BEAR

He’s quiet for a moment, and I know he heard the lie in my voice. Takes one to know one. I listen to him breathing as he ponders what to say. I remember a lot of heavy silences over long-distance lines with my father, me desperate, him inadequate or unwilling to help. At last I say, “Tell me again, Dad.”

“Oh, honey,” he says after a slow exhale. “Come on. I thought you were past this.”

I sigh and listen to Victory chatting to her doll in the other room. “You’re so pretty,” she tells it. “On the outside and the inside. And you’re smart and strong.” She’s mimicking the things I’ve told her about herself, and it makes me smile.

“Loli, are you there?”

My father always thought my name was silly. He calls me “L” or “Loli” or sometimes just “Loli.” As if those aren’t silly things to call someone. I think he used them to annoy my mother. And they did, to no end. But those silly nicknames stuck, at least between us.

“Just tell me,” I say, trying to keep the edge out of my voice.

I close my eyes, and I can see my father’s face, brown and wrinkled from too much time in the sun on his Harley. When he was a younger man, he wore his hair in a long black mane down to the middle of his back. I’ve never seen the entirety of my father’s face, hidden as it has always been behind a thick black beard. The last time I saw him, years ago now, his hair and beard were well on their way to ash gray. He is forever dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, motorcycle boots. His voice sounds like cigarettes and whiskey.

“You were kids when you came here, you and him,” he says, because he knows that’s where I want him to start. “Right away I didn’t like him. Something not right about his eyes.” He issues an angry grunt. “I really didn’t like how you were mooning over him. It made me jealous. Even though you said otherwise, I knew you were in big trouble. But I let you down, kid. I’m still sorry about that.”

I just listen and remember.

“I should have taken care of the guy right then and there. Or called the police or something, but I didn’t. That was always one of my biggest flaws as a parent: I was always trying to be your friend.”

My father had multiple “flaws as a parent,” lying and abandonment chief among them. Trying to be my friend was not high on my list of things for which he should be sorry, but I don’t say this.

“I let you hide out at my place for a while. I didn’t know how bad things had gotten. I really didn’t.”

I hear the stuttering wail of a siren in the background. Someone comes into the room and coughs. I hear my father put his hand over the receiver and say something that sounds like, “Give me a minute, for fuck’s sake.”

“You’d never done a tattoo like that. Never before and never since,” I prompt impatiently.

“That’s right,” he says quickly. “I gave the bastard a tattoo. It was unique in all the world. His drawing, my bodywork.”

“It couldn’t be duplicated,” I say.

He releases a disdainful breath. “Not by anyone I know in the industry.

And I know everyone. It was the kind of art I wanted to do for you. But you never wanted that.”

I never have. Life is hard enough, leaves enough scars - why voluntarily put your flesh under a needle? Piercing is another thing I’ve managed to avoid. I don’t get people who take pleasure in pain.

“Tell me about the tattoo.”

He sighs before going on, as if he regrets starting down this road with me. “I’ve never seen anything like it. That was part of the reason I wanted to do it. It was a nice piece. Stormy seas, breaking waves on these crags that jutted out of the water like shark teeth - lots of lines and shadows, lots of small hidden images within, even the shadow of a girl’s face. Your face, Loli. That’s how I know.”

He doesn’t have to describe it; I can see it so clearly in my mind’s eye. It’s an image that comes back to me again and again in my dreams, and sometimes when I’m awake.

“And when they showed you the picture, there was no mistaking it.”

There’s silence. “No, girl. There was no mistaking it.” Then, “He’s dead, Loli.”

“Call me Annie.”

I know he hates the name Annie even more than he does Lolita. He thinks it’s common. But it’s no more common than his name, Teddy March. Everyone calls him “Bear.” Anyway, I’d give my right arm to be common. 

“He’s dead, Annie. He’ll never hurt you again. Not you or anyone else. He didn’t kill you back then. You fought and won.” I like his words; I try to let them in and become my truth. Pathological liar or not, he has a kind of horse sense that always calms me.

“Don’t turn your life over to him now,” he goes on. “You’re hurting yourself and Victory-and that husband of yours. Move on, kid.”

These are my little rituals, the things I do and need to hear to comfort myself. In the past couple of years, knowing what I know, it has taken only one or two of these things to calm me, to assure myself that it is safe to live my life. But this time nothing’s working; I don’t know why. I feel like I’m seeing these signs that no one else is seeing: the dog running in circles because some vibration in the ground has told him that an earthquake is coming, a hundred crows landing on the lawn. I tell myself it’s not real, that it’s all in my head. Of course, there’s no worse place for it to be. Maybe I do need to talk to the doctor.