Chapter 19
As soon as Elena was safely in the car, Sam said, “What the fuck was that.” Quick as she could, she locked the doors. Elena was pulling down her seatbelt to buckle. Through the glass rising in the window frame, the trees stood motionless.
“You’re off late,” Elena said. “What was what?”
“Was that what I thought it was?” It was, it was.
“Was what?” Elena was playing games with her. She was smiling, bantering. She smelled like the grill and like something else. Dirt. The woods. Oh, God, Sam’s heart. “What did you think it was?”
“Elena,” Sam said. “Stop. A fucking bear. That’s what. I just saw you with it right there.”
Elena kept smiling. That beloved canine, her teeth precise and sweet. The bags under her eyes were dark, thin-skinned, but creased up and almost hidden by her happiness. “Okay. So?”
Inside Sam, a violence rose. She flung her hand off the steering wheel and grabbed her sister’s shoulder. Dug into it with five fingers. All her might. Elena twisted under her grip and said, “Stop it,” but Sam wasn’t letting go, and Elena said, “SAM,” and took her own hands and pried at Sam’s, ripped her away. Her fingernails into Sam’s wrist, puncturing the back of Sam’s hand, leaving crescent-moon marks red and purple in Sam’s skin. That bite, that shock. Sam hit at her, tried to get her, and Elena swatted her away. Elena’s body thumped against the passenger-side door. Sam’s seatbelt caught and tugged her backwards. Sam hit again at air.
Elena was shouting. Desperate. “What are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” Sam shouted back. “What—” The seatbelt had locked in place, restraining her. She hit against the wheel and the horn blasted. She pounded on it. There was some satisfaction in the noise: the scream louder than she could scream, the greatest possible disruption. It would keep the animals away. She kept going.
Their car was filled with noise. Her mind was obliterated by it. Her fingers hurt, her jaw ached, two of the moon marks on the back of her right hand were filled bloody. Her sister. What was she thinking. Right there.
Elena reached out, cupped a hand over Sam’s, and pulled it off the wheel. Moving slowly. “Sammy.”
So gentle, Sam thought. Like taming a beast.
“Shh,” Elena said. “Take a breath.”
Sam let her head drop against the headrest. Her ears were ringing. The violence had receded as suddenly as it’d come, leaving emptiness in its wake. Worn out by what had flooded over, Sam shut her eyes. She pulled air in through her nose.
“You hit me,” Elena said. “You can’t do that. It’s not acceptable.”
Sam lifted her head again. “I’m sorry,” she said, automatically, truthfully—who was she, their mother’s ex? She wasn’t that kind of person, able to hurt someone. The impulse had simply come over her.
Elena squeezed her hand, then reached over to shut off the engine. “If you want to talk about it, let’s talk about it,” she said. “But you and I don’t act that way.”
“I just—” Sam didn’t know where to start. “What were you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“No, not nothing—”
Elena said, “I was saying hello.”
The body that had withdrawn back into the tree line. Its shocking size. “You were…what?”
“Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, on my way to and from work, he’s there. And if he is, he comes over. I say hi. I talk to him.”
“You talk to him.”
“He listens. If I have a snack with me, he’ll want it.”
Sam could not believe what she was hearing. “That’s literally exactly what we’re not supposed to do.”
“It doesn’t happen that often.”
“This is insane,” Sam said. “Can you hear yourself? You’re being insane.”
Elena sighed. She was making expressions like she was exasperated with Sam—as if Sam hadn’t potentially saved her life by pulling the car over—as if Sam somehow wasn’t seeing the situation clearly. “Okay, you don’t understand,” she said, and that in itself was a blow. Sam wanted to understand. She had been trying to understand. If there was some aspect of this she didn’t, at this point, grasp, it was because Elena had kept its details from her. “Do you really think I would do anything crazy? I’m only standing there. And he’s learning me, getting to know how I behave. It’s like—you know how a dog sniffs your hand before it lets you pet it?”
“Are you petting it?”
Elena took another breath. “I need you to listen to me. Right now you aren’t listening at all.”
Sam couldn’t stand the sound of her sister’s measured inhalations and exhalations. The place in her where fury had risen before felt empty and enormous. It was the distance between her and Elena. It shouldn’t exist. She didn’t want to be strapped here, misunderstanding, a center console’s width from Elena and on opposite sides of an abyss. She wanted to be together with her sister as they ought to be.
Sam needed to close this gap between them. She said to Elena, “Tell me again.”
“I walk to work and back, like always. I look for him. Sometimes he’s there. If he does approach, I stand, arms by my sides, and let him however near he wants to come. I’m not doing anything to provoke him.” Elena was being patient. She was making her words as precise and soothing as possible, because she wanted to be united, too. “I know,” she said, “that they told us not to give food. They tell us those warnings so we stay away from animals that are aggressive or unpredictable, except he’s not either. He’s different. They talk about bears in general—they say they act this way and do these things. But they don’t know this one. He has his own personality, like you or I do. He’s not like what they say.”
Sam was trying her best to absorb this. “What’s his…personality?”
Elena thought. “He’s very gentle. He doesn’t rush. He’s curious.”
Sam sat. She had to think, too. It was true that no one so far, not the sheriff’s deputies or the Journal reporters, the state scientist or the people whispering at the grocery store, had told the sisters anything that matched their actual experience. They said the bear was small, but it was huge; they called it black, but it was vivid brown; they said it would leave the island, and it had not. What everyone else described was not the thing Sam and Elena had seen sitting at their door.
Elena was right: what was going on here was exceptional. A fairy-tale creature stepping out of the trees. Madeline Pettit had warned against approaching the animal, but she hadn’t said what to do if the animal came to them, held itself like a tame thing, snuffled and sniffed. She hadn’t even considered the possibility. So Elena was right: something outside those authorities’ knowledge was happening. Something one of a kind.
The child in Sam, the little-sister part that would always, no matter how old they were or where they lived, be there, absorbed this. Elena, herself, was special. Their whole family was not like the neighbors they’d known. It made a certain fundamental sense that different things, things that could not be related to by others, would happen to them.
Sam’s attention was entirely on Elena. The tiny muscles in Elena’s cheeks and her dry quiet lips. The untweezed hairs under her brows. Her eyes, her neck, her jawline. The insulated air between them—the warmth the car trapped. Their mingled smells. Soil, salt water, hamburger grease, and creased dollar bills. All Sam’s thoughts, every sense at her command, were taking in Elena. Giving over to Elena. Her sister was asking her to accept the impossible, but it was only the impossible reality in which they already lived.
“Okay,” Sam said.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” Sam turned the key in the ignition. The car chimed. She touched her sister’s shoulder, the one she’d seized before. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Elena said. “The whole thing is…intense.”
Sam held the steering wheel. She had to laugh. “It is.” Looking over her shoulder, she made another U-turn and started driving home.
Elena put her window down and Sam did the same. Wind flowed across them, tousling their hair, filling their ears. The road was mostly empty of other cars. The farther Sam and Elena got from the center of Friday Harbor, the more peaceful things became. Their house was only a few miles from town but felt like another universe. It was a place without tourists or ferries or galleries or boutiques or oat-milk lattes or stuffed souvenir octopuses. A place that was quiet, lush with new summer growth, entirely theirs.
“I know you think I don’t understand,” Sam said, “but I do.” She turned right off Cattle Point.
Elena was chastened by that. Sam, watching the road, could hear it in her sister’s voice. “No, I know you do.”
“And I’m trying to be helpful to you.”
“I know you are.”
“It’s just hard to sort out,” Sam said. “Obviously. It’s this totally unprecedented situation.” They were already pulling up in front of the house. The thick green of the trees in the yard, the scattered dirt, the shabby siding. Their mother in there, waiting. Sam put the car in park, touched the dangling keys, and gathered herself. She turned to her sister once more. Elena: whom she’d hit, whom she loved. “All I want is for you to be happy.”
In the passenger seat, Elena, still seatbelted, sank with relief. It was startling for Sam to see, how marked the effect was. Her shoulders dropped and her eyelids lowered. “Thank you,” she said. “I really needed to hear that from you.”
“It’s true,” Sam said. “I’ll tell you anytime. You know what I was thinking about? Remember that video of the guys hugging a lion?” Elena shook her head. “Oh,” Sam said. “Well, it was cool.” A classmate had shown it to Sam in the elementary school library. She remembered, precisely, the fuzzy yellow quality of the images, the swelling music as the lion ran full speed across African savanna and leapt into a thin man’s arms. It had brought tears to Sam’s eyes. Bizarre as they were, these situations weren’t unknown: Sam had seen television shows where characters befriended elephants, movie trailers about men in Canada who lived with grizzlies, and pictures in books of people cuddling gorillas. She’d been told myths of orphans and wolf packs and beauties and beasts. Thousands of years before, people living in caves had drawn these creatures on their walls to dance in the fire around them while they slept. Somewhere, somehow, in the space left unexplored by bureaucrats and biologists, there existed possibilities. There might be magic to be found.
Home was waiting. They would have chicken thighs for dinner. Elena reached for her door handle but didn’t pull it yet. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you.”
“You trust me?”
“Always,” Sam said. “Yes. You know I do.”
Elena’s smile returned. She used to look like this when they were girls adventuring. Unencumbered. She would lead them deep into the woods. Sam smiled back. It was irresistible. Elena said, “Listen, Sammy, do you want to meet him, too?”