Bear

Chapter 35

The walk home from the club forced Sam to go in Elena’s footsteps, along Elena’s daily commute, on American Camp Trail. Sam moved stricken. She traced the border of the golf course, the edges of luxury properties, and the turn onto Cattle Point. The trail dipped into the woods. Lines of ants crossed the soil in front of her. Spiderwebs strung across her face and arms. She had to rub her skin free. She itched.

Roots rolled under her sneakers. Elena’s words were in her mind. The grief of the last week had pushed both sisters too far. What Sam might’ve thought had been the worst times of their lives (surviving under their mother’s boyfriend, learning their mother’s illness was terminal) were recast as mild trials, compared to this. At least for those, they’d had each other. Now they were apart.

But then again they’d made it through other periods of separation. They had. Though Sam didn’t like to think of those. When Elena graduated to middle school and left Sam by herself in fifth grade, or to high school and left Sam in eighth. When she finished high school and moved on to the golf club, while Sam counted down the days left as a senior. Over and over, Elena had stepped away from their pairing—Elena was asked to dances, tried out for the National Ocean Sciences Bowl, told Sam the club wasn’t hiring anymore—but she had always come back to Sam. Eventually.

Toward the end of elementary school, one girl, Chloe McRary, had shown off her nails in the cafeteria: neon yellow with fine green tips. Sam had been so excited. “Did you get those done at Treasures?” Sam asked. “My mom works there.” And Chloe, her nasty little friends sitting alongside, had squealed. “Your mom works there?” Chloe said. “That’s so embarrassing.”

Sam hadn’t known until then that she ought to be embarrassed. Her body felt like it had been lit on fire. She spent that whole school year alone, watching the other girls gather in circles and whisper, laugh over the sleepovers they’d shared, talk about what she wasn’t acquainted with. Their parents, their vacations, their housekeepers, their pets. Their fluorescent manicures, hardened with mysterious shames.

Elena told Sam today that she didn’t listen, didn’t understand. If that was true, it wasn’t for lack of Sam’s early effort. She had spent lunch periods, long days, and entire seasons of her young life at the edges of other kids’ crowds, attempting to grasp but never catching what those kids actually meant. That’s so embarrassing, Chloe had said. Was it? Why? Sam asked Elena about it later. Elena only said, with the authority of a twelve-year-old speaking about eleven-year-olds, “Who cares what they’re saying? They don’t matter anyway.”

So Sam adopted that same philosophy. She and Elena were essential; everyone outside of their family was simply a bother. She stopped loitering near her classmates at lunch, at recess, or in the locker room. She didn’t join any sports teams or the choir. When she finally got to middle school, she made sure to line up her schedule as much as possible with Elena’s, so they could walk the halls together between periods. If not, Sam walked alone. By the time she got to Friday Harbor High, Sam’s reputation was set: she was a loser. Poor and weird and sullen. Refused to participate in routine conversation, rude to anyone who approached. Sam broadcast the message conveyed to her by her older sister: no one else mattered, so who cared?

Elena behaved differently, though. In high school, Sam saw it: Elena wasn’t an outcast or a freak. The kids in different cliques were friendly; the teachers in Sam and Elena’s shared electives called on her; their guidance counselor even told her he’d write her a recommendation letter for college. Elena, meanwhile, smiled, nodded, shrugged, and drifted away. She stayed graceful in her disregard. Though she accepted nothing, she humored anything. Everyone liked her for that quality. Watching, Sam feared that Elena might quietly detach from her, too.

But Elena hadn’t. Despite these moments of seeming distance, Elena was there, at home, washing their dishes and joking with Sam at the end of the day. And in this moment, too, Sam had to believe that Elena would return to their sisterhood. Friends and lovers and assorted duties would pass out of Elena’s existence, but Sam wouldn’t. She never could.

Branches striped the ground with shadows. The trail bumped down. On Sam’s right, a car whooshed by. On her left, then, another kind of movement. Something stepping in the woods.

She turned. The brush was thick. Trees, bushes, pine needles, wide leaves, a fence marking a property line, filmy webs and orange flower buds. No unusual motion. Had she imagined it? But: no. Again.

A brown mass between far trunks.

“I don’t have anything for you,” Sam said. The bear, in the distance, didn’t budge. She raised her voice: “Get out of here. Leave.”

Between the trees, a shift. Not a departure.

“Go,” Sam shouted. “Go on. Get.” Did it smell Elena on her? Was it lingering in the hope of tracking her sister? “She’s not coming.”

The thing stayed.

Sam stepped toward it. It had to be two hundred feet away—what was she trying to do, intimidate it by inches? Grasses crushed under her feet. Tall, tender, alive. She bent over, picked up a loose branch, and threw it in the bear’s direction, but the branch vanished into undergrowth.

“Go. Would you go? Get away.”

It stayed. It waited there, in front of her, patient as a groom at the altar. And the fury overwhelmed.

Sam went up to the plank fence that separated her from the stretch of green the bear occupied. She climbed onto its bottom rung. Sweat rolled down her spine. She shook. Until now, she’d spent her every encounter with this animal consumed by fear, but her fear had left at last, she was filled with nothing but anger. In a more fair universe, this thing would’ve never come here, but in this world everything was terrible and their mother, at only fifty-one, had died alone of a heart attack, and Elena and Sam were stuck, and Elena liked it, and this bear stared after them every single day as if it relished their position. It looked at them as entertainment or as prey. With the edge of the plank pressing hard against her soles, Sam screamed at it. “Leave us alone.” Her throat hurt to make the sound. “Get out of here. I’m not going to let you take her.”

Way back in the woods, the thing receded.

Sam wobbled on the fence. She had to lean over and grip the top plank, thigh-level, for balance. She kept shaking. All these years, she’d tried to follow what her sister told her was right. She had even walked into the forest to greet a bear because Elena encouraged it. But Elena was wrong now. It was obvious. She’d been wrong, today, in the way she insulted Sam; she’d been wrong to organize this memorial; she had done wrong for years by keeping secrets that drove a wedge between them; she was wrong to make a vision for a new life and then let it go. Elena had gotten off track, somehow. She messed up. She loved a grizzly bear. Sam, though, had not lost her focus. From this vantage point, Sam could see the grassy island, the place the animal had stood, and her sister’s failings. She saw, at last, how to proceed.

After Elena, newly graduated, went full-time at the club, Sam was terrified that her sister was moving on from the life of their family. Elena came home then talking about her co-workers. She seemed to engage with them in a way she never fully had with the kids they grew up alongside. She moved out of their shared bedroom into the living room and spent more time on her phone. Sam’s prospects were curtailed by a high school schedule, but Elena’s were enlarging, and Sam worried that soon they would be big enough to make a sister small. So one day, after the last bell rang, Sam walked from the school campus to the golf course, entered the dusty parking lot, and sat on the hood of their car. She did her homework there while she waited for Elena to clock out. It took hours. Finally Elena emerged from the door of the grill. She was in a clot with two other servers. When she saw Sam, she straightened, grinned.

They got in the car together that day. Elena was in the driver’s seat. She smelled of grease, alcohol, and sugar. Her eyes were bright. “I was bored so I thought I’d come visit,” Sam said.

“Aren’t you a sweetie,” Elena said. She waved out the window to one of the other servers, then buckled herself in.

“It’s fun here?”

“Yeah. The people are fun, yeah.”

“Should I work here, too? After school?”

Elena rolled out of the parking space. Her voice was casual. “If you want.”

Sam watched her sister navigating the dirt road from the club like she’d been born to it. “I’m just trying to sort out, you know, what’ll happen after my senior year ends. What’ll we do?”

“You’ve got time. Don’t stress.”

“I’m serious, though,” Sam said. Elena glanced from the road to her for a second before flicking her eyes back. Sam felt, in her throat, the slightest tremor. She had spent that whole day sitting alone in classes, surrounded by people who had nothing in common with her, stuck in a routine she by that point despised. If she couldn’t go backwards, to when their mother was perfectly healthy and the sisters spent their days walking wild over the island’s mysteries, then she wanted to go forward to something as good. Something better. “I don’t want us to split up,” she said. Her voice cracked at the last words. She could tell Elena heard. “What are we going to do?”

That very night, when Sam came out to sit with her on the sofa before sleep, Elena laid out their new vision: working for a while, taking care of their mother, then selling the house, setting themselves up somewhere private and calm. Sam knew that Elena had invented this answer to comfort her. That didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

Elena had come back to Sam, to the bond they shared, because Sam demanded it of her. She would do it again now. Sorrow, money, and this goddamn creature had pulled Elena away, but Sam wasn’t going to let her go any further. Elena confessed she loved other things, but in the end, she had to love her sister more.

So Sam would set them right one last time. Put Elena’s distractions behind them—death, debt, Danny Larsen. The bear. Elena had called it the best thing that ever happened to her, but once it was gone, Elena would see what other bests were waiting. She would return to Sam.