Sonya Jackson was cleaning her son's room when she saw the bear.
John was at work and it was just the two of them there. From the living room came the sounds of inane day time TV, the bane of urban housewives everywhere. It was mid-June, the sun was shining outside, Mr. Anderson next door was mowing his lawn and Ms. Petrucci, the merry widow next door to him, was pruning her rosebushes. Just a normal day in suburbia, USA. And what could be more right than a woman in a ratty housecoat running a vacuum cleaner over a rug which has seen better days, a plump baby cooing to himself in a basonett? Why, nothing at all. Absolutely nothing, my dear.
Yet when she saw the bear, all the mundanity went out of the day. The sound of the tv became distant, like broadcasts from another world, the way distant laughter on a beach must seem to a drowning man. The vacuum cleaner roaring in her hand seemd to be on the end of a long plastic arm in a plastic universe. Mr. Anderson's lawnmower was grumbling from a thousand miles away.
The bear. It was just an ordinary teddy bear. A little ratty, a little threadbare, it's shoe button eyes gleaming from it's fluffy face, upon which a cheery smile had been stitched.
And with a single small drop of blood on the end of it's nose.
Like maybe br'er Bear had banged into a wall while running off on its Ursian errands, oops, sorry, just a little clumsy here, hardy har har. That single small drop of blood seemed to turn the bear's mindless glassy gaze into something sly and knowing, the gaze of a confidence man in a dark alley who would be happy to steal your wallet and make you think he was doing you a favor at the same time. It was dry and not very old, like a chocolate milk stain.
Stop it, she told herself, yanking herself back from these thoughts with a tangible effort. Little Peter probably did spill chocolate milk on it, he had some last night, and it's not blood at all. And how can a stuffed bear look like a con man? It's just an inanimate stuffed animal, you silly goose.
The bear smiled up at her, it's shiny eyes seeming to suggest otherwise, seeming to suggest that if she leaned a little closer, why, just a little closer, the better to see you with my dear, that maybe they could talk about it. Hmmmmm? Just a little-
There she went again. She turned resolutely away from the bear. The room needed vacuuming and she had to get the roast out of the freezer. Lots to do, no time to think about a crazy bear.
She left the nursery in a hurry anyway, despite all her self-assurances. Peter was squalling for his eleven o'clock feeding and it was time for her to have a little lunch too. Behind her, the bear smiled up at the ceiling. One glassy eye twitched, and then it was still.
* * *
Later that afternoon, Sonya was out back, sitting on the porch with a John D. MacDonald paperback. Little Peter was taking his afternoon nap in a shady spot near by. The sun shone brightly on the birdbath, sending up little rainbows from it's splashing fountain. Somebody down the street was playing music while washing their car, and the faint sounds of Hot Blooded came drifting across the yard. All afternoon she had been making excuses to herself about why she avoided the nursery.--I already cleaned in there; it's good for Petey to be here with me and not in a room by himself; the sun's too bright in there during the day. But what it all boiled down to was the simple fact that she was afraid to go in there. Something in the atmosphere of the nursery had changed. It felt like the moment in a movie were all the music went quiet just before the killer or the monster pounced.
And it was all that teddy bears fault.
That one small drop of blood on its nose.
It did no good to tell herself that it was chocolate milk and not blood. In her secret heart, she knew it was blood. Knew it the same way she knew her name. Where it had come from she did not know. There was no wound on Peter to account for it. No wound on herself either. And, as far as she could remember, John had never even touched the bear. John left the thankless job of child rearing to her. Old Johnny Jackson didn't get his pompous executive hands dirty, no sir. In fact, she was beginning to think more and more as the months went by that old Johnny Jackson didn't really want a kid for a kid itself; that having a kid was a means to an end, said end being to keep her out of his well-coiffed hair.
You could point to certain things-the way he never seemed to be around when diaper changing time came around; the way he always magically disappeared or was unwakeable when feeding time rolled around; the way he always called Peter "the kid." But what it all came down to was just a gut feeling. Peter was his protection, Peter was the distraction that kept her from looking too closely at him. And what would he need protection from? Was he having an affair with the Safeway clerk down the road on Stratford Avenue? Was he, perhaps, involved in drug shipments at the university campus?
Ridiculous. A real laugh riot, as Jackie Smith, the paper boy, would say. But still she wondered. In the dark hours after three A.M. while lying, stiff and unsleeping, as her husband snored next to her, she wondered. Perhaps he wasn't doing anything at all. Perhaps he just thought that raising kids was a woman's work. The dark side of chivalry, the side that never seems to get mentioned in those dating protocol books. Thou shalt open doors for women and, when she pops a bun outa the oven, thou shalt not interfere. Ever. In other words, maybe she was just being paranoid.
She had met John Jackson at NYU her second year. In 1972 this had been. She was majoring in beer tasting and pot smoking, and he was just one of the fraternity boys she and her fellow program majors entertained on Saturday nights.
He had been a lot different back then. More willing to laugh, less detached and more involved in the rhythms of life. He had told her that he was going to take over the world of finance and set it on its ear. She, being young and almost giddily optimistic, had believed him.
They had left the university, he had gotten a job at a bank in New York City and she had settled in to be a housewife. They were now getting up into their forties, and John had withdrawn more and more into himself. The more money he made, the more detached he got. Some days he didn't speak a single word to her, just retreated into the book lined sanctuary of his study, a room which she was not allowed to enter. She cleaned house, he cleaned out others' checkbooks.
Then Peter came along early this year, a late child, but finally she had a focus. She was forty-two, her hips and waist wider and heavier, her hair more gray than black, and her wild sorrority days not much more than a distant dream. And now John was free to-
To what, exactly? To do almost anything at all, her mind whispered. You're out of his hair now. You have a baby to keep you busy. You saw how it was with your own mother.
Yes, she certainly had. Her mother had been what they would no doubt call bipolar these days. There wasn't a word for it back then. Sonya just knew she was always walking on eggshells around her. Her father had been a lot like John, and it sometimes filled her with sour amusement how history repeated itself. Only, with Sam Fleisman, it wasn't bank balances and bonds and stocks he was concerned with, it was drinking every bottle of liquor in the state of New Hampshire.
And so, with her husband out doing what he called "hunting up a job," Henrietta Fleisman lavished attention on her daughter Sonya. Somedays it was cookies and storybooks, other days it was lashings, both verbal and physical. And was she ever glad to get out of there? You bet. Free at last.
Except she wasn't. She had her own wailing wall didn't she? Her own little slice of captive attention. Peter.
But she wasn't like her mother. She was just being paranoid again, going off on little mind games.
Thoughts of paranoia led her back to the bear. It seemed ridiculous now, in the bright sunlight of summer, to think that it was anything other than chocolate milk on its nose. Sure.
She got up and stretched. It was time to put dinner on. The hour was growing late and John liked his dinner served promptly at six and here it was, passing on four. It was time to think of the dinner, the whole dinner, and nothing but the dinner. But she wanted to have one more look in the nursery. One to grow on, as it were.
Scooping up Peter, Sonya carried him back into the air conditioned sanctuary of her home. He was waking up, muttering in that sweet muzzy way babies do. She was going to have a look in the nursery, yes, but first she had to see to Peter. She wasn't delaying, no, not at all. I'm just ... being sensible. That's it, she thought. I'm not going anywhere near that bear again.
So she set Peter in his basonett and walked down to the nursery and looked in and saw that the bear was gone.
* * *
Later that night. The house was sleepy silent. John and Sonya were tucked up in their double bed down the hall; Peter was asleep in his nursery.. The teddy bear which had so troubled Sonya was still gone, to where she didn't know. John had come home, kissed her passionlessly on the cheek and settled behind the evening paper. She had fed Peter his dinner-pureed spinach and carrots and tiny pieces of roast-and dished out their own.
"How was your day, John?" she had asked.
"Just fine, dear," he had answered absently from behind his paper. And that was the extent of their dinner conversation. You couldn't say John Jackson was a bad man, just extremely self-involved. Sonya had sighed and gone about eating her carefully prepared dinner, for which she got not a single word of thanks, and then cleaning the kitchen, for which she was not noticed at all.
They had made love joylessly, and she faked her orgasm, something she'd had to do ever since the first time, and which John never noticed. And with his seed drying on her thighs, she wondered, like almost all women in unhappy marriages, what it was all for. And she wondered about the bear, of course. You could say that old br'er Bear had never escaped her mind.
But before she could do much more than wonder about it, she had fallen off to sleep. And dreamed.
It was a very peculiar dream. In it, she was standing in her kitchen. The house was silent around her, silent with the hush of expectation. Her counter tops gleamed; her floor reflected the bars of moonlight falling through the Venecian blinds on the window above the kitchen sink; the last drops of water on the dishes in the drainer glimmered like diamonds. And in front of her was a large butcher knife.
Her dream self picked up the knife and studied it. The sharp blade glimmered coldly in the moonlight, sending sparkles off the serrated edges. The handle felt warm and comforting in her hand, and she didn't think it at all odd when she suddenly found herself in the nursery. And who should be sitting against the wall, smiling slyly up at her, but br'er Bear his own self. The drop of blood on the end of his nose looked different by moonlight. Fresher. But her dream self felt no fear. br'er Bear was talking to her, now, telling her what to do, and she was not afraid, it was rather wonderful.
"You know what to do, Sonya, my little Goldilocks, don't you?" he whispered inside her head. "You know just how to be free, my little Sonyapoo."
"Yes," her dream self whispered fuzzily. All worries and cares were swept from her head, leaving nothing but a gentle untraceable happiness. And, since it was all a dream, everything would be all right. She crept toward the crib, the butcher knife raised high in one hand. And then she went to see John, her Johnny, he of the well-coiffed hair and pompous executive hands.
* * *
It was snowing again. Maggie Crenshaw sighed to herself as the news caster ran down the list of business and school closures for the day in his shabitual monotone. Jack was absent again; yet another business trip which had taken him out of state. Vanessa was howling from her high chair, and the dishwasher had broken this morning. Again.
Maggie sighed and got her daughter out of the chair and started washing the dishes, keeping a close eye out to make sure the baby didn't try to do something weird like put her head in the oven.
Snow was really falling in earnest now, and she watched it pile up out in the backyard through the kitchen window. She hoped Jack wouldn't get delayed at the airport. He was due home tonight, and Maggie had high hopes that maybe he could spend a whole weekend at home, something which hadn't happened in almost two years. In the meantime, though, she had to go clean Vanessa's room before it was time for her nap.
She got out the vacuum cleaner and wheeled it down the hallway, noticing that one of the lightbulbs in the hall fixture was out, casting it in deep shadows. Great, one more thing to do, she thought resentfully.
The blinds were pulled in the baby's room, and so she didn't notice it at first. It wasn't until she ran the shades up that she noticed it.
A raggedy teddy bear leaning against the wall. With three bloodstains on its fluffy face.