Young Widower (7 page)

Katie put on her pack. Her ankle was swelling now; it would soon be stiff. They walked the trail single-file, cautiously, stepping
carefully up and down the rocks, making little noise to announce their presence. So perhaps they surprised each other. The bear ambling toward them, doglike, taking its time, careful about the surrounding darkness. The hikers securing their footing and saying nothing in the last light. The bear must have seemed enormous: three and four times the size of bears at a zoo, outsized but also vibrant, so plain in its terror. The claws retracted. The snout closed.

How far away was it? Ten feet? Twenty? No one seemed to know. Katie’s mind flashed options, calculating the intervening time and space. Three or four seconds. Did the bear
really
see them? Did the bear care that they were there? She thought,
We can run
, but she knew they could not outpace it. She thought to open the pack and find the pepper spray. Was there enough time? The pepper spray was zipped into a pouch inside the top pocket. If she dropped the pack and dug inside of it, then she might call attention to herself and distract the bear. It might charge. Of course, anything she did could provoke the bear. There was a space between them still; that was important. And maybe the bear had not yet seen them.

Katie was easily the most fit, the one who knew and loved nature. She looked to the two hikers behind her. How quickly did the surprise turn to terror? Was it in an instant? Was the understanding of their danger, and their mortality, obvious? Or, did they laugh at first? Were they shocked and overwhelmed?
A fucking bear!
Was that shock held in check by reason and optimism? There were three of them and only one bear. Could they, together, scare it off and escape the situation?

Katie looked at Sara, then the Romanian. No one did anything. They stood there, stock-still, and the bear approached.

How long had it been now? A few seconds? Katie took off her pack and threw it as far as she could in the other direction. Sara did the same thing. If the bear was hungry, it might follow the packs. The outer pouches were filled with candy, water, granola bars, dried
fruit. They had only managed to toss the packs three or four feet, but it might give them enough time. They walked as a group, slowly and backward, shading just right, to open a distance between themselves, the bear, and the packs. If the bear followed, Katie told Sara, then it might still become distracted. It might break off its pursuit to find food. It might lose interest.

Did she imagine then they would all survive? Was she hopeful for it? The hill inclined toward the path, then the water. Bears were faster but perhaps not as sure-footed as humans. Could they make it to the rocks at the stream? Should they arm themselves with rocks and sticks? The pepper spray was in the pack, but perhaps with a few rocks and a little luck they could grab it.

Or perhaps this was the foolish option. The bear was large, heavy, resolute. It could charge at any moment. Why was Katie making these decisions? The bear continued forward, slow and deliberate. Katie said they should all play dead, so they rolled onto the ground and covered their heads. At what strange angles to the ground they must have held their bodies. How terrifying, that waiting in the dark for the attack to either begin or not begin, and thinking still, this might pass. They might survive all of this, if they only remained still and waited.

The bear pawed first at Sara and the Romanian, not Katie. It swiped at their heads, tore at their scalps and legs, pushed into their backs. They were injured and afraid but not yet hysterical. They continued to play dead.

They submitted to the bear, but the bear did not choose them.

Who was the first person to think of it? That one or two of them might survive if only one of them didn’t? That they did not have to outrun the bear, or defeat it, or discourage it. Perhaps they thought of it like this: the odds are on someone’s side. Individually, whoever ran first had only to get clear and back to the trail. If the bear did not follow, then it would be the other person who abandoned the victim. They had only to surrender the idea of the
group, and wasn’t the bear doing that already, focusing now on Katie, leaving them be? How long should they wait like that? Didn’t each minute they stayed only increase the odds that the bear might turn back to them and take a second look?

Could they turn away from this last part of themselves? They did not have to want to do it. It could appear suddenly in their minds, a surprise, a well-reasoned and complete idea for which they had no agency. Fortune. Distraction. Survival.

Who worked out the math, the timing, the imperfect logistics, until running became the only real option? Who lay there, waiting to try it? How long did they wait? It seemed an eternity, this waiting, but it had only been a few minutes since they stood at the kilometer marker with the rest of the group, taking pictures. Hadn’t the other group abandoned them there? The victims were here, while the survivors had gone ahead to the hostel to sleep for the night. Did anyone notice their absence? Hadn’t they missed their window to catch up?

They must have heard a voice yelling Katie’s name, then their own. Perhaps they recognized it. Should they respond to it? Did their voices risk unsettling the balance of disinterest and safety? Still, they were all alive. The bear seemed now more menacing than curious. It seemed to wait for something.

And then Katie’s voice yelled back, sudden and louder than the wind on the ridge, clear and insistent.

Don’t come closer. Find a gun. Get back quickly
.

Katie had spoken. She had broken the silence.

The voice was gone now. A window of time was closing. Did any of them really believe that help would arrive in time? Now there was no longer obligation, only panic and its acceleration, and Katie, unable to move, laying stock-still on the ground, following the rules, still played dead and waited. She whispered to the others to leave, to go get help and come back. She watched them leave, and in the silence that followed, she understood she was now brave
and selfless, heroic and elect, and that these were judgments that could come only after the fact of her death, in the witness of those who survived to speak of it.

I must tell this last part even if I do not know it. I have to think through how she made this decision and what happened afterward, even if I cannot know.

Katie lay on the ground, waiting. She made her body into a ball so that the bear could only strike obliquely. She covered her face and waited. She would not have felt optimistic or hopeful for herself, and she would not have felt good for the people she had rescued. Her mind did not work this way. There would be no pleasure, only a sense of obligation flashing once across her mind, to say she had done the right thing by the people she loved. She had saved them. Or, better still, she had given them the chance to save themselves. However they cowered from it and tried to refuse it, or say it was a matter of circumstance and timing and luck, always just below their complicated reasoning, their absence of guilt and refusal to explain, was the irrefutable fact of their witness. Katie had given them permission to leave. She asked them to do it.

In that moment, perhaps, Katie imagined her own death without consequence. She waited for it. Through the fear, the pain, and then the absence of pain. Long enough for her friends to get clear. Patient for what she knew now was the end. She heard the voices, closer, then further away. Then, no voices. No sound, no presence, no sense of self. Only the object of her body waiting to be received. Her mind becoming one part of that body, calling for help until it could not make words, only sounds, locating itself in the surrounding darkness. Then the mind, separate of that darkness.

It was roughly twenty minutes from the moment the two hikers left the hill until Katie’s death, but in this last moment, she was not present. She could not be. The mind cannot organize so much pain and fear and suffering and also withstand it. This is the last, great lie of the surviving witness, and from everything I could find
to read about trauma after Katie’s death, it is also true. Katie’s pupils opened to receive the last light coming across the ridge. She saw nothing. Not the stars or the grass or the bear, or the bear leaving and everyone arriving, slowly and too late, to claim her.

4. Sunday Morning

I stayed up the night with Katie’s body. Local police, doctors, and reporters came through the room, performed or insinuated their duties, and left. It did not matter why they were there or when they would leave. I would never see them again.

Every half hour or so, I stepped out onto the hostel’s porch to catch my breath. We had carried Katie’s body about a quarter of a mile and laid it out on the basement floor. Someone thought to cover it with a tarp, which was pulled back with every arriving expert, who only confirmed the obvious. As though they had practiced it before, two or three people would stand me up and walk me to the other side of the room. I could listen to the various tests performed, but I did not have to watch them, a small grace for which I felt overwhelming relief and resentment. Who were they to deny me a place next to Katie? How could anyone think I would want to watch?

The place where Katie had died was only a few hundred yards away, but I couldn’t see it. I imagined a sleuth of bears waiting there. I fantasized about killing them with my hands, braining them with large stones, spring-loading rusted traps that would stump their limbs and snouts. A bear would bleed out several days before it died somewhere, disoriented, alone, with only half a paw. Or maybe another bear would come along and kill it. Were bears hierarchical creatures? Empathic? I had no idea. The wind was blowing hard on the ridge. It was dark, cold and loud, and hard to listen or watch for anything from such a distance.

I was safe now, and I knew it. I would never put myself in harm’s way again. I felt like a kid playing army with his friends in the yard.
However well I simulated the circumstances of Katie’s death, I would never repeat them. Some part of me would understand it was a pantomime, just as I understood on the porch that I had had an opportunity to be truly brave, and I had failed. Or, I had stood as close to the danger as I could bear, but not close enough to make a difference. So, it wasn’t like playing army; rather, it was like standing next to a large fire. There was a natural limit to the approach, which meant there was also a physical limit to my sense of the world. I had wanted to live. I had stood at a distance by a rock and watched my wife die. I had crouched in the neighbor’s bushes, barely making a noise, trying to win the game by not getting caught, while my world burned around me.

No one seemed to notice my absence. We could do very little before morning. I signed forms and made decisions. I reported Katie’s death in the careful detail that I had witnessed it. No one cared that I had not been heroic. No one asked me to explain my inability to protect Katie, my fear of her death, or the instinct to prevent my own. Didn’t they know I had made futile gestures to intervene? That I had not really put myself in harm’s way? This conversation kept not starting; that part of my answer kept getting lost or skipped over. I told the story again and again, slowing the night down, speeding it up, trying to keep the emphasis in the right places. The police distinguished motive from cause; if I had prevented Katie’s death, then my actions would become part of the report. Instead, I was a witness. To them, the facts of her death, and my knowledge of them, exceeded my feelings of guilt.

The hunters understood why Katie had died. For them it was very simple. Katie was menstruating, and the bear smelled the blood. She was throwing rocks at a bear, and it charged her. We all had taunted the bear by taking photographs of it and next to it, testing its patience with us. We were Americans hiking on a mountaintop in the Buscegi Mountains on a late summer night. What did we think was going to happen?

The hunters moved to the far side of the room and set up a grill. There were sausages in the upstairs kitchen that someone brought down, then peppers and onions, then vodka and cigarettes. It was early in the night still, and no one would leave until morning. They spread out newspapers and sat eating their meals, smoking, and drinking. Much later the drinking would become a kind of carousing. The hunters laughed and played music on the radio. I hated them, and I could do nothing. This was their domain. I had asked for their help. Now, I was an intruder. My presence was a nuisance. When a reporter posing as a state investigator took video of me sitting in the corner, they stood next to me, asking questions so that it looked official.

The Israelis stayed up with me that night. The husband had a satellite phone. He said I should use it until the battery died. I called Katie’s family, then my own, then the embassy. A friend of a friend took my call at the embassy help desk in Washington
DC
, and an hour or so later, the hunters received an official phone call, after which I was given a blanket and treated with excessive deference. The grill was closed, and with it their absurd intrusions were replaced with a solemn, post-Communist vigilance. Someone important was paying attention now. We waited in silence for doctors, then state detectives.

I had called Judy first and then promised to call her again. Here was another convenient form that my cowardice took. I stood in a basement on the side of a mountain in Romania. Just north of Chicago, Judy sat in a blue plush recliner by a digital telephone, waiting for my call. But I had nothing more to tell her. Or, I would know more when we left the mountain, but the situation would not change so long as we did not move. All day—my night—she waited. It was reasonable that I did not call again. Just out the living room window a neighbor had built a small fence to pen in the edge of her yard and keep the lines of the lawn narrow and clean.

I could apologize for Katie’s death, but to whom could I explain it? In Chicago it was June, humid, sunny. I thought,
Katie has died in a place her mother will never visit
. A few days later Judy would call to tell me that she and Ed were flying to Romania. Could I take them to the mountain? But I did not want to go back there. Not that week and not a year later, when I called the airline and begged them to credit the price of my ticket to an account in my friend’s name. What was I thinking, suggesting we go back? I knew what I was thinking. I thought that if I went back then I could be done with grief. I would transform the place of Katie’s death into a memorial. I would dare the bears to come out and challenge me for it, and it would be daylight, and there would be tourists and hikers, and the absence of danger would mean Katie had been unlucky; there was nothing any of us could have done to stop her death.