Read Online Hold Still by Lynn Steger Strong - Free Book Online Page A

she wanted. Maya wasn’t. Maya had understood then that she was something people had to work to want. Her father had taken on the role of dad most earnestly. Though he was awkward, though he was uncomfortable often around his girl, he did adore his daughter; he adored her in the bumbling self-centered way that sad and callow men love their little girls.
    He was in real estate, self-made and later self-destroyed. He’d bought in with a development company with offerings in the middle of the state, deeds handed over, for properties that could be used only for camping and hiking, some of it completely swampland, to buyers far away who thought they were getting land to build. And though the bulk of sales had happened in the sixties, it was nearly ten years later that he’d finally been bankrupt as a result.
    She was fourteen and home from St. George’s. Upstairs, trying to sleep in her room. It was a room that never felt like hers because her father had moved the year she’d left for boarding school. It felt like someone’s approximation of a girl’s room, which in fact it was: a designer that he’d hired. It was how it felt when her dad looked at her, like she was an approximation of a daughter, something he had conjured, less somehow than he’d hoped.
    This night, like all nights, he’d been drinking. He padded barefoot through the house. She could still summon the smell of him. Aftershave from a dark green bottle, old, slightly watered gin. He’d taken a lime when she was younger but he didn’t anymore. She’d noticed this because she watched him, she studied him for lack of knowing what to say. He read three papers every morning cover to cover. He ate his breakfast quickly, standing up, drank his coffee black. Instead of interacting with one another, on her trips home they each sat quietly across the table at dinner,next to one another in the car, and noted how the other smelled and moved. They took each other in with care and a safe distance and, both of them maybe, hoped that added up to love.
    He seldom touched her. She made him nervous, especially as she’d grown slightly taller, begun to grow breasts and shave her legs. These were all things she’d learned to deal with on her own, reading magazines furtively at grocery stores and at the doctor’s, listening to girls at school, to women on TV. When she’d first used a tampon, she hadn’t realized she was supposed to remove the applicator and instead had left it in the entire time, tearing herself up, having to wear pads for the next month.
    They said good night that night, all nights, in the kitchen, Maya leaning toward him, kissing his cheek. “Daddy,” she still called him. “My girl,” he still said. He’d never come into her bedroom, though sometimes she would check on him in his room, slipping off his shoes or pulling down the duvet and the sheets.
    But this night, late, he came to her. And what he did had been so simple, could have been, had he been an altogether different father, a thing she remembered with a sort of loving, quiet angst. But instead it left her squirming, nauseous, nervous, each time after. And each time after, he did it again and then again.
    He was slurring, his shoulders folded inward. He wore his undershirt and shorts. She hardly ever saw his legs and was shocked by their thinness, how pale and thick with dark coarse hair. She was supposed to be asleep but wasn’t. The room was still so new and foreign. She was up reading, a small light she’d gotten at school to read by while her roommate slept. She was under the covers with Charlotte Brontë: Bertha was in the attic and Jane had just run away.
    Her father said her name once in a whisper, then pulled the covers up and climbed in next to her. She felt the coarseness ofthe hairs along his legs against her, the warmth of his breath, and smelled the aftershave and gin. It was then she realized he