Bear

Chapter 6

No one else would get it, but Sam, even after spending the ride to the club reliving the sighting with Elena, couldn’t keep the encounter quiet—it was too exciting not to talk about. It made her usual dull routine glow. She had been frightened, absolutely, but now, with the bear gone, the adrenaline in Sam had turned to sheer thrill.

On returning home, Sam hurried to her mother’s room, where she refilled her mother’s water glass, adjusted her pillows, and took her through every detail. The bear, the wait, the police, the plan. “We’re supposed to call in any more sightings,” Sam said, and her mother said, seriously, “All right,” which made Sam wonder—how often in a day did her mother even look out the window? When she was first diagnosed, the fatigue and shortness of breath were manageable, but as time passed, she spent more and more hours in bed, concentrating her effort on her oxygen intake, metering out the life she had left. All the same, Sam played along, for this short moment, with the story that her mother was an active member of their community, a participant in the wider world outside this house’s door. “We need to be careful,” Sam said, “until they confirm it’s off the island. The sheriff’s deputies said it won’t hurt us but you never really know.”

That afternoon, on the ferry, Sam told one of the deckhands who swung by concessions for a soda. He raised his eyebrows but didn’t move his mouth inside his wiry gray beard. Once he left, Sam busied herself by sorting the cash in the register so the bills faced the same way. Presidents looking to starboard. The deckhand hadn’t understood; the deputies, that morning, hadn’t either. She didn’t know why she had bothered telling anybody. It was too bizarre to share.

Then that deckhand returned with another crew member. They asked for the story again. Sam perked right up. She gave them all the details, and free coffees, too.

A few hours later, Ben appeared in her galley. In his yellow reflective vest, he shone through the dinnertime crowd. His radio was looped across his chest. When he caught her looking, he winked. Sam turned to the register and shook her head. A passenger came up to ask her how the sausages were. She shrugged. The passenger trotted off to grab himself one from the rolling rack. Keeping her head bowed, Sam rang up ice creams for two teenagers, bagged nuts for an old man. Gleaming yellow stayed in her peripheral vision. The line cleared, she raised her eyes, and Ben was there.

“So you don’t answer any of my texts,” he said, “but you pick up the call of the wild?”

Sam tightened her mouth so she wouldn’t smile at him. “Don’t be dumb.”

“Come on. I want to hear.”

“What’s there to tell?” she said. “It was only a grizzly sitting on our front step. Practically ringing the doorbell.”

Ben hadn’t been working the evening the bear swam the channel, but he’d heard about it, of course, from the other deckhands. They all gossiped down there in the bowels of the boat. He was newer to the ferry system than Sam was, but he’d started during the pandemic, while dining was closed, so he had months on her of working with these particular people. They were chummy. It reminded Sam, sometimes, of high school. If Ben had been there with her, instead of six hundred miles south smoking weed and driving his parents crazy, he would’ve sunk right into Friday Harbor’s tiny social scene. Been the snarky kid at the back of the classroom, played golf, gotten high with the popular crowd after the last bell rang. He wouldn’t have bothered with Sam. And she would’ve found him annoying. Sometimes she still did. At least, she knew she should.

He leaned over her counter. “Don’t you have to work?” she asked, and he said yes, he did, but he didn’t move. So she told him the whole thing. He gasped. He goggled. He performed, beautifully, the same amazement that tourists did when a whale surfaced alongside their boat. Sam decided not to mind it this time. When she took out her phone to show him the pictures, he took it from her, and, while a passenger came up to the counter to buy a handful of candy bars, pinched the screen, zooming in. Ben’s hair was a cap of brown waves. His neck was long and thin. His ears stuck out. Elena had told Sam, years earlier, not to get distracted by romance, which was an easy guideline to follow when hanging around a guy like him. Sam rang up someone else’s bag of chips.

Ben’s radio crackled. “I’ve got to go,” he said, handing the phone back. “You’re sure you’re not up for Orcas tonight?”

“Yeah. I can’t.”

“You could,” he said. “You just don’t want to.”

Sam shrugged. “Okay, I don’t want to.” She slipped her phone under the counter. He left for the lower deck, his body a yellow buoy bobbing away.

She sold people chowders, caramel corn, and baked goods. The shift passed more easily than usual. The more Sam spread the story around, the more the bright, busy feeling that had come over her after the bear left seeped into every bit of the day: how big the animal had been, how vivid and close, became, in her retelling, fantastic qualities, exhilarating rather than intimidating. Now that she knew she and Elena were safe, that they had survived it and laughed at the end, she almost wished it would happen again.

Toward the end of her shift, Ben popped up in front of her counter and growled. Sam jumped and yelped and laughed again. The passengers milling in front of the beverage fridge smiled in confusion. Past the galley windows, the water reflected the white, round, low sun.

It was a wonderful day. When Sam got home after work, she and Elena talked through their morning over again. They reminded each other of the details one had forgotten: the long roll of the animal’s tongue, the mound at the top of its back. What Sam had blurted out to the police when they first arrived: “?‘What else were you doing all this time?’?” Elena quoted, delighted at the impropriety. Sam didn’t even remember. The deputies’ faces had fuzzed into one pale, sandy-haired blot of authority in her mind. She only wanted to talk with Elena about the ferocious thing they’d seen, the dangerous magic they had lived through.

In bed, that night, Sam took surveys while her thoughts wandered. The floorboards in the hall creaked. Her sister came in and crawled onto the covers beside her.

“I can’t sleep,” Elena whispered.

Sam clicked off her screen and nestled down next to her sister. Their mother’s room was silent on the other side of the wall. Sam missed this: the two of them curled up in this bedroom. Telling secrets to each other in the dark.

Sam said, “I wish we’d gotten better pictures of it.”

“You should’ve taken a video.”

“I will if it comes back.”

“Ooh,” Elena said. They lay there. The long weight of Elena’s body held Sam’s covers, so she was pinned, pleasantly, under her sheet. Warm and secure. Exhaustion hit her like a blow. Her jaw and eyes ached.

Elena kept talking, steady. “I didn’t think it was real when I first saw it. I used to have nightmares about that. A bear.”

Sam unstuck her mouth. “No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did,” Elena said. “When we were kids, I’d have dreams that we were outside and a bear, or sometimes a wolf, would try to get us. And I’d have to save you and Mom.”

That wasn’t true, Sam thought. At least, she didn’t remember them—these nightmares. She remembered Elena dreaming about sharks. Sharks? Or was it—an octopus? Elena was scared, even now, of deep water—not being able to see her feet under the surface—murkiness—Elena was still talking. It was too much to listen. Swaddled in her sister’s voice, by the hush of her meaningless words, Sam let herself, happily, drift.