Bear #3
“Thank you,” he says into her skirt. “For waiting. For putting up with me.” He looks up.
“Do you know the things I love about you, Lily? Really love?” She shakes her head.
“Because, yeah, it’s true, I do love that you speak so many languages, that you know your way around European cities, that you’re my equal.
Not even my equal; you’re better than me.
But I also love the way you sleep curled up like a dormouse,” he says, mimicking her pose.
“I love that when you send me letters, you sign off with your first and last name and I’ve never known why you do that, but I haven’t asked in case it makes you stop.
I love that you add lemon to everything you cook.
I love that in winter you keep those weird heated handwarmers in your handbag to give to homeless people.
I love that I can pick you out in a crowd, not just by your hair or face, but by the way you move.
I love that cats follow you home and that you think that happens to everyone—and it does, but not every day.
Not every time they leave the house.” She is smiling, but he’s not finished.
“I love that when I introduce you to someone, you know exactly what to say to make them feel good, even though you’ve never met before.
And even though it’s not great for my ego, I love that they’ll come away liking you better than me.
I love how your clothes are kind of drapey—I don’t know how to explain it, but the way your wrists look where they meet your cuffs, it’s sexy, and I love your ankles in summer when you’re wearing jeans, and the long bone that runs along the top of your foot.
” She’s laughing now. “I’m serious. I know I’m not saying any of this properly, but I think it’s something to do with grace.
I love how graceful you are. And I love how much grace you’ve given me.
But I’m sorry you’ve had to. And I’m sorry I’ve been so graceless.
That I’ve acted like some kind of idiot Indiana Jones all these years. ”
Lily leans forward, kisses Bear’s forehead. “I love knowing those things.” She takes a breath. “But I don’t know if it’s enough. I need to know what it means, if anything. For us. Our future. If we have one together.”
He stands, massages the life back into his knees for a moment, and then takes his wallet from his pocket. He peers inside, riffling through its contents until he finds what he’s looking for.
“I joined a gym,” he says, holding out a card as he sits down beside her.
Lily takes it, studies the small digital reproduction of his face.
He is smiling and wearing one of Cora’s old, oversized T-shirts.
“Do you see the line beneath my name?” She stares at the words Annual Membership, and then looks up at him.
“I took it out a few months ago. Before I applied for the position at the museum. Because I knew even then I was going to stay.”
“Why didn’t you say, though? Why didn’t you tell me you’d joined a gym for a whole year?”
“I don’t know. Because I’m weird. Because I needed to test out how it felt without messing you around? Because people always join gyms and quit after a month? But I’m telling you now, because there hasn’t been a single day when I’ve felt tied down by it. By what it represents.”
She reaches across the bench and takes his hand. Eventually, she says, “I can’t imagine you in a gym. What do you do there?”
“Mainly weights. The other guys are all built like fridges, but they’re nice. They even offer to spot me now.”
“Go on,” Lily says, letting him explain this new terminology.
“Basically, someone just stands there ready to step in if you can’t manage it—it means you can lift more without the risk of injuring yourself. But it makes the whole thing more social because obviously you end up chatting.”
“Can you notice a difference yet?”
Bear has caught his reflection in the changing-room mirror and his biceps seem more defined. His chest now two small mounds rather than the flat canvas it’s always been. “Probably not,” Bear says. “It’s still early days.”
“Why are you doing it?” Lily has turned to look at him now, no longer giving her whole attention to the warden’s van or the boy doing keepy-uppies with a football down by the lake.
“I’m not really sure.”
“Is it so you can fend off would-be attackers?” Her eyes are laughing, although not unkindly, and he feels like maybe a little piece of the wall she’s built up around herself is crumbling away.
He ponders if there’s any truth in what she’s said, if that is why he’s doing it.
Because he’s never been someone who’s gone to the gym before.
It’s oddly out of character. Almost embarrassingly so; he hasn’t even told Maia.
Bear shuffles along the bench toward Lily and nudges her, presses a sideways kiss into her hair.
“That stuff you mentioned earlier. None of it scares me, you know? I think I want those things too.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good,” Lily says, and she leans into him, and nestles her head into the biscuit-scented warmth between his shoulder and chin, as they look out across the lake.
Bear has always found it odd when people settle down not far from where they grew up, as though they’ve lacked the imagination to go elsewhere.
But after seven years abroad, the idea of being near Bees and her wife, Charlotte, in Brighton, and having Cora, Mehri, and Roland only an hour up the road… it just feels right.
Lily is slumped on the sofa, dusty from unpacking boxes. “Look at that,” Bear says, gazing at the mishmash of rooftops lit red-gold in the evening sun, paving the view toward the seafront.
“I think I’ll like being at the top of this hill,” Lily says, coming over to rest her elbows on the windowsill next to his. “They’ll arrive from that direction.” She looks down the street, thinking of the train station where her parents and Cora might come in, of Charlotte and Bees’ house.
“Like a castle. We’ll be able to see them coming.”
“I don’t think there’s an enemy,” Lily says, laughing.
“I like your sister.” It was a clumsy attempt at reassurance; they’d both wanted to move to Brighton, but still, this is Maia’s hometown.
He notices Lily said like. Not love, though.
Also, that she’d spotted what he was trying to do.
He leans further out of the window, craning to see into the next street.
“Are you expecting me to watch for you coming home from work each night like that?”
“If only,” he says, bending back and twisting his lips to plant a lazy kiss on her cheek, although, in reality, he hopes Lily will have her nose in a book.
Before the attacks, she’d read voraciously, her mind a vast archive of authors and titles, ready to be called on during quizzes or whenever a friend wanted a recommendation.
But she finds it more difficult to recall things now, complaining that her thinking feels jerky.
That sometimes, when she’s asked to look something up on the library’s computer system, it takes a few seconds for the inquirer’s words to reach her fingertips.
Her doctors say this is normal after a traumatic event, but she’s thrown by it.
“Do you need to go to bed now?” Bear asks, thinking the move might have exhausted her.
“Yes, Bear, I need to go to bed with you—desperately—right now!” she says, rolling her eyes.
“Thought so,” he smiles, happy to be misunderstood.
Bear has been at the museum for six months.
He doesn’t know why he ever felt this kind of work would be restrictive; he speaks to experts from all over the world, and travels when he’s considering acquiring a particular piece for the permanent collection.
But the thing that’s surprised him most is the children.
Sitting in on a workshop one afternoon was like opening a door to a secret room.
He watched as they searched for fragments of broken china planted by the staff in a mudbox, listened to their odd conversations: This stuff is actually as old as a dinosaur; Yeah, they stamped on all the plates and broke them.
When Bear noticed a child reluctant to join in, he knelt beside her and demonstrated how to use her tool to scour the earth without damaging the hidden artifacts.
A few minutes later, when she and another girl placed fragments bearing the same blue-and-white print side by side, their classmates gasped, as though two halves of a real-life puppy had been reunited.
As they returned to sifting, Bear saw a boy who’d previously been attacking the earth with a trowel now using its edge to gently peel it back, layer by layer, keen not to miss anything.
He recalls his own delight in this. Of being a boy with a big, wild energy and finding stillness when he discovered a way to concentrate it.
When he funneled it into careful, painstaking work.
He wondered who he’d be if he hadn’t spent all those hours scrubbling around in the dirt as his mother worked close by.
Later, he’d asked his boss if he could lead a children’s session each week.
Richard had smiled as though he was talking to one of its attendees and explained, “We actually follow a specific structure for schools, all carefully planned out months in advance to provide a rounded offering.” Bear had sat on the train that evening annoyed, unsure if working within the bureaucracy of a large organization was right for him after all.
But then he thought about his previous nomadic existence, and somehow that no longer felt right either.
He wanted—needed—to be with Lily. And his family.