Part 6
I reached across the floor and took Beth’s hand. “I want to,” I said. Then the rest of it came out: every time the phone rang late, I expected news like the call about Sarah and Lily. Wanting Beth in my life meant risking that kind of loss again. She did not try to argue me out of being afraid.
“When Dad was dying, I kept making plans for the days afterward,” she said. “He wanted me to sit beside him for one last ball game.”
I turned her hand in mine. An owl called beyond the window. We listened, and when I could think of nothing to add, she stayed where she was.
With the bags in Frank’s old Jeep, I walked back to the porch. Beth was still making sure the stove was out. Two bears stood at the far edge of the clearing. The older one had a white seam across her muzzle. The young one beside her was much larger than the cub I had carried, but a narrow patch on his left hind leg showed when he shifted.
I called Beth softly. At the doorway she took my arm. The young bear raised his muzzle toward us. I went down one step and stood well away from him, aware of his mother watching from the trees. He moved a few yards closer, paused, and came on again. He was bearing weight on the once-injured leg without the old hitch.
I knew we should let them pass. The mother had brought him back across the clearing of her own accord, and I could not tell whether they were heading for the creek or simply crossing our old track. Beth held her place at the doorway. I stayed still, the Jeep keys digging into my palm.
“Hey, little fighter,” I said.
When he approached, I sank to one knee before I quite decided to.
He put his forehead against my chest.
He was heavier, his fur rougher, but the push had the same impatient force I remembered from the cabin. I rested a hand against his head for a few breaths.
Then he stepped away, and I did not reach to keep him there.
The first time I had touched him, the warmth under the fur had felt alarmingly slight. Here I could feel the weight of his head through my coat. I could not turn the contact into a lesson about what bears understand. It happened, and then his feet took him backward over the grass.
His mother turned first. He followed her into the trees, glancing back once. Beth joined me after they were gone. She said he had recognized me. I couldn’t prove what he knew; I could feel where his head had rested. I wiped my face and let her lean against my shoulder. As the road curved downhill, I turned to catch one more glimpse of the porch through the trunks.
Town had its own demands. Two nervous dogs needed their owners, a delivery had gone to the wrong address, and there were towels to wash. I did the work, then went to Beth’s kitchen with my books. Molly sat opposite me over her homework. The house was noisy in the ordinary ways I had once thought I couldn’t bear again.
It took another month for me to ask Beth to marry me at that table. I had kept postponing the question while waiting for a way to say it without sounding exposed. I had no ring and no prepared speech. I told her I wanted to build a life with her, that I was still scared, and that I was asking anyway. She took my hand and said yes before I could make a second speech.
By fall we were signing marriage papers; afterward we uncorked champagne, with no reception planned. Molly spent a weekend with us at the cabin. She wanted to see the little bear’s old sleeping place. I had finally mended the lining of Dad’s hunting coat; I showed her the old holes when she asked whether the cub had made them. At the clearing, we described the first steps he had taken toward the scarred sow.
“You both cared about him?” she asked.
“Yes,” I told her. “His mother kept coming while he healed.”
Molly scuffed a line through the pine needles. “He got both of you for a while.” She noticed a print near the grass and called me to come look. I went to her, leaving Beth with a smile I could see even from the other side of the clearing.
At fifty-eight, I work beside Beth as a veterinarian. Our licenses hang together at the clinic, with a photograph from the day mine arrived because she and Molly would not let me put it away before they took one. I spent two years catching up on science. Veterinary school took another four, followed by licensing exams, time away near campus, and drives home that sometimes seemed longer than the nine miles to Hank’s station. The first B is in a drawer underneath my later certificates, creased from the day Molly folded it to fit the refrigerator.
When a student asks me to explain something for the third time, I try to remember how Beth answered my morning questions. The clinic has more patients than we can finish with in a day. We go back the next morning and begin again.
The cabin is ours still. I visit about once a month to check the roof and the road. Tracks sometimes cross the damp bank by the creek. I cannot identify a grown bear by the print of one hind foot, and by now the young one would have a range of his own. I don’t call for him. I stand by the old footbridge in my father’s patched coat and listen to the water underneath it.
Then I look once down the bank, turn toward the cabin, and set to work on the porch boards while there is light enough to see the nails.