Bear

“Did they know, then, how little their family had, and how precarious their grip on that little bit was? They had no idea. Each evening, their mother came home from the salon exhausted. Stinking of solvents. Sometimes she would cough. But the girls didn’t know yet—none of them knew—that the chemicals she inhaled were growing granulomas in her lungs, causing lymph nodes to swell, narrowing her arteries.”

Sam recalls the family’s life before her mother became ill with a life-threatening condition. Though their lives weren’t easy then because of the stresses associated with living in an economically disadvantaged condition, Sam considers that time as happier and freer. This partly stems from the burden of additional responsibilities associated with caring for her mother and the resulting expenses, but it also signifies the carefree life of childhood. The fact that their mother’s job as a nail technician exposed her to chemicals that led to her illness, however, underscores her sacrifices that she made for her family and the hidden injustices of some blue-collar jobs.

“Elena talked about her sighting the way a person might if an angel touched down in front of them, or if a burning bush spoke, or if, Sam supposed, a grizzly walked up, met their gaze, and did not do them harm. It was remarkable, certainly. To come so close to danger and emerge unscathed. Elena’s day, before seeing it, must have been tedious, spotted by moments of frustration, but after crossing the bear’s path, the simple fact of her life had to be recast as some sort of miracle.”

Elena’s enchantment with the bear begins innocently. Sam initially understands Elena’s fascination with the bear, but as her interest increases, Sam grows increasingly fearful that the bear will harm Elena. Her fascination with the bear (and Sam’s inability to relate) indicates the way that they are, Sam fears, drifting apart, complicating the theme of Familial Bonds and Connections by presenting a scenario that challenges the sisters’ bond.

“[Their mother] was the woman they [Sam and Elena] wanted to grow up to be. Elena’s plan had made them into that, in a way. And Sam had agreed. They’d done it together: stepped into their mother’s shoes, in their mother’s house. Their mother, in her turn, moved into the bedroom that their grandmother had occupied. They were playing the roles set out for them generations earlier.”

Both Sam and Elena love and revere their mother. However, while both their mother and grandmother lived their entire lives on the island, Sam intends to leave it. She views leaving her home for better economic opportunities as a way to honor both women. She assumes that Elena wants the same thing. By the end of the novel, however, it becomes clear that Elena views their future differently, largely because she knows the full reality of their financial situation and considers striving for a better life futile. The sisters’ differing views of the future juxtapose two themes: The Power of Goals and Dreams versus The Burden of Economic Hardship.

“Why couldn’t Sam just practice accepting, like Elena did, what came to them each day? The long list of obligations. Sam complained about those, but Elena didn’t; Elena went back and forth to work, quietly managed their finances, and shrugged. Of the short, shocking visions of beauty—the bear—Elena confided in no one but Sam, Elena kept their household confidences. Sam told everyone, from the deckhands to random government bureaucrats. She had fantasized about altering the newspaper. She couldn’t seem to satisfy herself, even temporarily, with their lot.”

This passage draws a strong contrast between Sam’s focus on the future and Elena’s focus in the present. In one respect, this means that Elena has resigned herself to a life of living day-to-day with no opportunity for upward mobility. Sam, however, concentrates on her goals and dreams of leaving the island. Sam finds solace and motivation in dreaming of a better life, while Elena relishes smaller, accessible pleasures. This is why she finds the bear fascinating.

“Sam and Elena sat together in silence. There was so much that didn’t need to be spoken. How long they’d been in this exact position, standing at their mother’s death’s door—waiting for the latch to give, and for their mother to pass through at last.

When they first learned her diagnosis, the sisters had cried over it together, Sam felt shattered. That was back when she pictured pain as something swift and final. She understood better, now, what it actually was—not a glass dropped onto a tile floor, one terrible burst, but a tree required to grow over years in a space that limited it. Branches curled in on themselves, leaves dropping. A living thing that was forced, relentlessly, to submit.”

Sam comes to understand that the sadness of the inevitable loss of their mother will stay with her and Elena for a long time. She grows accustomed to daily life amid a sad atmosphere, though this doesn’t make accepting their mother’s imminent death any easier. It doesn’t make it easier for her mother to breathe, literally, or for the sisters to breathe, figuratively. The house feels smaller, and so do their opportunities.

“Sam knew their mother’s death was near—it couldn’t be avoided—and when she thought of it, some part of her, the waiting part, the grieving part, the part that had doubled back on itself with pain, did wish to be past it already. If Sam’s heart broke from the loss, then it broke; what difference did having a whole heart make anyhow? Let it be destroyed. She just needed the long ache to stop.”

The uncertainty of when her mother’s death will occur and end her pain is, in some ways, more difficult for Sam to manage than the sadness of daily life as she watches her mother decline. Seeing her mother so sick is difficult, but she dreads her mother’s death and thus, in some respects, longs for it to happen more quickly so that she can confront, and then be finished with, the thing she dreads to experience.

“Elena wasn’t upset, her forehead was smooth, but she wasn’t glad at this chance to talk, either. She wasn’t anything. She was radically different from the way she’d been after that trail encounter: her million texts and calls, her rapid retellings, her shine. Sam found the change so irritating. This was how Elena had been in school, too, or behaved at the club when they worked together—to strangers, she was always friendly, smiling and making small talk, but flattened. She showed them none of her true self. Sam knew that Elena’s excitement was there, trapped in her body, kept under high pressure by her skin, but Elena let it out for nobody but Sam.”

For Sam, the encounter with the bear is special because it’s an event she shares with Elena—and no one else. This prevents others from infringing on Sam’s connection to Elena, which feels right to Sam. However, when Elena eventually grows increasingly fascinated—to the point of obsession, in Sam’s view—with the bear, Sam becomes jealous. The bear threatens to come between her and Elena.

“Elena explained: a creature that did not exist on their island, did not belong in their lives, had nevertheless come. It swam long miles in the wet black night to arrive at their home. Made an exception of itself, and of them, to every rule. It was supposed to be gruff but was instead tender. It was supposed to be wild but behaved like it was tamed. It came on the path to Elena as gentle as a suitor. Is that not wonderful? Doesn’t that seem like magic to you?”

Here, Elena attempts to explain to Sam why she regards the bear as special and a magical presence. She points out the ways that her experience with the bear contradict what Agent Petitt warned them about regarding the animal. Elena’s interest in the bear shows how desperately she longs for excitement and meaning in her difficult life. She’s open to believing in magic and destiny because she has little else to believe in.

“The bear had come and brought delight. The bear was deep-furred majesty. Without it, Elena didn’t know what they’d do. The bear was their one good thing: a specter, a spirit, an extraordinary beast. A visitor from someplace enchanted. A vision of the mysterious world.”

For Elena, the bear’s appearance in their lives isn’t a fluke of the natural world but a supernatural force like a creature from a fairy tale. Her certainty about this takes over and, in Sam’s view, causes Elena to gradually lose sight of the bear’s potential threat and grow dangerously comfortable with it. She fears that her sister is losing the ability to see reality. These differing views on the bear create significant conflict between sisters whose bond was previously indestructible. Thematically, the bear threatens Familial Bonds and Connection.

“Sam traveled in loops day after day—Anacortes, Orcas, Lopez, Shaw—and pictured Elena walking on the trail through the trees. She didn’t picture the bear. Imagining it was too frightening—its paws crushing twigs, its breath curling from wet nostrils, its mouth open to expose yellow fangs—but imagining her sister was a balm. Elena out there, happy. Unencumbered, however briefly, by the demands of the old ladies who lunched at the club. Walking in hope of seeing something that would delight. Sam worked on accepting that image, and really, when she put her mind to it, it wasn’t hard.”

Ironically, Elena serves the same purpose for Sam that the bear serves for Elena: a mental respite from the stress of daily life. Deliberately thinking of Elena can lift Sam’s spirits and regain her hopeful attitude. The loops that she mentions, alluding to her monotonous job on the ferry, are the names of the smaller islands in the San Juan Islands.

“She drove home from the harbor with the windows down. The breeze was warm, powdery with pollen, soft with the promise of early summer. Here was another day she’d almost entirely missed, penned through the daylight hours in the fluorescent-lined box on the ferry’s top deck, but she’d made it at last into this sunshine. Driving lazily, playing pop on the radio. Trees brushed by on either side. Farm animals watched her pass. When she and Elena moved off-island, they would enjoy, she imagined, mentioning to people the beautiful place in which they’d grown up.”

The island was a magical place for Sam and Elena when they were children, and, at times, Sam still feels some of that magic. Despite her dull work routine and the stresses of her mother’s illness and the associated expenses, Sam draws strength from the beauty of the physical world that surrounds her and resolves to retain those memories when she leaves her childhood home.

“Elena was right: what was going on here was exceptional. A fairy-tale creature stepping out of the trees. Madeline Petitt had warned against approaching the animal, but she hadn’t said what to do if the animal came to them, held itself like a tamed thing, snuffled and sniffed. She hadn’t even considered the possibility. So Elena was right: something outside of those authorities’ knowledge was happening. Something one of a kind.”

In this instance, Sam shares Elena’s viewpoint that the bear is special and magical for them. The bear, initially seen by only Elena and Sam, was, in that moment, a phenomenon that Sam believed strengthened the bond between her and her sister. As the novel unfolds, however, the bear instead creates a divide between them.

“Elena had told Sam that the bear was something extraordinary. She said it was magic—enchanted—a gift from the animal gods. She’d told Sam, leading up to this afternoon, that when she was with it, she felt strong and brave and also tiny and insignificant and utterly aware of her own body and dissolved into everything else in the universe. She felt glowing and connected and magnificent. She told Sam that this was the best thing that had ever happened—she said that. Elena. That the bear was what she looked forward to each day. And Sam, even in her fear, crossing into this forest, had come because she believed she might feel that too.

She didn’t. She was horrified.”

The contrast between Elena’s thoughts about the bear and Sam’s increases after Sam has a close encounter with the bear. Though Elena’s intent in “introducing” Sam to the bear is to prove to her that the bear isn’t dangerous, this event has the opposite effect on Sam, terrifying her. It marks a turning point in the novel: Sam becomes determined to separate Elena from the bear.

“Don’t do this. That’s what Sam would say. Bent in the dark, in their home, face-to-face with her sister. Cracking open with fear and with faith. Elena. Please. We have each other. We’ll make it through this. Elena, can’t you hold on to that, and let the bear go?”

As Elena grows increasingly enthralled by the bear, it creates a deep rift between the sisters. Sam not only fears that the bear will harm Elena but also is concerned about the emotional fulfillment that the bear apparently provides for Elena. Sam has always been the one to hold a special place in Elena’s life; the bear threatens to replace her and, more crucially, sever Elena’s grip on reality.

“What was it in Elena and in their mother that drew toward danger? Looking at them, Sam could not make sense of it. They were the type of women who ought to need no one, and whom everyone wished to be around. Sam and Elena’s grandmother, too, had been like that—self-assured, in their mother’s stories of her […] But their grandfather used to have rages, their mother told them. He smashed plates and punched open their walls. Their grandmother, as capable as she seemed in their mother’s telling, had put up with his violence for years.”

Sam identifies a parallel between her mother’s and grandmother’s relationships with abusive men and Elena’s interest in the bear. She can’t understand why all three women place themselves in danger and seem to do so willingly. Later, Elena explains that the bear makes her feel alive. Apparently, the threat of danger is a source of excitement or positive disruption in Elena’s otherwise mundane life.

“Sam had imagined their mother’s passing as a release from long disease, a bitter kind of liberation. But now she just wanted her mom back. Having her mother was natural. It was foundational. Sam was hollowed, while at the front of the house, Elena wept on.”

Throughout the novel, Sam has anticipated her mother’s death, wanting it to arrive so that she can put the thing she most fears behind her. However, when the death finally occurs, Sam is unprepared for the strangeness she feels and the emptiness of her mother’s absence. The sisters respond differently: Sam is in shock and can’t express any emotion, while Elena can’t contain her crying. Their different reactions reflect the many differences between them.

“Going to bed side by side on their mother’s mattress was a return to Elena and Sam’s childhood, when they shared a room and let each other’s night noises soothe them into sleep. Elena’s teeth rubbed together when she dreamed. Sam took solace from the grind. A third of their household had dropped away; so many of the tiny, beloved disruptions that Sam had come to rely on—their mother’s door opening, the rise of her voice, the background chatter from her television—were absent. Sam needed Elena now more than ever. Even when they bickered, their sisterhood, the strength of it, held.”

In keeping with the theme of Familial Bonds and Connections, Sam draws strength from her bond with Elena. Because their mother is gone, the house becomes eerily quiet, and she emphasizes that the sisters need one another more than they ever have before. Sam is certain that this bond is unshakeable, never imagining the way their connection will be severed by Elena’s death at the novel’s end.

“It hit Sam, then, the hot rush of humiliation: she was going to cry. Her eyes flooded. Her sinuses burned. She hadn’t cried since they found their mother; Elena had done the breaking down for both of them; Sam had held herself in check these many days, and now, horribly, Madeline Petitt, of all people, was making her fall apart. She tried to talk, but saliva was thick in her throat, she couldn’t start. She had to try again. ‘Why.’ Sam stopped. She wasn’t going to be able to get out the words, she turned away because she couldn’t stand for Madeline to see her like this.”

Sam repeatedly feels belittled by Agent Petitt, who is refined and educated and who Sam is certain looks down on her as being inferior because she’s young, uneducated, unworldly, and economically disadvantaged. For these reasons, it pains Sam to let Petitt see her in a vulnerable state. This is true of other people in Sam’s life too: She has difficulty trusting others besides her sister and is unwilling to show them her intimate, inner life.

“This man had terrorized them. Told their mother he loved her and then screamed at her. Made their grandmother’s house into a thorn-choked place. Forced Elena to get desperate enough to, for the last time, ask an outsider for help. He had altered them permanently; after him, their mother got sick, and Elena stopped trusting people, and Sam fixated on their escape.

He glanced over at the sisters and nodded. As if he was one more unremarkable visitor at the event, and hadn’t, once upon a time, filled them with fear. He was shorter than Sam remembered—now that she’d seen a bear up on its hind legs, everything in comparison looked small—but he still scared the shit out of her. He did. More than any other monster on this island ever could.”

The unexpected presence of their mother’s former boyfriend at her memorial terrifies Sam. She’s keenly aware of the negative impact and trauma that his abuse caused her and her sister, and his presence forces her to return to that vulnerable state. Importantly, she ranks the harm he can cause as worse than that of the bear. A bear’s violence is instinctive and motivated by survival, not an act of intentional cruelty.

“And this was love. Wasn’t it? They might argue with each other or waste their time with random men, but this bond was really what mattered. Their mother was gone, and this narrowing family, this love and precious sisterhood, was all Sam and Elena had left.”

As the novel reaches its climax, Sam’s thoughts repeatedly express her certainty that she can fulfill Elena’s emotional needs. However, her sister’s increasing fascination with the bear leads Sam to question herself, and she seeks to draw her sister back to the safety of their bond.

“But Elena hadn’t. Despite these moments of seeming distance, Elena was there, at home, washing their dishes and joking with Sam at the end of the day. And in this moment, too, Sam had to believe that Elena would return to their sisterhood. Friends and lovers and assorted duties would pass out of Elena’s existence, but Sam wouldn’t. She never could.”

Sam’s connection with her sister is a friendship that she feels allows no room for anyone else. She—somewhat selfishly—insists that she and Elena can fulfill all of one another’s emotional and mental needs. Her belief that Elena need not seek out a romantic relationship is shortsighted. In addition, her words prove sadly ironic when Elena’s life is cut short and the sisters are thus emotionally and physically separated forever.

“If Sam’s mother were alive, she would’ve shaken her head at Sam. How could you not trust your sister? she’d have asked. Their mother always insisted Elena knew what she was doing. Sam hadn’t believed her enough.”

Sam undoubtedly blames herself for the bear killing Elena. Her certainty that her mother would also not only blame her but also verbally chastise her shows how devastated Sam is by the events. Elena was always consistently responsible and rational, and Sam berates herself for not trusting this, forgetting her sister’s increasingly bizarre behavior around the bear.

“[Ben] told Sam no one could possibly think it was anyone’s fault.

Sam didn’t believe that. If she had left with him before, would that have saved Elena’s life? It could’ve. So might have a million other shifts—if Elena hadn’t gone to work that day. Or if she had crossed paths with the bear farther from the spot Sam and Danny chose to sit, so met it, stroked its face without incident, and moved on. If Elena, instead of serving at the golf club, had been a waitress at a restaurant in town, and needed to drive to and from her shifts. That way, she never, ever would have walked that trail.”

After Elena’s death, Sam berates herself with a series of “what if” thoughts. She wishes that she could redo history, make a different decision, or take alternative actions. Her consideration of the things that led to Elena’s death is a small attempt to not only remove some of the blame from herself but also understand how such an unthinkable event could have happened.