Bear

Chapter 11

Their mother was dying. Sam and Elena and their mother herself knew it. The doctor knew it, and knew that they knew, so shared his assessment after her appointment without any hesitation or tenderness: her condition had worsened. Her pulmonary arteries showed more damage than at her last visit, and her right ventricle, pushing harder to pump blood through damaged vessels, had further enlarged. Her heart was straining. Eventually its muscle would weaken enough to fail. When Sam asked how long eventually might be, he said he didn’t know. Eventually, he repeated. She would pass by heart failure, or, perhaps, a blood clot, or a sudden gush of blood into the lungs. His message to Sam, a reiteration, was that at some point, from one cause or another, she would go.

Her mother sat in a vinyl-wrapped chair in his office while he recited this. Sam, from the other chair, reached for her hand. Her mother squeezed back. Her slim fingers wrapped around Sam’s palm. Her fingernails were pale and smooth as the sliced almonds in the salads served at the golf club; her pulse was fast, alarming, the rhythm of a bird’s chest clenched in Sam’s fist.

The doctor showed them to the reception desk, where, he said, they needed to discuss their account. There, a woman showed Sam numbers she didn’t understand. The woman spoke firmly. Her surgical mask creased with every movement of her mouth. Sam’s mother leaned against the counter. At one point, she shut her eyes, and Sam said, “I need to get my mom home.”

Her mother opened them again. “I’m sorry. Just tired.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Sam said. She took the notices from the woman at the front desk, then helped her mother out the door. After she led her mother to the car at the curb, she texted Elena: Appt done, heart not great. Let’s discuss newest info together

Their mother’s death was on its way. This wasn’t a surprise. Still, Sam was shaken. She gripped the steering wheel and guided the car through the town’s roundabouts. Her mother, in the passenger seat, looked at the low houses passing by. Above the noise of the engine, Sam could hear her mother’s breathing. Thin and rapid. As it always was. How much longer would Sam get to hear that sound?

The phone vibrated in Sam’s lap when they were already out of Friday Harbor. She glanced down to read it. Ok thanks. New info over here to talk about too

“Is that Elena?” their mother asked.

Sam pressed a button on the phone to darken the screen. “Yeah.”

“Is she home?”

“She should be,” Sam said. The grill had closed an hour earlier.

Her mother said, “Don’t worry, baby.” Sam glanced over at her, then back at the road. She wanted to cry when she looked at her mom. When Sam was little, if she was frightened, she would press her face against her mother’s thighs, and her mother would bend to rub circles on Sam’s back, and whisper in Sam’s ear: it’s all right. You’re all right. Sam wanted that, exactly that. The warm pressure of her mother’s hand between her shoulder blades. It’s all right.

But it wasn’t. And there was nothing to cry about in that fact. This was how it was.

“I’m not worried,” Sam said.

“Good.”

They kept driving. On the side of the road, cows stared, dumb-eyed and helpless, over an unending fence. At a stop sign, Sam said, “I just want you to be comfortable.”

“I am,” her mother said. “I’m fine.”

“I don’t want you to be in pain.”

Her mother sighed. The constricted sound of that air—it hurt Sam to listen. “You know what, Sammy, does it help you to hear that I’m used to it?”

The car’s blinker was on. Sam said, “I guess.”

Her mother was looking out the passenger-side window. “When your grandmother passed,” she said, “I was with her. She’d spent her last week kind of…in and out. She wasn’t totally conscious. I took those days off work. I didn’t know when it would be. Every time I made a meal for you girls, or went to the bathroom, or had to change a diaper, I was scared that she would go without me, but she held on.”

Sam didn’t know what kind of response her mother wanted. She guessed: “That sounds so hard.”

“It was beautiful,” her mother said. “She waited for me. In the end, we were together—it was at night, I was in her room—and her breath changed. It sounded different. It got slow. I held her hand through it. I told her how much I loved her—how much I’d always loved her, all my life. It would go quiet, and I’d think that there it was, that had to have been her last breath, but then she would breathe again. It went on like that for hours, until there was no breath anymore.”

They were parked at the house by now. The trees leaned over them. The engine was running. Sam turned the key to shut it off.

Her mother said, “I’m so grateful I got to be with her in that moment. To help her go.”

The trees grew thick, branches laced together. Sam stared out the windshield at their shapes. Inside the car, the air was cool, and her mother, Sam felt, was waiting for something, but Sam didn’t know what that something was.

“I wish I remembered her,” Sam said.

“She adored you two.”

Sam and Elena were toddlers when their grandmother died. Their mother had practically been a child herself—three years younger than Sam was now—but she had already, at that age, done so much. Brought two people into life. Accompanied another person out of it.

The spectacular young woman their mother used to be. Before her boyfriend moved in, before sickness, back when the sisters were small. Their gorgeous girlish mother: cropped shirts, false teeth, impeccable pedicures. Lying on the floor between their beds in the dark to whisper assurances to Sam after nightmares. Coming home with her cash tips and giving Elena, with a flourish, a ten-dollar bill. Acting like they were rich. Like she was doing wonderfully. And the sisters, in their innocence, believing her. Revering her. The way their mother had taken care of them, until she couldn’t anymore.

Carefully, Sam said, “Is there something you need from us? Or want? That kind of…the way you helped Mimi?”

“Oh, my baby,” her mother said. “Thank you. No. I’m glad we’re together, that’s all.”

“We’re not going anywhere.” Sam said it so easily. Because it was what her mother needed to hear, but also because it was true, they weren’t going anywhere, were they, not while their mother was alive. Except the arc of those words out of her own mouth was like a nail sunk into Sam’s chest. She had said it without thinking: her biggest fear. That idea was more horrible than a bear’s tooth, more vivid than a death rattle. It punctured her.

“Well, good.” Her mother’s voice was light.

“Good,” Sam said. “Great.” The day’s errand was over at last.

Getting out of the car, Sam slammed the driver-side door, making a sound that carried into the woods. This late in the day, their property was long with shadows. It was quiet and brown and green. Somewhere out there, beyond the hills and houses, the sound of the car door’s slam was still traveling. It was passing over the edge of the island and along the ripples of the sea.

The air smelled like it had the other day. Like fresh shit.

Sam went to help her mother out of the passenger seat. Her mother straightened, gripping Sam’s shoulder, and wrinkled her nose. “Ugh.”

“Let’s get inside,” Sam said.

The front door of their house opened and Elena stepped out. She had showered, changed from her uniform, knotted her hair into a bun. It wasn’t yet that magical hour before sunset, the time of day when the sky turned pink and honey, but Elena glowed.

“Do you want help?” Elena asked.

Sam said, “We got it.”

“Come get my bag?” their mother asked. Elena came over to take the purse from the car. Her mouth was tipped up at the corners, a tiny smile. She was somewhere Sam was not. Their mother added, “Do you smell that?”

Elena raised her head. Her thin neck stretched.

That stink: meat, fur, oil, earth. There was no second pile on their sidewalk, but the weight of it, the taste, hung in the air. An animal had left its scent there. Sam didn’t want her family to be outside anymore.

In the kitchen, Elena made a fried egg over black beans for their mother, who ate a bite before pausing to catch her breath. Sam told Elena about the new receptionist at the medical center who had blue hair. And a crystal stud, their mother added, set into the skin right here—she touched the top of her cheekbone. How had Sam not noticed that? “That’s called a dermal piercing,” Elena said, leaning over to borrow their mother’s fork, share a bit of the beans. Their mother pushed the plate toward her and Elena pushed it back. “How do you know that?” Sam asked. Elena shrugged. She encouraged their mother to eat a little more. Their mother tried.

Head propped on her hand, Sam watched them. Elena was making some joke; their mother chuckled. It had been Sam’s day off, yet her sister, who’d just worked a full shift, was the one who looked refreshed. She was luminous. Her eyes shone. The idea entered Sam’s mind of their grandmother lying in the dark—the sounds she must’ve made, gasping toward death. Would they hear their mother’s breath change that same way? But Sam pushed that image out. She didn’t want to think about it. Elena was telling a story about a customer.

Dusk had fallen by the time their mother headed to bed. Sam wiped grease from the stove. Down the hall, she could hear Elena’s voice, their mother’s low responses. The toilet flushing, the water running, a door opening and shutting again. The rush of the oxygen tank. Elena’s footsteps coming back.

Entering the kitchen, Elena said, “So how was it really?”

“Bad,” Sam said. “The ventricle looks worse.”

“What’s her PAP?”

“I don’t remember the exact number. They gave me a printout.” Elena went to the hall to dig into Sam’s jacket pockets. Sam went on: “Fifty, maybe?”

Elena returned, papers in hand. Her forehead creased as she skimmed them. “Sammy.”

“What?”

“A hundred twenty.” Elena sat at the table. She was pinching the papers. Her skin was tight over her jaw. “That’s really bad.”

Sam said, “You don’t need to tell me that. I know.”

“You should’ve told me right away.”

“I—” What was the difference, to have texted her from the office or showed her now? What did it change? But then—Sam looked again at Elena’s face, the tension there. Elena had to take on the role of caring for them; the least Sam could do was give her what she needed to do that job.

Elena turned a page over and shook her head. She set that sheet aside on the table. It was what the woman at the reception desk had tried to discuss with Sam when they were leaving: their account, the amount owed. Sam said, “They’re mad about that.”

“I’m on it,” Elena said. “Don’t worry.”

“The lady said we’re overdue or whatever.”

Elena put the papers down and pressed her fingers to her brow bone. Her nails were shaped like their mother’s, thin ovals, but flushed with more color. Her hands hid her eyes for a moment. Then she lowered them, revealing herself again. “I’m handling it. Okay?”

Sam took a chair. On the table between them, Elena’s phone vibrated, and Elena turned it over, checked the screen, put it down. Sam twisted her mouth: “Kristine?” Elena mm-hmmed. “What’s she saying?”

“Nothing important,” Elena said. She picked the papers back up. “Tell me about the rest of the day.”

Sam blew her breath out. Every appointment she drove her mother to was made up of tiny unremarkable griefs: the doctor’s tone, their mother’s posture. She owed Elena the details but they were too dull to share.

Instead, then, of talking about Dr. Boyce’s repeated concerns, Sam said, “During the ride, she talked about Mimi dying.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“She said it was beautiful to be with her. That’s the word she used.” Elena pressed her lips together. Sam said, “She said she was glad we’re here with her now.”

The house around them was quiet. Down the hall, from behind their mother’s door, came the faint noise of televised voices, but that was a background hum. It was nothing more intrusive than the refrigerator running or the faint whistle, outside, of the wind. “Well,” Elena said, letting her voice drop into the stillness. “We’re all glamorous beauties here.”

The papers were set aside. Sam and Elena sat together in silence. There was so much that didn’t need to be spoken. How long they’d been in this exact position, standing at their mother’s death’s door—waiting for the latch to give, and for their mother to pass through at last.

When they first learned her diagnosis, the sisters had cried over it together. Sam felt shattered. That was back when she pictured pain as something swift and final. She understood better, now, what it actually was—not a glass dropped onto a tile floor, one terrible burst, but a tree required to grow over years in a space that limited it. Branches curled in on themselves, leaves dropping. A living thing that was forced, relentlessly, to submit.

That was how sorrow acted on them. Sam wanted more for her mother, but the wanting was useless, the wanting didn’t change anything. Their mother was dying, whether they wanted it or not. Most of the treatments the doctors recommended to improve her quality of life—not to actually fix her lungs, they emphasized, but to make her feel better, for a while—weren’t covered under their insurance, so she would suffer on her way to the end. She had been suffering for a long time. At some point, she would be in enough distress that Sam or Elena would have to stay with her, constantly, to manage the equipment, the tank and the mask, and if that point came during peak season, their household might have to forfeit half its yearly income. And then the bills would come. Sam knew their mother’s death was near—it couldn’t be avoided—and when she thought of it, some part of her, the waiting part, the grieving part, the part that had doubled back on itself with pain, did wish to be past it already. If Sam’s heart broke from the loss, then it broke; what difference did having a whole heart make anyhow? Let it be destroyed. She just needed the long ache to stop.

Elena leaned over, her chest pressed to the table, and whispered, “Sorry, but I have to tell you something.”

“Okay,” Sam said.

“Except you can’t tell Mom.”

Sam shook her head. “I won’t.”

Elena was indeed a beauty. Her hair, swept up on top of her head, pulled her forehead tight, made her brows rise. Her eyes were wide. Their blue was pale, luminous, holes made in ice. Sam leaned forward, too—she couldn’t help herself. Elena said, “The bear came back.”