Bear
Her grandmother had let out an exaggerated sigh and said, “Well, if you must call her by that ridiculous name, at least make it just one bee.”
Maia felt elated to be included in his wildness.
She saw how adults responded to him. “And what’s your name?
” someone would ask, leaning over the counter in a shop, something in the set of their face softening when they heard.
Instant fondness. Delight. He was a buttercup held beneath the chin: Do you like butter?
Yes, always yes. There was no one it didn’t work on.
And Maia would bathe in the warmth of his glow.
Sometimes Fern would say, “Oh, God, you’re so lucky. Mother, why didn’t we have one of these!”
“You don’t have to be weird just because he’s here,” Fern tells her.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Most dads aren’t like yours was, you know.” Maia knows that. But there’s a difference between knowing and feeling.
Sometimes, in lessons, she looks out of the window and imagines what life would have been like if the Before had carried on, and when the teacher shouts “Maia!” to bring her attention back, she jumps and, in that instant, knows.
Blood thrumming in her ears as she furiously blinks away tears that appear from nowhere.
It’s a fight-or-flight reaction, Peggy had said.
But being able to name it doesn’t take it away.
At their next session, she’d told Peggy she didn’t think it was either of those things for her, that it was more like freeze.
And Peggy had said, “You’re right—I should have said that.
It can be fight, flight, freeze…also fawn.
That’s the fourth response. The one you might have had to rely on when you were living with your father. ”
Maia knew what she meant, but somehow it was the literal image of a baby deer—quiver-legged, dapple-spotted, vulnerable—that left her sitting with a tissue disintegrating in her hands, tiny white lint balls sticking to the wool of her school skirt.
When the time was up, Peggy hugged her. “Next week, maybe you can tell me what you were thinking about just now.” And then she’d reached into a desk drawer and brought out a freshly ironed handkerchief.
“One for the road. Sometimes tissues aren’t up to the big snotter cries, are they? ”
Maia made sure the hanky was washed and smoothed flat for their next session.
She kept it in the inside breast pocket of her blazer, and when she told Peggy about the fawn, she didn’t let herself cry, but her hand hovered above where the hanky rested.
Only when she stood to leave did she make herself say, “Oh, I nearly forgot—”
But before she could take it out, Peggy said, “My handkerchief? I should have said, you can keep it,” and for the first time all week, Maia had felt her body loosen. She still carries it with her now, even though she only sees Peggy once or twice a year, just to check in.
Once the boys notice how jumpy she is, they delight in touching her on the shoulder or pulling the end of her ponytail when she’s least expecting it. “Leave her alone,” Fern tells them. But it’s too much fun, they can’t help themselves.
“Idiots,” Mehri says. “They’re just trying to get a reaction because they all fancy you.”
Fern rolls her eyes. “That’s what you say whenever a boy does anything annoying.”
“Because it’s true! Look at you both!”
“Ugh, you’re blinded by love for us, Mother. We’re like two ugly peas in a pod,” and they press their faces together and puff out their cheeks, laughing. And then Fern says, “Anyway, Bees is into girls.”
Maia’s cheeks flush red, but Mehri acts like she’s just been told Bees likes sultanas over raisins. “Sadly, that won’t stop the boys from thinking they’re God’s gift.”
Maia doesn’t know when she first realized she was gay.
Perhaps the year after her father left. She remembers their swimming teacher dividing them into As and Bs.
The Bs left on the side, while the As were sent into the pool.
She can still picture Fern jumping in, then reemerging.
Head back, treading water. Fern had beamed up at her, a semi-circle of smooth black hair fanning out on the surface.
And Maia’s stomach had flipped, her chest expanding with something that felt glorious and surprising.
Like a balloon being blown up. She’d had to look away.
Had known, even then, that Fern loved her, but not like that.
Now, Maia and Bear recover his things from the pavement and walk up the hill toward home as he asks questions about France, and listens to half an answer, before interrupting with another.
“Is the Mama Bear home?” he says when they reach their door, and Maia tells him not yet.
She’s left a note on the table saying she’ll try to finish work by five and will collect pizza.
“Yum. I hope she gets Sprite too. What about Mehri?” he asks, and Maia reminds him that Roland is arriving back from Japan tonight, so she and Fern won’t be around.
“What d’you think he’ll have brought for us?” he asks. Maia says she doesn’t know and that they mustn’t expect anything, even though she’s been wondering this herself.
In the kitchen, Maia makes milkshakes, plunging the frother up and down in the jug until all the strawberry powder is mixed in and bubbles start to form. “Harder, Bees, we want it really froffy,” Bear says, standing on tiptoes to watch.
“Fro-th.”
“Fro-th,” Bear repeats back.
“Eeee,” she says as she begins to pour.
“Eeee,” he echoes, his eyes traveling up the glass with the rising line of the milk.
When he’s licked away a strawberry mustache, Maia remembers the fruit caramels and lets Bear pick out one of each flavor, and he sits on her bed chewing while she unpacks.
She sorts her clothes into lights and darks and empties a loose centime from her jeans pocket before putting them in the washing pile too.
“Here you go, this one’s French,” she tells Bear, and he holds the coin close to his nose and breathes in, before running off to his own room to fetch his money box.
He jangles it upside down until a two-pence piece slips back through the slot, then puts the coins side by side and sniffs from one to the other.
“The same,” he concludes. “The money smell is funny, though. When you smell it, you know exactly how it’d taste, don’t you?”
Maia nods. “Dirty.”
“Like pavement grime mixed with the standing-up toilets at school.”
“The urinals?”
“And also,” he says, breathing in again, “metally. Can we taste, just to check?”
“You want to lick a coin after saying it smells like urinals?”
“Yes!” he says, and Maia soaks up the sound of his laughter. She’s missed it.
Cora reaches into the dense foliage of the forsythia, checking for nesting birds before choosing a few branches to strip out near its heart.
She overhears the end-of-day conversations as visitors wander back to the car park, their voices drawing close, then fading away.
She’s never sure—as she walks through town or crosses the common—if people might recognize her and remember.
Her photo didn’t appear in the press and, as Mehri says, Tell me, azizam, how might someone pick you out when you barely left the house?
But even so, Cora likes that here people rarely notice her; talking unchecked, as though she and the stately home’s other gardeners hear as little as the plants they tend.
This, Cora thinks, is partly true. She can lose whole hours deadheading the rose garden or reshaping shrubs into neat domes, oblivious to even her own thoughts.
But then she will look up and realize she’s been mulling over something one of the children has told her, some new thing in their life. Or a memory from before.
Barren, he’d said. It had been years between Maia’s birth and Bear finally coming along.
Her fault. Her failure to conceive. Although had she ever allowed herself to wonder if the issue might have been with him?
Her memory is hazy. Perhaps her way of enduring it back then had simply been not to think, not to feel.
She snips at the outer branches and wonders now if he’d been right.
If it had been of her making. If, at some deep, subconscious level, it was a form of self-protection.
For herself, for an unborn child. Sometimes, even now, she hears his voice in her head, the things he might say if he could hear her thoughts.
What utter tosh. Listen to you, trying to make out it was all some bit of supreme cleverness on your part, when the fact is, you were barren.
The word has lost its sting. And with the early evening sun on her back, her hands smudged with earth, she thinks, once again, how different life is now.
She begins to gather up the cut branches, keen to get home to Maia and Bear; to Mehri and Fern.
Then remembers Roland is also coming back today.
Even after all this time, she still feels a slight wobble at the idea of manning her ship alone.
It’s not that she doesn’t see Mehri during Roland’s homecomings, just that Cora senses her being less available.