Fiction

Two days before she left, my mother pinned a newspaper clipping to the corkboard in our kitchen.

January and February 2002: “Seafarers and satellites notice something amiss in the Gulf of Mexico. The seas north and west of the Florida Keys have grown dark, with nearly 700 square miles of water (two-thirds the size of Rhode Island) taking on the color of black ink. Tests show this ‘black water’ has normal salinity and oxygen levels, but researchers suspect an unusual, non-toxic algal bloom. There are none of the usual signs of a HAB, but fishermen note that the black water seems to be devoid of fish.”

Our corkboard was covered in articles like these: in October, a swarm of three dozen blackbirds flocked in panicked patterns above the trees in Philadelphia for over two hours. Three teenagers cutting class to smoke cigarettes captured it on video on their cell phones. Two years ago, seven dead dolphins had washed up on Revere Beach in Boston. Their bodies formed a delicate straight line across the sand. Recent tests at Lake Karachay in Russia, former storage site of nuclear waste, revealed that a human being standing for thirty minutes at the shore would receive a dose of radiation that could kill them.

There had been a time when I asked her about the articles. “What do they mean, Mom?” I might have asked when I was fourteen, fifteen. Elizabeth would shiver, as though she were equipped with an eerily fine-tuned plague-sensor, a direct line to Moses. There were days when this direct line was so distracting she could barely focus on things like turning the stove off when she left the house, or picking me up from school. I would find her sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair with her boots up on the railing, her hair hiding her face.

“Mom?” I’d ask, poking her shoulder.

“Mmm? Hey, baby girl. Hey.” Some days she’d pull me close to her, especially when I was younger, still young enough to sit on the couch with her and act out Bible stories, young enough to laugh when she put on a red bathrobe and pretended to be Mary Magdalene. Alice was crazy and funny in those years, playing the part of the angry Pharisee or, more often, demanding to be Jesus. We could do this late into the night, so that we’d stop to brush our teeth and Elizabeth would return with her big hair out, and we sang “Stop (in the Name of Love)” as the Apostles.

In my mother’s absence, I had continued adding to the corkboard, pinning a note up each time I sighted the bear. Last night she’d come over the top of the hill like a dream. In the twilight she looked smaller than she actually was, and colored a black so deep she was blue, moving so smooth she was water. The time before that, she’d been snuffling in the compost, a couple hundred yards down the road. She’d buried her nose deep in the slimy noodles and swiped melon rinds with her dinner-plate paws. Then she was a color just darker than the trees when they were wet. She turned and rolled past the crest of the hill with her hair matted back in the wind, too far away to make a sound.

Since I’d first noticed the bear in our front yard a week ago, I’d dreamt almost every night of being carried off by her, waking up with my hot cheek pressed against her fur. According to the Encyclopedia of Wildlife in the Halifax Free Library, she could weigh up to five hundred pounds, run thirty miles per hour, and swim rivers. She was incredible. The first time I’d seen her, Mom and I had been driving up the hill back to our house, when her shape appeared at the edge of the field, between the trees and all the wet green leaves.

“Look!” I whispered and jerked the stick shift down into park.

“What?” Mom yelped, then pressed her forehead against the foggy window. “Is that—”

For a minute I couldn’t imagine what she was. I couldn’t see her snout, just her enormous shoulders moving up and down like a seesaw. We’d see rabbits all the time flashing across the field, and every once in a while deer flipping their white tails up and disappearing into the woods, but never a bear. In those first moments seeing her I imagined she was something from out of time and space, something so huge and powerful she appeared only as a furry mountain of muscle. When my brain put a name to her I whispered it—“Bear!”—and said it over and over in my head. Bear. Bear. Bear.

I switched off the heater. It was silent inside the car. Elizabeth pressed her nose to the glass and made two little mushroom clouds of steam against the window. “Wow,” she whispered.

My mother is beautiful when she is awestruck.

***