Chapter 22
Sam woke up late the next morning. Her bedroom was flooded by sun. The walls, which were painted pale orange, sherbet color, were suffused with light. Radiant.
Elena was gone for work, but Sam’s shift didn’t start until noon. She went to the bathroom to drink from the tap. Her mouth was tacky, tongue dry, and throat rough. Had she been sobbing in her sleep? She felt wrung out. Eyes aching, she headed to her mother’s room, where she found her mother watching some game show.
“Have you already had breakfast?” Sam asked.
Her mother shook her head. “Elena made me a bowl, but I wasn’t hungry. She left it in the fridge.”
The TV made Sam’s head ache. People jumping up and down in front of buzzer stations. “Are you hungry now? I can bring it.”
Her mother picked up the remote, turned the volume down, and pushed her blanket back. “I’ll come.”
They moved along the hall together. Sam walked behind her mother, keeping watch. The bones on the back of her mother’s neck stood out as high ridges. Topography of a desolate land. Her ankles were swollen. Behind them, the faint sounds of the show continued: cheering and a host’s happy voice.
“You okay?” Sam asked.
Her mother had one hand out for balance. “I’m good.”
Once her mother took a seat in the kitchen, Sam pulled the leftover oatmeal from the refrigerator to reheat in the microwave. She mixed syrup into it as it steamed. At her mother’s request, she made coffee, too—Elena wouldn’t like that, was always trying to get their mother to have herbal tea. They ate together at the table while the sun poured in.
“How are you doing, baby?” her mother asked.
Sam didn’t know where to start. Elena had introduced her to a bear the day before. She’d spent the last night having visions of alligators and chimpanzees. “Fine,” Sam said, taking out her phone to refresh her email: nothing yet from Madeline. Quick, she tapped a text to Elena: You get to work ok this morning? Sending the text made her fear surface, sharp as a fang. What if the answer was no?
“How is it being back on the boat? Are there as many summer people as there used to be?”
Sam looked up. “It’s okay,” she said. “Not as busy as before, but the season’s still early. We’ll see.”
“Do most of them wear masks?”
“Not really.” The phone vibrated under Sam’s palm and she glanced down. Elena had replied: Yeah totally. Why?
“You know what I’d love to do this summer?” her mother said. “Now that the world’s opening back up? Take a trip to Vancouver Island. What do you think, maybe the next time you girls both have the day off, we could go over, walk around Sidney, have afternoon tea at a hotel?”
Absently, Sam said, “They stopped running the ferry there when the pandemic started.” She wrote, Thinking about you. On the screen there was no sign of Elena’s typing back. Sam wrote again: Worrying
Why?
Guess
Ha, Elena sent. Then: No worries. All good
Her mother said, “I miss having you here all day. I got used to it.”
Sam looked up. Her mother’s lips were blue-tinged. Her eyes were large and lovely. “Oh,” Sam said. “I did, too, Mom. I miss it, too.” The last two years of staying home, doing chores, and waiting for life to begin. Sam and her mother fitting their meals around Elena’s work schedule because there was nothing else to look forward to. Virtual doctors’ visits that missed her mother’s every important symptom. The claustrophobia of it all—the closeness.
“The shows aren’t the same without you watching along.”
“Yeah. You’ve got to keep me updated on what’s happening.”
“Who knows. I lose track of it,” her mother said. “I get so bored.”
Sam laughed. “You know what? At work, me too.” Her mother smiled wide. Those perfect front teeth. She was still the prettiest. She touched Sam’s hand, the one holding the phone, with cold fingertips.
What was it in Elena and in their mother that drew toward danger? Looking at them, Sam could not make sense of it. They were the type of women who ought to need no one, and whom everyone wished to be around. Sam and Elena’s grandmother, too, had been like that—self-assured, in their mother’s stories of her. A nurse, a flirt, a tender of the vegetable garden that once grew by the side of their house, before things got too busy and the plants withered away. But their grandfather used to have rages, their mother told them. He smashed plates and punched open their walls. Their grandmother, as capable as she seemed in their mother’s telling, had put up with his violences for years. She’d had three children with him. When he totaled the family car, she got a bicycle. Those were the memories their mother liked to share: how dazzling her mother had been on a bike, cruising along the island roads with her hair blowing behind.
Their grandmother hadn’t gotten out from the threat of him until he died. For a brief window, she, their mother, Elena, and Sam lived together in this house, squeezed tight, their precious family, and then their grandmother passed. Eventually their mother brought destruction back in.
When their mother’s boyfriend started living with them, Sam thought of him every second. In class, after school, while he worked, as she and Elena fell asleep—he constantly had to be negotiated. Was he in a good mood? If not, how could they repair things for him—or stay out of his way? What did their mother need them to do, at dinner or while he watched TV, to set things right? He had countless rules that Sam and Elena always ended up breaking. Their mother did, too. They tried so hard but he never found their efforts enough.
Their house was small and he could set the whole thing shaking. They lived like that for nearly a year before Social Services stepped in. He moved out, and these days, Sam went weeks, months, without a thought of his being there. He entered her head only randomly: if she overheard an argument between two strangers, or passed some man who used his same cologne. On those instances she happened to brush too close to someone broad-shouldered and overly friendly. When her mother brought up the past. Though they never talked about him, she occasionally mentioned the period that had overlapped with him. Its terrors.
But marks faded. Nobody flinched anymore. His only meaningful effect was that, afterward, the members of their family knew to what end each could and could not be counted on. Their mother would, if offered, eat a poisoned apple, while the sisters would not. They didn’t love their mother any less for that quality—she had inherited it, a curse laid on her family line. They just put some distance between themselves and her after that. They grew up to pursue a world beyond such threats.
So Sam had thought, anyway. Until her sister started to call to the bear.
“You girls work so hard,” her mother said. “Do you know how proud I am of you?”
Sam stirred her oatmeal. It was congealing on the sides of the bowl. “We learned from the best.”
From the back of the house, a voice actor recited the side effects of some advertised medication. Her mother chewed. “Do you think you and Elena will raise your own kids here?”
Sam coughed against her spoon. The whole notion—no. Eight years ago, Sam had somehow gotten pregnant (which didn’t make sense, she always used protection, and yet she’d ended up conceiving a year earlier than their mother did with Elena) and Elena had taken her to the health center in town. They’d sat together there, waiting for someone to come in with an abortion referral. Sam had felt queasy. That was her lasting impression of her short pregnancy: the constant feeling of car sickness. And disappointment. In the office, which was decorated with framed watercolors of the ocean to try to look serene, Elena squeezed Sam’s knee and said, “We’re going to get through this.”
Then the nurse came in. Sam got her pills, her blood, her clean slate. She got renewed resolve to avoid the ways a place might trap its residents: teen pregnancy, marriage to a high school sweetheart, a gaggle of girlfriends who met monthly at a bar, a decision to accept the shitty hand you’d been dealt. Sam and Elena weren’t going to do any of that. Not ever.
“I don’t know about that,” Sam said to her mother.
“It means a lot to picture babies in this house again. Your mimi would’ve loved that. She was so excited when she found out Elena was on the way.”
“She wasn’t mad?” Sam asked.
Her mother looked at her, quick and stunned at the question. “Why would she be?”
“You were so young.”
“I wasn’t a child. I’d already been working for ages.” The coffee mug had left a brown ring on the table. Sam fetched a dishcloth to wipe it up. Her mother went on. “You two were a gift. One right after the other. You don’t argue with the timing of gifts, do you? You don’t say, oh, no, not right now, I’m not ready. You open your arms and welcome them.”
Sam folded the cloth and set it under the mug. She could think of an argument or two against that.
“Are you seeing anyone?” her mother asked.
“Come on,” Sam said, embarrassed.
Her mother was being playful. “I’m just asking.”
“No. No one.”
“What about Elena?”
Oh, Elena’s seeing something, Sam imagined saying. A creature that stalks her along the side of the road. A thing that comes out of the woods to sniff her. A wild animal.
“You know how Elena is,” Sam said. “Nope.”
Her mother passed her bowl, a layer of oatmeal thick on its bottom, to Sam, who got up to put it in the sink. Her back to the table, she checked her phone again. One new email. A response from Madeline Pettit. Sam held her breath.
Hi Sam, thanks for getting in touch. Is this a hypothetical question? If so, I want to reiterate that it is very unlikely any bear would approach you. That said, if this one does, you can clap your hands and yell to scare him off. Carrying a safety whistle and/or bear deterrent spray can also help provide peace of mind. Best, M
Bear spray. Sam checked the time on the microwave: there wasn’t going to be time to shop for it before work. She’d slept too late, she’d fucked up the whole thing, she’d have to wait. Her mother, she realized, was still talking. Sam took the coffeepot from the counter, filled both their mugs, and sat back down.
“These days, you don’t even need a man to have a baby,” her mother said. “People can get pregnant at the doctor’s office. You pick what kind you want out of a catalog. And once it’s born, things work out.”
“Mom. Oh my god.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Stop saying it!” Sam was trying to sound jokey in return, but under her words was shrill humiliation. Her mother was bringing up subjects that she herself, if she were thinking reasonably, would not want to discuss. Things work out, she’d said. Had they for her? An orphan with two toddlers by the time she was twenty-five?
Her mother leaned forward. Her expression was sober now. Sometimes Sam thought her mother didn’t know what was going on with them, but other times she found a person who listened, even to what wasn’t said. In this house, there were countless secrets kept simply to protect each other; their mother, every so often, picked one up as it hummed through the air.
Her voice was soft. “Only thinking how I’d like to meet my grandchildren.”
So her mother hadn’t heard what was buzzing in Sam’s head. The bear, the fears, the need to escape these island deaths that waited for them. Well. Why should she? What she’d said was clarifying even so: their time together was short. Even if Elena and Sam both got pregnant this afternoon, their mother would, in all likelihood, never meet the babies that emerged. So why fight? What was there to fight about?
In the warm sunlight, Sam said, “You know, I bet we will have our kids here.” Her mother smiled at her, and Sam smiled back. Nestled in the place her mother did not perceive was Sam’s real future: the funeral, the sale, the final ferry out.
Sam had told herself she didn’t grasp what made her sister, their mother, and their mother’s mother act the way they did. That wasn’t true, though, was it? She felt it at work in her core. Sam would take pain—the lie told, the self stifled—as long as she got one pleasurable moment out of it. She’d slog for ten years in food service to preserve a single well-loved vision. She’d keep herself apart from new relationships; she’d betray their dying mother’s wishes; she’d nod along with Elena’s convictions that they should sink their hands into the gold-tipped fur of a bear. All of that was worth it, if, in the end, Sam and her sister got safely out of here.
Their grandmother, in a knee-length skirt, pedaling her bicycle. Their mother wrapping her arms around the two-faced man she must have adored. Sam sharing a pillow with her mother while they watched soap operas. Elena calling—hello?—across the trees. It didn’t matter if it hurt. They did what they had to. They took their joys where they could find them, because they knew, every one of them, that joys were few and far between. Sam would embrace it, this moment, drinking coffee in the sun with her mother. Short and false as it was—who cared? This was the way her family sustained itself. This was how they would last.