Part 6
“I want there to be,” I said. Beth moved her hand across the floor, leaving it between us, and I reached for it.
“But?”
“I keep thinking about getting another phone call. About what happens if I let myself need somebody.”
She lay quietly for a moment. “My father was dying, and I kept trying to arrange everything so I wouldn’t miss him as much afterward. He finally asked me to sit down and watch a ball game with him.”
I turned her hand over in mine. Outside, an owl called, and we listened until it stopped. Beth didn’t pull away when I couldn’t find anything else to say.
In the morning, I carried our bags to the Jeep. Beth was checking the stove when I stepped back onto the porch and saw two bears standing at the far side of the clearing.
The mother’s muzzle had the same pale seam across it. Beside her stood a young bear, still smaller than she was but nothing like the bundle I had carried through the snow. When he shifted his weight, I saw the thin patch of fur along his left hind leg.
“Beth,” I said. “Come here. Slowly.”
She stopped beside me. I heard her draw a breath and felt her fingers close around my arm.
The young bear lifted his nose. I stepped down from the porch, then stopped well short of the trees. His mother watched while he moved away from her.
“Hello, little fighter.”
He came a few yards, paused, and lifted his nose again. I stood with my hands at my sides, afraid that any movement would send him back into the woods. The scarred leg took his weight without the hitch I remembered.
He approached until I could see the moisture around his nostrils. I lowered myself onto one knee, hardly aware I was doing it, and he pressed his forehead into my chest.
The weight was entirely different. The small shove was familiar.
I put one hand against the side of his head. His fur felt coarse beneath my fingers, with none of the soft, fever-damp tangles I remembered. He held there for a few breaths while I tried to say something and couldn’t get it past my throat.
Then he stepped away. I let my hand fall instead of reaching after him.
His mother lowered her head and turned. He followed her across the clearing, looking back once at the pines. Beth came down the steps after they had disappeared, and we stood together where his feet had pressed into the wet ground.
“He knew you,” she said.
I nodded. My face was wet, and I wiped it with the heel of my hand, embarrassed by nothing except how difficult it was to speak.
Beth rested her head against my shoulder. We stayed until the morning sounds settled around us, then finished loading the Jeep. At the bend in the road, I looked back once and could still see the porch through the trees.
Back in town, the clinic needed towels washed, two anxious dogs wanted their owners, and a delivery had been left at the wrong door. I took care of what I could. That night, I sat at Beth’s kitchen table with my books while Molly worked on her homework across from me.
A month later, I asked Beth to marry me in that same kitchen. There was no ring ready, and I didn’t kneel; I had been putting off the question while trying to find a version of it that wouldn’t leave me so exposed.
“I want us to do this together,” I said. “I’m still scared. I’m asking anyway.”
Beth looked at me long enough that I nearly started explaining. Then she took my hand, the same way she had beside the stove, and said yes.
We signed the papers that fall and opened a bottle of champagne afterward. Neither of us wanted a reception. We drove to the cabin, and Molly came for the weekend because she wanted to see where the little bear had lived.
She inspected the loose patch in my father’s coat, which I had finally sewn back together, and asked whether his claws had made the holes. Then we took her to the clearing and told her how he had run to his mother.
“Did you both love him?” she asked.
“I did,” I said. “And she kept coming back for him, even while he was with me.”
Molly considered that, pushing the toe of her boot through the fallen needles. “So he didn’t have to pick just one.”
Beth smiled at me. I watched Molly crouch to examine a track at the edge of the grass, and when she called me over, I went.
I am fifty-eight now. My veterinary license hangs beside Beth’s in the clinic, along with the photograph she and Molly insisted on taking when it arrived. Getting there took two years of catching up on science courses, four years of veterinary school, and the licensing examinations; there were weekdays in a room near campus and long drives home that I was often too tired to enjoy.
I still keep the paper with that first B. It sits in a drawer beneath the later certificates, creased where Molly folded it to make it fit on the refrigerator. When a student at the clinic looks ashamed of needing something explained again, I remember how many mornings I went downstairs with the same question for Beth.
The cabin is still ours. About once a month I go up, check the roof, and spend some time beside the creek. Sometimes there are bear tracks in the soft ground, large ones crossing the trail and continuing toward the water.
I can’t tell from those tracks whether they belong to him. He would have his own range by now, and I don’t expect him to come when I call. I stand a while anyway, with my father’s patched coat open at the collar, listening to the water run beneath the old footbridge.
Before I leave, I look once along the bank. Then I turn toward the cabin, where the porch boards need work and there is still daylight enough to do it.