MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

Mentor Commentary:
Isaiah Hunt

Recipient Reflection: 
Abigail Carlson

We Will Not Leave Each Other, Never So Long as We Live

Fiction by Abigail Carlson 

Northeast Ohio Writer

My sister calls to tell me her husband turned into a bear. We haven’t spoken much lately, not since she married him. Her voice sounds like the cracking of a book’s spine. “He’s a bear,” she says, and from the background there’s a snuffling, wet and heavy. A sound with its own gravity.

“A bear,” I repeat. “Do you mean like a gay man who —”

“No,” she hisses. “God. Shut up. I mean like a grizzled animal bear.” She exhales hard, like she’s being squeezed. “Hey, lay off,” she says, a little softer, phone held away from her mouth. “Stop it, you know I’m on the phone.” She sounds both patient and fearful, her voice’s edges rubbed smooth and thin.

“How can he be a bear?” I ask, lowering my voice to match hers. “Did he say anything about this before?” There is a hint of accusation — they did not discuss much before they married.

“No, of course not.” She sounds strained now, her breathing fast and shallow. “Can you just come over?”

“I don’t know. Listen, I told you this was a bad —”

“Please,” she interrupts me as a habit because, as a habit, I stop and listen when I hear her voice. “Please. Just come over. Come and help me.”

She is my baby sister. When she was born, our mother nestled her golden body into my arms and said This is your only sister. No matter what happens, no matter what she does, she’ll always have you.

“All right.” I’m already at my door. “I’ll be there soon.”


I sent a card after my sister got married, so I know her address. Their address now, I suppose. Our mother has told me about how my sister has adapted to domestic living, the surprises of a new couple learning each other. Our mother thinks my sister’s marriage is very romantic, that her husband is very romantic. She tells me he buys my sister flowers, that he has already shared grand plans for their first anniversary even though it’s nearly a year away. My mother tries to persuade me every day to call my sister.

I tell her that I’ll be here when my sister needs me.

So now I’m at my sister’s place, a shabby casita outside town. A broke young couple’s first home. There’s a rusty yellow mailbox tilting drunkenly on its post by the sidewalk where I park, first placing my valuables into the trunk because this neighborhood sounds like smashed glass. By the door, there’s a battered sign for a security company hammered into the gravelly planter, but the letters have faded and the sign balances crookedly on its stake. A little faux-stone gnome figurine squats by a worn doormat. I crouch to pick up the gnome, shaking it until I hear the ding of the key rattling around its plastic beer belly. A quick wring of the gnome’s neck and its head pops off with a little click, the key tumbling into my palm. I put it back together again after I unlock the door and replace the key.

Inside, the space looks even smaller than it did from the outside. My sister’s presence is everywhere — her painted figurines on every shelf not stuffed with crime novels, dollar bin romcoms on every flat surface and scattered on the ground. It’s musty inside, weed and animal smells heavy in the dim grayish light. There’s a door on the left with the light on behind it, and my sister’s voice murmurs indistinctly from within. I hear a rustling, then a deep moaning sound that freezes me. There’s something ancient in that moan, too deep and resonant for a human chest. My sister whispers something else and then she emerges from the bathroom, shutting the door behind her gently.

She doesn’t see me at first, her back to me where I stand just inside the door. She hasn’t changed much in the months since she got married, maybe a bit thinner in the gut, the cheeks. She walks a little bow-legged, her skinny legs emerging from a floral romper that makes her even younger. Her hair is braided sloppily, the sort of quick plait she does when she’s nervous, weaving and unweaving her dark hair to keep her hands busy. A sheet of paper towel clings to her calf, copper feathering out from a central wound. There’s a crusty trail of red leaking down onto her bare foot.

“What happened to your leg?”

She gasps, whirling on me. Her shoulders hunch inward in the turn, one tilted to face me, either to prepare or to defend against a charge.

“Shit!” she snaps, eyes darting between me and the bathroom door. She puts her shoulders back out and limps to me, favoring the wounded leg. “How’d you get in here?”

“What happened?” I repeat, crossing the space between us to tuck an arm around her. She leans on me, gripping my forearm hard as I walk her to sit on the dirty loveseat. She starts to curl her legs under her but hisses and stretches out the hurt one instead. I reach for the paper towel. She swats my hand away.

“He scratched me.” She carefully extends her leg to balance the cracked heel on a tower of DVD cases. “He didn’t mean to. It was surprising, when he changed.” She wiggles and sits up, tapping at the paper towel and sucking in her breath. “At least the blood dried, finally.”

“He scratched you?” I peer more closely at her leg before she turns it, angling it away from me. Sticking out just under the paper towel’s edge, I can see a gash of red snaking up.

“I surprised him,” she says. “I was being stupid. Don’t fuss. I just want to know what I’m supposed to do.” She jerks her head to the closed bathroom door. “He barely fits in there, but I think his fur is making him hot, so he’s jammed in the shower with the cold water running.”

I think she must be lying to me. She did that a lot when she was younger. It wasn’t that long ago she was stealing my I.D. to buy cheap beer for her friends and I had to convince their parents not to call the cops. She is a flame, and she’s seared me before. “Can I see him? Can he talk?”

“I think he’s embarrassed. He knows you hate him. He doesn’t want you to see him like this.”

“I don’t hate him,” I say automatically because I can feel it, the fight we had before she got married, the one that’s really never ended, only simmering, waiting.

When she introduced me to her newest boyfriend, I was polite. I tittered at his attempts to joke, though I was not won over as my mother was when he paid the tip and held the door. I kept my opinions to myself then because the relationship was new and my sister was infatuated. I could see it in how she looked at him, how she watched my reaction to everything he said. And the next Thursday, when she asked me to meet them at the courthouse, I tried my best to be gentle: You have known this man for fifty-two days; if it’s love, it will still be love in a year, won’t it? But telling me what she heard has always been easier for her than listening to what I said, since we were little girls. The fight grew in the same soil all our fights have, both of us left prickly and hurt at the end. This new unpruned tension that has grown in the distance between us the past three months chokes me now. She’s on an edge I don’t understand and I don’t want to make her leap away from me again.

“Leave him alone. He’s sensitive, he doesn’t need to be embarrassed.” From the bathroom, I can hear the sound of water running, the groaning of...pipes? Or him. She lowers her voice and waves her hand at me. “Hush, he’s trying to rest. Leave him alone, okay? We need to fix this without bothering him.”

“That’s impossible,” I snap back in a matching whisper. “I’m going to go get my first aid kit from my car, and I’m going to properly bandage your leg. Then, we’re going to go bother him and figure out why… Why this is happening.” My hands flutter. I could be gesturing at anything.

I know she wants me to just say Why he’s a bear, I know that she isn’t fooled by my vagueness, but it doesn’t matter. At least I can fix up her leg, whatever else is true. She pouts while I do it and keeps trying to tell me about him turning into a bear. That they were arguing, just a little fight, but she said something nasty (she won’t say what) and then he was suddenly not her husband, but a bear. He roared and scared the cats outside, she said, and then he brushed her with his claw accidentally, accidentally, when he rushed into the bathroom to hide. She speaks under her breath, glancing now and then to the closed door. I’m not sure if she’s worried about not being able to hear him or if she’s worried about him hearing her. “It’s probably not all that bad,” she says. “Especially if it’s not permanent. He can understand me, I can tell from the way he looks at me. He’s already sorry about my leg, by the way, so you don’t have to make a villain out of him.”

“I’m not making anyone the villain.” Her leg is bandaged now, mummified, and she can’t quite bend her knee enough to stand up and follow me. It was a longer, deeper wound than she made it sound. Not a scratch. A gouge. “Listen to me. You sit, I’ll take a look at him, and we’ll see what we can do, okay?” 

“Hey!” she says. “Stop!”

I ignore her and stride to the bathroom door, rapping once with the point of my knuckles. “Hey. It’s me.”

Inside, that pipes-groaning sound again. A shifting, great and heavy, air being moved.

“I fixed up her leg, but listen, what’s going on here?” My sister makes an exaggerated wince, flapping her hands at me, and I add, “I’m not mad, I’m just worried. About you. Not sure what’s going on here, and I’d like to help.” My sister grips the side of the couch and shakes it a little, twisting in her seat to glare at me with wide, accusing eyes. “And make sure you’re okay.” She relaxes, slightly, but stays twisted to face the bathroom door, plucking at loose threads in the couch’s faded embroidery.

Water splashes from inside the bathroom, splattering, then lots of fast drips on tile. I wait, lean against the wall with my arms crossed in front of me. He’s coming out, I mouth to my sister, and she huffs and starts picking at the edge of her bandage, eyes still on the bathroom door. I want to swat her hand, Stop that, why do you keep opening your wounds?

The door opens and there he stands, my sister’s chosen mate, ducking his head under the doorframe. He has a towel draped around his waist, steam spreading from the bathroom, and he looks at me like he is evaluating a threat. He stoops, tall, his bare shoulders seeming to expand to fill the space; my sister’s husband is great in the mighty and terrible sense. His face is unreadable.

My sister gapes at him, curls back in her seat. He is no beast, and I’m not sure if she’s feeling foolish because of her lie, or because he apparently thinks I hate him and by being here I’m committing a social sin. “Hi, babe,” she murmurs in that ground-down, softened tone I never heard her use until she called me this morning.

She looks at me, and this, this is why I haven’t been speaking to her, this is why I told her I did not support her marriage with this man she barely knew, this is why I knew that if I came here I’d be repairing her only so she could break herself again. She tells me, “You can leave now. I told you not to come over. Everything is fine.” She reaches out her arms to her husband and he crosses the room to lean down and kiss her, a broad palm wrapped behind her head at the base of her neck to tilt her more deeply toward him. He touches her as if he loves her.

“Fine,” I say, and I go.

​
We talk on the phone in our years apart, especially after she got pregnant and they moved. He wanted to go where the work was better, she told me, to be a better father. He’d been having a hard time holding down jobs here, people were such assholes in this city, and anyway he was still figuring out what he wanted to do. Even our mother disagreed with the move, but my sister’s husband was adamant. No one seemed to know how to argue with him so that he would listen. Reasonable to a fault, my mother called him; he made such good points, and my sister wanted to stay home with their baby. So they moved across the country, and my sister had a child far away. She never spoke again of the afternoon she called me to her apartment.

But then I got sick, and at the end of our weekly phone call she said, “You should come out and visit. For your birthday. If you’re not busy. Please.” It’s a landmark birthday, and with the diagnosis I’m trying to think outside myself more. Twenty minutes a week holds almost nothing of a life. We have never been so long without seeing each other, not since the day she was born. Her absence is a broken sidewalk in the middle of my life, absence where we once shared a world. She says I can sleep in their spare room, that we can take her son to the zoo together and catch up, that I should meet my baby nephew. I have banked time off and I have missed her barking laugh. I haven’t heard it in years.

She is my only sister, no matter what has happened or what she has done. The bearness of her husband, imagined or lie or else. The trench in her leg. I agree to come.

My sister picks me up from the airport with her sleeping toddler buckled in the back of her station wagon. She hugs me like she has forgotten softness, squeezing me hard. Despite looking underfed in the cheekbones, her stomach protrudes and yes, she tells me on the drive, “I’m pregnant, but it’s still early. We’re going to wait a bit longer to tell people, once he’s back in the swing of things at the new job.”

All through the drive to her house, she keeps up a steady stream of the same everyday chatter that filled the space between us on our phone calls: her son is learning his shapes and colors, the spats and dramas her husband has with the assholes he works with, the new Christian Women’s Club she joined to learn to make bread and keep better house. Though she’s not sure she’ll keep it up. They’re cliquey, gossipy as the friends she used to have back home, the ones she ditched when she didn’t have time for book clubs or nights out anymore. 

I listen, as I have. I parse through the pieces of her life like sifting through pebbles in a rushing stream, trying to tell which are normal meaningless things and which must be code or secret plea. Which ones are lies to make me worry less and which ones are truly kind things he’s done or said to her. I’m a geologist squinting at stone after stone, trying to decipher what they mean, what they represent, where they came from.

It’s exhausting, puzzling out which things are real and which are constructs. I’m too tired to dig forever, and now that I cannot unknow an end is coming, I am terrified of leaving my work undone.

Their house isn’t far from the airport, which she tells me is nice because he’s been doing more traveling for this new job, and if he can keep the HR lady off his back (she’s got it out for him) he may even get a promotion soon. The development complex where they live has lots of other new construction going up, repetitions of the same four ticky-tacky house plans and HOA-straight plastic mailboxes. She pulls up to the curb, parks on the border between two houses, and cuts the engine. “His car’s in the garage so we can keep it nice,” she tells me, though I did not ask for an explanation. “You can’t be a salesman with an ugly car, right?” Is she bragging or trying to change what she thinks of my mind? I used to know the difference, her differences.

One of the houses has a bright red plastic car on its side in the front yard, yellow light pooling from the porch lamp onto a few lounge chairs and a small table stacked with coasters; the other has the Venetian blinds all pulled shut tight, its mailbox’s upright red arm the only sign that this unit, too, is someone’s home. I wonder which belongs to the nosy neighbor my sister complains about, the one who leaves a note on her door any time the baby or anyone in her family makes a peep after nine P.M. Neither house seems capable of holding the wild girl she is in my memory, bright and burning.

I glance at her son’s sleeping face in the backseat. He’s got the same dark curls as his mother, long baby eyelashes spread out over his cheeks. I’ve seen photos and videos, the same ones she posts on her socials, and I’ve heard about meeting him in the hospital from my mother. Online, in stories, he was a baby everyone said had his father’s eyes; now that I see him in person, he looks just like my sister. I remember in my bones what it felt like to hold her in my lap, barely bigger than she was, while I read her fairy tales. I don’t want to wake him. I’m scared of what I’ll feel when he looks up at me.

“How has he been treating you?” I ask.

“What do you mean,” my sister says, and I can hear the hint of mistrust in her voice, that she’s thinking, Dangerous ground. I didn’t know which of them I meant, her husband or her son, before she spoke. She drapes an arm over herself, thumb stroking over the swollen skin of her gut, and looks toward the houses. In the dark house, someone pulls up a blind, spilling a band of fluorescent white light over the trim, regimented grass. I wish, I just wish I could tell which home was hers.

I shouldn’t push her, I know that. I have known that for all these years, back to the beginning of her marriage, since that day at the courthouse when she cried, Don’t you ever want me to be happy? He loves me, someone loves me with shining, angry tears in her eyes: this has been the boundary she will not allow me to cross.

She opened the door. Just a crack. But she did. So I ask her what I need to know. “Do you remember? When you called me over to your apartment that morning?”

“Oh,” she titters, “yeah. God, that place was awful. Did I tell you I found cockroaches in my cereal there?”

“Remember,” I say. “You told me he had turned into a bear. And he hurt your leg.”

She doesn’t answer for several heartbeats, her eyes fixed on the houses, one hand on her belly and the other gripping the steering wheel, thumbnail digging deeper into one of the grooves carved into the rubber. She’s wearing shorts. I can see her scars.

She tells me that it’s been a long time since he lost his temper like that. That he’s the father of her child, her children, and they need him in their lives. He already knows I hate him, so it’s no use to try to push him out. Because I can’t, I should know, I can’t chase him off, he’s the father of her babies and he’ll always be in their lives. He’s a good dad, he works hard to support his family, and do I really think she’s such a bad mother, don’t I know that her kids mean the world to her? She would never, ever do anything to put them in danger. He’s a good father. He’s such a good father.

I am not looking at her. I’m staring at her child in the rearview mirror, stirring in the backseat. For a moment he’s a ghost image of my sister at that age and I think a tantrum might save me from her fury, guilt and relief flooding me. But he does not have not the softness of a baby emerging from sleep. Just wide, intent eyes watching the back of his mother’s head as her voice scratches high and sharp.

My sister is demanding to know what is wrong with me. Pretending to know her husband when I wouldn’t even try to get to know him all those years ago. I couldn’t try, wouldn’t even try to be nice to the man she loved. He’s her husband, her husband, can’t I respect the bond between them? He loves her, and I should know, shouldn’t I, how hard she is to love. And he loves her. She should be grateful for him, she’s grateful for him, and if I truly cared about her, I’d be grateful, too, that she’s found someone who loves her like he does. If I was married, if I had ever known love like this, I would understand.

Her son’s eyes are shining, tiny eyebrows twisting together. He presses a chubby fist to his mouth. Silent, somehow. I stare at him in the rearview mirror, unable to square how much he looks like my sister and how she was never, ever that quiet when she cried. She digs her fingernails into the wheel like she is steering the car still, desperately trying to avoid a crash only she can see. I open my mouth, but I can only gape as she reacts to what I said. What she heard. She shouldn’t have invited me out to visit, that much is clear. Things are still too raw. If I am going to attack him like this, hinting, making snide comments, then why did I even come here, to stress her out? Just to try to ruin her life? Because this is her life, the life she’s chosen, and I need to respect that choice and believe what she tells me.
​
Do I think she's lying to me? Do I still, after all these years, think she’s lying?

Her voice raises to a shout and cracks in half, and her son’s eyes are huge and bright.

My sister follows my frozen eyes to the mirror, and she falls silent as the stillness after glass breaks. “You woke him up,” she breathes. She throws open her door and goes to her son, crooning. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, Mama’s got you,” over and over, “Mama’s got you, Mama’s got you.”

The fat baby tears finally begin to fall down his fat baby face and his fat baby fingers cling to his mother, knotting in the hair at the base of her skull. He whimpers so quietly I almost cannot hear him with his face buried in her neck. He makes sounds like a trapped animal, a plaintive, faint mewling. I strain my ears to hear him; I have never heard anyone cry so quietly.

The spell breaks. I climb from the car. My sister has popped the trunk, mutters without looking at me, “Get his diaper bag with your suitcase. Let’s just forget it and go inside. He’s upset, you’ve upset him.” Her voice is calm now. Soft, small, curled up around itself. She wipes the back of her hand hard against her cheek.

I say nothing because that’s what I am, and we go to the home she has buried herself within.

Abigail Carlson

Abigail Carlson was raised in Ohio and received her M.F.A. from New Mexico State University. Her work has previously appeared in The Journal and the Rappahannock Review, and she lives with her partner and dog in northeastern Ohio, where she works from home, writes distastefully sad stories, and pays careful attention to local birds.