by Davina Bell
‘Don’t look like that, all cute and worried like a lost lamb,’ said Edward. ‘I know how you feel about her, and I like Surf—I really do. I’m just trying to understand the whole thing better, I guess. The way it works between you.’
‘Summer finds it hard to trust people,’ I said. ‘She thinks she needs to keep me safe.’
Edward strummed all the strings at once. There were three so far. They sounded pretty. He reached for the next. ‘And does she?’
I plucked at the grass and thought of all the things we had seen. I thought of the flash of bullets outside the window of our seaplane, how Summer had told me they were shooting stars. That I should wish. I thought how easily she had forgiven me when I still couldn’t forgive myself.
‘When you have seen a lot of things,’ I said eventually, ‘sometimes it is easier just pretending you haven’t. That way, you can believe that bad things aren’t still going to happen. At least, you can sometimes. Sometimes you need to pretend that you know how the story ends.’ I looked up. ‘Do you get what I mean?’
‘Sure. But I’m here now,’ Edward said. ‘The past doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing bad’s going to happen while I’m with you. I’m like a one-man SWAT team. I’m like a force field.’
He sounded so sure. But that was just what our father had promised when we left Tokyo. So I didn’t say anything back.
I thought about Summer. How hard it was to admit to myself that my feelings for her had changed.
It wasn’t that I loved her less. It was realising that I could still love her from further away. Like you can love the house you grew up in from two cities west. From across the world.
‘What’s Summer’s favourite song?’ he asked when he’d fitted five strings. ‘What kind of music does she like?’
‘Summer loves Elvis,’ I said. ‘The slow ones. Sung slowly. “Can’t Help Falling in Love”—that’s her favourite.’
‘Too easy,’ he said. ‘Give me a day. No—a week. Two weeks? Leave it with me.’
Summer
Winter woke me sometime in the space between midnight and dawn, when the world is otherworldly and your mind takes up all of the bedroom, not just your head, and your breath is a tiny thing. It was so lovely to see her there, so unexpected after all the hours I had spent like a rolled slab of dough with a cookie-cutter girl missing from the middle. In the wide moonlight, her teeth shone so that I could see that she was smiling as she said, ‘Come with me.’
And even though I knew that wherever she took me, that bear would be there too—even though I knew that and I couldn’t think how to warn her about him, and even though, whatever I said, she would never believe me—I followed her out across the moat and through the orchard and over the cold night dunes. Edward was waiting on the beach, standing up on his hind legs and gazing out at the water with a kind of sea-captain longing. By now he was so tall that we came only part-way past his knees and when he dropped back down to all fours, Winter had to take a run-up to vault onto the solid rug of his back. They both turned to look at me and it was so deeply annoying to know that I couldn’t do what Winter had just done, that it was only because of all her running muscles that she could jump so high. I kicked at the sand and looked out at the crinkled desert of moon-hit sea and sulked.
Then the bear lay down, flattened his belly against the sand and put his head on his paws, just looking at me and waggling his big old ears, and Winter held out her hands, even though she knew I’d only pull her off if I took them, and the breeze was running through her hair like kind fingers, and the rocks in the distance shone like basking whales. I swallowed my pride and went over and took fists of his fur and pulled myself up onto his back. I even tried not to yank it too hard. Nestled in behind Winter as the bear stood, I may as well have been five years old and riding Tanka, that fat old brown pony with the snowy mane who came each year to the Scandinavian Christmas Bazaar, except it was always me up front, every time, his plaited reins through my fingers and my heels kicking, crying out ‘Yeeha!’ and Winter behind me, worried that two was too much for a pony, trying to make herself feather light and her bones small.
Edward’s back swayed as he sloshed into the sea and though I guess I should have been wondering if bears can even swim, I was really just half drunk on being so close to Winter, feeling her heart beat through the back of her ribs. I put my arms around her waist and my cheek against the wing of her shoulderblade and my lips against the sharp angle of bone, and at that second, the bear’s feet lifted off the bottom of the ocean and I opened my eyes to see that as he paddled, all around him, in the webs of his fur, little beads of phosphorescence clung and sparkled—so many that, in their eerie glow, I could see a turtle pass beneath us, could make out his pinprick nostrils and his prehistoric beak and his grumpy little brow with those eyes that said, ‘I s’pose you really have to be here?’
Winter said, ‘Watch this!’ and kicked her foot through the sea so that water showered down in a spray of emerald phosphorescence, and I felt my stomach slam up against itself, not because it was so sublime, because it was, but because she knew how to flick her toes like that, just so, which meant that she’d been here before, perhaps a heap of times, and as we glided, ringed with light, parallel with the shore, rising up and down as the ocean shrugged beneath us, I was sad with love that had nowhere to go.
Winter turned her head to me and I wondered if she could feel it—if somehow she knew what was boiling inside my heart.
‘Isn’t it like we’re on Aslan’s back,’ she said loudly, ‘just flying?’
There was nothing and no one Winter loved more than Aslan, that wise old papa lion from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe who’s one part Jesus and one part love and one part brute animal and one part all the world’s wisdom in a pelt. How many hours Winter had wept for him, vowed to live her life as a tribute to him and the Good (capital G) he represented; how she had put all her longings onto him for the things we didn’t have. I felt sorry for the bear, then, because I knew what I was going to do—the only thing I could do in the face of that love, which towered over me like a cliff and cast a grave-cold shadow so big it had its own postcode.
I couldn’t wait two weeks. Could hardly wait a hot second.
I squeezed my arms tighter around Winter, trying not to bend her ribs with all the sorries I felt for what would come next. And all the ones that I didn’t.
Winter
Edward didn’t let us outside all afternoon. Not till after the sun had gone down.
‘Stay in here and read something,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that what you do all day anyway?’
‘Are you trying to curtail our fundamental liberties?’ Summer demanded. ‘Are you threatening our right to freedom of movement?’
‘Go write a poem about it,’ said Edward. ‘If you keep the lines short, I might even read it.’
She didn’t. She climbed up on the bookshelf that Edward had made for my mother’s books. She pulled down The Secret Garden for me and Oliver Twist for her. ‘These are both narratives of oppression, so that’s fitting,’ she said. ‘What’s he doing out there, anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s a surprise.’
‘As if,’ said Summer. Her voice had a sharpness to it that I hated. ‘Don’t you two tell each other everything now?’
I looked down at the book—at dear Mary Lennox. I ran my fingers over the title and thought. How sour she was at the start, and how creamy at the end.
People change, she whispered to me from the cover. And that’s not a bad thing.
So instead of feeling the sad sorry that I’d left Summer out, instead of all the apologies to make it better, I told the truth. ‘I tell him the things you won’t listen to. We talk about the things you won’t talk about.’
Summer didn’t respond. She opened Oliver Twist. She started reading furiously.
The last of the sunlight came sideways through the windows. Everything glowed and flickered, but inside, I felt calm.
&nbs
p; And something else—something unfamiliar. I felt strong and tall. Like a lion. Like a bear.
We read in silence, but not the silence we were used to. Outside there were scrapes and knocks. When the light got low, I lit a lamp.
‘I bet you think he’s Dickon,’ Summer said viciously as I sat back down.
Dickon is the Yorkshire boy in The Secret Garden who teaches Mary Lennox about hope, and nature, and love. ‘What a babe,’ Summer would always say when we reached the part where he rescues the secret garden.
‘You know,’ I said quietly, ‘I hadn’t thought about it. But you’re right. He’s a lot like Dickon.’
‘Seasons!’ Edward called. ‘Get out here!’
We didn’t look at each other as we walked outside.
At first I couldn’t see anything. When you haven’t had it for so long, electric light is blinding. And it seemed to be flashing all around us, little balls of it. There was loud whirring. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that it was my father’s old generator, put back together. Something smelled incredibly good in a fire-y, charcoal-y, smoke-house-y way.
And then it started—the song.
It was the tin guitar. But because of the fairy lights that were strung up over the moat and the table with the white cloth and some kind of roasted meat and some kind of flowers in a jam jar, and the stars and the moon, it sounded like an enchanted harp.
I didn’t recognise the tune at first. Just that it was beautiful.
But gradually it rearranged itself in my mind.
Then Edward began to sing and I knew for sure. It was a song my father had sung to my mother in a time so long ago, I wasn’t sure it had really happened.
It was slow, slow Elvis, and next to me Summer was crying.
Summer
Maybe I felt guilty for what I hadn’t even done to the bear yet—maybe that’s why I picked a fight. And if you think it would be impossible to pick a fight with peaceful, sweet little Winter, well, you’re so almost very right, and, sure, I could blame the hunger that bumps along behind two meals a day of beef broth and minimal snacks. But by now Winter was hardly eating anything—was giving it all to that stupid bear—and you didn’t see her picking at my scabs with the filthy point of an old compass.
‘Winter,’ I said, when she ran back in the door, panting and pink, forest-glowing, her hair spritzing out at the sides. ‘Don’t you think it’s sort of kind of weird that a bear just arrived here—out of nowhere, I mean?’
‘No?’ said Winter, putting her hands on her knees to catch her breath. ‘There are other animals here.’
And she was right, there were—bunnies and foxes and squirrels and geese and all kinds of birds, which had been so scared of us at the start that for ages we hadn’t been able to coax them back to their own nests, they were that shy, and it had taken Winter’s patience and sugar water and days.
‘But there are lots of all those—you can see how they’d breed. How does just a single baby bear end up here? Isn’t that, well, odd? Sort of…suspicious?’
Winter was quiet, and I knew that type of quiet; that was fright quiet, shutting-up-shop quiet. That was Pops-is-yelling quiet, and bullets-on-the-side-of-the-plane quiet. And you’ll think I’m a total brute, but I liked it—I liked that I could make her feel that way, and so I went on.
‘Have you actually even checked his fur—you know, for bugs?’
‘He doesn’t have bugs—he’s clean. He doesn’t even smell bad.’
‘I mean electronic bugs. You know, like in spy movies. Listening devices or whatever. Or some kind of bomb. He has a lot of fur. It would be easy to strap a bomb on him—a mini one. Like a suicide bomber crossed with that dog they sent into space. The Russian one.’
And you probably won’t even get how cruel that was, because when Winter learned about Laika and how they’d sent her up to float around the stars as an experiment in the early spaceship days, that she had died alone in that floating cage, Winter had practically ripped her own heart out of her chest with sadness. She had even written a gosh-darn poem about it, and it won an award in a country we weren’t even living in, but our teacher had sent it off along with the kittens she’d given birth to when she read it.
‘Stop it,’ whispered Winter, and she looked at me with eyes that said, Why are you doing this to me? And I liked that even more.
‘Pretty clever, wouldn’t it be, to make an animal swallow something with a timing device, or one of those cameras that can see through skin. They’d learn a lot about what’s in the bell tower that way.’
‘He doesn’t know about the bell tower,’ Winter whispered. ‘I promise.’
But she said it a little too quickly—only a nanosecond, or something like that, but if anyone had an Olympic-grade timer that could detect those teeny fractions of Winter, it was me, and suddenly I wasn’t just trying to poke a stick in a bee’s nest, I was actually, genuinely angry, because we’d made a promise to our father that we’d never, ever, in a thousand years, on pain of death, with a knife at our throat, with acid being poured into our eyeballs, with our feet pressed up against a barbecue—well, you get the picture. We’d promised never to tell anyone what was up there, because the contents of the bell tower were worth more than our lives, and I know you’ll think I’m being dramatic and all, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that what was up there was Everything. It was the future of the whole world. If the wrong people got it, well…
‘You know what your problem is?’ I said coolly, much more coolly than I felt, which was molten. I looked her right in the eyes—right in her pink-cheeked, loved-up, gentle face—and I whispered, ‘You’re a slut.’
Winter stepped back as if I had slapped her with a palm full of thumbtacks. She even put her hand up to her cheek to soothe the sting, like the illustration on the cover of some kind of dime-store romance novel, and I hated her even more because she looked so ridiculously beautiful as she did it.
‘Don’t use that word,’ she said. ‘And besides, I haven’t done anything. We haven’t done anything. And even if we had…If we had, that’s okay too.’
‘That bear couldn’t care less about you,’ I spat. ‘And you think it’s love, I can tell, but he’s a goddamn animal.’
‘You’re just jealous,’ Winter said in a low voice. ‘You’re jealous. You’re jealous. You’re jealous. You’re—’
Winter
We were often in the moat, Edward and I, through long afternoons, the water silky dark. We could signal each other under the surface, away from the blade of Summer’s gaze. With our fingers we spun a new language between us. As our third winter approached, it wasn’t warm. But the river ran too fast to bathe in. I still wasn’t the strongest swimmer.
‘You’re getting too scrawny—that’s the problem,’ said Edward. ‘You can’t float if you’ve got no body fat. That’s just science, right there. You’ve got to eat more.’
But there wasn’t really more. Every day there was less. Soon there would be none. The generator was already almost out of fuel for stewing apples. Boiling broth. Edward hadn’t caught a fish in weeks.
‘It’s like they’re in hiding,’ he said, pushing off from the edge of the moat and gliding to the other side. ‘It’s like they’re gangsters who’ve been tipped off before a drug bust, and they’re just trying to keep a low profile.’
‘You sound like Summer,’ I said. I was trying to float on my back, hipbones to the sky like he’d taught me.
‘When was the last time she even spoke?’ said Edward. ‘She’s like a ghost now—suddenly there, glowering round corners. It’s creepy. She’s even started showing up in my dreams.’ He rested his forearms on the stones of the water’s edge, warm from the afternoon sun. ‘I thought…I don’t know…I thought the Elvis would fix things. Break the ice. Dumb, huh?’
I stood up and I kicked off and I swam over to him with my strongest strokes. I put my palms on his cheeks. I kissed him long. Our lips fizzed stars. I didn’t even worry that Summer was watching. He was r
ight; she was everywhere now.
‘It wasn’t dumb,’ I whispered when we’d finished.
The tips of his fingers traced drops down my chest. ‘Hey, Pretty,’ he whispered back.
My stomach twirled. I ducked under water, pulled him down with me to where Summer couldn’t see. ‘Run away with me?’ I asked with my hands and my heart.
That night, the sky was thick with stars.
The stars saw me leave my bed in only a blanket. By then we didn’t have knickers.
I found Edward. He was still awake.
I lay down on the nest that we’d made him. His head was on the pillowcase, the one I’d sewn with our initials.
I said, ‘Sorry these blankets are rough,’ because I could feel them now, in just my skin. I could feel everything.
I had to turn and face the wall.
I felt his eyes on my neck. Then his breath on my neck. Then his breath on my hair.
Edward ran his finger down the knobbles of my spine. Like he was looking for dust, or tracing through steam on a window.
‘Are you cold?’ he whispered when I shivered.
I wondered if he had done this before. I wondered if he could see that I hadn’t.
I’d only kissed Summer. She’d wanted to practise.
I whispered, ‘No.’ I whispered, ‘You found the fairy lights.’
‘Sure.’
A butterfly kiss. Is that what it’s called?
‘Did you know we were here?’ I whispered, ‘Were you looking for us?’
‘Only my whole life,’ he whispered back. Then he rubbed his ankle against my ankle.
‘Ho!’ said the stars. But they needn’t have worried. That was enough.