Chapter 20
And so Sam found herself, on her next day off, after an afternoon of tidying the house and buying eggs and refilling their mother’s prescriptions and pulling a hair clog from the slow-draining shower, parked in the golf club’s lot. Electric vehicles glided into the spaces around her. Sam couldn’t think about what she and Elena were about to do; she couldn’t help thinking about it; she stared up, out the windshield, over the rolling hills of the green and the white boxes of golf carts, to the clouds turning slowly across pure blue.
Elena flung open the passenger-side door and Sam jumped. Climbing in, Elena laughed, and Sam laughed, too, shaky, starting the car. “How was work?”
“Shitty,” Elena said. “It doesn’t matter. Ready?”
As ready as she could be. They drove together around the manicured perimeter of the club, covering in minutes the distance that took an hour of Elena’s day to walk. Golfers raised clubs against the sky. The car had filled with the smell of the grill. Did the bear follow Elena because of that smell? Seasoned meat.
“Pull over,” Elena said.
Sam guided their car off the road. Its weight rolled across gravel, soil, and matted grass before coming to a stop. They were a ten-minute walk from the spot on the trail where the bear had first approached Elena, two weeks earlier. Surrounding them were trees shot through with sunlight. Brown rippled trunks and the thin glistening lines of spiderwebs. Leaves swaying. Sam turned off the engine.
She dreaded this. No, she craved it. Both. She was terrified and fascinated and daunted by what was to come. She wanted to talk to her sister but she didn’t know what to say. Elena was climbing out of her seat. Sam followed.
Elena was already beyond the slope of the road’s shoulder, but Sam, coming around from the driver’s side, had to slide a few feet down. The ground was soft and uneven under her shoes. Elena was at the trees; immediately, she was striped with shadow, turned brown and blue as a bruise. Sam, crossing the tree line, felt the temperature shift of shadow on her own skin. She hurried after.
Across the road from where they’d pulled over, an unpaved driveway broke the line of the forest, but it wasn’t visible now. The slope up to the road and the branches above blocked it. They were heading away from human habitation, toward whatever else waited. And Elena had started calling. Calm, clear, her voice rose into the air: “Are you there? Hello? I’m here. Can you hear me?”
The confidence of Elena’s words. The way they shivered, precise as a ringing bell, into the woods. The sound made Sam tremble. One day, in their future lives, this would be a crazy story they told each other; one day, Sam would repeat these words to Elena to jog her memory and to amuse.
Hello? Are you there?
I’m here. Can you hear me?
Hello? Are you there? I’m here.
Can you hear me? Hello? I’m here. Are you there?
I’m here. Hello? Are you there?
They were far enough in now that the road, their car, and any help were out of sight. The ground was thick with moss. Elena stepped over fallen logs. The bear, if it was listening, could approach from any direction. Sam slipped on a slick patch of mud and caught herself. She took an extra step to catch up with her sister. Prayed nothing was on its way.
I’m here. Hello? Can you hear me? Are you there?
Hello? Are you there?
I’m here.
Elena said she used to have dreams about animals attacking them. Sam couldn’t remember any of her own, but she felt their residue, the terror of childhood nightmares. Shark attacks and serial killers. Chases into a witch’s lair. These were the woods she knew, the same ones she’d walked all her life, but they were changed by the creature that had come into them. They frightened her. Her breath was short, her pulse throbbing in her neck, and she couldn’t tell if that was caused by her stumbling over caked leaves or by what she imagined. She was almost made faint by the pictures Elena’s words put in her head. She did not want to be here.
An arm’s length ahead, Elena stopped walking. She lifted her chin. Sam reached her side, and Elena glanced over at her. Winked.
Wasn’t this like a dream, too: Elena’s familiarity, her foreignness. Her sister and yet not her sister. An altered girl. Sam could smell the earth, the sap, the sharp crushed flakes of bark underfoot. The saliva-thickening weight of mud, the floury dust of pollen. Birds chirped. The breeze blew. She could smell something rotten.
The bear had arrived.
Elena looked out to their right and Sam looked after. There. Moving, an enormous animal, coming toward them. Its head was huge. Its arms were broad and its shoulders were high, an alternating rise with every step, one blade lifted then the other. Its back dipped then rose again into a wide rump. The bear moved in a slow arc around them. It watched.
Sam didn’t exhale. Elena said, “Oh, hello, there.”
The bear was less than fifty feet away now. Almost directly in front of them. Furred and muscle-bound.
“This is my sister,” Elena said. “I wanted you to meet each other.”
The bear slowed to a stop. It waited. Deliberate, Sam thought, it was being deliberate, it was deliberating.
Elena laughed, then, a sound that could not have surprised Sam more. Elena was totally relaxed. Her voice, the easy swing of it, was intimate—it suggested friendship. How many times had she seen this thing? Did she find it here every day? “Hungry, hungry,” she said. “I don’t have anything for you this time.”
Sam could hear the air exiting its monstrous lungs. It raised its head. Then, in one fluid motion, it stood, lifting its great weight off its arms and straightening its spine.
Sam thought: now. Now it would lunge forward. Now was when they would die.
The bear stood there on its short hind legs. Its belly was thick with pale yellow fur. It looked at them, appraising. Its arms hung at its sides. Its neck was massive.
Elena had told Sam that the bear was something extraordinary. She said it was magic—enchanted—a gift from the animal gods— She’d told Sam, leading up to this afternoon, that when she was with it she felt strong and brave and also tiny and insignificant and utterly aware of her own body and dissolved into everything else in the universe. She felt glowing and connected and magnificent. She told Sam that this was the best thing that had ever happened—she said that. Elena. That the bear was what she looked forward to each day. And Sam, even in her fear, crossing into this forest, had come because she believed she might feel that too.
She didn’t. She was horrified.
Different, yes; Elena had been right about that; Sam was hit with a feeling she did not have any other moment of her day. This was different from sex, from dreaming, from counting out tips, from the routine devastation of doctors’ visits. It was not like driving winding roads or listening to loud music. It was not sleeping late or riding the ferry through the fog. It was something else entirely. It was standing before a bear. The only other feeling that had ever gotten close was when she was fourteen years old and Elena was fifteen and their mother’s boyfriend lived with them, and they would hear him coming down the hall toward their bedroom and then he would open their door, and there was nothing they could do about him, his rage, there was no one to protect them. It was like that, except it was worse.
Sam was not strong or brave or tiny or aware. She didn’t dissolve into an appreciation of the intricate links in the food chain. This was not wonderful. She was only herself, acutely, and certain that she did not want to die this way. She did not want to be clawed, eviscerated, decapitated. She didn’t want her life to end on San Juan. This creature could not come any closer to her. She wanted it to get away.
The bear kept standing there staring. It was bigger than a refrigerator. Brown tinged with gold. Its fur was heaped shaggy around its throat, at its armpits, and over its groin. The animal’s stink was overwhelming: old urine, wet dog. It was near enough for Sam to see its nostrils flare. It was huffing them in.
Elena asked, “Do you want to say hi?”
Sam was silent. Elena touched Sam’s wrist. Reflexively, Sam clenched her fists, and the bear’s eyes tracked Sam’s movement. Two amber beads tugged on a string.
Elena said, “Well?”
Sam tried to speak without moving her lips. “Me?”
“Yes, you. Who else would I be asking, him?”
Would that be such a surprise? Elena had been talking to the animal like it was her companion this whole time. Still, Sam attempted, mere feet from destruction, to act like this was fine. “Okay,” she said. She looked at the bear, and the bear looked at her, its eyes glass, its expression unreadable. It didn’t have an expression. It was not human. It had no thoughts, only the instinct to devour them. With her sister waiting beside her, Sam said, “Hi.”
“He’s curious about you,” Elena said.
Sam made a noise.
“Remember what that woman said? He stands like that when he wants to find out more.”
Sam was going to go to her death like this: trying to humor her sister, making small talk with a beast. The bear was going to drop to all fours, push off the dirt toward them, and launch teeth-first into her neck. It was going to rip her apart. She was going to bleed.
To the bear, Elena said, “You didn’t bother any more livestock, did you? You wild thing.”
It turned its gaze toward her. Elena chuckled, pleased, clearly, to have its attention again. Sam felt cold. She was frozen and stiff and profoundly aware of how stupid they were being. Playing at friendship with something that had no capacity to care for them.
The bear fell forward. Its front paws hit the earth. Sam jolted. Now.
On all fours, it stretched its mouth wide open. Its lips slid over its teeth, exposing red-white gums and yellow bone. Its tongue lolled out. It shifted its weight, and then it turned from them to walk slowly away. Elena called after: “See you soon.”
Then Elena turned to Sam. The bear’s body was still visible, weaving through the trees. Leaving them? Or circling them? “What’d you think?” Elena said.
Sam said, “Let’s get to the car.”
Elena was grinning. “No, hold on,” she said, “I want to hear what you think. Incredible, isn’t he?”
Sam was in the dream again. The horrible realm entered in the middle of the night where her house was different and intruders were breaking in and Elena was not Elena anymore. Sam couldn’t recognize this. She couldn’t bear it. She had to wake up and return to her old expected life, where they were pressured and even at times desperate but they were always, at the very least, safe. She said, “Mom’s waiting for us.” She took Elena’s warm arm in her hands. Sam was trembling. She was begging. “Let’s get back to the car. Now. Please.”