Part 6
“I’d like to,” I said. Claire reached a hand across the floor, and I held it. She did not let me stop at those four words.
I told her about the phone call eight years earlier and the way I still listened for another one whenever someone I cared for traveled after dark. I had become good at arranging my days so I didn’t have to need anybody. Claire lay beside the stove and listened without promising me I could prevent a second loss.
When her father was dying, she said, she’d tried to manage every appointment and every small need ahead of time. Arthur had asked her to sit with him for a ball game instead. She still remembered how long she’d stood in the doorway before she sat down. An owl called outside. I turned her hand over in mine, and we remained there until the fire needed tending.
In the morning I carried the sleeping bags to the Jeep. Claire was checking the stove. I came onto the porch again and saw two bears at the far edge of the clearing. The larger one had the pale seam across her muzzle. Beside her stood a young bear with a thin place in the fur over his left hind leg. He had grown beyond anything I could have carried in a pack.
I asked Claire to come slowly. She took my arm when she saw them. The younger bear scented the air. I came down from the porch and stopped a long way from the trees. He moved several yards away from his mother while she watched. My heart was working so hard that I could hear it. A foolish name came to me as I spoke: little fighter.
He paused to smell the air once more. His healed leg bore his weight without a hitch. Claire called softly from the porch. I meant to answer, but he came close and my knees weakened; I sank onto one of them as he pressed his forehead into my coat. The shove was gentle only by his measure. I touched the side of his head for a few breaths, feeling coarse fur under my fingers and the strength of a wild animal that could no longer fit inside any coat of mine.
Words would not come.
He stepped away, and I let my hand drop. Only after he rejoined the scarred bear and they vanished among the pines did Claire leave the porch. Their prints held water in the soft earth. She said he had recognized me. I could not prove it, and she did not ask me to try.
I wiped my face. From the first bend on our drive out, the cabin porch was still visible between the trunks.
The clinic was waiting for us: laundry, two dogs who wanted their people, and a delivery left at the wrong door. I worked through what I could. That evening Tess did her homework at Claire’s kitchen table while I opened my books beside her. I had expected returning to town to feel like leaving something behind; instead, I kept finding my hands occupied there.
A month later, in the same kitchen, I asked Claire to marry me. I had no ring ready. Every version I’d rehearsed sounded as if I could ask without exposing how afraid I remained. I finally told her I wanted us to go forward together and was asking even with that fear.
She let me finish, took my hand, and said yes.
We signed the marriage papers that fall. Later we opened champagne and skipped the reception neither of us wanted. Tess spent a weekend with us at the cabin to see where the cub had slept and where his mother had met him again. I’d repaired the torn lining of my father’s coat at last. Tess examined the stitches and wanted to know if the bear had made the holes. Out in the clearing she had us describe his run to the pines.
“Did you love him and she did too?” she asked.
I told her about the mother’s long wait near the cabin. Tess scuffed the needles with her boot before deciding he had been loved in both places. Claire caught my eye as Tess bent to study an impression in the grass near the pines. When she called us over, I went with Claire to look.
Seven years have passed since the sack arrived. At fifty-eight, I practice at the clinic with a veterinary license of my own beside Claire’s. I spent two years making up science courses, then four at veterinary school before I could take the licensing exams. During much of that time I slept near campus on weekdays and drove home when I could. Claire and Tess insisted on a photograph when the license arrived. The old exam paper with its first B is still in my drawer, folded along the crease Tess made to fit it on the refrigerator. When a student feels foolish asking me to explain something again, I pull up a chair and begin where Claire used to begin with me.
We have kept the cabin. I visit roughly once a month to mend whatever the weather has loosened. Some days the mud beside the creek bears large prints. I have no way to know whether any of them are his; an adult bear would have a range of his own. In my father’s coat, its lining patched where little claws once found it, I linger near the footbridge and hear the creek moving under the logs.
I take a last look down the bank.
The boards on the porch have gone soft in two places, so I climb the path to the cabin while the afternoon is still bright enough to lift the first one.