Bear #2
In the early days, after Gordon was taken away, they’d drifted from room to room, as though looking for some unnamed thing that couldn’t be found.
Images from the television screen passed before their eyes without meaning and the days blurred, punctuated by a stream of visitors.
Police officers, social workers, a woman from a domestic-abuse charity, someone from the CPS.
All spokes on some giant wheel that had been set in motion behind the scenes.
She’d had no idea so many people were standing in the wings waiting to step forward.
Some visited regularly, while others turned up unannounced, holding out a photocard on a lanyard by way of introduction.
Cora’s mother, Sílbhe, moved around the house quietly, making cups of tea, washing clothes, conjuring up meals that left no trace on the kitchen.
Each night she camped at the foot of the bed where Cora and the children slept, a silver-haired protector who placed herself between them and the door.
“He’s locked up,” Cora told her. “We’re safe now.” But she recognized a new fierceness in her mother and knew she wouldn’t leave them to sleep alone. Not at first.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t know; I just never saw it,” Sílbhe whispered, her soft, freckled hand on Cora’s one night as she sat up in bed feeding Bear.
“Because I didn’t let you—it was too risky to ask for help. No one could have known.”
“But I’m your mother. It was my job to know.”
As the weeks passed, the bruise covering one side of Cora’s face worked its way through a petrol puddle of colors until finally it paled to yellow, then faded into her skin.
The alarm bell of tinnitus ringing in her ears lessened too, revealing the sound of silence; her own breath; of tiny bones shifting and crunching somewhere inside her ear as she chewed.
The patio doors were reglazed, and where they’d been boarded up, light flooded the room again.
The day before she returned to Ireland, Sílbhe scrubbed at the patio with a coarse brush and endless washing-up bowls of soapy water, until a neighbor, who must have seen her from an upstairs window, took over with his pressure washer.
Cora sat in Maia’s room at the front of the house, Bear asleep on her shoulder, unable to witness the effort it took to erase the stain of Vihaan’s blood.
She thought of Lady Macbeth and wondered if her neighbors did too; the washing-away of blood somehow synonymous with a woman’s guilt.
Even now, an anonymous quote in an article run by the local newspaper replays in her head: Dr. Atkin was such a gentle man, couldn’t do enough for people.
If it was murder, you have to wonder what drove him to it. It beggars belief.
The morning a taxi arrived to take her to the airport, Sílbhe said, “Don’t be waving me off. It’ll make it too hard to leave.”
And so they’d sat in the living room—Cora, Maia, and Bear—and listened as the car pulled away, leaving them in eerie silence, the quiet somehow bigger than the space her mother had taken up.
And even though Cora hadn’t wanted her to go, she’d needed to know she was capable of doing this alone. Whatever this may be.
“Okay, you two,” she’d said, wanting to do something—anything—to be taking that first step. “Let’s bake. You can oversee,” she told Bear, placing his bouncer on the kitchen table. “And you, my lovely big girl, can be chief stirrer, quality control, and taste tester.”
As they’d weighed flour, sugar, and too-cold butter straight from the fridge, Cora’s anxiety began to dissipate. She watched as Maia ushered mixture into cake tins, spilling batter down their sides, and realized this was all she needed to do. Just keep following one step with another.
The months before Gordon’s conviction had felt like a pause in time.
Even though Cora felt sure of the outcome, she was somehow unable to move their lives forward, to settle and say to herself—to Maia, to Bear—so this is how it will be.
She had a sense of rootlessness, almost as though they were on holiday, where the rules and patterns that once regulated their days had been temporarily left behind.
The bits of routine that did remain—school, mealtimes, swimming lessons—felt surprising; things they must navigate around.
But once they were back inside with the door locked and the chain across, the hours were formless, open to possibility.
They found themselves taking baths at four o’clock in the afternoon and learning times tables during Bear’s night feeds.
On Saturdays, Cora and Maia ate toast spread with golden syrup and sprinkled with Rice Krispies, spilling crumbs over the duvet cover and Bear’s babygro.
“This is health food,” Maia told Bear, “every Krispie fortified with frolic acid!” and Bear kicked his legs and rewarded her with gummy smiles.
There was an ease in doing things as they came to them, and Cora wondered at the structure that had metered out their days to that point.
At how, in Gordon going, they’d also cast off all the other strictures that ordered their lives.
For the first time in over a decade, Cora began to dance again, just for the sheer, private joy of it.
Tentatively at first. When Maia was out at school, she sometimes pushed back the table and pirouetted around the kitchen, as Bear sat looking on from his bouncer, laughing.
A hearty sound that made her insides fizz; some long-repressed part of herself bubbling back to life again.
And throughout that time, Mehri arrived with home-cooked food.
At first, Cora noticed how the texture of another woman’s mashed potato, or the creaminess of her cheese sauce, was somehow distinctly different from her own.
But then these things became familiar, beloved even, and they often ended up sharing meals.
The girls had been so young then, only nine.
They’re sixteen now. Fern the more outwardly confident of the two—mouthy, Mehri likes to say, proudly.
And Maia is breathtakingly capable. In the beginning, Cora had tried to stop her from always helping with Bear, but the counselor said people often did instinctively what was needed to heal. “You’ll see if it’s too much for her.”
When Cora arrives home with pizza, she is bone tired.
But in a way that feels good. She hugs Maia hello, then washes the dirt from beneath her fingernails, while Maia gets out glasses and waits for the tap to come free and fills Cora in on the French trip, pausing to remind Bear to use his fractions to divvy up the slices he’s sharing out.
Cora dries her hands. “Hang on,” she says, leaning in to snip at a string of mozzarella trailing between box and plate.
But Bear carries the dish away, laughing, watching to see how far he can go before the cheese boings apart.
It’s in these moments—domestic, cramped, the three of them bustling about their flat’s small kitchen—that Cora feels most amazed.
Oh. We’re actually doing it. We’re all here, and we’re doing okay.