Bear
Lily slips her phone back into her coat pocket and rests her hand against it, not wanting to miss the vibration of a reply coming in.
Lily turns onto rue de Charonne. A breeze whips at her scarf, and she catches the end that’s come loose and tosses it back over her shoulder.
Lily is nearly at the restaurant. Veronique sits at a table beneath the awning, her face lit by fairy lights and the glow of an outdoor heater.
“Lucky bastard,” Cameron says, gathering up the cards.
A black SEAT Leon turns onto rue de Charonne.
Cameron shuffles. Beneath his book, Bear’s phone silently lights up again.
Lily kisses Veronique hello, catching the familiar scent of her friend’s perfume. Car doors open.
Cameron deals the cards again.
A man shouts. His words are in another tongue, but it’s a phrase anyone would recognize, although its meaning has long been distorted by misuse. Veronique’s eyes widen over Lily’s shoulder.
It is too late to change anything.
When Bear returns to his book and glances at his phone beneath, it shows both Lily’s text and the BBC newsflash on the lock screen, one above the other, as though they were always intended to be linked.
Meeting V for dinner, minus your beautiful equipment. Wish you were here. Lx.
Breaking News
Multiple attacks in Paris.
At least 18 people killed.
The next two days are a hollow of unanswered texts, and a rush of noise.
The bustle of Cairo gives way to a slick white departures hall, a blur of people, the endless refresh and refresh and refresh of the news cycle on Bear’s phone, scanning the same photos for her face in the background, the fabric of her coat, as the official death toll rises.
There is a sleepless night. A long wait for a flight as texts arrive in a stream of pings that are never the one he’s hoping for.
Then the perma-hum of the plane thrumming through him.
The foot-tapping wait at passport control.
The tumult of Paris, which throws obstacles in the path of his taxi as it makes a loop around the city.
He registers his name and Lily’s details with the hospital gatekeepers who have now dealt with so many desperate people, their sympathy has become routine.
And then, as they sit in traffic, a text from Lily’s parents. Brief, staccato sentences, like a telegram, its words in short supply.
She’s been found.
In ICU at Salpêtrière.
Alive.
She’s been shot.
Bear redirects the taxi and then sits in the back, sobbing, the rest of the world finally tuned out. She is alive. That she’s hurt barely registers. He wipes his face on the sleeve of his jacket, under the glancing eye of the driver in the rearview mirror.
In the days that follow, Lily’s parents orchestrate things from her bedside, insisting it will all be more manageable once she’s back in England with doctors who speak the language, even though Lily is fluent.
“What’s he saying?” her mother asks, before the surgeon has finished speaking.
In conversations only Lily can translate, they discuss whether the initial reconstruction of her hip was successful, the possibility of damage to cartilage, nerves.
A potential hip replacement. While her parents repeat in haunted whispers, “Thank God it wasn’t her spine,” and talk about her returning to live with them, as though it’s a foregone conclusion.
They do not consult Bear. But neither does Lily.
He’s surprised but can’t let it show on his face.
Instead, when they have a brief moment alone, he says, “Tell me what I can do for you. How I can help.”
He wants her to say, Just be here. Just stay by my side. But she says, “Pack up my flat?” and again he is hit by the odd feeling that things are not as he expected.
He collects empty boxes from Lily’s local supermarket and returns to her apartment.
He starts by packing up the books. Then her laptop, her papers.
Her desk drawers. Here he slows, handling her possessions with reverence.
There is something in the form of each item that tells him it was as carefully chosen as the stapler she picked out weeks earlier when he was by her side in a shop in the Marais.
But there is also a frugality. She does not have or need much.
He takes her jumpers from the drawers and transfers them into an empty suitcase, noticing the ones that have nothing at the neck, as though Lily had found the label scratchy and snipped it out.
In the wardrobe, where cardigans and blouses hang, some fabrics say to Bear, this café, that day, while others belong to a life he doesn’t recognize.
He folds the garments carefully, breathing in her smell, which seems woven into the fibers.
Lily. When he moves on to the impersonality of jeans and trousers, he wonders at how these don’t hold the same stories.
Why is it only the top half of a person’s clothing that speaks?
On the floor of the wardrobe, there are two large, low boxes.
He lifts the lid on the first and has the discomforting sensation of catching his own reflection in a shop window when he’s not expecting it.
It is filled with envelopes addressed in his own handwriting, stickered with the stamps he bought in each new country.
He has traveled lighter than Lily and realizes he doesn’t have his side in the call and response of their correspondence.
He doesn’t recall actively throwing her letters away.
But perhaps he left them in the drawer of a temporary desk or abandoned them amongst a pile of papers.
He’s stunned by his own certainty that there would always be more of her words, that he could treat them so carelessly.
As though there were an inexhaustible supply.
He’s come so close to being left with nothing; with only his own thoughts to read back.
He opens the other box, the word Us on its lid.
Them. Him and Lily. It is messier, like the midden layer of earth, rich with artifacts of the everyday, the things that tell a story.
Some are easy to understand. Ticket stubs to a museum.
Boarding passes. A wristband from a festival.
But there are others that leave him guessing: a small gray-and-white candy-striped paper bag with a feather inside.
He holds it, scrolls through his mind trying to match up details, but nothing comes.
He studies the items and mentally catalogs them.
Heart-shaped granite pebble with white calcite vein. Origin unknown. Ask Lily.
Folded cream napkin, marked with a coffee ring.
Logo: Irini’s Café. A Google search reveals the café is in Santorini, where they spent a week together in September 2010—Lily was in the middle of cataloging a book collection for some Italian guy’s estate sale; and Bear had been between jobs, after finishing up what he’d come to think of as “the flying cockroach dig.” He remembers baklava and morning coffee at the same place each day.
A blue/gray butterfly wing. Partially disintegrated. Preserved inside an unused tissue. Chalkhill blue? Maybe he’d found it at Totternhoe Knolls and given it to Lily on his return. That would have been late 2003, when they were sixteen.
He works his way through the box, puzzling over the gaps in his knowledge.
Studying each item for clues, his memory jogged by a logo or an area code, coming up against blanks at others.
It is past 2 a.m. when he carefully repacks the box.
He feels as though he has just time-traveled through their years together.
Their years apart. He climbs into Lily’s bed and turns onto his side, facing the wall.
His mind fills with fractured images of faceless men getting into a car, riding through the city as Lily dressed, as she walked toward them.
As he’d played cards. His head swirls with regrets, analyzing how their fates had shifted unseen, as though on tectonic plates.
Not once, but twice. First avoiding the concert that had been targeted in the attacks—teetering, about to cross a fault line onto another plane, until pressure, release.
They continued on. Only for Lily to meet another fault.
He wonders where they’d be now, if he’d come when he was meant to?
Would going to the concert have been better or worse?
Her colleague’s younger brother walked away unscarred, physically, at least. Would it have changed things if he’d seen Lily’s text sooner, caused her to pause on the street for a moment to read his reply?
Almost certainly. A few seconds could have made all the difference.
He sees gloved fingers on a trigger, the white of bone, an X-ray on a backlit screen, her face, the roadblock of her parents, whose presence seems to say to Bear, You have not been enough.
Their expectation that he will not step up.
He thinks of Lily’s boxes of keepsakes and realizes these are the riches.
What the hell has he been doing, he wonders, sifting through the earth on another continent, looking for the fragmented remains of someone else’s life from a thousand, or ten thousand, years ago?
Looking for broken pieces of china, a chip of clay, as though they were precious.
As though they had more importance than the foundations of his own life with Lily, which she has nurtured all this time.
The next morning, Bear sits on the edge of the bed and studies the slice of bathroom visible through the half-open door.
It’s the only room he’s yet to pack up. He sees her bath towel folded on the rail.
Her bottles of perfume and lotions sitting neatly on the shelves.
And becomes aware, again, of the spaces where he’s been absent.
What would their lives be like, he wonders, if his shaving cream and nail clippers weren’t tucked away in a wash-bag but mingled in amongst her things?