Hold Still Page 13

  They parked and walked barefoot over the boardwalk and out onto the sand. The beach was empty of people, but it was a mess of stuff left over. The storm had come close enough that the tides had risen, dumping all sorts of debris out on the beach. Mounds of seaweed—it looked living—glistened in the dark. The sand was wet even far up by the boardwalk, and her mom pointed out the lines on the wooden poles where the water had reached. Ellie touched the line along one of the poles—it hit just above her head—the wood still wet and dark and slick. The ocean, though, was quiet now. It came in small rolls, trickles of black and gray, to shore.

  Ellie’s mom wore shorts and one of their dad’s sweaters. She walked on tiptoes, long freckled legs. Her messy hair hung dark down her back. Her eyes were big and searching. Ellie loved them best when they found her. Her mom caught them both, Ellie and Ben, within her vision. She grinned. She walked closer to the water and stood a minute, letting the trickles splash over her feet. She nodded toward Ben and Ellie. They both followed, though Ben wandered quickly farther out. Her mom took Ellie’s hand and leaned down a foot or two from the shore break. Carefully, her sweater open and her hair fallen forward, she knelt, her shin and then her knee covered in sand. She picked up a mound of seaweed and held it in her hand. Her eyes up again, she shook her head and blew her hair out of her face, holding Ellie close.

  “Come here, Benny,” she said. He stopped a minute, then came toward them. He’d gone in past his waist, his shorts and shirt now soaking wet.

  Ellie smelled the seaweed that her mother held and wanted to ask if they could take it home.

  “Watch,” their mom said, once Ben was beside her. She whispered. And Ben and Ellie leaned in very close.

  Ellie’s mother shook the seaweed. It was dark brown and black, wet and shining. As it shook, Ellie got drops of salt water on her face and in her eyes. She watched Ben pinch his eyes shut and his lips puckered. It was there, though, when Ellie looked back down at the plant. Light, like a hundred tiny Christmas tree bulbs popping up out of it. Alive, thought El, and stopped breathing as she watched.

  Ellie feels Annie somewhere close but doesn’t turn to find her. Either Jeff or Annie is always there somewhere when she’s with Jack. She wonders if they’ll ever trust her to be with him without them. It’s July and the sort of hot that Ellie had forgotten. She’d been so looking forward to the swimming; but all this time inside these past few days has begun to wear on her. She’s getting itchy, anxious, crazy. They keep all the doors open and she can feel his parents listening as she plods through her first attempts with Jack. She asks awkward unsure questions. And Jack is on and on with this stuff he finds on the Internet.

  As welcoming as he was the first day, he seems to be pulling away from her instead of opening up. Annie has mentioned something about separation issues. Ellie’s not sure what this means. He always knows where his parents are, and the farther they are, the less likely he is to speak to Ellie. He likes bugs and she’s never been squeamish. She felt him suppress a smile her first full day, when she asked to hold one of the scorpions. He has two iguanas, countless lizards, an ant farm, and an assortment of spiders and beetles he’s caught himself and placed in jars. He has a small Jack-sized table set up in the corner where he dissects the ones that he finds already dead.

  He leaves the computer now and goes back to his bugs, administering to each of them in some five-year-old version of efficiency, opening cages and jars, changing water pans and dropping food. Ellie flips through a book of stories that her mother sent down with her. Deborah Eisenberg. Her mom marked a story called “Rosie Gets a Soul.” Rosie, of course, is an addict, but Ellie’s read the whole thing since she got here. Against her will, certain bits of it—she’s had her hands full just standing upright. Just trying to work up some traction. Just dealing with the fact of herself, which pops up in front of her every day when she awakes, like some doltish puppet. So certain other worrisome items have slid off the agenda—have lodged themselves inside her brain.

  “We should go somewhere,” she says to Jack.

  He looks up at her, suspicious. She wonders if he can tell somehow what she’s thinking. “Annie,” she calls loudly, pretending that she doesn’t know how close she is. Annie comes to the entrance to Jack’s room.

  “What’s up?”

  “I think we need to get out of here.”

  Annie holds the doorframe hard with her right hand and grabs hold of a wisp of hair come loose from her ponytail with her left.

  “Sure,” she says.

  Ellie has briefly lost her confidence, but she keeps talking. Either she’ll take Jack or she’ll go alone, but she has to get out.

  “What do you think, Jack?” Annie asks.

  He seems nervous. He has a beetle crawling over his hand and up onto his forearm. He places it carefully back in its jar and walks toward his mom. “We all go?”

  Annie looks down at her watch. “I have to go in to work soon, baby.” She and Jeff usually pass the baton of watching Ellie watch Jack. Jeff comes home at three-fifteen and Annie leaves about twenty minutes after. She whispers something to Jack that Ellie strains to hear.

  “Why don’t the two of you go?” She nods down at the book that Ellie’s been lugging around. “Why not Barnes & Noble? It’s close and you can get another book.”

  “Me too?” Jack says. He has shelves across one wall of his room with the usual children’s picture books as well as piles and piles of species catalogues for all the bugs.

  “If you’re very good,” his mom says.

  She turns to Ellie, fishes twenty dollars from her pocket. “Only one,” she says to both of them. “And only if you’re nice to Ellie the whole time.”

  The rain still comes down hard and Ellie can’t remember the last time she’s driven. She only got her license so she could drive when they’re down here. The wipers swish one-two as the water rushes to fill the windshield, and there are a couple seconds each time when Ellie can’t see the road at all. They have Jeffrey’s old Bronco. Ellie thinks she might smell weed, something smoky and illicit settled deep in the canvas seats. She thinks maybe when they get back, once Annie and Jack and Jeffrey are all safely in bed, she could search underneath the seats for some remnants. She wouldn’t smoke it. She just wants to know what’s available in case.

  “You okay?” Ellie says, catching Jack’s eye in the rearview mirror. But Jack just looks down at the book he’s brought and doesn’t speak. He’s strapped into his booster and looks taller than he is.

  She lets him go in front of her when they get there. She’s forgotten an umbrella and they run through the parking lot, Jack jumping through two massive puddles, water splashing up into Ellie’s face and covering Jack’s shorts, splattering the back of his shirt as they head toward the double doors. He seems so sure—so much surer than she’s ever been—she doesn’t think twice about letting him off alone. She heads to the literature section and searches for more Deborah Eisenberg. The book she has is the only one they carry, and she wanders farther through the alphabet, coming to Woolf. She opens To The Lighthouse. Her mother never leaves the house without this book, a book Ellie’s never read. She opens to a random page and begins reading. For a while, she sinks down deep:

  They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let its sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness—because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.

  She reaches for her cell phone in her pocket. She almost calls her mom. She wants to read this paragraph out loud to her. Her mom probably has it memorized, but she thinks maybe if Ellie call
s to give it to her, it will be something both of them can keep.

  She’s forgotten Jack until she remembers. It’s been half an hour. Briefly, on and off until she finds him, she feels a rush of tight hot panic through her shoulders, straight up to her teeth. But then he’s there in front of her. He’s cross-legged on the floor in the Science section, immersed in a book on scorpions. “You know, there’s a scorpion in Laos—my mom’s been there—it’s called the Heterometrus laoticus. It’s black in the daylight, but it glows blue under UV light.” Ellie nods. She’s so relieved to see him, she’s almost interested in whatever it is he’s babbling about. “Scientists don’t know if it’s sun protection or if it’s meant to alert them if the night’s too bright for them to go out without being eaten by some predator.”

  “Sure,” Ellie says. She’s still thinking about the Woolf, her mom; her mind catches on the words night and predator.

  “Come on.” She’s still holding the Woolf until she realizes she doesn’t have the money to pay for it. She has a credit card her mom gave her for emergencies and she fingers it inside her wallet, deciding if this counts. “We have to go.”

  He seems surprised that she’s still standing there. He piles four books into his arms and stands. “I need all of these.”

  Ellie still has the credit card between her fingers and thinks a minute that she should get them all for him, that maybe he’ll like her if she does. “No,” she says.

  She puts down the Woolf. She’ll come back and get it with the money she’s meant to get from Jeff and Annie. She kneels close to Jack. “Pick one, okay?”

  He clutches the stack to his chest and glares at her. His shoes don’t match. They’re those rubber clog things with little buttons stuck into them. One of them is green and one of them is blue.

  “No,” he says.

  It’s quiet at first, like he’s trying it out. Ellie stands up and tries to take the books from Jack.

  “No,” he says again.

  “Please, Jack,” she says. This isn’t right, she thinks. She shouldn’t plead with him. She reaches for the books again and he runs from her, squeals. “Noooo!” he yells as he bolts for the front door. They’re in a massive concrete shopping center and just outside is a broad expanse of parking lot, beyond which is a major road. Ellie’s quick behind him and grabs him up into her arms right before he’s out the door, but Jack is yelling now and she’s not sure what to do. He’s strong and heavier than he looked running in front of her; she’s afraid suddenly she’ll drop him on the tile floor. People stare from all sides of the store and Ellie almost starts to cry, she’s so afraid of what might happen. “Please,” she whispers now, as if the people will stop staring. Jack screams and she keeps hold of him so he doesn’t make it out the door. “Please,” she says again. He’s lost a clog in their scuffle and all the books have fallen. “We’ll get the books,” says Ellie. “Please.”

  Winter 2013

  The buzzer buzzes and Maya starts and almost drops her wine glass. She’s been crying. Caitlin hands her a paper towel and holds Maya’s arm up by her shoulder, briefly, before turning to buzz in whoever has arrived. Maya’s heart beats too quickly. She clutches her glass, which she has refilled once while telling Caitlin what her daughter’s done. “Sorry,” she says. She shakes her head and fixes her eyes on Caitlin’s green toenails.

  Caitlin’s been an intent, quiet listener. She shakes her head and grabs hold of Maya once more before she reaches for the door. “It’s fine, Maya,” she says. “You know that.”

  Maya hardly has time to mourn the loss of this closeness before the first of the other guests arrive. It’s a man and woman. Bryant, Caitlin calls him. She hugs him big, then is very delicate with the woman, kissing her, her hand up on her shoulder, then helping her take off her coat. The man—Maya guesses very quickly that they’re married, there are simple gold bands on both, he’s slow to get even a few steps from the woman—watches, ready, it seems, to swoop in if Caitlin fails at retrieving her coat. And underneath the coat is what he also must be so diligently protecting; large stretches of brown cotton are wrapped tightly over the woman’s shoulders and around her waist. Maya glimpses just a patch of newborn baby head peeking out from against the woman’s chest.

  Caitlin breathes in the minute that she catches sight of the tiny child. She holds her fingers to her lips, then reaches for the baby without touching her. She puts her arms around the woman, careful to stay clear of the tiny head. “Lana,” she says to the woman. She leans in once more very close to the baby, then smiles back up toward her friend. She whispers, “You made this.”

  She leads her to Maya. “Alana.” She nods toward Maya. “Maya.” Alana smiles. “And Vivian,” she says, nodding toward the newborn head. Alana’s very tall and her eyes are round and large and dark and her nose has a bump up top, then curves in. She has a wide mouth and long hair, thick and wavy, that reaches below the child on either side.

  “No one looks like this after having a baby,” Caitlin says. She’s back at the stove and transferring the kale to a serving plate, stirring the quinoa. She waves the spoon at Alana as if measuring her, then steps toward her once more and holds her face, kissing her once and then a second time on each cheek.

  Alana’s husband is close behind her and offers up his hand to Maya. “We’ve heard so much,” he says and smiles. Up close Maya sees how much older he is than his wife: fifty, at least, to her maybe twenty-five. The girl seems suddenly impossibly young to have a person to take care of. The man rests the hand he has not offered to Maya on the small of his wife’s back. “Bryant,” he says.

  Caitlin’s back’s to them. “He teaches too,” she says.

  Maya finds her wine again. She takes very small sips, feeling the first rush of warmth of excess spread through her as she does. But she feels too unmoored by the prospect of having nothing to do with her hands to put the glass down. “What do you teach?” she says.

  “Writing.” He nods toward Alana. “Both of us.”

  “They’re both novelists,” Caitlin interjects, taking hold of Alana’s arm and smiling up at her. The girl looks down and brushes her nose along her baby’s head.

  “How old?” says Maya, facing Alana. And then she’s still a moment, hoping it’s clear she meant the child.

  “Seven and a half weeks,” Alana says.

  “My God,” Maya says. “Just cooked.” She tries to smile at the girl.

  Maya eyes Caitlin again and wonders if this is all a party to prepare everyone for Caitlin’s own revelation. She wonders what part Maya might be allowed to play. Perhaps, if there is no father, she could play the role of partner. She imagines the possibility of getting to make all those choices all over, to do it equipped with the knowledge she has now, twice over. She could scour the apartment, change the diapers. She could hold the baby very tight up on her chest and let it sleep.

  The door opens behind them. “Someone let me in.” The voice is familiar. Maya turns. She almost drops her wine glass: Charles. Caitlin seems to hesitate before deciding how to greet him. She reaches her hand up to his shoulder, but he loops his arm around her waist and hugs her close.

  “Hi,” Caitlin says, a little breathless, Charles’s arms still around her waist.

  Maya averts her eyes, her whole head turning toward the window, as Charles frees himself from Caitlin and catches sight of her.

  “Hi.” his voice is very close, and when she looks back he’s right in front of her. Alana and Bryant have slipped past her to the bed.

  Charles looks back at Caitlin. “You didn’t tell me …”

  Caitlin shrugs, blushing slightly. “It’s not your party.”

  They’re friends, Maya sees, of course. They’re close. Perhaps what might be inside of Caitlin belongs to Charles. He stands a minute, quiet. He finally leans in close to her, his arms stick straight, and brushes her cheek with his.

  “It’s really wonderful to see you,” he says. He smells exactly like he tasted when they kissed.

>   “You too,” Maya says.

  Charles’s eyes stay on her a moment longer.

  “Hey, you.” It’s Alana behind her. “Come meet her.”

  Charles looks at Maya one last time.

  “Baby,” whispers Charles, taking three big steps, then leaning in to see the child. He’s awkward with Bryant. He shakes his hand brusquely, his eyes already stuck on the infant. He sidles up close to Alana on the bed and peers in at the baby. “She’s wonderful,” he says.

  Alana grabs hold of his arm. “I know,” she says.

  Charles grins and leans in once more and nuzzles the top of the baby’s head.

  Maya wants to stand next to him and do the same. She can nearly conjure it standing here: that baby feel and smell, the weight of it against her. She wonders if later she could ask to hold her. She wants to settle her, feet curled up underneath, breathing quickly, onto her chest.

  Maya has no idea why she’s so sure. The proximity of this other just-formed baby, the sheen of Caitlin’s skin. Her hair is thick like it gets in those months when the body’s so slow to let go of things, keeping everything just in case. She wonders again who the father is, but only briefly. Perhaps Caitlin’s gotten one of those procedures where the father is never a person. In many ways this would be easiest. Or he was a one-night stand. She looks around the room. She can’t imagine Bryant has offered his sperm so freely. That leaves only Charles. She breathes in quickly, then thinks it couldn’t possibly be. Charles catches her eye and she feels her face get warm.

  They all settle in their chairs. Caitlin’s just finished grilling the steaks and the air’s still filled with the smell and smoke of it as she comes to pass around the salad. Pomegranates and large chunks of avocado, crumbled walnuts, a homemade vinaigrette. Maya cuts her lettuce into tiny pieces. She has a small mouth, a tendency to get food stuck around its edges. She’s self-conscious like she hasn’t been in years. She feels Caitlin’s eyes on her and looks up, smiling. She drops her fork, picks up her wine glass, and nods at Caitlin, who grins, shoveling a large piece of avocado into her mouth.