She tried to fight him. But she wasn’t strong enough. She lost.
Shelly screams and I’m back in the desert. She charges the bear, running and running and shaking the ground.
I yell, but she doesn’t hear me. She collides with his massive body and a thousand sparks explode in the dark night.
She is thrown to the ground and the bear stands on his hind legs. I watch as he transforms into a flickering image of someone who looks both familiar and like a stranger. He has blue, blue eyes.
He sneers at my aunt and she is up on her feet again, charging again, clawing at him, tearing out patches of fur.
Mom watches.
Shelly keeps going. She punches and pounds the bear and he makes horrible noises. Yelps that echo through the desert. And this makes him step back, and another face flickers over the bear’s. This one resembles Shelly.
I know it’s my grandmother.
Shelly notices the face and stops. The bear looks at her and closes his eyes, and big tears flow down his face.
Shelly cries quietly. The bear reaches for her and pets her head and this makes her cry harder. And then he takes her in his arms and cradles her and whispers words I can’t understand.
He takes her away, gently lays her on the ground far from us, and then turns and sets his eyes on me.
I feel Mom around me. I make myself bigger. I make a sound I don’t even recognize as my voice as he charges. I brace myself for the blow.
But he doesn’t charge at me. He stands there, his face flickering with so many images. Here’s what I see:
My mother lying under a hot sun. The sun kissing her skin.
My memories of us together, that bear always lurking in the background.
The way her room looked at night, how the ceiling spun, how her memories made her dizzy.
Mom crying, and how, once, I touched her hot tears.
How I looked at her.
How she treated me, how she wished she could have been different.
How she tried to stay.
All the things Shelly told me happened.
He waits, until I see it all.
And I reach out my hand. I reach out to touch his prickly fur, but I feel nothing. I reach again, brush my hand against him, feel only air.
He walks away and with one, two, three strikes of his enormous paw, he makes a hole and stands at the edge and looks at me.
He’s been following me for months. He’s roared me to sleep and haunted me since the day I was born. He killed my mother.
But now I don’t want him to go.
I race toward him, but he closes his eyes and falls,
and falls,
and falls.
I watch as he tumbles through the darkness.
I look up at Doña Marcela, a blurry figure high in those mountains. She puts a hand to her heart.
Dolor, she whispers. I can hear her as if she were standing right next to me, whispering in my ear.
Dolor, she says again.
And I close my eyes, letting the fresh pain wash over me, saturating every part of me. I feel my mother’s kiss on my face, her hand on my cheek, gentle in a way it never was in real life.
And I cry.
And I mourn
all the things that could’ve been,
and all the things that were.
Paulo is in the kitchen with his grandmother. I hear them talking in low voices and then Paulo is looking over at me.
“Hey,” he says as he comes and sits at the end of the couch. I pull my feet up so there’s room. “You okay? How’d you sleep?”
I look at him. I fought a bear except he didn’t fight back. Your grandmother was there. I think she’s the one who gathered us all….
I try to make sense of everything.
“I should go,” I tell Paulo. “I have to see Shelly.” I worry she’s still out in the desert, crying. I wonder if the bear came back for her. I don’t remember how my dream ended.
Paulo moves closer. “Don’t worry about Shelly,” he says. “I drove over there this morning, told her you were here. She came by to check on you but didn’t want to wake you up.”
“I gotta go,” I insist.
“I’ll give you a ride.”
“I’ll walk.”
He looks at me doubtfully.
“I’ll go straight to her house,” I tell him. “The sun’s not hot and…I just have to walk.” I offer him a small smile.
He nods. “All right.”
I get up and head outside. He grabs my hand, and when he pulls me close to him, my eyes fill with tears.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I tell him.
“Come on, let me walk you home, at least,” he says. I stare at the road leading to Shelly’s. The same dusty road my mom walked so many times.
I shake my head. “I’m fine, really.”
“Okay, but you’re going straight to Shelly’s, right?”
“I promise.”
He watches me go.
And as I set my feet on that road and walk, I look for the bear around every bend. I wait for him to emerge from a bush and charge me.
“Hey, Dani!” I hear. “Dani!” It takes me a few seconds to process the voices, to see the dark silhouettes that keep calling to me.
It’s Jessie and Chicken. They wave and tell me to hurry up or I’m gonna miss the bus. I shake my head and they keep calling but I ignore them.
My brain is like a dial on a radio and it tunes in to a Patsy Cline song, and I look over to the mountains and wait for the ground to tremble.
But nothing.
Just Patsy’s voice.
And my mom. She’s who I feel. Some version of her that once existed. Some version of her that never existed. Walking with me.
Shelly is sitting at the kitchen table when I get home. She watches me come in and I sit down across from her.
“You…okay?” she asks.
I nod. “I’m sorry…if I worried you,” I tell her.
She sighs and looks at the wall on the far side of the kitchen. “When I got home, I thought you’d gone back to the trailer. I looked for you there first, but then…” She shakes her head. “I thought maybe you’d left….”
It takes me a minute to understand she means left like my mom left.
“I couldn’t sleep…,” I explain.
“Paulo came just when I was getting in the truck.” She sighs again. “I don’t even know where I was headed, but I knew I was going after you, the way I would’ve gone after your mom if I’d known….” Her red eyes fill with fresh tears, making my own eyes hurt. She lets out a breath. “God, Dani, you look so much like her,” she says, staring at me.
I can see how much Shelly misses her. I want to ask if she dreamed what I did, but I don’t know how.
We sit in silence. “She loved you, you know…,” Shelly says suddenly.
I think of all the times Mom looked at me with anger, with that look that seemed to ask why she ever had me. Shelly couldn’t know if Mom really loved me or not. “She hated me…,” I tell her.
“We were full of hate, Dani. I know she was. I have been too. Hate and anger and…loneliness. All that bad blood, it runs in our veins.” Shelly lets out another sigh, one that seems to echo off the bare walls and through the empty hallways. The house feels even emptier somehow.
I look at Shelly, the way she stares off into nothingness, the way she has surrounded herself with nothingness. And I think of how she hasn’t let anyone into her life; she never brought anyone into this world. I think of how Shelly has cut herself off from everyone. Everything.
I suddenly remember reading somewhere about a man who was infected with rabies and tied himself to a tree so he wouldn’t hurt anyone else. An image of Shelly tied to a tree, foaming at the mouth, whips into my mind. And another, of her out here in the desert by herself, bleeding that bad blood into the desert floor, fills my head. It scares me to think of her that way. It makes it hard to breathe. I push the images out
of my mind and focus on her face. Despite the stern lines on her face, there’s a softness in her eyes as she speaks.
No, Shelly isn’t bleeding to death. She isn’t tied to trees. She has withstood the unthinkable. She reminds me of Paulo’s grandmother. I want to tell her that, but suddenly I see something so clearly.
She let me in.
My chest tightens and I suck in my breath at the realization.
“Are you okay?” She reaches across the table and takes my hand in hers.
She closed out the whole world. But she let me in. I nod. “Fine,” I say. She gives me a worried smile.
“I’m not making excuses for her,” Shelly continues. “I just know she loved you. I know she probably wanted to do right by you. She just didn’t know how. I feel…like she’s asking me to do right by you now.”
Her eyes fill with even more tears. “It’s difficult to understand how you can hate somebody, wish they were dead even, and yet still cling to them and feel them with you. It doesn’t make sense. It feels wrong to love them and it feels wrong to hate them.” She looks like she’s trying to figure it out herself. “You might spend the rest of your life trying to make sense of it.”
You might hide yourself away, tie yourself to a tree, dwell in an empty house.
My eyes fill with tears.
Shelly takes a deep breath. “It’s not fair that she wasn’t a good mom. But there was goodness in your mother once, when I knew her. Before all that other crap piled up over it. There was goodness there. And that part loved you.” She looks like she doesn’t want to go on, but she forces herself to ask, “Did you…did you ever see that side of her?”
She looks at me and I try to answer. I try to remember. Maybe my mother tried, but it always turned bad and she blamed me for it. She always said it was me who ruined everything. And I believed her.
Shelly searches my eyes and I turn away because now I keep seeing it, that kindness, that softness. For me.
I remember instead how Mom’s eyes looked when she drank. Like she was glad not to feel anything at all, to be numb and dull. But there was more underneath that. Hate. Disgust. Disappointment.
But maybe it wasn’t for me.
Maybe it was for herself.
I look at the emptiness around me.
Maybe Mom just wanted room to breathe, like Shelly.
Isn’t this better?
But maybe for Mom the past was too loud in all that space. Maybe it screamed and clattered and told her who she was, who she would always be, what she couldn’t escape.
Maybe only the liquor muffled the past.
Maybe it hid the part that wanted to do right by me.
Maybe all of it was just too much for the good part to fight through.
“Did you ever see that part of her? The good part?” Shelly asks again.
I look at Shelly. “I…I don’t know,” I tell her. I feel panicked and scared. Because looking at Shelly and trying to remember makes my heart quiver with too much emotion. It makes me feel love and hate and too many things I can’t define.
I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I repeat. Shelly nods and tells me it’s okay. And we sit there. With too much. In all that emptiness.
Days and weeks pass. I go to school. I make more slashes on the calendar, watch September start filling up. But time keeps passing without me. Even as I try to pin it down, it keeps going while I feel stuck.
I feel like the bear failed me. All this time he was pushing me, urging me to find out about the past. As if it would bring some kind of enlightenment. But all I learned is how screwed up my mom’s life was and how that made her a screwed-up person and a screwed-up mom. And then the bear just disappeared. I don’t know if I’m glad or if I miss rounding each corner to find him there. All I know is that knowing all those things about Mom doesn’t make anything easier. It makes it harder.
And I hate her more because she never told me.
And I hate her less because I think of her in that trailer all those years ago.
But she’s not reachable. She never was and never will be. Because it’s too late.
I tell Paulo. I tell him everything. I tell him I was a superhero in my dream, that I defeated the bear. I pretend I drop-kicked the bear and levitated and beat him, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. And shouldn’t that count for something? Shouldn’t life be easier now? Except I didn’t do any of that. The bear lay down and died and left me with more questions than answers.
Paulo tells me you never really bury your past, that it always comes back and haunts you. And there are never any ends, just the beginnings of something else. So I keep searching for the something else.
I haven’t picked up The Stranger in a while, but sometimes I remember Meursault. A part of me hates him and his unfeeling ways, because it’s a lie. The world won’t let you go through life unscathed. It insists you feel every burn. It insists you pay attention. Even if you’re stumbling the whole way. Falling. Almost dead.
There’s a pep rally at school. The music thumps into the bleachers and the players come running into the gymnasium. And then the bear comes running, wearing a T-shirt and dancing. He waves and break-dances and everyone goes wild. He jumps and spins around and around. He lashes out at us with his paws. He nods like he knows something we don’t.
You forgot to tell me something! I yell at him. You forgot to tell me what to do! But he doesn’t listen. He can’t hear me over all the other screaming. He doesn’t even look at me.
But I watch him. I keep my eyes on him the whole time and when he goes to the locker room afterward, I wait outside the door. It’s the end of the day. Everyone is dismissed. Go home. Go home.
The players emerge, laughing and joking and giving each other high fives. And when I’m sure they’re gone, I go in.
I look around, wondering where the bear can be.
Now it’s me, I tell him, me coming for you. I walk past locker after locker. I peek inside the coach’s office. Nothing.
Where are you hiding?
I walk past showers and wooden benches, bags with basketballs, and stacked orange cones. And then I see a large storage closet at the end of the room.
I walk to it, stand there a moment before opening the door.
There he is, his mouth open in a silent growl. His teeth white and sharp. His tongue velvety red. A bodiless bear’s head.
This time, I’m here for you, I tell him, and he stares back at me with that frozen menacing look.
I reach out, touch the black cotton fur of his face. He doesn’t flinch. I stick my hand in his mouth. He doesn’t bite. I lift his head and bring it closer to me, look at his plastic eyes and leather nose. Nothing. He is empty and lifeless and I don’t know what else I expected.
I look around and when I get the urge to put it on, I do. I lower it over my head, the smell of sweat filling my nose and an uncomfortable warmth caressing my face.
I can hear myself breathing, heavy, like I’ve been running.
I take the head off. I want to steal it. I don’t know why, but I do. I want to take it home and keep it in the corner of my closet where I can keep an eye on it. So I’ll know when the bear comes alive again.
I go to the office. I tell them I missed my bus and need to call for a ride. And I call Paulo, who closes the gas station and says he’ll be there soon. And when I see his truck pulling into the school parking lot, I run to the locker room, grab the head, and sprint like hell to the truck.
I only sort of register Paulo’s words and the way he looks at me when I get in. I only sort of wonder what he must think as I tell him Drive!
I put the bear head on the kitchen table, stare at it until it doesn’t make sense, and then leave it there. I go to my room and lie down.
It gets darker and I keep telling myself to Get up, get up and hide it!
But then Shelly comes home. I hear her footsteps as she enters the house, the way they stop when she must have laid eyes on the head. And then I wait for her to come and find me. It fe
els like forever.
“Why is that bear head on the table?” she says in the darkness of the hallway.
My eyes fill with tears. I want to tell her the reasons, because there were reasons. I know I took it for a reason, but I can’t make sense of it. I don’t know how to tell her because I can’t remember why anymore.
“I had to” is all I say. It isn’t a good reason, but it is the truth.
She leans against the doorframe and stays quiet for a long time.
I don’t think Shelly knows what the hell to do now. I don’t think she knew what to do when they were young, and she didn’t know what to do when her family exploded, when they shot out in all different directions and only she survived. And I don’t think she knows what to do with me, a piece of Anna Ruby projected back.
“Dani…,” she says.
“I…I’m trying,” I tell her. “I’m trying to make sense of everything.”
“I know,” Shelly says. “I know you are. I’m sorry….”
I wipe my eyes. “It’s not your fault.”
Shelly starts crying then, softly and with her head down, but I hear her. And it makes more tears slide out of my own eyes. She comes in, sits at the foot of my bed. She bends over in a way that reminds me of the Atlas lotería card, the whole world on her shoulders, and I worry that whatever peace Shelly has made with the past, I’ve gone and dug it all up. Now she has to figure out what to do with the dead body all over again.
I sit up, put one hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry…,” I tell her as she keeps crying. “I’m sorry I’m here. I’ve brought it all back.”
Only the light from the hallway offers any light in my room, but I catch the expression on Shelly’s face when she grabs my hand and turns to look at me.
“Don’t you ever think that,” she says through clenched teeth. I’m scared she’s angry, but she caresses my hand and holds it to her face. “I’m so glad you’re here. So glad you exist. So glad Anna carried you…” She tries to get through the words. “So glad that I have this chance to do right by her.”
Her tears wet my hand, and something in me, some hard rock that has been lodged in my heart forever shifts a little.
Because of the Sun Page 16