Bear
She stares and he takes out his earbuds and says, “You want to see it again?” The child nods almost imperceptibly, uncertain, but not dropping her gaze.
“Are you looking?” he says, even though he can see her eyes are fixed on him.
The child’s mum is looking too. Suspicious; she hadn’t seen what caught the girl’s attention.
He slides across the aisle into the empty seat opposite them. “Hey,” he says, “want to see something else?”
“Robyn,” she says.
“No way! Like the bird?”
When he’s done, he walks the bear across the table toward the child, shifting the weight between its triangular feet.
“Want me to make you a robin to go with it?” he says, and the girl nods, her hand on the animal, eyes darting from Bear’s face only momentarily. “It’s more of a generic bird, really, but maybe if you have some felt-tips at home, you can color its belly in red.”
When the train reaches the end of the line at Brighton, Maia watches from the ticket barriers as Bear waves goodbye to a woman and child, the girl’s hands filled with what Maia knows will be paper animals.
He turns and sees her then and his face is full beam as he lopes along the platform, arms outstretched the last few steps, embracing her across the barrier before he’s even on the other side.
“Bees,” he says, “I’ve missed you.” Maia’s whole body fills with warmth.
They stop at a fish and chip shop, then walk along the seafront and cover the preliminary topics: Mum, school, Bear’s latest geography field trip, Maia’s homeopathy training, and then into the easy back and forth of everything and nothing.
“So, what’s she like?” Maia asks, when Bear tells her he’s asked someone out.
“Kind of quiet, but also, like, really confident and kind. Smart too. We’ll be discussing some book in English and everyone will be coming out with all the usual lame stuff and then she’ll say something and the whole class will be kind of, I don’t know, like you can tell she’s in a different league.
But it’s not like she does it to show us all up.
It’s just who she is.” He doesn’t mention that their surnames are almost the same—only she’s Atkins with an s—or that he also sits next to her in maths, which she’s less good at; he wants to keep some details for himself.
A seagull missing a toe hops toward them, and Bear breaks one of his chips in half and throws it for the bird, who snaps it up hungrily and then flies off.
“Who does she hang out with then?”
“Lily? She’s not one of the popular kids,” Bear says, understanding what she’s really asking, “but everyone’s cool with her.”
Fern once said Bear is one of those kids who could be in the popular crowd, but then chooses some other, more obscure group, and Mehri had smiled in agreement.
Maia realized it was true, that Bear could glide effortlessly across the unseen lines that define most children’s school days.
And that it was never like that for her.
“She has this hair. Always makes me think of licorice toffee or something…” and he trails off, embarrassed by himself.
“Like Grandma Sílbhe’s sweets? Oh, Bear, you’ve got it bad,” Maia says, and they laugh, and he nudges her shoulder with his own as they sit looking out to sea from one of the rusted turquoise benches. “What color are her eyes then?” Maia asks, teasing.
Back in Maia’s flat, they drink hot chocolate sitting cross-legged on a sofa draped in a throw he doesn’t recognize.
Bear wonders if Maia and her girlfriend choose these things together, or if the living room is a merging of both their possessions.
He decides that later he’ll use some of the money he earns from his newspaper round to buy her something from one of the shops in the Lanes, a cushion maybe.
“I had this weird thing in class,” he says.
“I can’t even remember how we got to it, but we must’ve been talking about The Canterbury Tales, how the men are defined by what they do, but the only women— Well, it’s more about who they are in relation to a man.
Like the Wife of Bath, or even the nun in a way. ”
“I can’t remember the stories, but I’d say definitely the nun.”
“Anyway, somehow it ended up with the teacher asking us, if we had to give our life a title where we were defined by someone else, what it would be. And I realized—”
“Oh,” Maia says, grasping where he’s going with this. Because until she moved away, it was always there hovering in the back of her own mind.
“You know what I was thinking?”
“Yeah, I think so. After it happened, I always thought people in shops, teachers, our neighbors…Well, that I’d pass them in the street, and they’d be thinking, Oh, there goes…” She pauses for a moment, and then begins again. “Oh, there goes the murderer’s daughter.”
They sit in silence. Maia moves her feet so they meet Bear’s where the sofa cushions join. And for a while they stare at the tips of their toes.
“What’s weird is that it’s taken me fourteen years to have that thought. That I’m the murderer’s son.”
“Do you actually feel related to him like that, though? When you’ve barely met him?”
“I guess not. Most of the time I don’t really think of myself as having a dad. Do you?”
“Yes, but in a different life. Like I had one, but now, in this life, I don’t.”
“D’you reckon he thinks about us? Like we’re his?”
Maia goes back to looking at their socks.
At the stripes of hers and the faded black of his.
She’s wondered about this often but doesn’t share her thoughts: that she believes he probably still thinks of her as his daughter, but perhaps not Bear as his son.
She wishes she had that same anonymity in their father’s mind. “I don’t know,” she says eventually.
“It’s next year, isn’t it? That he’s getting out of prison?”
Maia wants to sweep the conversation away. To stop it polluting Bear’s mind or their time together. But she knows she has to give him a little. That it will only make him more hungry if she denies this is a part of his history too. “If he’s good,” she says.
“Will he be, d’you think? Good, I mean.”
“Yes,” Maia says, her spine running cold. “Me and Mum have been surprised he hasn’t been let out earlier. He was incredibly charming. I don’t think anyone would have believed how he treated Mum, if it hadn’t been for what he did to Vihaan.”
They speak his name as though they knew him.
But it’s not familiarity; it’s a point of honor, an acknowledgment of what he sacrificed for them.
“We mustn’t ever forget that we only have our freedom because he died for us,” Cora says.
To Maia, it’s always sounded like he was their own personal Jesus.
They don’t go to church, but every year on October 16, even now, they go to Vihaan’s grave and lay flowers for him.
Sometimes there are already flowers there, just starting to wilt.
It’s only as they’ve grown older that she’s recognized the choices—crocuses, daffodils, peonies, dahlias, cyclamens—as their mum’s favorites and realized she must come more often.
“Do you think he’ll, you know, come after her? Or us?”
“Oh, Bear,” Maia says. “It was all such a long time ago. And he’s never tried to get in touch.
” These are the things she tells herself when she lies in bed at night.
Or when she’s walking home after dark, heart beating too fast, sensing him lurking, ready to grab her and whisper threats into her ear.
But soon, she won’t have the reassurance of knowing it’s just an overactive mind.
Bear feels stupid for being melodramatic, but what happened when he was a baby feels so divorced from the life he’s known that sometimes he finds it hard to believe at all.
Recently though, he’s found himself working through imaginary scenarios.
His father’s face at the window when he goes to close the curtains at night, even though their flat is on the second floor of a Victorian mansion block.
A neighbor leaving the front door open, their father hiding beneath the communal staircase.
The telephone wire cut…Sometimes he picks up the receiver, just to check.
He knows they’ll be told when there’s a release date, but still.
Lately he’s found himself wishing his mother had met someone.
Someone thickset with a mean side that only shows if his new family is threatened.
He’s wondered about Aaron who comes to patch up the aging plumbing in their flat every few months, never charging his mum the proper call-out fee and sitting down with Bear to play a game of Mario Kart before he leaves.
He’s not noticed a spark between them, and he might be married for all Bear knows, but he’s certain Aaron could handle himself if he needed to.
It’s not that Bear thinks he couldn’t handle himself too, just that he’s never been put to the test. At school, if he sees someone being given a hard time, he steps in, and he’s not sure why, but the bully always stands down without putting up a challenge.
He wondered once if it was his dad; if they back off because they think Bear might have that same loose-cannon gene.
Whatever it is, he’s not sure his presence would have this effect on someone capable of murder.
He worries, too, about who he’ll be if their father sought them out now. He’s shaped their lives through his absence. What if his presence changes who Bear is, his sense of himself knocked off balance as easily as a scoop of ice cream from a cone.
“D’you think he’ll have changed much?” Bear asks.
Maia shrugs. “So much of who he was came from being respected, from people looking up to him. I’m not sure what he’ll be left with when he’s not a doctor. If he’s not living in some big, perfect house. It’s like everything that made him him will have been stripped away.”
“I went to see it one day on my bike,” Bear says. “I couldn’t picture us living there.”