Bear

Chapter 32

San Juan wasn’t large. Fewer than nine thousand people. Still, all this time, Sam and Elena had managed to avoid him. Sam thought, once, she’d seen him at the harbor, but she’d tracked that person for long minutes and concluded at last that it was some other brown-haired man who simply held his arms, overly muscled, the same way. She’d told Elena about the mix-up that night. “We don’t need to worry about him anymore,” Elena told her back then. “He’s out of our lives.” Elena spoke with the confidence that might come from his moving to San Francisco or falling down a well, and Sam took her words as a promise. She worked on forgetting him. She didn’t keep watch for his posture anymore.

In the golf club, though, her mother’s ex was so obviously, nauseatingly, himself that Sam couldn’t see how she ever might have confused him for a different person. His neck, his shoulders, the slope of his jaw—years had passed, and his widow’s peak had deepened, but Sam knew him in an instant. She knew him as well as she had on the last day he lived in their house. Her body knew his. The memory could never be let go.

She caught up with Elena, whose arms were folded across her chest. Sam wanted, like a child, to hold her big sister’s hand. It wasn’t in reach. She stood there.

This man had terrorized them. Told their mother he loved her and then screamed at her. Made their grandmother’s house into a thorn-choked place. Forced Elena to get desperate enough to, for the last time, ask an outsider for help. He had altered them permanently; after him, their mother got sick, and Elena stopped trusting people, and Sam fixated on their escape.

He glanced over at the sisters and nodded. As if he was one more unremarkable visitor to the event, and hadn’t, once upon a time, filled them with fear. He was shorter than Sam remembered—now that she’d seen a bear up on its hind legs, everything in comparison looked small—but he still scared the shit out of her. He did. More than any other monster on this island ever could.

Around them, people shuffled, talking of kids and schools and summer plans. They did what they had always done, which was ignore Sam and Elena’s emergency, pretend the crisis away. Over the heads of neighbors, Sam spotted Danny Larsen holding a beer. He saw her, too, glanced at Elena, and frowned.

Their mother’s ex had already moved ten feet into the club. Danny was making his way over.

Beside Sam, Elena trembled. The air between them shivered.

Danny got to their mother’s ex and gripped his shoulder. Bent his head to say something that Sam couldn’t read. Their mother’s ex was facing away from them, but they could clearly see Danny, his teeth flashing within his beard as he spoke. Then he smiled, a small, sympathetic smile. He was taller than the older man and almost as broad. Whatever he was saying gave some push. The man turned toward the door. Together, he and Danny walked out.

“Oh my god,” Sam said.

Elena took a step forward. Her arms were goosebumped. She didn’t speak yet; Sam understood that she could not.

“Are they—?”

Elena shook herself. Her back moved like an animal’s after a rain. Quiet enough that only Sam should hear, she said, “That’s it. He left.”

The relief. It was everything. The feeling of the bear spray in Sam’s back pocket, the trigger releasing under her finger so the line of pepper arced out—each morning Sam had opened her eyes worrying that she wouldn’t hear their mother’s voice, and then she’d heard it, life continuing in the next room, that old vital sound—the day in high school they’d gotten home to find their mother’s ex’s things missing, their mother sitting alone in the living room, the light through the windows—every consolation Sam had ever had paled in comparison to this moment, the full-bodied joy of seeing this man gone so simply now. Even if it was temporary, even if it wasn’t true. It filled her. She and Elena had survived crossing him again. He hadn’t even gotten close to them. They were unscathed.

“God,” Sam said. “He’s even scarier than the bear.”

Her sister whipped toward her. They should’ve been together in this moment, washed over by the same cool wave, but Elena only looked tight and furious. Her voice stayed low: “I don’t know why I ever bothered,” she said. “You don’t understand a thing.”