Bearing

by Amber Foxx

  When he finally did, he kissed her, left her in the hole, and came back with food. It seemed to be dark outside, but Mikayla wasn’t sure. In the lethargy that swallowed her, she could hardly keep her eyes open. She couldn’t even lift her hands to eat. Angus fed her meat and fruit and something crunchy from a hard shallow bowl, and then she slept.

  Angus drove Mikayla in his truck and left her at the door of her parents’ camper. Her legs and hips felt like blobs of dough as she stumbled up the steps. When she sneaked inside, she saw all the beds along the sides of the hallway were full. How the children had gotten back to the campground, Mikayla had no idea, but she was glad they had. It was a long way from the park, though it was on the same side of the road, and it had to have been a terrifying walk. Mikayla tried not to wake her parents in their upper-level bed in the back of the RV, but she heard her father the second she closed the door.

  “We’ll talk in the morning, young lady.”

  Lacking the strength to care, she murmured a noise of agreement, unrolled her sleeping bag from where she’d stowed it in the driver’s seat, and laid it on the floor between the beds.

  “Jeez,” Suzi grumbled, “you smell like an animal.”

  “Fine. I’ll take a shower.”

  In a daze of post-pleasure lethargy, Mikayla lay down. Did she really have to shower? She liked his scent. Anyway, she could barely move. Her flesh was like a ripe plum. All she could do was fall and wait to be devoured. Again.

  In spite of this feeling, Mikayla didn’t sleep well. In a fog of luxuriant weariness, she drifted in and out of short dreams of Angus and a dim awareness of the room full of softly snoring sisters.

  At dawn, light pressed against the drawn shades like a nose against a window. She lingered in the sleeping bag while her family showered and dressed. When her mother and the children went outside, her father folded one of the beds up into its bench form and sat and stared at her. His brows drew down, his expression more sad than angry.

  “This isn’t like you. Lazing around. Were you out drinking last night?”

  “No.”

  “Snagging—or whatever you kids say now, hooking up—with a man, then?”

  Mikayla looked away. She didn’t like lying to her father, or letting him down with the truth. She knew he would read her silence for what it meant.

  “How could you leave your sisters like that? You had them scared to death, playing that game and not coming back. They’re little girls, Mikayla. They started thinking you’d been hurt by a bear.”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t ...” How could she explain? “I couldn’t get away.”

  “Oh my God.” Her father bent down, his forehead creased, his hands knotted in front of him. “Did he force you? He gave you one of those date-rape drugs, didn’t he?”

  “No. No.” Angus had fed her afterward. She hadn’t yet swallowed a thing when she’d gone all soft like this. “He was nice to me.” Her lips barely moved. Talking was hard work. “I’m really sorry I left the girls.”

  “I should hope you are.” Her father straightened up. The disappointment on his face and in his voice was worse than any scolding he could have given her. “Come on. Get up. We can’t use the kitchen with you on the floor.”

  He stepped over her and left.

  As if she were wading through mud, she made her way to the bathroom. The struggle wasn’t muscular work like exercising, more like dream-walking, a hazy, slow movement beyond her control to speed up or energize.

  There was no hot water left, but she didn’t care. The shape of the little tub reminded her of her hole in the ground, and it comforted her. She turned off the lights, closed the door, and curled up without bathing.

  Her mother knocked on the bathroom door. “What’s taking you so long?

  Mikayla heard voices outside the camper, her father and a man from a nearby campsite. A boy had gone missing from the playground the day before. Good. Hope it was the pushy kid on the slide. No, I don’t mean that. The boy had made Ally and Ursula cry, but he had parents and probably brothers and sisters who would be worried sick. A wad of guilt lodged in her chest. Some adult must have done what Mikayla had done—neglected to watch a child. The missing child could just as easily have been one of her sisters.

  “Mikayla?”

  She rolled onto her back. The curve of the tub felt cool and supportive. Much as she wanted to answer her mother, her voice failed her. Her muscles and bones had ceased obeying her, and though they were happy about it, her mind wasn’t. Her condition reminded her of the time she’d eaten marijuana brownies. Her heart had been racing, and yet the rest of her body had been possessed by a spirit of slowness, a disjointed experience of simultaneous pleasure and distress.

  The door opened. Her mother gasped. “What in the world? Are you sick?”

  Mikayla exhaled a slurry “no.”

  “Did you fall?”

  In love. She managed to move her head side to side in negation, and then rested. Her neck was weary after the movement, but the heaviness was delicious. How could she feel so bad and so wonderful at the same time?

  Her mother bathed her, got her into a nightgown, and put her in one of the beds toward the back of the camper while the rest of the family ate breakfast. Suzi brought Mikayla a plate of eggs and toast and helped her eat it.

  “Open your mouth so I don’t shove this stuff all over your face. Jeez.”

  Mikayla obeyed. To her surprise she liked having Suzi feed her, though not as much as when Angus had done it.

  Suzi offered her coffee with a straw in the mug. “I hope this wakes you up. You know how weird this is? I mean, if you’re not sick, what’s the matter with you?”

  Helen had arrived without a sound. Her wide, solemn eyes disturbed Mikayla. The dark depths of them held fear. “She touched a bear. Look how her face is puffy. She has bear sickness.”

  Helen, the worrier. Didn’t everyone look a little puffy in the morning? Mikayla never should have told her about bear sickness or played that game. Now her sister thought she had this mythical affliction from touching the imaginary bear.

  Or Angus’s necklace. The bear claw had been dangling into his chest hair.

  That didn’t make sense, though. Angus wore it and he didn’t have bear sickness—unless he’d just bought the necklace from the vendor he’d been talking to, and it hadn’t had time to affect him. No—the Mescalero tribe didn’t want anyone bringing bear parts onto the reservation. They even said so on their web site. Someone would have told the vendor not to sell such a thing. Maybe Crees couldn’t get bear sickness. Different tribes had different sicknesses, different relationships with the animals. A bear had taught the Apaches the bear dance for healing the sickness. Did anyone in Mescalero know that ceremony? Even if they did, all the medicine men were busy, doing the girls’ coming of age ceremony.

  Why was she thinking all this? There was no such thing as bear sickness. Mikayla closed her eyes and let her sister feed her, imagining Angus’s hand instead.

  Suzi started talking about Refugio, and how he’d be running in the race the next morning, and Mikayla would get a chance to hang out with him if she ran. The race had formerly excited Mikayla, and so had Refugio. That was how she’d met him two years before, waiting around getting numbers before it started, flirting at the fruit and water table when it was over. Now she couldn’t muster the desire to run, to see him, or even to talk about him. Suzi prodded. “What if I see him and tell him you decided to stay in bed?”

  Mikayla flicked her fingers in a gesture of indifference and let her hands fall. She felt like melting ice cream. The thought of his lean, cut, hairless body had no effect, and the idea of running bored her. She forced her lips to move. “Don’t care.”

  Suzi’s head pulled back, and her mouth went crooked. “Are you crazy?”

  Their father called, “Suz—do want to stay with your sister first, or should one of us? We’ll come back and trade off, either me or Mom, in a few hours.”

  Suzi agreed t
hat she’d stay.

  “Thanks, darling. We’re going to try to find Mrs. Yahnaki to take a look at her.”

  The camper door closed. The family’s voices faded until the car’s doors closed around them, a series of four slams packing up the anxiety of the little ones and their parents’ unconvincing reassurances.

  “Who’s Mrs. Yahnaki?” Suzi asked.

  Mikayla tried to remember. They met so many people every summer here. The mental effort was too much, but Mrs. Yahnaki had to be a medicine woman. Her parents must have agreed with worry-weenie Helen. They really think I got bear sickness.

  Suzi tried to interest Mikayla in video games, but the competition was no more appealing to her than running a race. Her eyes closed and she snuggled into the bed, already halfway into a dream of Angus.

  “You’re kind of boring,” Suzi sighed. “Will you be okay if I go outside while you sleep? I’ll have my phone. You can call me. I just want to walk around a little.”

  Mikayla mumbled, “Go.”

  Within minutes of her sister’s departure, she heard the door open again. The steps were heavier than Suzi’s, accompanied by the smell of berries. She looked up. Angus knelt by the bed and kissed her on the forehead. “I was waiting for you to be alone.”

  He held a rough-shaped, shallow white bowl full of blueberries. One by one he fed them to her, the touch of his fingers on her lips as erotic as that of his tongue, and then lifted the sheet. He caressed her side in slow motion and tickled his fingers across her lower belly. “You look good. Have you admired yourself?”

  What was he talking about? With effort, she tucked her chin enough that she could see down the front of her body. She had thickened and softened overnight. Not fat, not even curvy, and yet she had changed subtly. Like Angus, she was slightly padded now. It should have troubled her, but it didn’t. His hand, slipping lower, sliding deeper, silenced her mind.

  Desire pulsed in her. She knew she should tell him to stop before they went any further—she wasn’t on the pill, had no condoms, and Suzi could come back any minute—but all her body could do was respond.

  As if he knew someone was coming, Angus dressed and sat on the bed opposite hers, his bear claw tucked inside his shirt, moments before Suzi came bursting in.

  “You—” She held her hands up as if to push Angus or to grab him, a gesture of desperate intensity. “Get out of here.”

  Mikayla roused enough to speak. “He’s okay.”

  “He is not. I was just talking to the campground manager. He said he saw Mr. Sneeze here come in, and he told me about Janelle. How nobody knows what happened to her.”

  “That doesn’t make me dangerous,” Angus replied. “I don’t know where she is either.”

  “Like you forgot where you buried her?”

  Was he capable of murder? He’d been so gentle with Janelle and with Mikayla, too. Her eyes went to Angus and back to Suzi. He remained steady, even a little sad, while Suzi held the door open wide, her skinny arm braced and trembling. Angus’s hand went to his chest, rubbing the spot where Mikayla knew the bear claw hung. “Relax, little sister. I didn’t kill her. She left me.”

  “While she was pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  They stared at each other. “We moved to Canada to be with my people, but then she wanted to come home to have her babies here with her people. Right before she was to have them ... she left me.”

  So he’s never seen his kids. He doesn’t know where they are either. No wonder he looked sad.

  “Mr. Bellamy said the police investigated you—”

  “And they concluded that I’m an innocent man. Apparently the court of gossip is still in session, though.” Angus stood, towering over Mikayla, and then bowed down and kissed her cheek. “Someday I’ll tell you why she left me. It’s a sad story, but nothing to worry about.”

  “Tell me, then,” Suzi said. “If you’re so damned innocent.”

  Ignoring her, he said to Mikayla, “I’ll be back,” touched his finger to the tip of her nose, and left.

  Suzi locked the door, hollering after him, “You can come back, but you can’t come in.” She sat on the edge of Mikayla’s bed. “That was scary.”

  Mikayla couldn’t feel fear, even as her mind considered that perhaps she should. Her adrenal glands had become as drowsy as her muscles. Suzi sniffed. “Jeez, you stink again. Is that what you smell like when you have sex?”

  Strange. Maybe she did, but Angus smelled like berries.

  Family members took turns caring for her. With her mother’s help, Mikayla went outdoors for a while, but all she did was lie under a tree remembering the hole in the ground with Angus. In the evening her father remained at the campground with her and the little ones so her mother and Suzi could stay late at the Mountain Gods’ dances. He fed her dinner in bed, walked her to the bathroom, helped her brush her teeth, and tucked her back in.

  “My poor Mikki.” He pushed her hair back. She normally hated that baby name, but she didn’t have the energy to fuss at him. “We’ll take you to Dr. Francis when we get home.”

  She pushed the words out slowly, one by one. “I’m not sick.”

  “Of course you are. We just don’t know what way yet.”

  How could this be sickness? Strange though it was, Mikayla’s lethargy felt good.

  “Mrs. Yahnaki is coming to see you in the morning. If she thinks it’s bear sickness, she can help us find someone who can do a cure. She doesn’t do that ceremony, but maybe she can heal you a little bit while we wait.”

  No. Mikayla couldn’t stir her voice to protest. Lying in silence and stillness was such bliss. I want to stay like this.

  The snuffling and scratching started around midnight. Helen was the first to scream. Then the sounds grew louder, a clattering at the door, not soft thumps like a hand, but hard like claws. The other girls woke and began to shriek. Their father scrambled down from the upper level and ran down the narrow hallway to the door, while their mother begged him to stay inside.

  Mikayla nudged her dreams back into place. She’d been with Angus in the woods, making love under the fallen tree, eating berries between bouts of ecstasy. Her father opened the blinds. “Jesus Christ.”

  The camper began to rock as something pounded against it, like the thrusts of a huge shoulder.

  “Daddy!” Helen wailed. “Make it stop.”

  “I’m getting help.” He grabbed his phone from the cup holder between the seats up front and made a call. “I need animal control. Now. I’m at the Riverpark Campground. There’s a bear trying to break into my RV.”

  It shoved into the wall beside Mikayla’s bed. The swaying of the vehicle merged with her half dream of being rocked in Angus’s embrace, the grunts of the bear with his sounds of passion.

  When the animal finally stopped its assault, her little sisters’ weeping and whimpering woke her fully. They huddled together all in one bed, arms around each other, while their father was outside talking with someone. Probably the animal control officer. None of the girls called to her. No whines of M’ka—ylaaa. The wound cut through her indolence. She had abandoned them in the woods. They didn’t trust her anymore. But she couldn’t get up to comfort them. The bed felt too good.

  In the morning the family went outside and left Mrs. Yahnaki with Mikayla. Easing her arthritic knees’ descent with the help of a three-pronged metal cane, the medicine woman sat on the couch where the opposite bed had been folded up. She had a round-cheeked, sun-lined face, a sturdy build, and piercing black eyes that poked a hole in Mikayla’s fog of laziness.

  “Have you got up yet today?” Mrs. Yahnaki asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you eat something in the woods the other day?”

  “Meat. Fruit.” Mikayla’s lips felt heavy as she said it. “Good food. Not poison.”

  “Did anything bite you?”

  No, but he licked me. Mikayla involuntarily rubbed herself. She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. His face and his furre
d chest seemed to descend over her. His tongue explored her lips, then her neck, and her nipples.

  Mrs. Yahnaki fell silent for a while, and then said, “Your sister told me you’ve been with that Cree man.”

  Mikayla’s voice came out creaky as she emerged from the half dream. “I like him.”

  The medicine woman took out her little pouch of pollen for blessings. “He might be a bearwalker.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His people’s bad shamans are bearwalkers, the way Apache witches go out as owls and wolves.”

  In the past Mikayla had always shivered at the mention of an owl witch. Refugio had told her a story that had frozen her bones, about seeing a woman turn into an owl and then the branch where it had perched dying the next day. Angus could have been the bear, using his power to come for her. This should have frightened her, but it didn’t.

  Mrs. Yahnaki asked, “Do you want me to pray with you?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t force a healing on you. You have to want it. But if he’s put some bad medicine on you—”

  “I don’t care.” Mikayla realized she’d been as rude she could be, interrupting an elder, but she couldn’t endure the healer anymore. All she wanted was to be left as she was. “Go away.”

  If he came again tonight, she would be outside in her sleeping bag, waiting. Then her sisters wouldn’t be scared again, her sisters who didn’t trust her to take care of them anymore. And Mikayla would be swept up, held, loved, fed and cared for, in this bear sickness of love with Angus.

  He came for her by day, though, as a man.

  Suzi was sitting with her at a picnic table, trying to convince Mikayla to use a fork to eat lunch. “You really can move if you make yourself. I didn’t carry you, did I? Jeez. You do your own business in the bathroom. If you can get it out one end, you can put it in the other. I’m sick of babying you.”

  Mikayla leaned on the table, her arms in pine sap, and forced her flaccid fingers around a plastic fork. The potato salad on her plate seemed miles away, the sandwich even further. Angus’s big black pick-up pulled in next to the camper and he clambered out, slow and graceful. His smile warmed Mikayla like nothing else could. He joined her on the bench. Suzi glared at him and picked up her phone.