The Shadow of the Bear: A Fairy Tale Retold (2 page)

Rose was feeling sorrier and sorrier for this person called Bear, who looked a bit overwhelmed at having been dragged into a strange living room and being told to take off his shoes.  And right now, he couldn’t even do that.  He groped clumsily at his laces, and he paused to try to take his grease-spotted gloves off. It was clear he was having trouble getting enough of a grip to pull off the first glove.

“Are your hands frostbitten, too?” Rose asked, almost wanting to lean over and help him.

“I don’t know. They hurt a bit, so that’s a good sign, I guess,” he said, easing the second glove off and then starting to work on his laces with red fingers.  Rose, stealing a glance at him through the concealing drape of her hair, decided that he would be good looking if he weren’t so scruffy.

“How long have you been outside?” Mother asked as she came into the living room with the basin full of water.

“Since sometime this morning.”

 Mother’s brow was furrowed. “It’s been terribly cold out. Several homeless people with severe frostbite were brought to the hospital today.” She knelt on the floor and began to help him with his sneakers.

There was silence while she eased off his shoes and peeled off his grubby sports socks in her best emergency room manner. The large feet were red, and the tips of the toes were slightly blue.  Rose found herself struck by how much larger a man’s feet were than her own.  She’d forgotten.

Mother shook her head. “My goodness, I’m glad I made you come inside. If you’d walked home, you’d have had some permanent damage.” She sunk his feet into the basin of cold water and began to rub them gently. “I’ve got to warm your feet slowly or I’ll damage the tissue.”

The young man said nothing, but his face was as red as his feet. “I’m sorry you’re having to be bothering about me—”

“Nothing to be sorry about. This water isn’t cold enough. Rose, get me some ice cubes from the freezer.”

When Rose went into the kitchen, Blanche slipped in next to her. “Rose. Mom shouldn’t have let this guy in the house,” she said in a whisper.

Rose stared at her sister, amazed at how rude she was being. “Why not? He’s got frostbite!  Didn’t you see?”

“Don’t you recognize him?”

Rose glanced at Bear and stared blankly at her sister’s white face framed by her black hair.  Blanche was always pale, but now she looked tense and almost scared.  “No. Should I?”

“He’s one of the guys who always hang out around the entrance to the school parking lot,” Blanche whispered, and waited. “Don’t you know who I mean?” 

“No.”

“The drug dealers,” Blanche’s voice was a bare hush.  “He’s one of them. I’m sure.”

A drug dealer.
Well.
Rose pursed her lips, then shrugged, scooping ice cubes into their pottery salad bowl. “Well, I don’t think he’d have any luck trying to sell drugs to us.”

Blanche slouched against the counter, exhaling, “That’s not exactly the point.”

Rose whisked back into the living room and handed the ice cubes to Mother. But despite blowing her nervous sister off, Rose had decided to investigate. Sitting back on the arm of the chair, she smiled casually. “So — why do you call yourself Bear? Is it because of your hair?”

Bear gave her a faint smile. “That’s part of it.” Rose decided he had nice eyes.  But she pushed on.

“What’s the other part?”

Bear stared at the floor for a second. “Well, actually, I spent some time in juvenile detention. I sort of picked up the name there.” He looked at her with a half-jesting expression, but his remarkably dark eyes were serious.

“Sounds like you’ve had a pretty tough life,” Mother said.

There was a noise from Blanche that sounded like a groan and a snort. Rose knew that Blanche was afraid they were setting themselves up for a con artist to spin them a tale of woe and self-pity.

But Bear didn’t seem any more anxious to talk about himself than Blanche was to hear it. He cracked his knuckles apprehensively. “Yeah, in a way. Look, I don’t want to make you nervous. I could just go to the emergency room.”

Mother laughed. “Bear, believe it or not that’s where I work, though I did think I was done for the night. But really, it’s better for you not to go outside yet.”

Rose was grateful for her mom’s cool handling of the situation. She felt proud, watching Mother as she knelt there, still wearing her coat, rubbing this stranger’s feet with practiced efficiency.

“What were you in juvenile detention for?” Mother asked.

“Drug possession.”

A long breath escaped Blanche, but Mother didn’t look either surprised or perturbed.

“Funny,” she said, squinting at him thoughtfully. “You don’t look like someone who uses drugs.”

Bear looked her in the face. “I don’t.”

“Hmph,” Mother said.  “I’m glad to hear it. Blanche, fill up the spaghetti pot with cold water and bring it out here. And put some water on low heat on the stove. Rose, I’ll need you to get me another basin and a coffee mug. I’m going to start taking these ice cubes out and put in some less cold water.”

Blanche seemed a little less scared when Rose went to the kitchen, but she kept looking at the phone, as though wondering if she should call the police, just in case.  Rose ignored her, collected the items her mother needed, and returned to the edge of the sofa.

“How was it, being in juvenile detention?” she asked, hoping to get Bear talking again.

“It was pretty bad,” Bear admitted. “I was glad to get out. I’m trying to make sure that I don’t go back again.”

“So why did they start calling you ‘Bear’?” Rose persisted.  “There’s got to be a story in that name.”

Bear rubbed his chin. “Well, one day these guys were beating up my brother. When I found them, they had his head in a sink full of water. It looked like they were trying to drown him, just for kicks, though they denied it later. I never used to fight anybody, but I just saw red and threw the three of them against the wall.” He winced, whether from the memory or from the pain in his feet, Rose couldn’t tell. “I knocked the one guy out and the other two were scared pretty bad. I got sent to the disciplinary unit for two weeks, but nobody ever picked on my brother again. That’s when they started calling me the Bear.”

“Wow,” Rose breathed. “So your brother was in detention too?  What’s his name?”

A closed look appeared over Bear’s face. He shrugged.

“Was he in juvenile detention for the same reason?” Rose asked.

“Yeah. Same as me. Drug possession with intent to deliver.” Bear paused. “But I’d rather not talk about that, sorry.”

Blanche came out with the pot of water, her dark hair falling like a curtain around the sides of it. She knelt by her mother as she set it down, avoiding Bear’s eyes, then retreated back to the sofa arm. But at least she had come into the room.

“What does that mean—‘possession with intent to deliver’?” Rose wanted to know.

“Possession with intent to sell.” Mother explained, sitting back on her heels for a moment. “It means they were caught with a large amount of drugs on their person.”

“Gee, Mom, you know all about this stuff!” Rose said.

“She probably sees a lot where she works,” Bear said.

Mother tested the water with her hand and put Bear’s feet into some slightly warmer water. “Yes, I do. Too much, unfortunately.”

“Have you lived here in the City all your life?” Bear asked.

“I was born here, but I moved out when I got married. My husband died last year, and my old supervisor offered me a staff management position in the hospital. So we moved back.”

“I’m sorry,” Bear said quietly. “What did he die of?”

“Cancer.” Mother added some warm water to the basin from the pot Blanche had brought.

“That’s what my mother died of,” Bear said.

 Rose saw that Blanche glanced at Bear when he said that, but lowered her eyes again quickly.

“I’m sorry,” said Mother. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is.” Bear was silent for a few minutes. Then he winced.

“Does that hurt?” Mother looked up at him. “Good! Good!” She continued rubbing. “How sharp is the pain? Faint or does it really hurt?”

“Um—it really hurts.”

“Good! Well, I’m sorry to tell you it will probably get worse before it gets better.”

As if to distract himself, Bear looked at Blanche and met her eyes. “So, what’s your name?”

Those black eyes seemed to see too much of her. She almost flinched, but stopped herself. “Blanche,” she said stiffly. The storm continued to roar in the darkness outside, and this person still seemed part of that darkness—and her mother had brought it right inside their house.

“We go to St. Catherine’s high school,” Rose informed their guest. “Blanche is a senior and I’m a junior.”

Blanche chewed her lip. There was Rose, spilling out information. The last thing Blanche wanted him to know was that they attended St. Catherine’s.  Mother should stop Rose from talking, but Mother didn’t know that Blanche knew that Bear was probably a drug dealer.  And Blanche couldn’t think of any way to tell her. 

Wretched but defiant, Blanche got up and walked over to the rocking chair. She picked up her quilt and sat down, folding and smoothing it over her knees.

“How do you like school?” Bear asked, leaning over to gently touch his feet. His jaw line was taut and he shut his eyes just a bit. Blanche noticed that he was really in pain, as much as he was trying hard not to show it.

She felt odd, seeing his chance vulnerability. Here, on their living room couch, surrounded by their quaint little tables and books and lamps, his hugeness seemed to make him more clumsy and out of place than threatening.  It was hard to remember now how he usually looked, hanging out with the drug pushers in the high school parking lot.

St. Catherine’s was an ugly rectangular block building, four unremarkable stories high. The hallways were long and narrow, and the three stairwells were always crowded between classes. But in the morning, the top of the south stairwell was usually empty, and that was where Blanche went for refuge when she felt besieged by her classmates. It had a window, and it was from there she had seen the guy who called himself Bear.

Sometimes on those mornings, she looked out on the grey cracked square of the parking lot and the surrounding dirty streets and felt trapped and lost. Before homeroom started, different groups of students hung out in the parking lot by the chain-link fence and smoked. Every once in a while, Blanche saw some money change hands, and she would get a hard, cold feeling inside.

Usually standing among the crowd or hanging about on the edges was a tall, burly figure, a kerchief over his lengthy dreadlocks.  Blanche had noticed him at the beginning of the school year, mostly because he was someone she wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.  He looked like the sort of thug who was hired by kingpins to break arms.  But since he didn’t seem to be taking orders from anyone, Blanche had decided he had to be working alone. He would pace up and down the periphery with cool indifference, sometimes pausing to talk to a student or another suspicious-looking character. Once she had seen a police car crawl slowly through the traffic near the school, and the guy with the dreadlocks had sauntered casually off.

And this was the same guy who was now sitting in their living room, having his feet washed by her mother. At the moment, he looked more shabby and bewildered than ferocious, but Blanche could not forget his usual appearance of disguised danger. She felt wooden inside, and cornered.

But her blithe younger sister was apparently quite taken with this character of conflicting faces and sat babbling away on the arm of the sofa.

“This is our first year of regular school. Our parents taught us at home ever since we were babies. Mom always said it was a more natural way to learn. She must be right, because Blanche and I are way ahead of the other kids at school in everything except science and health studies. Blanche almost didn’t have to go to high school at all—but the state required that she have one more year of English—even though she didn’t really need it, so Mom thought it would be best for us to go to school for at least one year. I don’t mind the work, but I don’t like the kids, generally. Some of them are okay, but the popular girls like to pick on my sister, and almost all the guys are gross. I don’t know why guys are like that. Do you?”

“Simple immaturity, usually,” Bear said. He didn’t seem to mind Rose’s chatter.

“So you think they’ll grow out of it?” Rose asked.

“Oh, it’s possible,” Bear said.

“Well, there’s a sign of hope. The boys at school are so degenerate that it makes one feel pessimistic about the future of the male gender in general. Some of the senior boys are nice enough, although I’ve had to yell at them when they make fun of my sister.”

Bear looked at Blanche. “What do they make fun of you for?”

Does Rose
have
to discuss my problems with him?
 Provoked, Blanche shrugged her shoulders
.
 “Something to do, I guess,” she said.

He seemed irritated. “Yeah, I used to get picked on myself in school. It’s not fun.”

Yet another odd feeling came over Blanche. It was hard to picture a guy as burly and muscular as Bear being teased.
But maybe he’s just saying that to get my sympathy,
she thought.