Chapter 5
When the sisters were young, very young, they loved living on San Juan. Summers, the girls would go over to Lime Kiln and pass entire days posted up on the rocky bluffs watching for whales. Spotting them was like catching shooting stars. You couldn’t focus on any one spot—you had to let your gaze go wide. Elena was especially good at it. She would jostle Sam’s elbow and say, “Humpback.” The tourists next to them, outfitted with binoculars, gasped, leaning close to try to learn her secrets. Elena pointed out the pods. Humpbacks, gray whales, minkes, porpoises rolling and leaping in the surf. Gorgeous orcas, with their dorsal fins sharp as blades.
The girls hiked along the coastal cliffs as otters floated below. They went north, to English Camp, where a Coast Salish longhouse once stood, and played pretend among the thick damp ferns. Park rangers waved in their direction. Elena asked where they came from, what they did here, whether they liked it, and they told her the names of their hometowns and the list of their duties and how, yes, they treasured this place. Sam and Elena chased each other down the park’s trails. They hooted and squealed. Their world seemed enchanted, a paradise.
They pulled out grass in clumps below people’s fences and fed it to the farm animals trapped behind: cows with wide wet eyes and luxurious lashes; sheep with flat, shocked human-seeming faces; long-necked alpacas who teetered over to them on thin legs. They watched the buzzing activity around neighbors’ bee boxes and pictured honey heists where they would crack a box open and steal its combs. Overhead, bald eagles held tight to tree branches. When roosters crowed, the sisters crowed back.
Blackberries and salmonberries grew wild in the bushes. Stained the girls’ fingers, their mouths. On the island’s south tip, in American Camp, they walked through grasses as tall as they were, where soft white flowers brushed their cheeks and ears. Tiny, rare marbled butterflies floated by. Foxes emerged on the paths ahead and stared, bold as could be, before vanishing into the undergrowth.
Even school, back then, seemed like an adventure. Or at least it wasn’t yet a site of social torture. Sam liked her teachers, up until third grade or so. She didn’t mind her classmates. She enjoyed the activities. They had pancake breakfasts; they skimmed pages at book fairs; they even, one year, got to spend three days aboard an enormous sailboat to learn about the marine ecosystem of the Salish Sea. In those contexts, Sam’s lack of friends didn’t matter. The school programmed their days, filling them with fun, so none of the students bothered to spend time on who was fitting in and who wasn’t. Or at least Sam didn’t bother. She poured syrup, flipped through chapters, gaped at Steller sea lions, and generally busied herself with the fantasy that she already had everything she could ever want or need.
The girls’ playgrounds were the stacks of driftwood on the beach. Deer peered at them from the hills. The sisters hid behind bleached logs and called out to each other. They stacked sticks to make shelters, then crouched inside. They dangled seaweed, salt-smelling, from their fingertips.
Did they know, then, how little their family had, and how precarious their grip on that little bit was? They had no idea. Each evening, their mother came home from the salon exhausted. Stinking of solvents. Sometimes she would cough. But the girls didn’t know yet—none of them knew—that the chemicals she inhaled were growing granulomas in her lungs, causing her lymph nodes to swell, narrowing her arteries. Their mother made them scrambled eggs or buttered noodles for dinner. She poured vegetables onto their plates. Canned peas, canned beets, canned corn. They told her what they’d seen on the island that day, and she oohed and aahed, making them proud as young queens.
Their power went out some days in winter. Elena rubbed their mother’s shoulders in front of the TV. The sisters crouched on the forest floor on their property, studying mushrooms, telling each other stories. They were heroines. They made magic. They were the girls at the center of a fairy tale, and they, along with their mother, would live in such bliss all their days.
This was not a fairy tale. They were not, faced with this beast on their step, brave. Sam woke up to the shock of a door slamming and Elena’s scream. Hearing the tumult, Sam knew immediately, horribly, that Elena had found their mother dead. Sam had been bracing for that moment for years but still it knocked her heart out of her chest. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. She tumbled out of bed, hit the floor with both feet, and ran.
Elena was in the front hall shaking. Sam was shaking, too, by then, coursing with dread and adrenaline, trying to prepare for whatever it was they would have to do. Their mother. Their anchor. “Where is she?” Sam said.
“There’s a bear.”
From behind her bedroom door, their mother was calling. “Elena?”
Sam couldn’t adjust. “She—”
“A fucking bear,” Elena said. “Oh my god.” She pressed her hands to her face, covered her eyes. Her trembling fingers stretched to her hairline, threading under the blond strands. “It’s right outside.”
Their mother’s door opened. She was repeating their names. Sam said, “There’s a what?”
“There’s a bear.” Elena took her hands down. “What do we do?”
“What do we—” Sam didn’t understand. Her rational mind hadn’t woken up yet, so the situation seemed incomplete, incomprehensible. She wanted to sit on the floor and have someone explain it to her. But Elena was hysterical. Turning to face their mother, Sam said, “Everything’s okay.”
“What happened?” their mother asked. “She’s hurt?” Her fists were pressed to her chest. The collar of her shirt was low enough to expose the top of her catheter. Her sternum, pale and ridged with bone.
“Everyone’s fine. Right?” Sam looked to Elena, who kept shaking. Turned back to their mother. “We’re fine. Elena just got a fright.”
Their mother didn’t understand, either. “What happened?”
“She got scared. Something outside.”
“There’s a bear outside,” Elena said.
“A what!” exclaimed their mother. “No!”
“We’re going to take care of it,” Sam said. To their mother, but to Elena, too, and to herself, because she did need assurance, she couldn’t clear the awful vision of their mother found stiff in bed, their mother gone from them. She went over to hold their mother’s thin arm. It was cool but not cold—not yet. “Don’t worry. We’ll call the police.”
“Animal control,” their mother said.
“Animal control,” Sam agreed. She squeezed their mother’s arm, and their mother squeezed back, pulling Sam’s hand toward her for a second, showing Sam she was still here. Sam said, “Go rest.”
As soon as their mother was back in her room, Sam said, quick, “What are you talking about, a bear?”
They went together to the window in the living room. Elena was holding on to Sam now. Sam could feel her quaking, the tendons seizing, Elena’s effort over and over to release them and how they refused. “Be careful,” Elena whispered. But Sam, having seen their mother, wasn’t scared anymore. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her older sister, or didn’t heed sincere warnings, or didn’t fear apex predators—she simply couldn’t process how it was possible, an animal like that outside. Here? The words made no sense. Had the ferry story made Elena delusional? She, who had spent her whole adulthood so levelheaded? Yet there was her movement, the seize and release, at Sam’s side.
And there, Sam saw through the glass, was a bear.
It was hunkered down at their front door, just at the edge of the walkway. It faced away. Its rump was huge, thickly furred, gold and black and brown. Matted in spots. Dense with texture. Past that, the lump of its shoulders, the soft half circles of its small high ears. Its head was massive. It turned its face and the sisters shrank from the window. But it was calm. It looked in profile toward the road, sniffed the air, and yawned, expansive, a mouth opening vastly, yellow teeth exposed three inches long, black lips curling back and tongue spilling forth. It shut its mouth and faced away from them again.
“Is this real?” Elena whispered. Her warm breath against Sam’s cheek.
Sam stared. The smudged windowpane, the cracking frame—the slimmest of barriers between them and it. There, not ten feet away, was the animal’s massive body. As big as three men. Wider, stronger, and far deadlier. Its tail, its back, its thighs. It twitched and its muscles rippled. A dark stripe of fur lay over its spine.
Elena clung to her. Sam said they had to call someone. Get help.
The 911 operator told them to calm down and breathe. They described the animal outside. Clutching Sam’s phone, they talked while pressed against the refrigerator. The bear, with a blow, could smash through one of their windows, barge into the kitchen, demolish their lives, but they huddled there as if the humming fridge could protect them. From the back of the house, their mother made a sound, and Elena met Sam’s eyes. Grimaced. The operator told them someone would be there soon.
After they hung up, they listened. All Sam could hear were the rustles of Elena’s body: her lips parting, her throat working. There was nothing from outside. A long minute passed. Elena said, “I’m going to check on Mom.”
Once she was alone, Sam realized that she was still in her pajamas—a T-shirt and underwear. Elena, who got up earlier on the days Sam worked the late shift, was already dressed, but Sam was bare-legged, half-naked, and goosebumped. She needed to put pants on. But she was afraid to leave her post at the front of the house. Step by cautious step, she crept out to the living room and peeked through the edge of the window. It was still there. Sittingfat and relaxed. She backed away and hurried to her room.
While she was pulling on a pair of leggings, she heard her sister whispering. “Sam?” Sam hopped over to her bedroom door. Elena was coming down the hall. When she saw Sam, she collapsed her shoulders, performing relief: “Oh, God, I thought you might’ve gone out there.”
“Out there?”
“I don’t know!”
Sam adjusted her waistband and came to Elena’s side. “She’s okay?”
“She’s fine.” They kept whispering to each other. Did bears have good hearing? Like owls? Sam had no idea. Elena said, “Why’d it come here?”
Sam couldn’t begin to guess. She had the urge, then, to go back to the living room, to check. “Is it still outside?”
“I mean, we didn’t hear it leave.”
Sam eased along the hall. Elena followed. They went together to the front. Together, it was easier to be brave; Sam knew Elena was worried, but that worry wrapped around them both like a shield, making it easier to step forward, easier to move. Sam got to the window’s edge, and yes, there it was, its brown fur bright in the sun. The sisters had seen whales, plenty of times, and cattle, but Sam could not wrap her mind around the size of this particular thing—the bear’s proximity threw off her sense of scale. Its head alone…the width of its neck. She took out her phone. Tried to get a picture. Couldn’t fit it all in the frame.
Elena said, “Be careful.”
“I’m being careful,” Sam whispered back.
On her screen, it looked like a lump, a badly folded shag rug. Sam took the pictures anyway. She needed to have the record. It was too strange. The photos were terrible, though. Her phone’s camera kept focusing on the smudged glass of the window, making the bear, beyond it, a blur. Sam came closer to the pane.
The bear moved. It rose to all fours, shifting its weight, and shivered. A cloud of sunlit dust rose off.
Elena yanked her back. Hissed, “Jesus Christ.” Sam’s heart was knocking in her chest again, smashing against the container of her rib cage. They pulled each other to the kitchen, where they huddled, waiting for rescue.
It took nearly half an hour for anyone to arrive. Long enough that their heart rates fell, and they got bored, there against the fridge, and Sam remembered all over again the uselessness of asking for help from the authorities. How many times in their lives had they been let down?
Sam took out her phone and opened a survey. “Send me those pictures,” Elena said, and Sam did. Elena texted her manager to say she’d be late, then texted the other server about getting there earlier to cover. The phone buzzed in Elena’s palm. Elena showed Sam her screen: Stop playing, her co-worker had written back, followed by three fat-cheeked brown bear emojis. Sam was struck by how insufficient those cartoon images were. As the flat-faced blond princess emoji was to Elena—a cap of hair, a thin smile, a golden crown—these blobby, even-keeled teddy bears were to the creature outside. The thing at their door was something more complicated, more volatile, than those could even hint at. It had capacities they could not imagine.
Elena kept texting. Sam tapped her way through two surveys and started a third.
At last, a knock on the door. Elena jumped, and then laughed, too loud, covering her mouth. Sam had to laugh along. The sound was high. Shrieky. “I thought it was the bear,” Elena said.
“I know. Me too.”
Impossible as that was, the beast rising to its hind legs, brushing itself off, smoothing the fur back from its brow with one monstrous paw, and giving three sharp raps to the door, Sam and Elena moved forward fearfully. They turned the lock and the knob. The door pushed toward them, and Sam, by instinct, pushed back, trying to defend her family, before she absorbed that there were two people on the step. A human hand reaching out.
“Sheriff’s office,” one of the two uniformed men said. “You called about a wildlife disturbance?”
The sisters explained. Sam started, then Elena stepped in to give the morning’s details. Sam took out her phone, the pictures, to show its shape, its bulk. The golden brown richness. The breadth of its body. The air between them stank of musk.
One sheriff’s deputy was taking notes. The other stepped off their walkway to look at the ground, the dirt and trampled weeds.
“And you’re sure it wasn’t a deer,” the note-taking one said. “Maybe a mama and a baby. Curled up together so they looked big.”
“No, this was— Absolutely not,” Elena said.
Sam said, “We got a good look at it. It was right here.”
The deputy kept writing. The other one said, “Does with their young can be very aggressive.”
“It wasn’t a deer,” Elena said.
The note-taking one took their names and phone numbers. He confirmed their address. He asked them how long they’d been there, and if they’d ever seen anything like this before.
Finally he clicked the top of his pen and threaded it through the coils at the top of his notebook. “What we’re going to do,” he said, “is report this to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Someone from there might reach out to you to follow up. But this isn’t unheard of. We had one swim over from Whidbey a couple years ago. You girls remember that?”
Sam and Elena shook their heads.
“They island-hop on their way to Canada.”
“One of the world’s largest black bear populations over there,” the other deputy said.
“Oh, really?” said Elena, faint and polite.
“Believe it,” the formerly note-taking deputy said. “Vancouver Island. So in our experience, so long as it’s not bothering anyone, not getting into garbage or chasing your pets or anything, we leave it be, let it make its way west. It’s on the move anyway.”
“You can give us a call if you see it again,” the second deputy added.
“Keep us posted,” the first one said. “So we can track it. No need to approach it, no need to shoot at it—”
“Shoot at it,” Sam repeated.
“For example,” the other deputy said. “Not suggesting you two would, but some guys, you know, get it into their heads to try.”
“We just hid,” Elena said.
“Well, good,” said the deputy. He gave them his card. Told them they could contact the public records office to get a copy of their case report if they wanted. Reminded them that someone from the WDFW might be in touch. And informed them they had nothing to worry about.
Behind the deputies and the green-striped car marked as a nonemergency vehicle, the woods were lush and shadowed. Oak leaves brushed against each other in the morning breeze. Birds called. The bear was out there somewhere. It was moving, heavy, between the trees, its claws sinking into the soil. It had visited them and then moved on to its next destination, wherever that might be.
It must have been the same bear Sam saw from the ferry, though the officers had made it sound as though these animals made a routine of crossing the sound. But really, that couldn’t be true, she’d been working on the boat for years and never seen such a thing. Unless the waters had changed somehow during the pause forced by the pandemic…but she’d been living on the island all her life, and they’d never had bears, she’d heard stories maybe only once or twice before—she could hardly remember—no one had ever talked about a thing like this.
The sheriff’s deputies left. Sam and Elena shut the door, faced each other, and laughed. Loud, glorious. Like they were little kids at play again. How strange—how magical. How grand.
“Girls?” their mother called.
“That was the sheriff,” Sam called back. “Everything’s fine. It’s gone.”
“Come and tell me,” their mother said.
Elena was still looking at Sam. Elena’s expression was radiant, giggly. She was trying to pinch her mouth shut. The corners of her eyes were creased. “I have to get to work,” she said.
“I’ll drive you,” Sam said. “Let me just tell Mom.”
“Okay.” Elena didn’t let her go yet, though; she stood smiling. “That was crazy.”
“Insane.”
“I was so scared.”
“You opened the door and it was there?”
“It was right there,” Elena said. Laughing again, awed, thrilled. “Oh my god. What’ll I tell everyone?”
“They must be dying for details. Are they still texting you? They probably think it gobbled you up by now.”
Elena shook her head. “I can’t believe that actually happened.”
“I know. No one’s going to believe us,” Sam said. “Oh, well.” Elena grinned at her, and Sam went to get her shoes and car keys.