Chapter 15
Bear
In the brief intermission between dissertation hand-in and graduation, Bear goes home to paint the rooms of the second-floor flat where he’s grown up. A spontaneous visit, after Cora mentions taking a week off work to redecorate. “I’ll come back,” he’d offered.
“Oh, wow! I’d love that,” she’d said, the smile coming through in her voice.
The windows are open and the freshness of outdoors mingles with the scent of wet paint, making the room shimmer with newness.
With their eyes on the back and forth of their rollers, the conversation is easy and the silences the same.
But still sometimes Cora has to bat away the thoughts that momentarily warp the room with a rising horizon of saltwater.
Remember this. Yes, he’s been away at university all this time, but he’s still relied on her meager financial assistance, still come for the holidays around visiting Maia in Brighton.
Their home has remained the anchor in these transition years toward adulthood.
But soon, his career will take him away for good.
First to an excavation at Khirbet Safra in Jordan, and then, who knows?
She wants these things for him. But still, a part of her craves folding him back into herself, having his small, dimpled hand in hers again.
In Maia’s. She suspects that, to be a good parent, she must pack away the mothering part of herself into a box and gently close the lid on it.
She had not realized this is what would be required of her, had not seen it coming.
And yet she will do so willingly. Would you lay down your life for your child?
the world silently asks. Yes, she’s done this.
But she hadn’t known there would be a second reckoning, where this would eventually mean laying down the arms of motherhood: caution, foreseeing, checking, reminding, nurturing, openly caring.
Because a switch has been tripped, and rather than keeping the child safe, if left in sight, her love might implode.
Might overwhelm him. So, she must seek to diminish her own presence in Bear’s mind, make space for others to move into the foreground.
What will be left of her then? she wonders, and immediately chastises herself for the thought.
She tries to imagine how Lily might feel. But she doesn’t ask Bear, doesn’t want to pull levers of guilt that don’t even belong to her.
“Are you ever scared?” Bear asks.
Cora is surprised by the question and keeps painting, comforted that in this moment they’re each focused on their respective patches of wall. “You mean of him?”
“Yeah,” Bear says.
“No, I don’t think so. Not anymore. I google him every now and then. Just to keep tabs on where he is.”
“Me too. But I haven’t found anything.”
It squeezes at Cora’s heart to think of him doing this; she likes to imagine Bear’s life is untouched by Gordon. “You wouldn’t have known his parents’ address. But he’s on the electoral register there. In London. He has been for a few years. Divine justice, perhaps,” she adds, and then regrets it.
“How d’you mean?” Bear knows bits and pieces from Maia, but he wants to hear it in his mother’s words.
“Just that he’s not likely to be having much fun there. I think you were four or five when we finally stopped seeing them, but if you’d got to know his father, well—it probably explains a bit about what he was like.”
“In what way?”
Cora pauses and then decides it’s probably safe to reveal these details; it’s not right to expect Bear to exist in total ignorance.
Not now he’s an adult. “His father, he was this amazing surgeon. A brain surgeon. He’s retired now, but he did all this groundbreaking work.
And Gordon was meant to follow him into that.
But when he was on his surgical rotation, they realized he had an essential tremor. ”
Bear stops painting and turns to her. “A what?”
“Uncontrollable shaking. In his hands,” Cora says. “It’s not uncommon in surgeons and usually they can treat it with medication. Beta blockers or something. But that didn’t work for him and so he went into general practice. And his dad couldn’t deal with that.”
“What was the problem? He was still a doctor.”
“There’s a hierarchy in medicine, and to a brain surgeon—one like Gordon’s father, at least—a GP is almost like a glorified waiting-room attendant.
They can refer patients on, order tests, prescribe, but it’s not the same as having someone’s brain under your knife and restoring the power of speech.
His dad genuinely believed he was God. And that his son was a failure.
When they’d visit, he’d say, Ah, it’s Dr. Gordon, which was a dig, because as a surgeon he was a Mr. And he’d put out his hand and then say, Sorry, I forgot. No need to shake your hand after all.”
“What?”
“Meaning it was already shaking.”
“Seriously? Couldn’t he do something if he was this big-shot surgeon, though?” Bear’s roller is dripping paint onto his socks, but he doesn’t notice, and Cora chooses not to say anything.
“That was the weird thing. When we first met, he said it was an essential tremor, which is neurological. And that was how it was viewed by the medics. But it seemed more of a psychological thing to me, because it didn’t exist outside of an operating theater.
I watched him thread a needle once and his hand was solid. ”
Bear winces. Bees once told him their father used to patch up the damage he’d done rather than taking their mother to a hospital.
But he doesn’t feel able to mention this, even opaquely.
He’s already surprised his mum has spoken as freely as she has.
“D’you wonder if he’d have been different?
If his dad had been, I mean,” Bear says.
“Yes. It’s probably hard to imagine, but in some areas of his life, I really think he tried to do good. His patients thought a lot of him. And he was pretty forward-thinking in the way he ran the practice.”
“It’s kind of reassuring. To know it was his dad, and not some genetic thing.”
Cora sees the flicker of uncertainty pass across his face and says, “Oh, Bear, you could never be like him.”
“I know,” he says, himself again. “But you can’t help wondering. I’ll be standing in a queue feeling impatient with the person on the checkout—how they can never seem to find the barcode—and I’ll start thinking, Is this it? Is this that bit of him?”
Cora laughs. “Everyone feels impatient in queues. Really, Bear, you couldn’t be more different.”
They go back to their painting. The light is fading, and the color is darkening on the walls as it dries.
“Can I ask you something?” Bear says. He tries to keep his voice casual, as though he’s not been steering their conversation to this point all along.
“What happened? That day. What was the thing that made him lose it?” He’s asked Maia several times and she’s always said she’s not sure.
But then she doesn’t sit and wonder with him, which makes Bear think it’s because she already knows.
Cora’s shoulders tense and her mind momentarily floods, wondering which way to jump.
She engrosses herself in the wall and is relieved not to be looking at Bear when she says, “It could have been anything—there was always something making him angry. Just small things, like the television being left on standby or dinner not being ready on time.”
Inside, she wavers, unsure if this is the right approach now, although she and Maia have always agreed this is a burden Bear should never have to carry. And it’s not something she wants to reveal on impulse.
“So there was nothing more specific?” Bear asks.
Cora’s neck prickles under his gaze. He knows, she thinks. He knows, and I’m still not going to tell him. “Not that I can remember,” she says.
Bear doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to press her; this has never felt like his wound to reopen.
But he thinks back to a day a few months earlier when he was applying for funding.
How something had made him pause when he’d caught sight of the date his birth certificate had been issued: October 16.
He’d looked at the black ink of the registrar’s pen, the relevance of that particular date coming into focus.
It was the same as Vihaan’s death. The same date they’d visited his grave each year for as long as Bear could remember.
He’d folded the certificate away into his desk drawer, but the coincidence rolled around his head like a marble.
And then, a few weeks later, he’d been riding his bike home from campus and had come to a stop at a red light and, as his foot touched down to the road to steady himself, he’d had the thought.
Yes, his name was Maia’s choice, but why would a man like that have agreed to break with tradition and call his son Bear?
For three glorious weeks it’s the summer of odd hours, waking at 2 a.m. and going to bed in the late afternoon as Bear and his flatmates keep time with the Beijing Olympics.
It’s a full-time job and they barely leave the house or make proper meals.
Bear can’t recall who bought the pack of bamboo skewers, but he already knows that when he looks back on this time, it will partly be defined by the foods they threaded onto them above the low coffee table.
Small squares of takeaway pizza cut with blunt scissors, pressed alternately against pickled onions; the salt-on-salt of folded salami slices interspersed with olives; a boiled egg sandwiched between spinach leaves.
“Why does it all taste so much better on a stick?” they marvel, eyes glued to the screen.