The Fish and the Bear – Terrain.org

The beavers were still there. The boat was still there. But everything felt different. 

 
Three weeks after her husband moved out, Lena’s finger started twitching. She had been fumbling her daughter’s hair into a braid before school, determined to get it right this time. Two fat strands, two skinny strands, and as she stared at the blonde mess in her hands, her pinky brushed Rae’s ear. In the mirror, Rae caught her eye and said, “Quit it, Mom.” Lena kept the hair tie pinched between her front teeth and told Rae to hold still.

“Then stop tickling me!” Rae said. She swatted her mother’s hand away.

It was only then that Lena noticed her twitching left pinky. She watched it dancing against the loose rope of Rae’s hair.

“That’s strange,” she said. The hair tie fell softly from her mouth.

They gave her an MRI right away and two weeks later she was scheduled for surgery. Lena assumed there had been some mistake, a mixed up file, a faulty screen. She signed the forms and consented to procedures and felt at any moment that a doctor would walk into the room and say Wait, hang on. She was 36. She did not feel sick. She hiked 15 miles and could whip a tarp and a rope into a dry shelter in five minutes flat. But her parents came to stay with her while her almost-ex-husband, Josh, took the kids to the lake they visited every summer. They sat the kids down in the living room, Josh’s hand gripped knuckle-white on Lena’s knee, while the kids rocked on the floor and ground their fingers into the carpet. Josh told the kids it was just going to be the three of them at the lake this year, that Mom was going to stay behind.

Rae’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you said Mom would still take us to the lake even though you’re getting divorced,” she said.

“We did,” Lena said, “but something came up. I have to stay and go to the doctor for some tests.”

“Why?” Luke said.

“What’s wrong?” Rae said.

By then, two of Lena’s fingers were twitching. She covered them with her other hand and smiled.

“Everything’s fine, honey,” Lena said.

They were quiet. Rae watched her mother’s hand shudder.

Luke leaned his cheek against her calf.

“Can we still go fishing?” Luke said.

Josh smiled. “Of course,” he said, “but you have to wear your life jackets.”

“We never wear life jackets!” Rae said.

Lena looked at Josh and shrugged. “You can’t cast for squat in a life jacket,” she said. The kids beamed triumphantly. For a moment, Lena smiled, then the air swept out of her and she pressed her temple, an old habit, into the tender plane just above Josh’s shoulder blade. He turned and dropped his nose against hers.

“Make sure they wear sunscreen,” she whispered.

“I will.”

“Every day. Ears too.”

“It will be fine,” he said.

Rae was not so sure. She watched her grandparents flicking away tears and stroking her mother’s hair, and Rae did not want to go to the lake. She had never seen her grandfather cry. Most summers, she counted the days until they left for the lake, but this year, she clung to Lena until Lena pried her arms off her waist. Lena squared Rae’s shoulders with her hands, looked her in the eye, and told her it was time for them both to be brave. Rae sat scowling in the backseat and watched out the rear windshield as her mother fluttered a wave, then dropped her face into her hands.

Rae had never gone to the lake without her mother.

The lake had been in Josh’s family for generations, but it was Lena who shepherded the kids there every summer. Lena taught high school biology, so the day after school got out, she loaded up the Subaru and drove her yammering children through the Pennsylvania forest until the asphalt turned to dirt and she lost WiFi and 3G. The three of them felled trees and split wood, built roaring bonfires at night with flames that licked over Lena’s head. They clambered over the boulders of Mehoopany Creek and picnicked with their cousins and hiked to the old railroad tracks a few times, but most days, Lena read on the porch or cleared the trails while Luke and Rae ran feral through the ferns. As long as they read for an hour every day and took the bear spray, she let them be. Josh joined for two weeks in July, but Lena and the kids didn’t come back, scabbed and freckled, until September. The lake was small enough to swim across both ways, and ringed by water lilies and cherry trees. They picked wild blueberries, pulled wintergreen up by the roots and chewed it till their mouths cooled, sprinted barefoot to the lake and fell asleep with pondweed in their hair.

Rae was only a little bothered by the thought of her parents divorcing. Her father’s new apartment was closer to her best friend’s house, and he kept his new fridge stocked with Sprite.

Her parents said they still loved her, and she believed them. But she stared at the same pages of Little Women the whole drive without reading a word. They arrived at the house just as the fireflies began to wink in the darkness.

The beavers were still there. The boat was still there. But everything felt different. Late that night, Rae crawled into Luke’s bed and asked if he was still awake. He nodded.

“I can’t sleep,” he said.

“Me either.”

He lifted his head off the pillow and pushed a corner toward her to share.

She settled into it and asked if he was worried about Mom.

He shrugged. “She said everything’s fine.”

Rae thought maybe that was the difference between being eight and being ten. She threw an arm over her little brother and watched the spilled glitter of the stars out the window, the darkness so vast that her own hands disappeared in front of her face. She felt the rise and fall of her chest under the blankets and willed sleep to come. She tried to imagine that she was rocking in the porch swing with her mother, crickets thrumming as her eyelids fell heavy. But all she could think about was the bear.

She planted her feet and held the gun with both hands, fired well above the bear’s head.

Last summer, she and Luke had been hiking with their mom. It had been one of Lena’s all-day hikes that started out fun but went on an hour too long, so by the end, Luke and Rae were hungry and hot and sat sprawled in the dirt while Lena went ahead to scout the best path back up the hill. The sun had just dipped below the tree lines, and Rae stared at her boots, kicking flurries of loam at her brother. She squinted into the setting sun toward the lake, sniffing the sudden tang in the air, and her mouth went dry as a bear took shape, not 30 feet away. It was nearly Luke’s height and the color of charcoal, nosing through the ferns, sniffing. They had seen bears before, but never this close.

She was on her feet in a second and grabbed Luke’s arm. “Back away,” she said.

Luke craned his neck to follow his sister’s gaze and his eyes saucered as he took in the bear. Rae pulled him to his feet and they crept backwards, twigs crunching beneath them, their faces pounding with every heartbeat.

“Slowly,” Rae whispered, “slowly.” They bumped against trees but did not take their eyes off the bear.

The bear cocked its head to one side and took a step forward, its rounded ears up, copper snout glinting in the sun.

In a voice Rae had never heard before, Lena bellowed, Stop. She exploded into Rae’s field of vision, wedged herself between her children and spread her arms protectively in front of them.

“Stay calm,” Lena said, her voice distant thunder. “Don’t run. Don’t make eye contact.”

The bear froze and the whole forest fell silent. Rae could hear the blood racing through her. The bear flattened its ears and pawed the ground, huffing and snorting. Each breath was a tornado in Rae’s ears.

Finally Lena spoke. “Turn around and walk,” she said. “Slowly. Straight up the hill. Do. Not. Run.”

Luke and Rae turned and stammered up the hill, Luke crying silently, a stream of urine snaking down his leg. Lena walked backwards facing the bear, limbs spread wide like a starfish, back to back with her children. After several yards, the bear turned away, and Lena turned to walk, throwing her head over her shoulder, never losing sight of the bear. Just as she was about to let her breathing return to normal, the bear reared up and scampered after them. Rae heard the bear’s crashing footfalls and clenched her eyes shut, bracing for impact.

Lena roared. She flung her arms over her head, like she was tracing angel wings in the air, and her shout ripped the forest in two, so loud that Luke ducked and covered his ears. She kept shouting and Rae was sure they were all going to die. The bear stopped and sniffed. Lena hauled a branch out of a tree and waved it overhead, yelling at the bear to get away. She hurled the branch at the bear, the bear reared up, and she reached for what her children assumed was the bear spray but turned out to be a gun. She pulled the gleaming pistol from the small of her back and loaded it without looking.

“Get. Away. From my. Kids!” She planted her feet and held the gun with both hands, fired well above the bear’s head. It staggered back, dropped to all fours, and ran away. Lena kept the gun at her side as she hustled her stricken children back to the house. When they were safely on the porch, Rae finally gasped, “I thought you said we were supposed to stay quiet.”

Lena shook her head. “Not with that one,” she said. “You guys weren’t doing anything to that one.” She swallowed hard and caught her breath. The gun was still in her hand and she could feel her children staring at it. She had always had a gun at the lake—she was a woman in the woods with her children—but the kids had never seen it. “Most bears, you’re in their space, and you just have to back away. You did the exact right thing.”

“Then why didn’t it work?”

Lena hesitated. Her heart was still galloping in her chest.

“Why didn’t it work?” Rae asked again.

“I don’t know, Baby. Maybe it was just curious. Or testing.” She heaved her shoulder against the door and they could not believe they were in the living room, safe and warm, chili bubbling in the crock pot. Lena could have cried with relief, but Rae was not ready. Lena put the gun high on the bookshelf just to get it out of sight and Luke dropped to the floor. Rae stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, popping her jaw.

“So how do we know if we’re supposed to be quiet and back away or get big and yell?”

Rae said.

Lena dropped to a squat to help Luke with his boots.

“How do we?” Rae was relentless.

“Baby, give me a second. Jesus.” Lena pressed a hand to her chest and willed her breathing to slow.

The living room was quiet as Lena set Luke’s sopping boots by the fire. She kissed his forehead, smoothed his hair.

She took a breath in and turned to her daughter. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred—no, 999 times out of 1,000—you back away and everything is fine.”

Rae’s eyes were steel. “What if it’s not,” she said.

“Then you’ll know, Baby.” She lifted her hands to Rae’s cheeks, pulled her face close, lowered her voice to a whisper. “And you fight for your goddamn life.”

Rae wakes with a gasp. Just as she processes her clammy pajamas, Luke rolls over and scowls, plucking at the bed sheets. Did you pee? he says, Or did I?

Luke thinks that his mother can do anything and Rae does not disagree. They have grown up hearing stories of the many ways Lena almost died doing field work in the Amazon during grad school, how she dropped out after her qualifying exams just after Rae was born. Lena jokes that her kids cost the world a little bit of scientific knowledge. I had you signed up for daycare before you were born, she likes to joke. How was I supposed to know that I’d love being with you even more than I love science?

Luke and Rae know what to do when they get to the lake: they unlock the boat house and check the anchor rope and thread their fishing rods, but they do not know how to feel on this trip. They have never been homesick before, but they both long for their other beds, for their mother’s hands on their faces, for her birch-like scent. For eight days, their father makes them pancakes, asks them what they are reading, and then they sit on the porch the rest of the morning until Luke asks to take the boat out. “You missed the fish,” Josh says, “but sure. Go for it.”

Luke and Rae spend hours hunched under the sunshine, casting listlessly along the lilies, swatting at gnats. Every time one of their poles dips, they ask the other, Got something? And the other shrugs, Weeds. They don’t care. They just want to cast and reel, cast and reel, to fling the pole and watch the sparkling arc of the lure, hear its soft plop as it ripples the water, feel the rhythmic turning of their wrists, the ticking of the spool. They want a reason not to talk.

She is not afraid to die, not really. She just doesn’t want to leave. She cannot imagine being without her children.

Three-hundred miles away, Lena stands hipshot against the sink. Her parents slouch at the dinner table, gutted by the latest trip to the oncologist. They watch their daughter pace back and forth in the kitchen, tell her to sit down, they can just order something, no need to cook. But

Lena says they have to eat the tomatoes before they go bad. Her head is half shaved; a line of staples marches over the back of her skull.

“They still have some life in them,” her mother says, gesturing to the tomatoes, “let’s just get Chinese.”

Lena wheels around and holds the fistful of tomatoes in the air. “These tomatoes,” she says, shaking them, “were dead the moment they were picked. The least we can do is fucking eat them.”

Her words first stun, then encourage her mother. This, this is the daughter she knows. The willful child she dragged out of trees and wrestled into car seats, the wiry daughter who fought tooth-brushing and jackets and sunscreen with her whole body. Lena’s eyes are wild and her mother thinks, She will fight this. She cannot fathom that in six months, she will be driving her grandchildren in the backseat, her daughter sobbing next to her because she has forgotten the way to the grocery store, that Rae will lift a finger and say, That way, Grandma. She cannot even entertain the thought. She looks and she looks and she knows with the very marrow of her bones that her daughter will beat this.

Lena stands at the sink, fingers wrapped around a bunch of cilantro, and the heft of it in her hand feels so much like Rae’s hair that her teeth throb. She knows she will never get that damn braid right. She knows what is coming. Of course it is my brain, she thinks. My goddamn motherfucking brain gone to rot.

She is not afraid to die, not really. She just doesn’t want to leave. She cannot imagine being without her children. That she will miss their bedhead and scabbed knees, their bickering in the backseat, their warm heads under her chin as she pulls them to her each morning. She cannot accept it; she will not. Briefly, she believes that if she simply refuses to die, she will not. She can simply insist on living. But then her heart beats again, and she feels it in her throat, and she knows with even more certainty that she is wrong, the way she was wrong about the bear, and nearly choked on her own heartbeat trying to get her kids out of there, that she got lucky that time, but this time, she will not.

Even the oncologist is rattled. She hunches over the computer and closes her eyes for a moment before her next patient. My god, she had thought, when she first reviewed Lena’s chart, we’re the same age. The patient was well versed in medical terminology, and talking to her felt like talking to a colleague. She had sat in the chair flanked by her parents and stared at the black and white image of her brain, and the shine in her eyes could have set the whole room on fire. The parents locked their arms, said their daughter was a fighter. But the oncologist looked at the patient and each recognized that the other knew. They understood. They would do chemo and radiation and the molecular analysis and consult with the tumor board. They would do all the things, and she would fight, sure. But it wouldn’t matter. Not this time.

She closes Lena’s chart and picks up her clipboard, smooths her hand over her ponytail, and strides back into the waiting room.

Back at the lake, Josh calls Lena, hangs up before she answers. He does not actually want to know. He stares into his whiskey. The universe is boundless, he thinks, in its ability to fuck you over. In a year, he will comb through Lena’s jewelry box with Rae, asking her which she wants to keep, which they can offer to her cousins. Telling her about the pearls he brought back from Japan, the ring Lena lost for years and then found in the garden, coiled among the roots of the rose bush. Through the dusking twilight, he can see his children hunched in the boat, their backs to him, poles slack.

Just as they are about to row home for dinner, Rae feels a bite, then a tug that nearly pulls the pole from her hands. She yanks the pole up and stumbles backward in the boat, reeling fast, telling Luke she has something. The end of her pole dances spastically, and she digs the handle into her belly to steady it. The pole bends nearly in half. Her arms strain against the fish and she reels and reels, then lets the line out so it won’t break. Luke’s eyes are wide. They keep it up for minutes and Luke says he can take a turn if her arms get tired. He rows toward the fish so she can reel in some more. Rae has never caught a fish this big, and is suddenly scared she might actually get close enough to see it. How would they get it into the boat? She huffs the gnats out of her nose and wants to yell for her father but cannot spare the breath. Luke grabs the net. The water churns and they see a black fin break the surface.

“Oh my god,” Luke says. He leans over the edge of the boat and lowers the net.

“Wait,” she says, “Let me do it.”

She hands him the pole. The bass is as long as her arm and thick as her thigh, thrashing so hard the water lips into the boat. The fish goes still and fixes its great black eye on her, bobbing like a leaf on the water, then dives down and thuds against the side of the boat with such force that Luke loses his balance and has to sit down. Rae takes a breath, feeling the fish thundering below her, and pulls her ponytail so tight her eyes stretch.

She does not know this yet, but in 20 years, she will be sandbagging her neighbor’s home in San Francisco, squinting against the lashing rain as the floodwaters surge up Great Highway, and when she shoulders the last bag she will hear herself roar with the effort and it will be her mother’s voice that comes out, and it will be both surprise and recognition that snap her eyes open and square her shoulders and plant her bare hands on the bag, and she will stack it high, and straight, and she will look out at the ocean and she will feel less afraid. Under the cuff of her raincoat, she will thumb the ring she kept, slipping like a fish against her skin.

But in this moment, she is ten, and she does not know what is coming, but she knows everything is about to change. She is terrified, picks up the net and swallows hard. The fish has gone still again. Rae leans over it, its back just breaking the surface, amber green and slick, fins raised like daggers. She closes her eyes and feels Lena’s hands square her shoulders. She doesn’t yet know that that feeling will come to her for the rest of her life. Then she grips the net like a baseball bat and swings it down hard, plunging it into the water and raking it back up, the lake water pouring through the mesh as she hauls the fish into the boat and drops it, thrashing and heaving and gasping for air, at Luke’s feet.

Tristen Chang grew up in Woodland, California and earned her MA in English from UC Davis. She was twice a finalist for Glimmer Train’s short story award, won first place in Six Fold’s fiction contest, and was awarded the Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction. She now lives in San Francisco and teaches creative writing. 

Header image generated by AI, courtesy Adobe Photoshop prompt: abstract bear and fish.