Hold Still Page 6

  She was terrified each time she went back to school that he wouldn’t be there the next time she came home, that she was betraying him in leaving, in not staying there to keep him safe. Each time she came back, she was terrified that he would be there, that this time he wouldn’t let her leave again.

  It would have been easier, she thought, if he’d done something more explicitly detestable: hit her, fucked her. Then maybe she could have rid herself of him, then maybe she could have finally been free. Instead she carried with her all he needed, all she knew she couldn’t give.

  Back at school, she had trouble sleeping, reading like she always had but then still needing more. She piled books into her bed and hardly slept. She woke up with pages sticking to her, flitting from one world to the other, feeling jarred and confused when she had to leave her room and interact with a world not made up of words. She discovered Woolf during this period, crying under the covers upon her first encounter with Mrs. Ramsay’s death. The paragraphs then, the way they caught inside her brain and stuck there. They ran back and forth over all her other thoughts and dulled, then sharpened them. She loved the vastness all wrapped up inside the minutiae: a house come to life, wind and dust sweeping through corners, suddenly enough to sustain a whole page. She knew she didn’t completely understand it, but that was part of what was so attractive, the knowledge that she could return later for more.

  What she can’t do, though, is situate her past within her present. She can’t apologize for the ways in which it’s made her less capable than she might have been. Stephen knows this, but he’s asked her for it anyway.

  She turns from him, pulls her boots on, grabs her coat; she leaves.

  Summer 2011

  “Food?” says Ellie, peering through her brother’s door, where he’s still in bed and half asleep. Their mom’s in her study with the door locked. Ben calls to her that they’re going, and he and Ellie walk the ten blocks to his favorite diner on the other side of Flatbush. Their neighborhood is different than it was when they were little. Ellie remembers being scared often, when her mom pulled her close walking up the stairs from the subway. A few times she remembers walking right past their apartment when her mom thought someone might be following too close. Now there are fancy coffee shops, a Barnes & Noble, a Starbucks, strollers and tiny scooters everywhere, dogs and kids. This all makes Ellie a different kind of nervous, like maybe she’s what’s dangerous about the place where they live.

  Her brother: he still looks like a little boy to Ellie. He was shorter than most of his classmates in middle school, and rounder. Ellie’s mom would rub her hands over his cheeks and smile at him and Ellie’d want to grab her mom’s hand and remind her she was hers. But then suddenly, sometime at the end of middle school, he’d shot straight up, all crooked aimless height and limbs, twisted and folded and hanging over couches, curled up in the backseat of the car.

  “Mom’s pissed,” he says, walking to the left of her, separating Ellie from the street.

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Benny.”

  “El.”

  “What’s it like?” she says. “Being the good one. Don’t you get bored?”

  “Please, El.” He looks angry.

  She doesn’t want to hear his answer.

  He says, “The only person who’s allowed to think in terms of what they want in our family is you.”

  She wants to start again. Her brother is the only person in the world she always likes.

  “I’m sorry, Benny,” she says. “I’m trying this time, though, okay? Please?”

  “Sure,” he says, not looking at her.

  “And you’re free of me now anyway. She’s shipping me off, and you’re a college kid.” She loops her arm through his elbow. He keeps his arm limp, but doesn’t pull away. “Seems like you’re having plenty of fun up at school.”

  He called her the second month of classes. He’d tried LSD. There had briefly been a girlfriend. He’d been crying. Her little brother. He sounded six years old. A friend of his had had the tabs and they’d slipped them on their tongues and let them melt while sitting on the dirty couch at some off-campus party. “Oh, Benny,” she kept saying, as he blubbered at her, “it’s not the seventies.”

  “My mind is wild,” he said.

  Ellie swallowed a laugh.

  “I can’t make it stop,” her brother said.

  He’d run out of the party. The music was too loud, he told her. It was too hot. There were too many people. Too, too, too. He’d run out onto the street and almost been run over by a Camry.

  Even the cars that almost hit him were reasonable and good.

  She’d talked to him until he fell asleep. He became more and more coherent and she ached to go to him. To curl up with him in his tiny dorm bed and tell stories like they had when they were little. He hated soccer. He’d met a girl. Ellie’d seen her Facebook pictures. She’d texted her brother immediately. “Stay away,” she’d said. It took a girl like her to know another one. And then the week after that Benny called with the LSD scare, and once they’d hung up Ellie couldn’t help but smile at herself. Her poor sweet brother: he’d called her.

  “I thought I’d be so happy to be free of all your shit,” he says now. He bumbles through, but talks more than he maybe ever has. Ellie eats slowly, mostly picking at her omelet, watching her brother form before her eyes.

  “But you know the most fucked-up thing?” he says. “You’re the only person I can talk to. You’re awful and you continue to make everybody else’s life impossible, but I still think about you all the time and worry whether you’re okay.”

  It was the way she seemed to always be suggesting that there was something somewhere that she could be doing that was more exciting than the thing everyone else was doing around her, he said. The way she had a place she went sometimes when she was right in front of you that could make you feel like, no matter what you did or said, it wasn’t as good as what she was refusing to do or say in front of you.

  Before he left he’d felt it was his job, in the face of her, to act as some kind of corrective for their parents. He was Good and Safe and Dependable. Sometimes he went out with friends and sometimes girls stood too close to him at parties. And sometimes he let them corner him in the kitchen of whoever’s parents’ apartment they were at that time and he’d kiss them. But he never let them lead him to another room. Everything he knew about girls—his mom, his sister—told him they couldn’t be trusted. There was nothing to be sure of when they got you alone.

  Once he got to college there had finally been a girl with whom he’d wanted to escape no matter what happened, no matter how out of control she made him feel. But then she’d turned out to be just as batshit as he knew she would. She fucked him in the dirty bed of some frat dude who had sheets with race cars on them and a hard white stain in the middle and then cried herself to sleep. She was almost too skinny, just like his sister. Just like his mom. He’d tried to hold her as she slept, all those bones jutting up against him, but she’d slipped from him and then asked him to please not talk to her as they dressed later and left.

  He was exhausted by and avoided the soccer guys. They were all such bros, a term he hadn’t understood until leaving New York. They grunted at one another. They took off their shirts. They said “screw” when they talked about sleeping with girls and called each other “fag” and “homo.” He found himself missing his sister more and more. He wasn’t as impressive when he wasn’t being constantly compared to her.

  He’d taken a philosophy class and macroeconomics. Though he loved it, he’d almost failed philosophy. He got so excited about the assignments he usually ended up not answering the questions that were asked, but going on for pages about some tangential idea that interested him more than the specific prompt. He got an A in econ only because it was so mind-numbingly boring that he had taken vigorous notes in order to stay awake.

  “I started saying I was an econ major at parties, just to see if people thought that might seem l
ike a thing a person like me might do.”

  He’s managed to consume completely his stack of pancakes. Now, as he talks, Ellie dips her finger in the syrup.

  She wants to tell him that she’s sorry. It was supposed to be her job to take care of him. When they were very small, when their mom disappeared, before he didn’t seem to need her anymore, Ellie would spend hours concocting games to distract him from their mom having locked herself inside her office again. Ellie could always tell when their mom had decided she couldn’t be their mom for a little while. (When she disappeared, her voice changed, the look of her was firmer in the jaw, tight around the eyes and mouth. Her gestures were all slow and heavy and she flinched sometimes if either Ben or Ellie came too close.) They had adventures among their dad’s flowers, dressed in hats with nets and magnifying glasses, with picks and shovels, in search of unknown treasures, sometimes digging up some of their dad’s plants accidentally, frantically replanting them, laughing, before he came home (he never noticed, was fastidious in his work even in the time he spent out in the garden, but Ellie figured he didn’t think quite enough about his children, when he wasn’t with them, to imagine that it might have been his kids, and not the weather or a bird, who had dug up or overturned his plants), building forts in the bunk beds in Ben’s room, piling up blanket after blanket until they might as well have not been in their house anymore, until their whole world was just color after color all around them, and they could lie back and Ellie’d read aloud to her brother, or they’d tell each other secrets, about nothing, really, about people that they knew or neighbors that they’d never spoken to, that, often, they just made up on the spot. Ben would wind his limbs over the top of her on the couch as they watched the same movies over and over, or they danced together to their mom’s records.

  Sometimes, after their mom had come out again, unlocking her office door and coming toward them slowly, seeming better somehow, seeming just barely willing to be their mom again, Ellie would put something fast and fun on the turntable and turn the music up loud. And she’d grab hold of Ben and her mom would sit and watch them until finally, sometimes, she’d dance with them. Her hair would fall from its bun, reaching down the middle of her back. They would all three swing their limbs and sing and dance. And those times, that fun, their mom free and careless, laughing with them after not even wanting them too close, all would have been because of Ellie. She’d known how to save all of them then.

  Her brother cups his coffee in one long-fingered hand and watches Ellie. She dips her finger, one more time, into his syrup, and keeps her eyes turned toward his plate.

  “I love you, you know?” she says.

  Her brother fingers the rim of the coffee with his free hand and looks down too into his empty plate.

  She passes him the rest of her omelet and sips her coffee. “I’m sorry, Benny,” she says.

  “I know, El,” her brother says. “Me too.”

  Winter 2013

  When the phone rings, it’s the middle of the night, and every time, before she remembers, Maya thinks: Ellie. But then right after that she holds her breath, picks up the phone, and waits.

  Maya thinks later that she knew it was her even before she started speaking, the way she paused, the way she breathed in once, long, then spoke in one big rush.

  Annie gives no preamble. “I don’t sleep, right?” she says.

  This is the first that Maya’s heard from her since the day before it happened. She almost doesn’t know her voice.

  “I mean, I guess I must, because I’m still, vaguely, somehow functional. Restaurant to run. Responsibilities. I’m grateful for it, actually. Because then, at home, there’s Jack. And Jack. And Jack. And I can’t look away from it. I’m still such a mess and all to myself, it’s no good. But I don’t ever remember sleeping. I don’t remember waking up. I always have noise going, in the bedroom, in the living room. I keep the radio on all day. The other day there was this story of this man who made a speech at a wedding about a friend of his from childhood who died. A kid, you know?”

  Maya digs her fingernails into her palms.

  “They didn’t give much backstory, but he seemed like your average sort of best-man type, friend from college, lawyer or something at the time of the speech. The program was about people getting things wrong in some accidental, public way. I missed the first part. He gives this awful speech about his friend dying. About him being shot accidentally with a left-out hunting rifle when he was ten years old. Well, it was incredibly articulate and felt, you know? How he never really knew how to process it, how he thought about it still. But the groom was interviewed briefly and said the whole tent of people just went quiet. And when the guy was done, he was smiling through the tears he’d managed to evoke both in himself and nearly half the room. It was clear he either had no idea what he’d just said or somehow thought it’d done the job. Someone came on after that, an expert. He said sometimes people confuse the quality of their feelings. They’re too caught up in their weight. So this guy, he was just giving his friend and his new wife the thing so far in his life that felt as weighty as the thing that they’d just done.”

  Maya tries to keep her breathing quiet. She keeps the comforter close to her face and sits up with three pillows propped behind her. She is, luckily, in Ellie’s room, so she doesn’t have to worry about Stephen hearing, asking questions, hanging up the phone. She listens to her friend talk and wishes she could go to her and help make her better. She grabs hold of the blanket. She can feel her fingernails, still digging in her palms, through the thick duvet.

  “I called you because I don’t want the weight of this sadness any longer,” says Annie. “Because I know you have to take it if I can just figure out how to pass it off to you.”

  Maya was twenty-one. She’d just graduated from Harvard. Moving out of her dorm room months before, she’d felt weightless, lost, like the last four years had been meant to give her something beyond the grades she’d always gotten, a few professors who seemed interested in the papers that she wrote. She’d gone to the best school. She’d made what she guessed might pass for friends. But she knew mostly they’d drift from her. At graduation, she’d accidentally sat alone. She’d assumed they’d sit the graduates alphabetically, that she didn’t need to worry about finding a group to spend the hours of speeches and name-calling with. She lived in a house with three other girls who would happily have brought her with them, but it would have been her coming along, not being a part. And she’d preferred spending the hour and a half running along the Charles beforehand instead, watching the sculls glide along the water, the faint echo of the coxswains in the large boats calling, Pull.

  Her dad had been there. He’d stayed at a hotel near Central Square and come the night before to take her to a steak dinner on Beacon Street. She’d worn a dress; he’d gotten drunk. She’d taken him back to his hotel and pulled off his shoes and socks and put him to bed, kissing his cheek brusquely, escaping quickly. She slept up in the attic of the house she shared. Sometimes she’d go days or weeks without talking to the girls at all. It was the night before graduation, and everyone was still out. There were parties to which she could have gone. The window next to her bed opened out onto the roof and she sat out there in a sweater with a blanket wrapped around her. It was May, but New England May, and the air still bit. She waited for some feeling to come over her, some sense of what might come next. She’d won a prize for her thesis. Her advisor had suggested a PhD. But she thought then there might be some other thing, some thing that wasn’t so predictable, that might take her outside herself. She thought life would come and tell her what to do. The plan was to move to New York. She sat alone the next day. She had a worn copy of To the Lighthouse on her lap. After, she’d gone to brunch with her dad, but neither of them seemed sure of what to do. Both of them seemed disappointed by all that the day wasn’t giving them. There was just the silly cap and gown, runny eggs, Macallan neat (celebratory, he said; a change) for Maya’s dad, black coffee for
her. “My girl,” he said, grabbing her hand across the table. And Maya flinched a moment, then let him hold it until the waiter brought his refreshed drink. He should have remarried. He should have found someone else in whom to channel all that need. But he seemed to prefer disappointment. She told him about her paper, the award. She said she might apply next year for doctoral programs. He brightened briefly, seemed to like the idea of more time to find a way to properly appreciate whatever it was she was becoming then. She had no job in New York but had found an apartment in Alphabet City and told her dad about a few leads she had, friends of friends in publishing and doing admin work. It had felt important, to declare herself as only herself. To try, for a while, to not be wrapped up inside her books.

  She was only in New York a month and a half before she got the phone call. It was two days before the Fourth. She was working sixty-hour weeks and hated every minute of it. Everyone she worked with was an actress or performer and spoke more loudly and gestured more aggressively than felt appropriate to Maya if one was not onstage. They were nice enough to her, the same as everyone who came before. They would let her come along to whichever bar they planned to stay at until closing and buy drinks until all the cash they’d accumulated the past seven or eight hours was depleted down to just enough to take a cab back to their shitty apartment shares. It was her one day off and she’d slept till two in the afternoon, then got up and ran two hours along the water, coming home feeling cleaner, straighter, more capable of being in the world. She’d bought a quarter of a watermelon at the better bodega a few blocks farther from her place and had ripped open the cellophane, cutting large chunks of it without bothering to put it in a bowl, holding it on her lap and letting the sticky juices fall onto her bare sweaty legs. She’d let the phone ring and then the sound of the machine, the click and then the beep. “At your earliest convenience,” said the voice she didn’t know but that mentioned her father’s name in full. Just like that. They didn’t tell her on the message, but she knew. For a moment, she thought, maybe she’d never call back.