didn't think it mattered when he was really small. It might not have.” She looks older, less sure. “There are probably plenty of kids who don't see other kids when they're little who acclimate fine to socializing later on. But he was brought up in the restaurant. It's the problem with having kids so late; it all feels so precious, you know? You've worked so hard for it. Even when I did just want a break, it felt ungrateful, spending any time away from him. I don't know how I expected preschool to go well. But you know.” She stops a minute and takes her hand back. “You think just loving is enough no matter what. I thought my love had this sort of primacy over every other person's. But then all those kids I'd pitied when they were two in those carts they'd push around downtown with gaggles of little children, those kids just laughed that first morning I took him, and greeted one another happily, while Jack screamed and kicked and refused to let go of my shirt.” As she says this she holds her shirt, which has come untucked near the bottom, rubbing her thumb along the edge. It's a thin, nearly translucent silk, light blue against the tan curve of her hand. “We thought that it'd get better. Lots of kids throw fits. But the kid has a will like nothing you've ever seen.” She lets go of her shirt and grabs hold of her own knee, harder than she held Ellie's. “The first week we were back to get him every day before noon. And the worst part.” Annie shakes her head. “It was only then I began to think of spending time with him as some kind of burden. Because I had made peace with him being away from me for a few hours every morning. And
then to not get that after all. I'd signed up for unlimited yoga.” She points her eyes to the floor. “I'd made plans to see friends I hadn't spent more than an hour with in years. I didn't want to give it up.” She holds her hands, palms up, in front of her, then sets them in her lap. “After two more weeks they recommended we try to transition him more slowly. Jeff and I took turns shadowing him for a couple of weeks. But every time we tried to leave: the same thing. And you know they tell you to let him just work it out himself. That that's the best way.” She looks up. She looks past Ellie's right ear, at the wall behind the bed. “I could feel the teacher's judgment from across the room every time I went to him when he cried. But the idea that I could do something to stop it and I didn't, I know it's not that simple but it felt that simple then. Finally they told us either he would be placed in special ed until they found a full-time aide or we'd have to find another place.” She stops a minute. She looks Ellie, briefly, in the face. “Jeff's a therapist, you know? You think rational thought should get you somewhere. We tried to talk to him about it, but my whole body would tense up even thinking about the word
school
. We decided to take another year and do homeschool. We had a woman come three days a week, and one of us was always there. And he was a dream as long as we didn't leave. I started to feel as if I would never have a moment free again. The past four years began to fold in on themselves and taunt me with all the things I hadn't been able to do. We got him a therapist. Who gets a therapist for a four-year-old? But the school recommended her. We stopped going when she started trying to give us diagnoses. Spectrums, medications. I wasn't ready yet to call him something other than himself. We worked on smaller increments of separation. None of the help we got ever lasted long. He'd throw the tantrums and they seemed to be getting worse. By the end of the last school year, we couldn't
even do school at home anymore. I found someone on the Internet who said live-in help might be the best option. But the idea of a stranger in our house . . . I don't know. And your mom said you needed to get out of New York for a while. And I remembered you when you were little. You were such a perfect little kid, the way you always were with Benny. I thought maybe you and Jack could do each other good. He's wonderful, really. He just . . .” She holds her hands in front of her again, palms out, then holds them to her face. “We all have shit, right?” She speaks through the gaps between her fingers, then places them back on her lap. For the first time since she started speaking, she holds Ellie's gaze. “I know it doesn't feel like it, but he likes you,” she says. “You understand him, I think. I think you might understand each other. This can be good for both of you.”

Annie looks down at Ellie's half-eaten dinner. She nods toward the plate, looks up. “But Ellie,” she says, “I am going to ask you to be careful.”

Ellie picks up another piece of fish and slowly chews it. She wraps her arms around her shins and tries hard not to look away from Annie. If only she were someone else.

“I'm going to beg you to love my son as much as I do. I want you to know I trust you and I want you to be okay too.”

Ellie wipes her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “I'm so sorry,” she says. “I . . .” She wants to promise she'll be good.

Winter, 2013

T
he new family has left them, the baby tucked back close to her mother, Bryant going dutifully behind. It's just Maya, Charles, and Caitlin, and no one seems sure of what to say next. Maya dumps her wine glass in the sink and grabs her coat. “I guess,” she says.

Charles nods. “Yeah,” he says, “me too.”

Maya blanches, avoiding eye contact with Caitlin.

“Sure,” Maya says. “Okay.”

“Oh,” Caitlin says. “You're sure?”

Charles holds her coat out for her. “I'll walk you,” he says.

Maya grabs hold of Caitlin before her coat's back on. “Okay,” she says, without looking at him, her head now safely nestled into Caitlin's neck.

“I didn't mean . . .” says Caitlin.

“I'm so proud of you,” Maya says again.

Maya and Charles are just outside the apartment. It's dark out and music pulses from the buildings across the street.

“A book,” Maya says. “It's wonderful.”

She must clear her head of thoughts of Ellie. She walks quickly, snow crunching underneath her feet.

Charles nods, his hands dug into the pockets of his coat. “It is,” he says.

“You knew already?”

“I had an idea.”

“You two are close?” She watches the light in front of them change to green.

You have to go to her
, she thinks.

She feels Charles nod next to her. “We're friends,” he says.

They pass a small community garden; patches of snow spot the dirt on the other side of the chain-link fence. They're quiet awhile and Maya watches the packs of kids walking through Tompkins Square Park clutch their cigarettes with ungloved hands. She fixates on a small girl walking next to a thin boy, laughing, her fingertips are red and chapped, the nails bitten down.

“I used to live down here,” she says.

“Really?” She thinks he looks skeptical, like maybe she's remembered wrong.

“Years ago,” she says. She smiles briefly. The girl drops her cigarette and stamps it with the toe of her boot. “I wasn't always this old,” Maya says.

He starts to correct her, but she holds up her hand.

“It wasn't this cool then.”

“Right.”

“It's like Disneyland.” They're on Saint Marks and Third Avenue. Fluorescent lights and tattoo parlors, shops selling scarves and gloves and cheap jewelry jut out into the street, three designer yogurt shops within a single block. The smells are exhaust, falafel, and something curried, cigarettes every other breath. Beautiful
young people, lithe limbs, firm everything, tourists clutching their maps and their bags. There are still the kids in ratty clothing, errant piercings, sitting with their backs against buildings, with their pit bulls and their dirty hair. But even they look like props now. Maya wouldn't be surprised to discover they take the subway home every night to Park Slope or Boerum Hill.

Maya rubs the nylon of her coat pocket between her thumb and forefinger as she burrows her hands in more deeply. A pack of laughing girls walks by; a couple leaning into one another almost bumps into Charles.

Ellie, Ellie, Ellie
, Maya thinks.

“Auden,” says Charles, nodding toward a brownstone to their left.

Maya turns to him.

“He lived there.”

“Right,” she says. She should be the one who knows.

“He had to walk to the liquor store across the street to pee.”

He stands up straighter as he says this. He'll be a great teacher, she thinks again, the way his whole body changes as soon as he thinks he has something he might offer to someone else.

“The plumbing froze, and he had to walk across the street to use the toilet.”

They pass the subway Maya would take to go back to Brooklyn. She has no idea where Charles lives. It seems they have agreed on something without agreeing to it. There's still the possibility to deny any agency in whatever they're about to do.

“He used to go to that church on Ninth Street,” he says. “He gave the manuscript of
The Age of Anxiety
to a friend so he could sell it for an operation he couldn't afford.”

“Nice guy,” Maya says.

Charles smiles, turning toward her. “I've always thought.”

They cross Broadway, still heading west, and Maya dips her chin to her chest as the wind picks up. Her shoulder brushes Charles's. The sidewalk gets more crowded, then thins out again; it's icy in places—she's drunker than she realized—and she almost grabs hold of Charles as her feet begin to slip.

Charles leads Maya into a bar off West Fourth. The streets no longer run in a grid, and West Fourth runs perpendicular to itself for a while.

“I forget how crooked everything gets down here,” Maya says.

He settles a hand against her back.

“So that was . . .” She stops herself. “How do you all know each other?”

She doesn't want to talk about Caitlin. She wants even less to talk about herself.

“Caitlin, I guess,” he says. “Though technically I met her through you.” Maya stiffens, and Charles pulls his hand back as he pulls out a stool for her. They loosen limbs from coats and sidle onto their stools. Charles places his elbows on the bar. “Alana and Caitlin were in some writing group together when Caitlin first moved here. The three of us were inseparable for a while.”

Maya thinks again about that day Caitlin cried to her. Alana: the other girl. “And then Bryant,” she says.

He shakes his head. “I don't know.” The bartender—thin, full beard, crooked posture, a blue T-shirt, and perfectly cut jeans—pours and delivers Charles's beer, then slides Maya her wine. “We were that sort of close that's not sustainable,” he says, nodding thanks to the bartender. “And the strangeness of being three of any group of people; it was bound to get weird or messy if Bryant hadn't come along.”

“Weird or messy how?” Maya says. She's asking too much.

“Oh, you know. Jealousy, maybe, or discomfort.”

“But none of you dated?” She sees Alana again, those eyes, her height. Maya feels the heat rising to her cheeks.

“That's not the only kind of jealousy.”

“Right,” she says. “Of course.”

“But Bryant.”

Maya sips her wine, watches the bartender mix and pour a purple drink.

“He sort of swept Lana away.”

“And you all didn't mind it.”

“It wasn't our place to mind.” Maya thinks she hears remorse.

“You and Caitlin are still close, then?”

He shrugs. “All relationships come in and out, right?”

“She loves you.” She didn't mean to say this. She almost clamps her hand over her mouth.

He holds his beer glass at a diagonal and rubs the label with his thumb. “I'm not sure she knows what that means.”

“She's pretty brilliant.”

“She's not spent much of her life in the real world.”

Maya shrugs. She didn't mean to stay on this as long as she has.

“She's not . . .” He stops himself.

She wants him to say something that proves Maya's not doing Caitlin wrong.

“Bryant's a douche,” he says.

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.”