Hold Still by Lynn Steger Strong

how she might make everything better. She’s not sure she’s willing to concede.

Winter 2013
    â€œY ou want company?”
    Maya turns around. It’s four-thirty in the morning. Ben wears shorts and running shoes, a long-sleeved dark red shirt. He stands halfway up the steps. She’s so grateful now that they were never the type of family to cover their walls in photos of each other, of their friends. Now, as she stares up toward her son, she catches sight of the massive Neil Welliver print Stephen got her years ago. Cora’s Sky , it’s called, and she’s always been comforted by the broad swaths of oranges and blues.
    Maya smiles. “Sure.” She double-knots her second shoe.
    Ben bounds down the steps.
    â€œI’m going to be too slow for you,” she says.
    He shrugs. “I’m not in training for anything.”
    â€œWell, no pressure to stay close.”
    He shakes his head, pulls his arms up, fingers laced, and places his palms behind his head. They walk out of the apartment and Maya locks the door.
    â€œPark or bridge?” says Ben.
    â€œYour call,” she says.
    â€œBridge.” And Maya’s so grateful for his choosing the longer, her preferred, route, she almost wraps her arms around her son.
    They take her usual route down Bergen. The city smells like trash, exhaust, and bacon. She watches him hold his long legs in check.
    â€œShe used to come into my room sometimes,” he says. His head keeps facing straight.
    Maya’s breath catches a few seconds. She sees Ben’s feet clip in even closer as her pace has briefly slowed. She stretches her legs out once and then another couple times before he speaks again.
    â€œI don’t . . . I’m not sure when it started. Or if she even knew what she was doing. But she did it a bunch of times.”
    â€œI didn’t . . .” She says it quietly. They pass a road under construction: dug up asphalt, crumbled concrete, and orange cones.
    â€œOne time, she got up and started yelling at me to get out of her bed. But it’s not like I could explain to her that it was my bed.” A small bodega on the corner, with rows of flowers outside, a school, a yoga studio. “She was too fucked up to know which room was hers.” He shakes his head, rolls his shoulders. “I just went to her room.”
    â€œDo you miss her?” Maya asks him. She’s not sure this is right, but she wants him to keep talking. When she first went down to Florida, Ben was the only one that Ellie spoke to on the phone.
    â€œYeah, I mean . . .” He’s quiet awhile, and Maya eyes the park just north of the bridge and then the courthouse, columns, concrete, and a blockade setup in front. The traffic’s heavier as theyapproach the bridge and someone honks and tires screech as they wait for the light to change.
    â€œShe’s my sister, you know?” her son says.
    Two years before: she’d taken him to dinner, picked him up from practice. He didn’t need picking up anymore; she’d sat on the sidelines like she had all those years of his forming, watching the boys yell to one another, gesture, run, the thwack of foot to ball, their impossibly long limbs. They all wore shorts, though it was just beginning to get cold out. They wore the socks up to their knees and the shorts that almost fell as far. Patches of bright red skin, knees and sides of thighs, popped out as they ran after one another and the ball.
    She was, mostly, a terrible watcher. She was the type to pull out a book in lines or on the subway, on trains or buses, when the kids or Stephen would keep their eyes on the world. Maya wasn’t capable of that much stillness, that much sustained attention to the outside world. Soccer had seduced her over the years, though, its beautiful simplicity, the boys’ doggedness, their strength. The crack of the whistle breaking through the low steady yells. The boys falling down