Bear

Chapter 43

Sam boarded the ferry from Friday Harbor, the seventh sailing leaving the island that fall weekday, for her last trip across San Juan Channel. A deckhand she didn’t recognize waved her into position on the car deck. He reminded her to turn off her engine during the ride.

Beyond the deck’s open front, water shifted, careless and gray. In the car’s trunk, Sam had what was left of Elena, her driver’s license and favorite items of clothing, and her cremains mixed with the dirt sent by Madeline.

Some of that mix, Sam had left on the island: on their property, among the trees, in the same spot they’d put their mother’s ashes. Unmarked though it was, the place was easy for Sam to find; she and Elena had walked those woods a thousand times. Sam knew the ground and the branches. The camas flowers were past their bloom but the fireweed had come out. She knelt there, as Elena did before, and spread her sister’s body. The dirt and ash were cool on her fingers. She pressed until they blended with the ground. The bank might have the deed to the property, but Elena and their mother had become part of the earth. They were under San Juan’s lighthouse, the high southern grasses, the bleached white logs on the beaches where Sam and Elena had played as girls.

The rest of the mix, Sam pictured, not for the first time, scattering off the side of this ship, though the channel had borne nothing good toward the sisters, it had carried the bear. But was it a resting place Elena would’ve wanted? Sam did not, and could not, know. So she kept carrying the dirt and ash along. Other passengers trailed down the narrow aisle between Sam and the neighboring line of vehicles. The water rippled. Once, Sam believed she knew her sister’s mind better than anything, but now they were separated from each other.

Elena was gone. Their mother, too. The house. The ideas Sam had held, closer and more valued than stolen jewels, about where the sisters were going—the places they would live, the adventures they would have, the opportunities they would learn to take for granted side by side. Every bit of it was lost.

Her phone buzzed. She lifted it to check: Ben making sure she’d boarded all right. She texted him back to confirm. The phone’s background was a picture of them he’d taken one afternoon on a fishing trip. Their heads pressed together, two smiles, the edge of Cascade Lake blurred behind. They had gone there for rainbow trout. When Sam caught one, Ben whooped for her. If another passenger glanced at the screen over her shoulder, they’d never guess what Sam had destroyed. They’d see only sweetness.

The ferry blew its horn. It pulled away from the harbor that had held Sam and Elena’s childhood. It would dock at Orcas, Shaw, and Lopez, and then unload itself in Anacortes, where Ben was waiting. He was going to drive with Sam to Oregon. A job, an apartment. His life there, as he described it over again, didn’t sound so very different from the one Sam’s family had led after all: a working existence, with some debt and some plan.

Sam’s eyelids ached. Tender and overtouched. She always had a headache these days. The engine underneath vibrated up through her spine.

The open end of the ferry made an enormous mouth that framed the sea. It moved across the water without mercy, swallowing the fantasies she’d dangled overboard these many years. How many times had Sam taken this trip, watching the boat’s spreading wake and dreaming? Waiting, always waiting, for her life to change? And now she had changed it. No matter what she did, her future, empty of Elena, waited ahead.

Sam sat in her shut-off car in the churning bottom of the ferry. Her view was cut in half by the horizon. Clouds above and waves below. A decade of practice had taught her how to pass this ride in imagination, how to spend its sixty-five minutes stretching her heart to a distant shore, so she did that, but not to Anacortes, the mainland where she was going. No, Sam went instead to where she’d come from, what she’d seen. She pulled apart the bloody pieces of her last day with her sister and formed them into something she could take with her. Nearly everything else, she had been forced to leave behind.

She pictured Elena. Elena and the bear. The bear turning to Elena for comfort. It bit into her to be closer, closest, made one. They had died together, Sam told herself; as the boat churned, she collapsed the time between Elena’s destruction and the bear’s final fall, the time that had distinguished what was being ravaged and what was ravaging. Sam imagined them together. They were wed.

I love it, Elena had told Sam. The bear. She’d said it was nowhere else but their island. She’d said she wanted nothing more. Knowing that, it had embraced her, wrapped its mouth and claws around her, pressed her into San Juan’s fragrant ground. The bear freed Elena from her responsibilities, her worries, her pain. The boat’s sound was mechanical. Sam let its grinding replace the noises she’d heard rise from her sister that day. In memory, Sam took away any suffering, and gave Elena glory instead.

The intimacy of it. The ecstasy. The bear’s body reaching into hers. Elena’s last breath rising into the bear’s flared nostrils. The bear letting its lips enclose her, the only kiss Sam had ever seen Elena invite.

With all the skill she had of picturing things better than they would ever be, Sam imagined everything better than what had actually been. She imagined Elena as a princess and the bear as an enchanted prince. The bear as a bridegroom and Elena a veiled bride. The two of them as two clasped hands, two cooing doves, the ocean swallowing the offering shore. One held entirely inside the other. Both adoring it. Both transformed.

Sam imagined that Elena was not alone, had not been alone, had in fact died surrounded by the love she’d wanted to be swallowed by. And she told herself Elena knew, in her last moments, that Sam was there, too—that Sam had given her that satisfaction. The sisters were together, then. Exactly as it should have been. After so long moving around each other in a single stale house, missing one another’s meaning, trying and failing to make themselves understood, they had, in the end, briefly but beautifully, found each other, the way they once had been united, as children, as babies who stared into each other’s round and glossy eyes, as creatures who swam in the same dark chamber of their mother’s pulsing womb.

Elena had married the bear and Sam was with her. On San Juan Island. Together. Always. And their mother had witnessed it, somehow, and she wasn’t sick, her body had healed miraculously, she grew old in peace beside them, nothing hurt. The world was full of hopes to be realized. Lifelong dreams coming true. Beyond the boat, the water pulled forward toward the rest of Sam’s days, but she didn’t feel it anymore, she didn’t notice, she was only going back to scenic San Juan. She told herself the story of what happened there. In it, the sisters wanted for nothing. They had a kingdom of their own. They were as close as two perfect girls in the fables people offered their children as bedtime stories. Every year, they grew the most beautiful roses, white and red. They lived happily ever after.