Chapter 8
Bear
Two rooms, a woodstove, a propane ring, a tin roof and a porch with a bench on it facing water.
The club's had it since before I was born.
It smells like woodsmoke and mouse and forty years of men not cleaning anything, and the first thing Marisol does when she gets through the door is open every window in it in forty-degree weather.
"It's April."
"It smells like a shoe."
"That's history."
"It's a shoe, Bear."
Day one, we fish.
I want to be precise about the fishing, because Marisol has since described it to at least nine people in ways that are not accurate.
We fish for five hours. We catch nothing. This is not unusual in April on the Sitkum, where the fish are present in the way that God is present.
"So when does it happen?"
"When does what happen?"
"The fish."
"That's not how it works."
"Then explain to me how it works."
"You stand here," I say, "and you throw this in the water, and nothing happens, and then you do it again."
"For how long?"
"Till dinner."
She looks at the river. She looks at the rod. She looks back at me, and her whole face is doing something.
"Bear," she says. "This isn't a hobby. This is a coping mechanism."
"It's fishing."
"It's a man standing in cold water performing repetitive motion to avoid a feeling! I've got a chart for this!"
"You want the rod or not."
"Obviously I want the rod," she says.
She catches something in ninety minutes.
It's about six inches long and possibly not a fish; Verse would know, Verse claims to know, Verse is wrong about most things.
She holds it up with both hands and demands photographs and then puts it back and is quiet for a second afterward and says, "That was actually great, don't tell anybody," and I say "I'm telling everybody," and she says "I know. "
Day one, night, we play cards.
She teaches me a game her grandmother plays which appears to have no rules and which she wins six times.
"You're inventing them."
"I'm remembering them."
"You remembered a new one in the middle of the hand."
"That's called a Reyes rule," Marisol says. "They surface."
"How many Reyes rules are there?"
"Some."
Day one, later, she finds the key hook.
It's a metal fish, screwed to the wall by the door, and it has been there since the seventies and every man in this club has hung a key on it and not one of us has ever remarked on it.
"Why is it a fish?"
"It's the fish."
"That's not an answer, Bear, that's a category—"
"It came with the cabin."
"So did the smell," she says, "and we're not keeping that either."
Day two it rains, which up here means it rains on the roof for nineteen hours and you learn things about a person.
I learn she was a swimmer. Genuinely good — regional times, a coach who wanted her to go to Corvallis, a box of medals somewhere in her mother's closet under a Christmas tree stand. She quit at nineteen when her father died and there wasn't a version of the arithmetic where it stayed in.
"Do you miss it?"
"I miss being in water."
"There's water outside."
"There is hypothermia outside."
I learn her brother's name is Eddie and that she loves him in the specific, exhausted way you love somebody you have already decided you cannot save.
I learn her mother has a boyfriend of eighty-three, called the child.
I learn she has a filing system for her own feelings and it is essentially a closet full of saline.
She learns almost nothing about me, because I keep turning it around, and she lets me for a day and a half.
She tries once, around four in the afternoon, and I turn it.
"What's the earliest thing you remember?"
"Sled."
"Sled?"
"I had a sled."
"Bear, I'm going to hit you with a fish."
"It's a nice sled."
She lets it go. That's the part I keep thinking about afterward — she lets it go, twice, three times, all afternoon, and every single time she does it without a sigh, without a look, without one gram of the thing people put on you when they've decided you're being difficult.
She just says okay and asks me something else.
And I sit there in a chair by a stove and watch her decide, over and over, for nine hours, to let me have it.
That's what breaks me in the end. Not pressure. The complete absence of it.
At about six she gets up and puts a pan on the propane ring and makes the worst rice I have ever eaten in my life.
"That's rice."
"That is not rice."
"It's rice, Bear."
"Marisol, my people have been eating starch since before there was writing, and that is not rice."
"Oh, so now you have people," she says, and something goes very still in the room, and she hears it a half second after she says it and looks up at me with the spoon in her hand. "Bear."
"It's fine."
"It's not."
"It's fine," I say. "Eat your — whatever that is. Eat your building material."
Then it's dark, and the stove's going, and the rain's coming off the tin in sheets, and she puts down the cards.
"Six what," she says.
I tell her.
All of it. Start to finish, out loud, in order, for the first time in a thousand years and two lives.
I tell her about a beach called Vestrfjord and a boat called the Bloodrune and a man named Halvard with a scar he lied about.
I tell her the ships came around the headland with their oars stroking in time and it was beautiful.
I tell her about the arrow that took a boy through the throat and how there was no more line after that.
I tell her about the hallway.
I tell her the oar. Ash-wood. Thick as my wrist. Still wet.
"Five," I say. "Five men who came at me with weapons in their hands on a boat in a battle, and I could carry five. I've carried five for a month and it's heavy but it's the kind of heavy a man can put down at night."
The stove ticks.
"And then a sixth," I say.
She doesn't say anything. She's got her knees up on the chair and both hands around a mug and she's looking at me with an expression I've never been on the other side of in my life.
"He was already down," I say. "He was younger than Rurik. He was curled up against the mast-fish with his hands over his head and he was crying and he said 'I yield.'"
"You heard him."
"I heard him."
"You're sure."
"Marisol, I've had a thousand years to be unsure," I say. "I heard him. I understood him. And something in me weighed it and decided it didn't count."
I make myself say the last part, because if I'm doing it I'm doing all of it.
"When it let go," I say, "and I came back up, and I looked for my brothers — they were all alive.
Every one of them. And they stepped back from me.
Not far. A half step. The kind you don't decide to do.
" I look at my hands. "And then the arrow came in, and they came right back, and knelt down, and held me while I died.
And the last thing I thought was that it's easy to love a man once he's safe. "
The rain does what rain does.
"And that's the six," I say. "And there's a woman named Solveig who was standing on that beach watching it like a pot she'd put on a fire, and her name's carved in the wall of my clubhouse, and mine's second under it, and nobody in that club knows any of what I just told you."
I stop.
I wait for the flinch.
I have been waiting for the flinch for a month, since a lot and a fence and a boy saying please. I have rehearsed the flinch. I know exactly what I'm going to say when it comes, which is nothing, and exactly what I'm going to do, which is drive her home.
She doesn't flinch.
She puts the mug down on the floor and she gets up and she crosses four feet of cabin and stands between my knees and puts her hands on either side of my face.
"Okay," she says.
"Marisol—"
"I said okay."
"You need to—"
"Bear. Stop talking." Her thumbs are on my cheekbones. "You've been holding a door shut for a month and I just watched it take everything you have, and now you want to argue with me about my own reaction. No. It's mine. You don't get a vote."
"Why aren't you scared of me?"
And that's the question. That's the one I've never asked out loud, to her or anyone, and it comes out of me sounding like it belongs to a much smaller man.
She takes her time with it.
"Because I've had my hands inside people," she says.
"...What?"
"Not a figure of speech. I've had my hands in a man's chest holding pressure on a heart while a surgeon ran down a hallway.
I have felt what a person is actually made of, Bear — the wet, stupid, mechanical fact of it.
Four times." She doesn't blink. "And people talk about monsters like it's a kind of thing you can be.
It isn't. There's nothing in there to be a monster with.
There's a pump and some plumbing and about three pounds of electricity making all of it up as it goes. "
"That's not comforting."
"It's not supposed to be comforting, it's supposed to be true.
" Her hands tighten. "What I know how to spot — nine years, every night, drunks and husbands and boys with pipes — is the difference between a man who enjoys it and a man who's afraid of himself.
And they don't look anything alike. They're not even in the same category.
The ones who enjoy it are relaxed, Bear.
They're relaxed. They come in relaxed and they leave relaxed and in between they call me sweetheart. "
She leans down until her forehead is against mine.
"You haven't been relaxed once," she says. "Not one time. Not for a second since you walked into my bay and stood in the middle of it because you didn't want to be a large man sitting near a small woman."
I can't say anything.
"A thousand years," she says. "You did it a thousand years ago in a fight you didn't start, and you've spent every minute since building a house around it, and I've been living in that house for a month and I want you to hear me: it's a good house."
I don't remember standing up.
I remember her going up on her toes and it not being enough and me lifting her, which is nothing, which is like lifting a coat, and her legs going around my waist and her arms around my neck, and the chair going over backward behind us.
I remember the wall.
I remember her hands in my hair and my name coming out of her about four different ways in ninety seconds and none of them the way anyone's ever said it.
I remember carrying her to the bed in the other room — the two steps down, the cold air, the sound the springs make, all of it — and her laughing at the springs and then not laughing.
I remember her getting my shirt off and going still, because there's a lot of me and most of it's a road map, and she put her palm flat on the worst one under my ribs and said "1997?
" and I said "1997," and she said "the guy at the Anchor?
" and I said "different guy," and she said "Bear," and I said "he moved to Idaho," and she laughed so hard she had to put her face in my shoulder.
I remember getting her sweater off over her head and her hair coming down with it.
I remember her mouth on my throat, and her hands going low, and my voice saying something that wasn't a word.
And I remember exactly, precisely where we were — my hands under her, hers on my belt, the stove throwing orange up the wall, both of us about four heartbeats from the end of any argument either of us was ever going to make —
when the windows went white.
Headlights.
Coming up the access road, sweeping across the ceiling of a cabin eleven miles up the Sitkum on a road the county gave up on in 1987, at ten forty at night, in the rain.
Marisol goes absolutely rigid under my hands.
"Bear."
"I see it."
"Who knows we're here?"
"Six people."
She's already off the bed and grabbing the sweater, and I'm already moving, and this is the part where I find out something about myself that I did not know an hour ago:
The hallway doesn't open.
There are lights on my ceiling and men on my road and a woman in this cabin, and I check for the cellar door the way you'd check a pocket for keys, and it is shut, and I am entirely, completely here.
"Get in the back room," I tell her.
"Absolutely not."
"Marisol—"
"I'm a nurse, Bear, I go toward it, that's the whole job—"
"Then stay behind me and don't argue about that one."
"...Fine."
I pick up the axe from beside the stove, and I think about the fact that I'm doing it, and I put it back down and pick up a flashlight instead.
"Good," she says quietly, behind me.
"Yeah."
The engine stops. A door opens.
And somebody out there in the dark and the rain shouts, "IT'S TOR, DON'T DO ANYTHING."