The Shadow of the Bear: A Fairy Tale Retold (11 page)

“What happened to him?” Rose wanted to know.

“He was killed in a robbery—the thief shot him,” Bear said briefly. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“You know, you’re always saying that …” Rose tried to make a joke, but her words trailed off into nothingness.

There was a silence, and Blanche felt the darkness of the night crawling inside the house.

“Thanks for telling us about your dream, Bear,” Rose said, after reflecting. Blanche was glad that her sister could find something to say.

“Yeah. Now you too will start seeing little cannibalistic dwarves in the shadows every time you go into your room after dark,” Bear said with a ghastly smile.

“No, I’m serious. I think it takes guts for a man to admit that he’s scared of—of a dream.”

“Pff! I’m scared of lots of things. Not just dreams, either.” Bear stood up and stretched himself from head to feet. “I should go.”

He scratched under his dreadlocks and stared thoughtfully at the door. “You know, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep visiting you so regularly. I’m just getting to be too busy, and I’ll be having to…work more in the evenings.”

“Oh no!” both girls exclaimed in dismay.

“Oh, I’ll be back again,” Bear said hastily. “Don’t worry about that. I just can’t come as often.”

“Well, come by whenever you can!” Rose urged. “You’re practically our only friend!”

“We’d miss you a lot,” Blanche said in a small voice, strangely disconsolate.

Bear laughed. “I’ll be back at least a few times this month,” he promised. “Thank you.” His eyes had returned to their usual teasing warmth. He picked up his coat from the stand and said good-bye, leaving the girls to gloomily imagine life without their odd friend.

“Dull, dreary, dark, and depressing,” was Rose’s verdict as they went upstairs to bed.

“Dead,” was Blanche’s sole comment. She wouldn’t say any more.

Chapter 7

MONDAY NIGHT, Bear didn’t come by, and Tuesday Rose was depressed at school. Even Rob’s teasing couldn’t get her out of her blue funk. He dogged her footsteps in the hallway when she passed his locker before lunch, singing her name to the tune of a popular song. She gave him a half-smile and ignored him.

He grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around, startling her. She gazed in surprise at his blue eyes, which were very close to hers, and wondered in shock if he was going to kiss her right in the hallway, with everyone watching.

But instead he said, “Remember that survey I was taking about the prom?”

 Her heart skipped a beat. “Yes?”

“Answers are in. Survey says, Rose should go to the prom with me.”

She didn’t understand at first. “With you?”

“Yeah. Want to go?”

So it was real. It was happening. It had happened. “Yyyess—” she stammered. “I think so—I’d have to ask my mom—”

He looked a bit miffed. “Still tied to the apron strings, huh?”

“No, not really,” she said defensively. “But I would have to ask her.”

“So ask her.” He shrugged. “It’ll be a blast.” 

“Thank you,” she said, not sure how else to respond.

“No problem,” he said lightly, moving away. “Just let me know.”

Rose could hardly wait to see Blanche. She finally saw her sister right before her last period class. “Blanche,” she bubbled over with excitement, “Rob just asked me to go to the prom with him!”

Blanche stopped, and stared at her. “Rob?” she asked.

“Rob Tirsch, of course!” Rose bounced up and down. “I’ll have to ask Mom, but I’m so excited! We’ll have to go look for a dress and everything. Can you believe it? Rob Tirsch asked me!”

“That’s great. That’s just great,” Blanche said mechanically, her face blank. She turned away.

“Is something wrong?” Rose asked.

“No. Not really.”

“What, are you jealous of me, or something?”

Blanched looked at Rose for a couple seconds and then said quietly, “Just leave me alone, okay?”

“Has someone been picking on you?”

Blanche burst out in sudden irritation, “Oh, just some friends of Rob, that’s all! I keep getting asked to the prom, but only as a joke!” She slammed her locker. When she spoke next it was with an emotionless voice as though she had imprisoned her resentment in the locker and none of the previous exchange had taken place. “I’m going straight to the library after school, so you don’t have to wait for me to walk home with you.”

“I have violin lessons, so I’ll be late anyhow,” Rose said.

 “It’s my term paper on Vincent van Gogh. I’ll be there until dinner time,” Blanche said stiffly, and gave a small smile. “See you later, then. I’m happy for you.”

She hurried off, leaving Rose feeling like the tiny soap suds left over from a burst bubble.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Rose chastised herself angrily as she walked home after her violin lesson. The day was foul and cloudy, and Rose’s mood was equally foul. She felt a kinship with the weather; the wind was complaining that spring had come before its store of chilliness was exhausted. There was no rain, and it wasn’t cold enough for ice. Everything was wet from the morning’s rain that refused to dry and refused to freeze, but remained in sour puddles on the pavement and grass.

I should have thought that Blanche might be jealous of me
going to the prom. Why didn’t I think before I burst out with my news like an idiot?

“But I was just so happy,” she protested to herself, banging her violin case against her legs as self-punishment. “How could I know she’d be so upset?”

She badgered herself for not being more sensitive to the little signs that told her that her sister was unhappy—her reluctance to talk with Rose about Rob, the stiffness that crept into her face whenever Rob’s name was mentioned. Rose had assumed it was just because Blanche didn’t like Rob—he called her the “Immaculate Complexion” like all the other kids did. But all along, perhaps, it was because Blanche was feeling left out with Rose getting all the attention and favors.

“Oh, maybe I just won’t go with him,” Rose said aloud to nobody. That would pacify Blanche. But Rose felt like crying. Oh, she would miss the unknown thrills and exhilarations of going to a prom. Going on a real date somewhere with a nice guy. She moaned and shook her head. It was too much to give up.

These were the times she wished she could talk to her father again. He was just like her—quick-tempered, red-haired, easy-going, eternally optimistic. Her soul mate. Perhaps because she felt so much like him, she rarely missed him. It was only when she felt uncertain of herself—when she disliked herself—that she began to wish he were still around to let her know that things in the universe were really okay in the end. Dad always knew just how she felt.

Rose hadn’t been there when he died, but Mom had told her all about it, how Mom had been sleeping in his hospital room when he went into sudden cardiac arrest. Even though he had been in acute pain, he died with a smile on his face. Rose could imagine that last smile with almost mystical clarity. Things were all right with him. She knew that, almost the way she knew how to breathe and how to walk. Without thinking. Just knowing.

There was a large park near their neighborhood, and Rose went to find some solitude there before it got dark or began to rain. For a while, she wandered along the cold, black cement paths beneath barely-budding trees until she came to the pond. There, despondency came over her again, and she scowled at the water, her hair blowing out of her thick brown coat hood.
Why couldn’t God make things equal, equally nasty or equally easy for everyone?
It really was unjust that she should be so lucky while her sister was neglected and persecuted. “By all rights, Rob never should have asked me to the prom,” she grumbled. Oh, why were things perpetually
simple
for her?

Feeling melodramatic and just plain rebellious, she put down her knapsack and took out her violin. Pushing back her hood, she tucked the hard plastic cup of the instrument beneath her chin and began to play. The low strings quivered through her jaw as she ran the horsehair bow up and down, stretching and groaning the strings with the wind. She was making up the tune, but it reminded her of something from Wagner. The violin’s voice was dark, ominous, not as thundering as the bass or cello, but still black in its own way. Up and down the scales, warning the universe with palpitating anger, up and down. Eyes dilating, staring out at the rippling waters, squeezing down painfully hard on the strings, pressing down the bow as if to crack it, forcing note after deep note out—Rose worked out the pulsing fury within her, gradually releasing the tension and rising a few notes up on the scale. She climbed her way up, the song growing louder, more insistent, still jarringly minor— now it sounded like Debussy. Birds hurtling themselves across the sky, screaming—Why? Why? Why? Dizzying note upon note, faster, faster, faster, in an accelerating canon chasing its tail in hypnotic repetition, faster, faster, why, why, why—

Rose sustained the last quivering note, and sent the final one singing higher up the scale than she had yet chosen to go, a distant, bold note flying high as a bird to the clouds, for no reason at all. It hung there, doubting, descending, surging up again and down, finally swooping down to the low notes she had begun with, down dark, then rising a half step, hopeful, subdued, final.

She lifted her bow from the strings in the silence of the rushing wind, her ears racing from the sound. There was a slight cough beside her and a voice, “Bravo.”

She turned, and saw a thin, young man with long scraggly hair propped up against one of the trees. He wore a thin jean jacket, a scarf, filthy jeans, a dirty shirt, and a flat grey cap. His light brown hair hung around a face that was anonymous behind its black glasses. A few crack vials were smashed into the ground around him. Rose instinctively drew back.

He spoke. “Do I look like a dangerous character?” His voice was amused.

“Yes.” Rose didn’t take her eyes off him.

“Oh, come on,” he teased, “I don’t look that sinister, do I?”

How was she supposed to answer that? While she was rapidly considering, he sighed and stretched.

“I forgot that I shouldn’t speak to you.  In the City, nice harmless people don’t speak to each other.  Well, you need have no fear of me. I’m too tired to mug anyone, even if I did that sort of thing.”  

Rose was edging away from him, and he snorted.

“Come on, don’t jump into that pond, which I can see you’re quite prepared to do. It’s not a nice pond. And you’d ruin your violin.  Which is why I bothered to speak to you in the first place.” He shifted himself and put his hands behind his head. “You play very well. Are you a professional or something?”

“No,” Rose said, still guarded.

“Just sort of playing for therapy? Letting off steam? You’re mad at someone?”

“Sort of,” Rose admitted.

“Classical music does wondrous things for the human passions. Oh, I’m Fish, by the way.”

“I’m Rose,” she said before she thought, and then wondered if that had been a wise move. Probably not.

Fish, as he called himself, scratched underneath his flat cap. “So you’re ticked off? Or is that too personal a question to ask a young girl like you?”

He couldn’t be much older than Blanche, but he talked as though he were much older. It was curious. A bit miffed, Rose said at last, “It’s just a little thing. It’s really my sister who is mad at
me
.”

“Ah, sibling rivalry?”

“Not really. It’s because I was invited to the senior prom and she wasn’t.”

He chuckled. “Oh, that old thing. I should have guessed. So, your sister is feeling left out. Naturally, you want to be sensitive. But there’s only so much you can do. You can’t help how she feels.”

“But she’s my sister!” Rose argued. “I don’t want to do things that make her feel bad!”

“Well, you can’t help that, can you?”

“I don’t think you understand.” Rose tossed her head angrily. “My sister’s feelings are more important to me than going to the prom. If I had to choose between her and this guy, I’d choose her.”

“Ah,” said the young man thoughtfully.

“It’s just—just hard, that’s all.”

“Well, maybe you won’t have to choose,” he said after a pause. “Maybe she’ll get adjusted to the situation. Give her a little space, and time, and she’ll probably come around.”

 “That’s true,” Rose heaved a sigh and remained silent for a minute. “But what if she doesn’t?”

“Then you’ll have to choose according to your convictions, won’t you?” the youth said mildly. He gave her a crooked smile. “God isn’t fair, is he?” he imitated her sigh melodramatically.

“Of course He is!” said Rose indignantly. “He’s a just God.”

“In theory, yes,” Fish nodded. “But in what seems like reality …” he cocked his head, “as you get older, you’ll find He deals out some odd judgments.”

Rose had had enough. She opened her violin case and put her instrument away, snapping the locks shut.  “Why are you so free with giving me advice?” she demanded, tossing her head.

“Oh, it’s just an excuse to talk to someone,” That strange contorted smile flitted over his face again. “You’d better get home now. This park isn’t safe after dark.”