Chapter 39
They went out together, she and Danny, while Elena was at work the next day. Sam had worked the morning shift so she was back home by lunch. He met her on the road with his dog at his side and a handgun holstered on his waist. Sam frowned down. “I thought you’d have a big rifle or something.”
“It’s not hunting season,” he said. “Washington may be an open carry state, but if I waved a rifle around the streets of Friday Harbor in June, I’m pretty sure a deputy would show up.”
The dog sniffed the road at Danny’s feet. In Danny’s holster, the gun was compact, promising. “Can I hold it?” Sam asked.
He grimaced. “Have you ever held one before?” She shook her head. “Not right now,” he said. “Maybe later.”
They had time. They were prepared to wait as long as it took. Side by side, they walked to the end of their road, crossed Cattle Point, and climbed onto the trail. The dog panted happily underneath. Danny, petting it, asked Sam why she imagined a hunting rifle. They weren’t hunting, were they? She could tell that, though he was with her, he was hesitating again, picking over his words as carefully as he had the night before when he was delaying his texts. Before he let his dread of losing Elena peek through. The dread was still there, though. The truest, hungriest part of him. She spoke to that. No, she told him, they weren’t hunting. They were intimidating. They were there to frighten away what had attempted first to frighten them.
Under the trees on the trail, the air was shaded, cooler. The weekend’s heat had finally broken. The dog pissed on a heap of roots that rose from the ground. They walked north, slowly, toward the golf club, and didn’t speak to each other. Sam concentrated on watching for movement in the far brush.
“Do you really think we’ll see it?” Danny asked.
His talking likely didn’t help them. But: “Yes.” The dog had run ahead on the path, but came back, goofy and grinning, at the sound of their voices. A car passed. Sam said, “We could’ve brought some food to attract it, I guess. Elena does that.”
He sighed.
Sam had considered, as they texted through the logistics, asking him whether they could tie some bait to the dog’s collar, to make sure the bear would be drawn their way. But she’d rethought that idea. The last thing she and Elena needed was to be sued by the Larsens for endangering their puppy. His mother seemed the type to overreact. It wasn’t worth mentioning to him, then, the schemes that Sam had come up with and disregarded before landing on this afternoon’s plan. The best way they had of finding it was following Elena. Walking this path. Watching, and waiting, and being ready, at any approach, to do enough damage to ensure the bear would never return.
They reached the patch of woods where Elena had shown the creature to Sam. The trail sloped down from the road. The trees were thick. When Elena brought Sam here, the ground was slippery with mud, but the recent heat had dried it. Was that really only two weeks ago? Less? Impossible. It was another lifetime, back when their mother was with them, and Sam was ignorant of her sister’s secrets, and none of them could conceive of the ruptures ahead.
“Let’s go in,” Sam said.
Danny hung back. “I’m pretty sure that’s private property.”
“Okay?” Sam stepped away from the road, toward the woods, over a log. Branches made a lattice overhead. He wasn’t following. As much as it irritated her to admit, she did need him to come along. Did he want to help her sister or what? She told him, “This is where Elena brought me to show me the bear.”
He stepped after her. The dog did, too.
The air between the trees moved as gently as a breath. Most of the trunks here were straight and gray, oak and hemlock and fir, but one gangly madrone twisted in front of them. Its bark was peeling already, showing raw orange skin. Berries grew thick on the bushes. The dog sniffed the earth, dropped down, and rolled. Sam couldn’t smell the bear’s stink. Only the clean summery scent of heated pine, the inland island smell, underlaid with dirt, moss, and salt from the distant shifting tides.
Sam took a seat on a smooth rock. Danny, stopping over her, squinted at the sky. He was less comfortable with her now than he’d been a week earlier. She could see it in his body. He wasn’t sure how close they should be.
“You can sit,” she said. “If you want. It might be a while.”
He paused, considering, then lowered himself to the ground. He was bigger than most of the other men Sam knew. Unwished for, the image of him with Elena, his wide hands and her pale back, flashed before Sam, and she had to shake it out of her mind. Disgusting. What was this thing between them, this not-a-relationship that had stayed in hiding for so long? It didn’t make any sense. But it was, Sam supposed, consistent; whatever desperation pushed Elena to try to tame a bear had to be the latest version of the impulse, years earlier, that inspired her to confide in Danny. She’d been frustrated enough to do things entirely inappropriate. Shameful and strange.
At least Danny tried not to be frightening. He made himself into the stuffed toy-store version of a bear or a boyfriend. Shiny-eyed, softly furred. Good for Elena—good choice there—finding someone who could muzzle his viciousness. If only she’d stayed satisfied with that.
“How’s work?” he asked.
The dog was exploring the plants around them. Everything was dappled from the sunlight through high leaves. “It’s fine,” Sam said. “Boring.”
“But good benefits, right? You get a pension?”
“That’s only if you work for the actual ferry system. They didn’t hire me. I do concessions instead.”
“Ah,” he said. “Food and drinks and stuff?”
“Yeah. Exactly.” Bittersweet: to think that Elena never talked to him about her. Sam didn’t know if it’d feel better to think he knew everything about their family or nothing. It hit as a betrayal from Elena, either way.
“When you got your merchant mariner certification, the idea was that you’d work for the ferry, right?” She nodded. “I remember that,” he said. “Elena was so excited when she found that course for you.”
Oh. So it was worse to think he knew everything. He was talking confidently enough about Sam’s past that she was, suddenly, shot through with suspicion: he had some information she didn’t. He was going to tell her he’d paid for the certification program. Lent their family money over the years…God, she could not stand to have one more secret revealed, she could not take it, enough already. Elena had lied to her, Sam understood, she would forgive. He didn’t need to tell her anything else. She said, “Can I hold the gun now?”
He pulled it out. Handed it over.
As soon as she took it from him, her attention sharpened. Other thoughts dropped away. There was only the touch of the breeze, the sound of the dog, the vegetal smells that surrounded. Her senses expanded, redirected, and turned toward what she held. What a surprise—its slickness. It felt almost oiled. The pistol was cool weight in her palm.
Such a small thing. Heavy, though. Odd. If she had had this in her hand a month ago…the first time the animal came to their door…She lifted it, shut one eye, aimed at a high branch.
“The safety’s on,” Danny said.
“I’m not going to pull the trigger,” she said. She was only looking. Remembering. Imagining.
This, in her hand, was at last the feeling Elena had talked about. The deep awareness of her body. The knowledge of all that had been and might be. With this gun, they could’ve gotten rid of their visitor that very first day. Cracked a living room window, fired a single shot, and seen the bear flee. She and Elena would’ve gasped and shrieked and clung to each other. They would’ve gone to the back of the house together and told the whole story to their mom. A bear! So wild! Sitting up in bed, their mother would laugh.
Sam and Elena would repeat the tale to each other over the years. They wouldn’t argue about anything. There would be no cause. Madeline would’ve never gotten in touch, so there would be no charges filed, no fines incurred, no bizarre offers, no consequences. Only a silly, momentary encounter with a feral thing that dashed off as soon as they frightened it—a passing moment in their unbroken sisterhood, which would travel, eventually, from San Juan to some new destination, where they would live in harmony, twin rose trees growing outside.
That was the power a gun carried. It let her believe she could change what was. Danny asked, “All done?”
“Not yet,” Sam said. She lowered the gun to her lap. Time passed. The metal, in her grip, warmed, like something alive.
A breeze blew. And then they heard her:
Are you there?