Bear #2
From where Lily lies, she can see the catheter bag dangling from the side of the bed is almost full.
It bulges with straw-colored liquid that seems divorced from her own body.
She studies the thin tubes entering the plastic pouch and wonders what will happen if someone doesn’t come and empty it soon.
Will the liquid flow back toward her kidneys?
The alarm is just out of reach. She considers banging on the bedside table or shouting for someone.
But she doesn’t want to be that patient.
To wake the person snoring lightly in the next room.
So she waits, and as dawn light spreads across the walls, her fears bloom.
She doesn’t want to be alone. To hear the surgeon’s words replay: Vous avez failli mourir sur la table; you nearly died on the table.
She just wants her mum. And she wants to go home.
Bear and Lily sit side by side on a bench, overlooking the lake where he’d once worked as a boat boy between university terms, her wheelchair on the path nearby.
After the murkiness of last November, Lily has detected in her parents—in Bear—a desire to move on, to cast off what happened like a winter coat that’s grown too heavy.
But she’s not sure she’s ready when she still struggles to make sense of everything.
When she can get around her parents’ house, but her wound aches and she still feels a crushing whole-body tiredness if she tries to walk too far.
“I read another one of those articles yesterday,” Lily says. “About how grateful someone is to be alive. How they don’t even mind that they’ve had their leg blown off.”
“Why read them if they make you feel bad?”
“Because I’m hoping one of them might feel like me,” Lily says, looking across the lake to where a mother and child are feeding the ducks, swans moving in on them, gliding at speed through the water.
“I’d always thought humans were essentially good.
I knew there were bad ones out there, but they somehow hadn’t seemed as real.
Until this. Now I just feel so…so victimized.
That this man watched me smiling, watched me hugging Veronique. But he still wanted to kill me.”
“These people—terrorists—they’re not even thinking like that. It could’ve been anyone. Yes, what they do is fueled by hate, but it’s not personal.”
“It is personal.”
“I know the consequences are personal. But the act itself wasn’t. It’ll eat away at you to think like that.”
She turns to him. “Do you have to do this?”
“What?”
“Rationalize it. I know all that, but it doesn’t change how I feel.”
A few of the swans are on the bank now, opening their wings, causing the child to cower behind his pushchair.
The mother throws bread into the water to lure them away.
Bear and Lily watch the drama unfold in silence, not near enough to hear what’s said, only to witness the action: the mother coaxing the toddler back into his pram, and their slow retreat toward the exit at the far side of the park.
“Sorry. Maia’s always saying that’s something men do too. I can see it’s annoying, though.”
“It’s something you do; I don’t care what the others are doing,” Lily says.
“Yes. Sorry, something I do.”
“Bloody annoying,” Lily mutters. And they sit simmering in her irritation, until eventually she asks, “When are you going back?”
“To where?”
Lily emits a sharp little sound and, although they’re not alike, it reminds him of her mother.
Bear imagines her parents have lost patience with him, that they’ve been telling Lily the relationship is impossible.
That he’s not committed. He hopes she would defend him but worries she might feel the same way.
He’d been going to wait to mention it, but it feels urgent now. “I’ve got an interview at a museum.”
“Which one?” Lily asks. “Penn? Peabody? Giza’s still under construction, isn’t it?”
“No, I mean here. In England.”
“Oh.” Silence. And then, “How long would it be for?”
“It’s a permanent position.”
“I see.” Lily watches as the mother pushing the pram comes back into view, reversing their route, patrolling the strip of land the swans scared them from minutes earlier. She’s bending down now, the child leaning out of his straps to inspect whatever it is the woman has retrieved from the ground.
As the silence extends, Bear knows she doesn’t believe he might accept something permanent.
She’s not even giving it a second thought.
Instead, she is watching a truck slowly making its way around the lake, stopping beside each bin while the park warden empties it.
Since the attacks, Bear has noticed her clocking everything going on around her, only half focused on him and their conversations.
“You know, when I was younger, Bees used to do this thing. She’d get me in a trap under her legs—a bear trap—and I’d have to try to break free.
And when I did, she taught me to put my hands up, to say that I was Bear, that I was free and wild.
” He raises his palms, his fingers becoming claws, drawing Lily’s attention from the truck for a moment.
“It was just one of those silly things, but I don’t know, maybe I’ve always believed it, that I was meant to be out there adventuring.
A wild thing.” Bear looks at Lily, but from the side, her face is hard to read.
“But since Paris, I’ve kept thinking I might have got it wrong.
That maybe freedom is just about choosing the life you want.
Even if that life’s in one place, doing the food shop together.
Arguing over who forgot to buy loo roll. ”
Lily gives a little nod, and Bear doesn’t know how his words have landed.
But then she says, “Nice work, Atkin,” just like she used to when they were fourteen and sitting beside one another in maths, although her tone has an edge now.
“But maybe you could realize this stuff without me having to nearly die.”
He reaches for her hand and gives it a squeeze. “I thought we were both happy. That we were both doing what we wanted?” It’s a question, but he knows this is only half true.
She laughs then, a thin sort of laugh. “I think I can only admit to it now, when I’m no longer willing to play, but I feel like I’ve been trying to mold myself into the woman you’d love since we were teenagers.
Never asking for too much, never pinning you down.
Showing you how independent and worldly I could be.
Your equal.” He goes to interrupt, but she raises a hand.
“But I’m tired of it now. I’m just so tired.
And I’ve no idea if you mean these things; if you’ll really take work in the UK, if you’re capable of staying for good.
So, I’ll be honest. Yes, I want you to have a job that will bring you home to me each night.
And this might come as a surprise but, yes, I also want children.
And not in some fuzzy, distant way, but soon.
In the next few years. And, no, I don’t want to bring up a child alone.
And, no, I don’t want to have to spend the rest of my life apologizing for that, or being made to feel like some ogre who’s trapped a butterfly in a net, or having Maia judge me for asking her precious little brother to put someone else before himself—”
She stops abruptly. As though shocked by her own words—by the mention of Maia—when, moments earlier, it had seemed she was only just getting started.
They sit in silence. For a minute, then two. Until eventually, Bear laughs. It’s a laugh that makes the bench’s backrest shake. Lily glances at him, uncertain. And then he says, “God, I’ve been insufferable, haven’t I?”
He gets up and squats on the ground in front of her, rests his palms against her thighs. He presses his forehead to her knees and for a moment—to him, to her—it feels he’s unwittingly adopted a pose resembling prayer. Repenting, asking forgiveness. For a time, he’s wordless.