Chapter 2
“You won’t believe what we saw from the boat tonight,” she told Elena, who was at the sink washing the day’s dishes. It was late, and Elena’s shift had ended hours earlier, but she always waited up for Sam. Elena had brought home from the golf club leftover chili con carne, and Sam was picking at it, shredded cheddar and green onion. Their mother was in her room sleeping. “Will you guess?”
The woods around their house were silent and black. Thick with hawthorn, which grew dark fruit, and Douglas fir. A yellow gleam at the edge of the kitchen window marked the presence of their closest neighbors, the Larsens, who had spotlights tastefully illuminating their landscaping, and who gave too-polite greetings to the girls whenever they bumped into each other in town. Danny Larsen, their youngest son, had asked Elena to homecoming senior year. His mother shut that down immediately.
Elena said, “A dead body.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Sam said. Put down her fork. “Would I talk like this if we saw a body?”
“I don’t know. You get worked up over the weirdest stuff.” Elena pushed her hair from her cheek with one wet wrist. “A whale.”
“We see whales all the time. Guess again.”
“A sea lion.”
Sam rolled her eyes. And though she was behind her sister’s back, Elena couldn’t see her, Elena still seemed to know. The movement must have been felt. So Elena was already on to the next guess: “A merman.”
“You’re never going to get it. A bear!”
“No way.”
“A huge bear! Swimming in the channel!”
Sam had seen it herself: the wet, furred hump of the animal’s back, the line of its neck, its pointed nose and small round ears. The water was silver and the sky was dimming blue, and the creature, against those colors, was a dark spot, but the last light in the air outlined its form, made it clear and shocking and strange. The tourists called out to each other in delight. Exclamations in English, Spanish, Chinese. One of them tossed something in the water toward it, and another passenger scolded them. The ferry chugged on, but for a few minutes, long odd ones, the boat and the bear were side by side, pushing forward, abandoning the mainland together, heading out toward the night. The captain even made an announcement over the intercom so anyone sitting inside could come see for themselves. The bear’s lifted head. Its slicked shoulders. The widening ripples it left behind. It did not look in their direction as it paddled determinedly on.
Elena was drying the plates now, stacking them in the cupboards. “Where in the channel? You don’t think it could reach us, do you?”
“Between Shaw and Lopez.” Sam was tickled by the question. “Why? Are you scared?”
“Of bears?”
“Of scary bears?”
“You’re not?”
“No way.” What was Sam afraid of? Withering away here. Dreaming of chances she’d never be able to take, and shriveling up from that denial, getting poorer and put under more pressure and pushed even farther from the rest of the world. Compared to those fears, getting mauled by a bear seemed a delight.
Elena turned back to the sink. “Our brave girl.”
“How was your day?”
“Fine. No wildlife. Unless you count Bert Greenwood coming in drunk at noon.”
“That’s not unusual, I guess.”
“More of a whale than a bear,” Elena said.
Her hands were under the faucet. Her face was tipped down, making her neck stretch long and the bones bump up at her nape. “Want me to do the pots?” Sam asked.
Elena shook her head. “It’s no problem. Keep talking.”
Sam was out of stuff to say. Those few wet minutes seeing the strange swimmer in the sound had been the only novel ones in the day. Everything else was routine: dismissive passengers, weak coffee, stacks of paper cups swaying as the ferry churned on. Except—“Ben asked if I wanted to go camping with him.”
Elena looked over her shoulder. Thin and dark as the skin under her eyes was, she still looked, for the moment, bright. Pleased. Like she’d heard a joke. “Camping?”
It was so embarrassing. “On Orcas on Thursday.”
“Where? At Moran?”
“At…I don’t know, I didn’t ask.”
Elena smirked, just a flash of it, before facing the sink again. “You should go.”
“No. Ew,” Sam said.
“What’s ew about it?”
“I’m not going to spend the night with him. In some tent, stargazing.”
“Why not?” Elena was faced away, but Sam could hear the smile in her voice, the little laughter there. “He likes you. It’s adorable. He wants to roll up in sleeping bags and make s’mores.”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
Elena turned back around. Her face was sincere. “I’m not making fun of you.” A swoop of purple underlining each wide eye. Sam didn’t say anything, but she forgave Elena, immediately, with no grudge held, and Elena knew it. “I wouldn’t,” Elena said. Then returned to the dishes.
“Anyway, I told him no,” Sam said. “It’s a stupid idea. I’m sure one of us will have to work on Friday.”
“So what, you can’t board from Orcas?”
Sam didn’t know about that, whether she and Ben could start their respective shifts from a different port. But she said, “No. You can’t. Anyway, you need me here overnight.”
“It’s fine.” Elena was scrubbing the bottom of a pot. One shoulder high with the effort. “You don’t really get up with her anyway.”
“Yes, I do,” Sam said.
Sudsy water sloshed into the sink. Elena turned on the faucet again, rinsed the pot, and set it on the counter.
This was love: the two of them in the kitchen at the end of the day. The one bond that would last their whole lives. Speaking shorthand, getting irritated, understanding each other so well that they didn’t even need to speak the words of a fight out loud.
Sam shook her head at her sister’s back. “I can’t believe you’re sticking up for camping. What a waste of time.”
Her sister was rinsing out the empty sink. “Oh, yeah, your precious time.”
“I’m not trying to go on dates with Ben. Right? We’re not here to get into relationships or whatever.” Sam was repeating what Elena herself had said, in so many words, when they were starting high school and things began to get bad with their mother’s boyfriend. That man had wanted to set himself up as king. Rule their household. It had been their family’s very worst time—no matter how punishing the relentless routine of these days now could feel, they were nothing compared to the actual punishments he had dealt out, his shouting and his hands. Surviving his reign made everything clear: they could only count on each other.
Elena turned off the faucet. “Just saying. A little stargazing sounds like fun.”
From the back room, a cough. Sound traveled too easily through this house. Thin walls with meager insulation. Elena took up a dish towel.
“I’ve got it,” Sam said. She put the chili in the fridge and fetched a clean glass from the cupboard. To fill the glass at the sink, she had to stand close to her sister. She put her hand on Elena’s back. That touch, and the water glass, were an apology. Elena was right: Sam did not take her fair share of the nighttime responsibilities. Sam could do better. Look at her now, standing, acting. Under her fingertips, Elena’s long shoulder blade felt flat as a dish. The water ran over the glass’s sides and Elena shut it off.
The sisters were born thirteen months apart. They had been raised together here in their mother’s rangy care, in this house that smelled of mildew, where the cupboards were never empty but the utility bills weren’t always paid. The men who’d sired them had left long before Sam could remember. Elena said she didn’t remember, either. Their mother must have remembered, but had chosen never to tell. When they were young, the girls tried to question her, but she would only distract them in response. If she was painting their nails, they took that quiet moment, her bent worshipful head, as their opportunity to ask: who were their fathers? How’d she meet them? Where’d they go? She would hold up the sisters’ hands and say, “Look what a beautiful color you chose.” Ice blue with white sparkles for Elena’s manicure. Deep, brilliant red for Sam’s.
As children, Sam and Elena imagined fathers worthy of keeping secret. Heroes. Princes. Spies gone deep undercover. But eventually they realized (their mother’s boyfriend, when he moved in, proved it) that people refused to speak not about exceptional romantic adventures but about run-of-the-mill assholes. At fourteen and fifteen, the sisters were told by their mother not to complain about their home life. He was stressed, she said, and that’s why he lashed out. They all had to be more sympathetic. When Elena mentioned to her tenth-grade science teacher what was going on, and child services got involved, their mother was shocked, silent. Bewildered by their decision to disclose. The social workers visited, wrote up reports, and vanished, and Elena’s teacher did nothing after that but gaze with furrowed eyebrows at the girls in the school halls. Once the man moved out, no one ever wanted to mention him again. Sam and Elena understood, then, that whoever their fathers were, they were better not discussed.
Their mother hadn’t dated anybody seriously since. As kids, the sisters thought they might one day marry—maybe a pair of brothers, they told themselves—and move out, but that didn’t happen. Within a couple years, their mother got sick, and so the stories they made up with each other shifted. A town where they were strangers to their neighbors. A garden of their own with two rosebushes, white and red, that they would have the time to indulge in tending.
The dreaming helped. It had since they were children, wondering about the answers to the questions no adults in their life would address. It helped them make sense of what they could not, in everyday life, fathom. When they were teens and their house became unbearable, they went out into the woods, so they could lie on the cool earth between hemlock trees and imagine being elsewhere. Needles shivered over them. Meteors streaked across the sky. The moon, when it was full, was a hole in the darkness, an open door to another world.
These days, they had less time to whisper about what would be. They needed to dedicate their days to what was. But Sam still dreamed. Even over the last two winters, when the days were short and dark, and they were worried about how the virus might threaten their mother, and their existence was so constrained by the pandemic’s rules—even then. Sam would stare out her bedroom window to the jumbled constellations. She imagined the moon filled, beyond its white shining surface, with roses. She dreamed, and carried those dreams, precious things, back to Elena to sustain them.
“Thank you, baby,” their mother said when Sam handed her the water. Under the worn cotton of her shirt, her chest catheter made unnatural lines. “Is your sister up?”
“She’s finishing the dishes.”
“Would you ask her to come here when she’s done?”
Sam said, “Do you need something, Mom?”
“Elena can help me,” their mother said.
“I can. More oxygen?”
Their mother hesitated. The water in the glass shivered in her grip. Finally, she said, “I have to use the toilet.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry. I just need a hand. I’m worn out tonight.”
“That’s fine. I can do it.”
“But don’t be rough.”
“I’m not,” Sam said. “I won’t.” She stretched out her fingers, clenched two fists, let them go. She could be the gentle one.
She drew the blanket off her mother’s legs and guided her feet to the floor. Held one arm around her mother’s waist, helped her stand. Her mother inhaled. The sound was strained. Sam loosened her grip on her mother’s body. They moved together to the hall, to the bathroom. Sam knelt, helped her mother with her underwear, and pushed to get her positioned on the toilet seat.
“Too fast,” her mother said.
“What?”
“Slow down.”
Sam’s muscles were tight with the energy she wasn’t expending. She moved more slowly. Got her mother sitting where she ought to be. Sat back on her shins on the powdery yellow tile of the bathroom floor.
Her mother, hunched forward, looked at her. The bending over made her breath shorter. She had Elena’s deep-set eyes, heavy eyelids, pale hair, and Sam’s mouth. She had split herself up, divided her own face, to make them.
“How was work?” she asked.
“Oh,” Sam said. “Fine.”
They were quiet. Then her mother said, “You think I should be in diapers.”
Sam said, “No, I don’t. Why do you say that?”
“It wouldn’t be easier?”
“I’m pretty sure they’re expensive. Would it be easier for you? Do you want them?”
“I can do this by myself,” she said. “I do it when you two aren’t here. I’m fine.”
Recently, their mother smelled, was wet, sometimes when they got home. Elena changed her sheets daily. Sam said, “All right.” Her shinbones pressed two hard lines against the tile.
Sam thought about the water off the sides of the ferry. The white pattern of ripples on top, and the bear’s bulk breaking through, pushing past. The tree-covered hills that met them at every return to the island. The swaying masts of the hundreds of sailboats moored. She thought about the girls she and Elena went to school with. The few who had stayed; the many who’d left. Their homes vacant during breaks while their families vacationed in Hawaii or at resorts in Mexico. Their manicures done by Sam and Elena’s mother for special occasions: nails buffed, cuticles pushed back, formaldehyde and dibutyl phthalate inhaled over hours and weeks and decades. Those girls, turned women, passing occasionally through the golf club with their parents, not bothering to ask Elena how her mother’s lungs were. Elena’s hands in the sink. The seals barking at the foot of the docks in the harbor.
“Tissue,” their mother said. “Please and thank you.”
Sam braced her, pulled at her clothes, tried again to move more considerately. When she flushed the toilet, Elena called, “Everything okay?” Yes, Sam called back, don’t worry. She escorted their mother to her bed.
That night, Sam woke up to groaning. Elena was in their mother’s bedroom talking too low to distinguish the words. Sam didn’t want to get up. She knew she should, but she didn’t want to—she decided to get up and then the oxygen concentrator turned on and Elena’s voice faded and it seemed that everything was fine. Sam listened and in the listening fell back asleep. She dreamed about the woods.
She woke up once more after that—more noises. The sun wasn’t up yet, but she had already slept long enough that the first ferry of the day had to be running. That wasn’t Sam’s business, though. She wasn’t working until the afternoon.
The noise wasn’t her family, this time. Sounds from outside, scratching, snuffling. An animal on the move.
She rolled over. Her bedroom was so dark that she couldn’t see the dresser or door. It was like her eyes were shut already. If the bear had swum the channel at this hour, they would’ve never seen it—it would’ve gone by them shadowed and sleek as a fish. She closed her eyes, black on black, while thinking of that: the animal. The luck she’d had to spot it. Sam did feel lucky, sometimes. She did see some beautiful things.