Bear

Chapter 33

Elena went straightaway to the bathroom. “I’ll come with you,” Sam said, reaching for her sister’s wrist, but Elena shook her off. Sam said, “El, you—” and Elena said, “For a single minute since you were born, can you leave me alone?”

So Sam let her go. Elena slipped out of the room. She was going to hide in the club’s single-occupancy bathroom, a space she’d probably wiped down thousands of times over the years, and defend to herself whoever or whatever she’d lashed out at Sam about: the man who’d hurt them, the animal that stalked them, the debts she’d accumulated and chosen to keep secret? No, Elena was right, Sam didn’t understand. She couldn’t. They’d spent their whole adult lives seemingly united in pursuit of a better future but somehow wound up here, orphaned, separate, stuck.

Sam forced her way to the club’s exit. The dirt parking lot opened in front of her. She followed the building’s edge, turned a corner, and sat heavy on the ground. Elena was a wall’s thickness away. A universe apart. To Sam’s right, acres of rolling green hills lay empty and perfectly mowed.

She sat there a long time. The day’s heat was unbroken, and the sun sat heavy on her, a punishment. Under her, gravel pressed hard, points of pain on her butt and thighs; then, after a while, they vanished, and she felt nothing, only the numbness that precedes the shock of pins and needles, the rush of blood that was waiting for her when she stood up.

At last, footsteps. Sam turned to see Elena and found Danny Larsen’s strong body instead.

“Hey,” he said, folding himself down to sit next to her. “How are you holding up?”

“Pretty shitty,” Sam said. “Yeah. If you’re asking.”

“I am.”

He was the gentlest person she’d heard talk all day. If there were any tears left in her, they’d leak out now, but there weren’t. She was emptied.

“Your mom was great,” he said. “She used to bring us over zucchini from your garden.”

Sam shook her head. Her mother bringing food to the Larsens—she couldn’t picture the time. “When was that?”

“In elementary school, maybe? When we were kids. My mom would make bread from it. Muffins.”

“I don’t remember our mom in that garden. I always thought it was our grandmother’s thing.”

He shrugged. “She definitely knew how to get vegetables out of it. Tomatoes, she’d bring, too.”

His bent leg was close to hers. An inch away. Less. Last month, she would have recoiled at the thought of being knee to knee with Danny, but in this moment, there were few things she wanted more. She was sweating in this weather, but he smelled good. Soapy. Clean laundry. Childhood memories.

“She was so young,” he said. “It isn’t fair.”

Sam had to agree with that. “No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

He didn’t say anything for a while after, and she was grateful. In quiet, they watched the cut grass shiver across the green.

Eventually, he spoke again. “Do you know where your sister is?”

“She’s in the bathroom,” Sam said. Bitter: “She wanted time alone.”

Elena would call that tone of voice immature. Danny didn’t comment on it, though. He rested his head against the wall of the clubhouse and let it go. The kid he’d been in school was blustering, foolish, too loud, too much, but Danny now was none of those things. He was just right.

Inside the club, Elena was probably washing her face clean of tears. Preparing to offer more niceties to the people who didn’t know them but whom, for some reason, she felt obliged to entertain. She was, in her grief, acting like someone Sam didn’t recognize, but then again Sam didn’t recognize herself, either. The girl sitting with Danny Larsen. Soothed by him. Too strange.

She opened her mouth to bring up what she thought she’d never discuss with anyone outside her home. “How’d you know?”

“Know what?”

“When he came in,” she said. Her mother’s ex. “That you needed to make him leave.”

He paused. Giving that question the deliberation it deserved. Then: “I saw your faces.”

The rest of the people in there had milled around them, looked right over them, thought only of themselves. How had Danny, out of everyone, seen?

“I remember that time,” he said. “When he lived with you. When he moved out.”

In the lot beside them, a car backed out of a parking space. Scattered stones crunched under its tires. Sam couldn’t look at Danny. He was too near. She leaned her head back, too, and gazed at the hot sky. That time—she and Elena came home from school every day not knowing what they would find when they unlocked their front door. Their mother wooed or hunted. That man cycling through threats. To think, now, that Danny had seen through the walls of their house—to think he’d known.

These past couple months, Ben had told Sam, as he pressed himself close, how much he cared, but it rang false in every instance. For all the time he’d spent inside her, they had no intimacy; she’d tried not to let him find out the most important things about her, and hardly paid attention to whatever he shared about himself. It was embarrassing, frankly, that he kept pursuing the idea that they liked each other, when they had no idea what there was to like. Real care was something else entirely. A more rare beast. It was growing up alongside each other, watching one another. It was the ability to hear what wasn’t said.

Not looking at Danny, Sam reached out toward him. His leg was so close. She touched her fingers to his thigh.

He moved his leg away.

She pulled her hand back. “Sorry.”

“No,” he said, “you’re good, don’t worry.”

“Sorry,” she said again. Shook her head. Stupid. Her hands were in her lap.

“No, I—” He stopped. She could picture it: his sincere, sad face, eyebrows pushed together in pity for her. He’d come out here because he felt bad for her. His poor pathetic neighbor. She’d gotten it all wrong.

“Forget about it,” she said. God knew she would try.

“Sam…” His distress was audible. She wished she could bury herself under the dirt of this parking lot. This was pure humiliation. “It’s not…I’m with Elena.”

She turned to him. “What?”

His face was as tortured as she’d expected, but it didn’t make sense to her, not his expression in this moment, not his words. “Elena and I are together.”

Sam opened her mouth and shut it.

He said, “For months now. We dated in school, and then we got back together last year, after things got crazy, the lockdown. I know it’s been tough on your family…She hasn’t wanted to tell anyone, she thought it’d be too much. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry you didn’t know.”

“That’s impossible,” Sam said.

He winced. His big, handsome face was only a foot from hers, and she couldn’t take it in, it was a stranger’s. Was he insane? Harboring some delusion? Had he gotten obsessed with Elena when they were seniors, after she turned him down, and ended up pretending they were having an affair?

Sam needed to make it clear to him. “No, you’re not.”

“That’s how I knew about…She told me back then. We’d just started talking. Sophomore year.”

Not true. Against her will, though, Sam remembered tenth-grade Elena confiding in her science teacher, Elena entertaining the idea that a social worker might set things right. Elena had behaved then in ways she never had since. Maybe Elena had…said something to him, let some secret slip…but it couldn’t have gone any further than that. Sam was sure. She had to be, otherwise she might sit here, in this dirty lot, and lose her mind.

He kept talking. She wanted to tell him to shut up. “I always had a huge crush on her, but she had a rule about not getting into any serious relationship. She said she’d seen what it did to your mom and she never wanted that. So we just talked. For ages. We texted a lot. Sometimes we did homework together during free periods. When she started working here, I’d hang in the grill during her shifts. And after we graduated, we…” He trailed off. They…? Sam stared at him. They what?

“You what?”

He grimaced. “You should really talk with her about this.”

“I’ll talk to my sister about whatever I want,” Sam said. Her sister, who was hiding in a bathroom to get away from her. Her sister who’d remortgaged their property.

“All I mean is that we’re with each other,” he said. “And she’s the one for me. I can’t imagine ever being with anyone else.”

The walks Elena went off on alone. The dog that barked in the background of her phone calls. The information Danny always seemed to have about Sam’s family. His coming over to fix their siding, at Elena’s request.

They were together. All this time.

Danny said, “She prefers to keep it quiet. She’s private.”

“I know that,” Sam said.

“Okay.”

“Because she and I don’t waste our time with other people. We’re trying to get out of here.”

Danny did look at her with pity then. “Okay,” he repeated. His voice made it horrendous and clear. He knew Elena exactly as she was now—the new Elena Sam had argued with this week, the one who’d decided they couldn’t afford to leave. So no apology text from Elena was going to pop up on Sam’s phone; Elena wasn’t going to take back what she’d said in their kitchen; Elena didn’t see the sisters ever getting their final ferry ride. He knew.