‘You can’t tell me you can visualise infinity,’ I said to Winter that day on the lawn, the sunshine finally warm again—our second spring on the island. We were looking up at the clouds, which were racing away as if they had somewhere good to get to, perhaps a cloud ball, which is something Winter would have loved to imagine, and I’ll keep that stored up to tell her when she gets to this place I’m in now.
I looked up at those clouds and I said to her, ‘Nothing goes on forever.’
‘It does, doesn’t it,’ said Winter happily and closed her eyes so her eyelids would get sunned too, because heaven forbid you should neglect your eyelids or anything else that might need the sweet and inextinguishable rays of your compassion. That’s why Pops and I would privately roll our eyes at old Winter, and say to each other with only our minds, ‘What a sap, am I right?’
‘It’s nice, isn’t it,’ Winter said then, ‘not knowing what day of the week it is.’
I said, ‘Don’t be stupid, it’s—’
And when I said, ‘Saturday’ and she said, ‘Wednesday?’, something inside me went cold, because Winter was ridiculously clever, and I wasn’t, like, totally stupid either. But before I had the chance to go into full hiding-my-breakdown mode, Winter said, ‘Summer, what’s that moving?’
Well, it was a plump brown bear waddling out of the trees at the bottom of Our Mountain.
Except there weren’t any bears on that island.
So what was he really?
Winter
‘Look at that moon,’ I said to the boy, hot-sick in his blankets. ‘You wouldn’t want to miss all those moons we’ve got coming. And the sunsets. It’s worth staying just for those, isn’t it? All peaches and orange and berry and plum. We grow those things here—all of them. We have trees. We make jam in late summer. If you stick around, we’ll put it on a scone for you. We don’t have cream or butter. But if the scone’s hot, you hardly notice that it’s a bit floury.
‘I was reading, just today, a quote about suns. Well, it was about Islamic women in extremist regimes. Saying how they’re like suns trapped behind walls. Isn’t that sad to think of? A thousand splendid suns all tucked away, blazing into nothing.
‘But then I thought…I still think, well, we’re those suns, aren’t we? Tucked away in here all day. Like we’re locked in a big cell. We’re suns, too—at least, a little. Summer would never admit it. And I know we’re lucky to still be alive and it’s safe here. But sometimes it feels so small, this church. Like a jar. And I look out at the sea and I think…Well, I guess I don’t know what I’m saying, just rambling. I’m out of practice. Usually I only have Pete to talk to.
‘I checked your back, by the way. And it’s fine—no bruises, no lumps, and your skin is still brown. I hope you don’t mind. You know how it is with The Greying. Summer says that everyone would know now—everyone everywhere.
‘If I just keep talking and you just keep breathing, that’s a fair deal, isn’t it. In and out, just like that. You should be proud, how well you’re doing. I’m proud of you and I don’t even know you. I’ll be here—every night, I’ll be here. You just sleep.’
Summer
We wrapped him up, that bear, as if he were a loaf of still-warm sourdough bread in a brown paper bag. For the first few hours, tight in his blanket, he shook like he was sitting on top of a dryer. He must have been scared, not cold, because it was spring then, and the sun was still rising and setting, rising and setting, like a super-reliable yo-yo, and the days were clean and blossom-warm.
Boy, was that bear cute. He was small and soft like…well, like a teddy, and that’s how he got his name. Edward. I had to grit my teeth a lot when he was lying in my arms and looking into my eyes as if I and only I were Love. Sure, he wasn’t quite a baby, but something in us must have wished he was, because we carried him round on one hip, even though it hurt our backs. I swear if we’d had access to a bonnet, he would’ve been getting around in that daily. I talked to him, that bear. I purred, ‘there there,’ and crooned and asked him questions that I answered myself and said the kind of rhymes I imagine a mother would murmur, though how would I really know? Never had one. But if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that a heck of a lot of things rhyme with ‘bear’, and it was nice to chat with someone after all this time—maybe a year?—of just us and old Bartleby. How was I to know what would happen after that?
I rocked him and swayed and walked around and, using all my might, lifted him up under his arms so we were face to face, and I rubbed our noses together, and kissed the flat little patch of fur between his eyes. You pretty much get the whole gooey picture, and if you’re thinking, Um, hello, wild animal?! then you’re smarter than we were, and we once tied for first place in an International Maths Olympiad, I kid you not.
Winter didn’t talk to him—not even a whisper. She just held him on her lap, quiet and tender, and sat by the stained-glass window and looked out, not down, and she didn’t tuck the sheet in or fuss about, blowing raspberries onto his pudgy beachball of a tummy. As I watched her, I felt impatient to have him back in my arms—could feel the weight of him there already—and those hours waiting for my turn were complete torture, like when a cake’s in the oven and the crust is baked but you know the middle is still runny and you just want to pull it out and stick a spoon in anyway.
But on Winter’s lap, that’s where he stopped shaking, and I swear to you that he yawned and stretched out his arms and smiled at her, and shook his head back and forth as if to say, ‘What the heck have I just been doing? Fool!’ Winter lowered him to the floor and off he went, loping in a happy kind of hop down the aisle, like he was fizzed up on communion wine. As we chased him around the church, we were laughing. He was so quick and funny and nosy and sweet, and here’s a word that people don’t get to use enough: gambolling.
After about an hour, he needed an actual nap like a real baby, and he tucked himself under the altar, coiled up like Pete would sleep each night in the crook of Winter’s knees.
We watched that bear for ages, not saying anything, both just deep in loving him, and maybe it wasn’t even him—maybe it was the idea that something else was out there in the world.
At first, it didn’t occur to me to do anything but love him till it hurt, so that’s what we did.
Winter
I went to that boy. Night after night. Pete came, too.
Gradually he cooled down.
At first, his throat was too tight for talking. But some nights he winked. The flutter of his eyelid on the skin of my heart.
Eventually he croaked out his name. It sank into me like a cutter through dough.
In the mornings, Summer felt my yawns as if they were hers. ‘I am warning you, Winter,’ she said. ‘You don’t know where he’s from or what he wants or how he even got onto this island. What if he’s actually some kind of kinky murderer who’s going to stuff us into a rubbish bin and pour acid on us so that our bones melt? Or if he’s been sent to steal all of Pops’s stuff, like those—’