Ordinary Bear, page 8
He stopped walking and turned to face her. “I can afford a ticket,” he said sharply.
“OK. I just . . .”
“What?”
“I wanted to thank you. For saving my daughter.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
They stood there in another awkward silence, waiting for the bus.
“Hey,” she said finally. “Do you want to come over for dinner tomorrow?”
13
A LONG SHELF LIFE IS HIGHLY PRIZED
As she set the table with paper napkins, mismatched silverware, and a candle that smelled like a new car, Lissa conceded that her skills for entertaining a dinner guest had rotted on the vine. But the knowledge that, until recently, her dinner guest had been sleeping on the sidewalk gave her confidence that whatever she pulled together would be sufficiently classy. The doorbell rang just as she squeezed the lemon onto the salmon fillet.
“I’ll get it,” Olive said, running in from the living room. She loved to answer the door or the phone, loved to be the one to push the elevator buttons or control the TV remote, a habit she’d developed young and had yet to grow out of. Lissa put the fish in the oven, set the timer, and refilled her wineglass before following her daughter into the foyer.
Though she’d held Olive in her arms in her first minutes on Earth, a tiny squint of a life still smeared with afterbirth, never had she seen her look as small as she did greeting their neighbor. The enormous man squeezed through their doorway and into their apartment, looking uncomfortable, unsure about being there. When he backed up against the entry wall, he took up as much space as a built-in hutch. Standing with his hands clasped behind his back and something tucked under his arms that Lissa couldn’t make out, she saw that he’d dressed for the occasion in a well-worn button-down, clean Carhartts, and work boots that were scuffed but clean. A huge improvement. The scars on his face glistened red and angry as if he’d scrubbed his face vigorously, and he’d combed his hair and beard and shaved his neck scruff.
He looked far more human than she’d thought possible.
“You’re big,” Olive said, approaching him like the lone protester standing his ground before the advancing Chinese Army tanks at Tiananmen Square.
“I know.” His gruff voice sounded woefully out of place in conversation with an eight-year-old.
“Are you a giant?”
“No.” He studied her for a moment. “Are you a pip-squeak?”
“No.”
“Well all right then. I guess we can be friends.”
Lissa saw her daughter smile and it warmed her.
“I’m Olive. That’s my mom. Her name is Alissa but nobody calls her that except Grandma.”
He nodded solemnly. “What do people call her?”
“Auntie Allie calls her Liss. I just call her Mom. Most people call her Lissa, so you can too.” She pointed to the object tucked under his arm. “What’s that?”
“It’s for your mom.”
He held it up for Lissa to see.
“Is that a canned ham?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Wow. OK. Thank you?”
He hung his head for a moment but recovered quickly. “Where I come from it’s the next best thing to bringing a freshly killed caribou.”
“Where’s that?”
“Up north.”
“Canada?”
“Further north.”
“Well, thank you for not bringing one of those.”
“Groceries have to be shipped in, and they’re expensive, so a long shelf life is highly prized.”
“It’s thoughtful. Thank you.” Lissa smiled. “Please come in,” she said a little stupidly since he was already inside. “I just realized I don’t know your name.”
“It’s Farley. Just Farley.”
“Farley? Is that a first name or a last name?”
“Yes,” he said, and pointed to the glass in her hand. “Is that wine?”
Lissa watched as he tucked into dinner with vigor. She’d made the sockeye with Dijon mustard, balsamic vinegar, and lemon, a delicate dish he ate indelicately, chasing each heaping forkful with another without pause. When he’d devoured the fish—a full pound portion—he moved on to the haricots vert, spearing five or six at a time with his fork and stuffing them into his maw. He ate quickly, as if he’d never eaten before, or not for a long time, and had a terrible hunger to fill.
Olive watched with curious glee. When he’d finished the green beans and then the rice pilaf, she pushed her plate in front of him.
“You can have mine,” she said. “I don’t really like salmon.”
Farley looked at her, then at Lissa.
“You’ve got leftover mac cheese in the fridge, love. I can throw it in the microwave.”
“See, Farley?” Olive said. “It’s OK.”
He nodded, dropped her plate on top of his own, and returned to eating. Lissa’s mother would declare his behavior unspeakably rude, but she found it flattering. Olive ate like a bird—if birds ate nothing but macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, and ice cream. She rarely got to cook for anyone who appreciated a well-executed meal.
When Farley had cleared her plate too, Olive giggled.
“I guess you were hungry,” she said.
“Hungry enough to eat my own combat boots. That’s what we used to say in the army.”
“Gross!”
“That’s what army food tasted like too.” He looked at Lissa. “This was delicious.”
She smiled involuntarily and felt foolish doing so. Needy. She caught Olive staring at her with a big grin of her own.
“You were in the army?”
“Long time ago.”
She had a million questions about why he’d been living on the street, about what he’d been through that had left those scars. She assumed a car accident—she couldn’t imagine what else could cause that much damage to a man that big. It would also explain why he took the bus or walked everywhere. But now she wondered if his injuries were combat-related. Sometimes a local nonprofit brought groups of veterans to the zoo for private tours, meet and greets with the animals—a kind of therapy for their PTSD, as if petting an ocelot could erase the memories of war. Farley had the same look in his eyes she saw in theirs, as if the sight of whatever horrors they’d seen or committed had been physically burned into their vision. Though her curiosity swelled, she worried that too many questions—or even just a few—would drive him away. He’d been through something and, from what she could tell, was still fighting his way back. Or still deciding whether he wanted to. She told herself he needed kindness more than she needed her curiosity sated.
“Are you from Portland?”
“Originally. I’ve been away a while.”
“How do you like being back?” she asked, embarrassed to be making such small talk but unable to persuade herself to stop.
“It’s different. City’s changing fast. More crowded. New development.” He nodded her way, at her arms, the exposed flesh covered in ink, photorealistic zoo animals. “While I was gone, everyone got tattoos.”
“Not me, Farley,” Olive said. She rolled up her sleeves to show him her pudgy white arms.
“I see that, Pip-squeak.” He turned back to Lissa. “Also the homeless problem has gotten worse.”
He must have seen the awkwardness on her face.
“That was a joke,” he said.
“Farley?” Olive leaned over her empty place setting to stare up at him. “Do you want to see my room?”
“Oh, love, I don’t think our poor guest wants to see your bedroom,” Lissa said, swallowing the panic rising in her throat like bile. She didn’t know this man at all. She couldn’t let him into her eight-year-old’s bedroom. In fact, it suddenly felt like a mistake to have invited him into her apartment at all. He’d been sleeping on the street, and she’d seen him throw a grown man as easily as a paper airplane. If he meant them harm, what could she do to stop him?
“Do you want to, Farley?” Olive said, persisting. He shrugged.
“Sure, Pip-squeak.”
Olive was on her feet, brimming with excitement, before Lissa could even react. She leaped to her own feet so abruptly that she smashed her legs against the table, rattling the plates and glasses and nearly toppling the wine bottle. She watched his face for some sign of motive but behind the scars he remained inscrutable. He hid a wince as he rose and took a moment to straighten himself out. How much pain did he live with, she wondered?
Olive reached for his hand. He recoiled like he’d been burned. Undaunted, she took his hand a second time and gave him a patient look. Her own hand was so small she could only grab his little finger.
“This way, Farley. Ready?”
When he nodded, she pulled him down the hallway like one of the tugs that towed massive barges up the Columbia River. Grabbing the chef’s knife from the kitchen counter, Lissa followed, pulling out her phone in case she needed to call for help.
Olive’s bedroom was barely big enough to hold the single bed, her dresser, and her toys. Farley filled it in an almost comical way.
“I feel like an elephant in a phone booth.”
Olive giggled and hopped onto her bed.
“Sit with me, Farley.”
She still had him by the hand. He glanced at Lissa.
“I’m not sure I should.”
“It’s OK, Farley. Right, Mom?”
With the knife hidden behind her back, Lissa nodded and then wondered why she had done so, wondered why she kept trusting this man she had scant reason to trust.
“It’s not that.” Farley’s deep voice filled the tiny room like rushing water. “That little bed might splinter into toothpicks if I sit on it.”
They all looked at the bed. Like every other girl her age, Olive had been wholeheartedly into Disney’s Frozen. She’d lost interest almost as soon as Lissa bought her the matching sheets and bedspread, but they were not inexpensive, so Lissa made her keep them anyway.
“You’re silly,” Olive said.
She patted the bed beside her. Farley lowered himself tentatively onto Olaf’s smiling, bucktoothed face. The mattress compressed beneath his weight, the springs groaned, and the slats bowed, but the bed held.
“Will you read me a book?”
Leaning against the doorframe, Lissa watched his expression change, darkening as he pondered his answer, and wondered why.
“Only if it’s OK with your mom.”
They both looked at her expectantly. She weighed the decision long enough to make the moment awkward.
“Mom?”
“OK. But just for a few minutes.” She hoped she did not sound nervous. “Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Farley?”
His expression betrayed both a happiness and profound sadness at once, a smile defeated by wet eyes that had seen something from which they had not yet recovered and might never. He nodded. Lissa slipped her phone into her pocket and smiled back at him.
Then the bed slats cracked like thunder and the box spring, mattress, and all its occupants—Olive, Farley, and Olaf—dropped through the frame to the floor.
14
DON’T WAKE HIM UP
Farley hadn’t just broken the bed slats—he’d broken the ice too. As Lissa and Olive laughed with a joy that felt both genuine and unbridled, some of the awkwardness that had hung over the evening faded with it. They disassembled the bed and set the box spring and mattress flat on the floor. Farley promised to come back the next day with tools to fix it.
Despite his rough appearance, and despite his edges, Lissa saw that he was good with Olive. Gentle. In fact, she felt comfortable enough to leave them alone for a few minutes to wash the dishes while he read. She was just down the hall and could hear their voices and listened along as they worked their way through The One and Only Ivan. It felt good to have company over. It felt good to have Olive connecting emotionally with someone else for a change. There were no union benefits for single parents, no mandated breaks or vacations or collective bargaining agreements, and often “parenting” meant “surviving” and not much more.
“I suppose you think gorillas can’t understand you,” Farley read, his voice well suited for the caged silverback gorilla who lived at a mall. “Of course, you also probably think we can’t walk upright. Try knuckle walking for an hour. You tell me: Which way is more fun?”
Lissa dried the last of the dishes from dinner, poured another glass of wine, and cracked the living room window. She smoked only infrequently and had made such good progress toward quitting completely since Olive asked her to a year ago that they maintained an unspoken détente—Olive knew she sneaked cigarettes but pretended not to, and Lissa kept them to a minimum. Cool air poured through the open window. It felt fresh and good. She could hear the traffic outside, the buzz of urban existence beneath the static of the rain, and she lit her cigarette and leaned out to exhale. Though the camp had been gone for more than a week, out of habit she shifted her gaze to the bus shelter. The glass had been replaced and it reflected the streetlights brightly.
A lone figure leaned against the new shelter glass, staring up at her. Lissa started when she recognized who it was. He yelled something at her. To her. Something lost to the ambient sounds of the city. She stuck her head out the window a little more and felt the cool, damp air on her cheeks.
“I see you, bitch,” he yelled. “I see you. They took my dog away because of you. They took Smoke because of you. Because of you. I’m gonna make you pay, bitch.”
Lissa mashed her cigarette out in the rain puddled on the windowsill and withdrew her head. All the sounds disappeared when she pulled the window closed. The sudden silence unsettled her. When she closed the blind, he disappeared too, gone at least from her sight. A little shaken, she took a deep breath to shake off the anxiousness and popped an Altoid to mask the smoke on her breath.
Only then did she realize that not only had the street sounds disappeared, but she could no longer hear Farley’s voice either. And just like that, her anxiety turned to panic.
Her own bad judgment buckled her knees as she ran down the hall to Olive’s room, grabbing her phone and the knife and punching in 911 as she ran. She burst through the open doorway in a panic, knife raised in front of her, phone to her ear, to find Farley flat on his back, occupying the full length of the mattress and then some, his legs hanging well past the edge and onto the floor. Though it did not look even remotely comfortable, he was deeply and obliviously asleep. Olive sat beside him with her back against her pillow and her book open on her lap. She put her finger to her mouth.
“Shhhhh,” she said. “Don’t wake him up.”
They ate pistachio ice cream on the couch and watched Cartoon Network on the small TV. They laughed and giggled together like friends, Lissa thought. Or sisters. Such moments were the reward for all the sacrifice and stress of being a parent. Such moments were increasingly hard to come by. With their legs entwined beneath the afghan Lissa kept on the back of the couch, neither of them mentioned the very big, very strange man sleeping on the tiny bed on the floor of the tiny bedroom down the hall, or how very, very strange it was for him to be there at all. They didn’t have to; that they both knew seemed sufficient. The shared knowledge infected their moods with a conspiratorial humor. They laughed at cartoons. They ate Farley’s share of the ice cream. And every now and then, when the athletic rumble of his snores reached them even there, on the couch, they’d lock eyes and laugh some more.
After about an hour, he appeared in the hallway looking disheveled and confused. Lissa smiled to save him any embarrassment, but when Olive broke out into good-natured laughter all over again, she found herself unable to resist.
Farley did not laugh. She’d never seen him laugh and wasn’t sure he even could. But he smiled, or something like a smile, and it was enough.
“Thank you for dinner. Both of you. I’ll come back tomorrow and fix that bed.”
“Say good night, Olive,” Lissa told her.
“Good night, Olive,” she said, still laughing.
Farley nodded.
“Good night,” he said. “Pip-squeak.”
Lissa stood behind her daughter in front of the bathroom mirror as they brushed their teeth together, a nightly ritual. Olive had an electric toothbrush, pink and white with flowers on it. It thrummed with vigor, filling her mouth with minty foam that spilled over her lips and chin like a goatee.
“Mom!” she said, locking eyes in the mirror, “I forgot,” though it sounded like Bob, I fah-gah.
“Fah-gah what, love?”
Olive wiped her face on a towel and ran down the hall to her bedroom. She returned with one of her stuffed animals.
“I want to give this to Farley. To borrow.”
“Why, love?”
“Because he’s alone in his apartment and I don’t want him to have to be alone. And because I think he likes this. He kept staring at it while he was reading me my story.”
“OK. You can give it to him when he comes to fix the bed.”
“No, Mom. I want to give it to him now. So he doesn’t have to be alone tonight.”
Lissa looked at her watch. He hadn’t left that long ago, and really, it wasn’t that late.
“OK,” she said. “Let’s bring it to him.”
They crossed the hall and knocked on Farley’s door, still giggling with carryover joy from the evening. He answered slowly, surprised, and stared at Lissa for a moment with an expression that made it clear that his joy had not carried over.
“What?” He sounded put out.
Lissa looked past him into his apartment and saw . . . nothing. Nothing at all, his walls bare of art or decorations, no furniture, no food or cooking utensils on the counters. Just an apartment as barren as hers had been the day the super showed it to her.
“Love what you’ve done with the place, man,” she said, but he did not laugh.
