The Man of My Dreams (16 page)

After dinner, they play hearts in Sam and Allison’s tent. It is so cold that they all put on jackets and wool hats. Around nine, when it starts getting dark—Alaska is not the land of the midnight sun this late in August—they pull out their flashlights and set them at angles pointing up, four moons inside the tent. But then it gets totally dark, and it’s impossible to see the cards even with the flashlights.

Before following Elliot into their tent, Hannah walks over to a tree twenty feet away. As she pulls down her underwear, long underwear, and fleece pants, she imagines a bear coming up behind her and pawing her ass. She shakes her bear bell, and Allison calls out, “I hear you, Hannah,” in a singsong. Hannah must squat there for an entire minute before she can relax enough to urinate. She’s pretty sure she gets a little on her feet—she’s wearing wool socks and flip-flops—but it is too dark, and she is too tired, to care.

THE DAYS DEVELOP
a rhythm. They eat oatmeal or Pop-Tarts for breakfast and sometimes hot cocoa; for lunch they have carrots and apples and bagels with peanut butter; and for dinner Elliot or Sam makes pasta or refried beans over Elliot’s stove. They each carry two water bottles, one bowl, one cup, and one set of utensils.

They move to a different island, and in the soil just above the beach, Hannah sees several piles of what must be bear shit: big mashed-looking clumps that are sometimes dark brown and sometimes almost pink, dotted by whole unchewed berries. She thinks of the guy in the store in Anchorage, the way he said, “You’re golden,” and she tries to hold his words close, like a talisman.

On the water, cruise ships appear in the distance. Sam and Elliot make sneering comments about their passengers, the inauthenticity of their Alaskan experience. “Tourists,” they say scornfully, and Hannah thinks,
But what are we?
She would rather be a cruise-ship passenger: a gray-haired woman from Milwaukee carrying a camera in a gold lamé shoulder bag and eating halibut off a white plate every night. The faraway ships make Hannah feel that they are less alone, and she is always sorry when they disappear from view. She also is comforted when, one evening at their campsite, she finds a Band-Aid half buried in dirt. The Band-Aid has a Flintstones motif, and Hannah picks it up—she would never do this in normal life—and looks at it in her palm.

At night Hannah sleeps in a sports bra and, as Allison has instructed, lays wet articles of clothing—socks, mostly—against her stomach so they’ll dry. At least once a day, it drizzles. When this happens, Hannah thinks that if she just suspends thought, time will pass and she will find herself back at Tufts, starting the new school year, kicking herself for not having appreciated her exotic and expensive vacation.

On the fourth afternoon, during a sunny interlude, the brothers—they are usually far in front—wait for Allison and Hannah, then begin to splash them with the paddles. More exactly, the brothers splash at Allison. Elliot, like Hannah, is sitting in the bow, but he angles his body so he is turned back toward Allison. As Allison shrieks and laughs, the expression on Elliot’s face becomes one of such undiluted pleasure that he looks demented. His momentary, soaring happiness is what makes Hannah suspicious. And then, that night at the campsite, Elliot goes with Allison to gather firewood, and Hannah sees them coming back along the beach. The giveaway is his relaxed but attentive posture; clearly, of anywhere in the world, here is where Elliot most wants to be.

It is in this moment, in his worship of Allison, that Hannah almost identifies with Elliot. Watching them, she can feel in her own hand the desire to touch this girl’s wavy hair, this girl whose kindness and beauty could make your life right if you could get her to be yours. Hannah wonders if Elliot imagined that she would be another version of Allison.

When they are finished cleaning up after dinner, Elliot and Sam announce that they’re going to explore. After they leave, Hannah walks with her bell and pepper spray to sit on a large rock that juts down to the water. The sky has a low-hanging, cottony whiteness, tinged slightly with pink, and the edges of everything are starting to darken. The Sound is flat and glassy. Allison joins her. They are silent for a long time. “It’s so beautiful I feel guilty going to sleep,” Allison says at last.

“I bet it’ll still be here in the morning,” Hannah says.

“You know what I mean.” Allison pauses. “Hannah, I really think you should talk to Dad. If you apologize to him, I’m sure he’ll still pay your tuition this year.”

Ah, yes—Hannah knew it was coming. She says, “There’s no way I’m apologizing to him.”

“Where are you going to come up with the money?”

“I’ve already met with a guy in the financial aid office. This isn’t your problem.”

“It kind of is. You’re stressing out Mom, too. She can’t afford to pay all your tuition herself.”

“I didn’t ask her to. I’m taking out student loans.”

“You think that’s appropriate? I’m sure someone from a less well-off family needs the money more than you do.”

“A loan, Allison, not a scholarship. I’ll have to pay it back, so yes, I do think I’m entitled.”

“Dad paid for me to get my master’s,” Allison says. “I’m sure he’d pay for you to go to grad school, too, if you let him. He’s actually an incredibly generous person.”

“Dad’s a prick,” Hannah says. “On a different subject, does Sam know his brother has the hots for you?”

Allison laughs. “What are you talking about?”

Of course Allison
would
laugh it off. But at what point is her optimistic denial the same as shallowness? Surely it’s not just that she’s dumb. Hannah tells people (she has told Dr. Lewin) that she and her sister are close, but is this really true? Do she and Allison enjoy each other’s company, do they know even the most basic things about each other anymore?

“Has he ever come on to you?” Hannah asks.

“Why are you asking me this?” Allison says, which is certainly less than a denial.

“What a slimeball,” Hannah says.

“It was once. He tried to kiss me at a party when he was really drunk, and the next day he was mortified.”

“Did you tell Sam?”

“Why do you care if I did?” Allison’s voice wavers between defiance and self-pity. “Either way, you’ll just sit there and judge us.”

Oh, how Hannah has missed the elementary-school Allison, the Allison capable of taking digs when adequately provoked!

“You know, I used to almost feel bad for you that men hit on you all the time,” Hannah says. “I knew I should envy you, but all those guys seemed like a burden. You barely ever liked them back, but you still had to return their phone calls or let them kiss your cheek or just, like,
manage
their interest in this way that seemed tedious. But now I think I was wrong. You thrive on managing their interest. Why else would you have invited Elliot on this trip, knowing he likes you?”

“That’s so unfair.”

“Was it so Elliot could watch you and Sam frolic in nature?”

“You can’t ever give it a rest, can you?” Allison says, and she is getting to her feet angrily and awkwardly. Her cheeks are flushed. When she’s gone, Hannah sits there in the hideous, quiet aftermath of her own hostility. But then Allison comes back. She stands in front of Hannah, her eyes narrowed. “Mom sometimes asks me if I think there’s something wrong with you. Did you know that? She says, ‘Why doesn’t Hannah have a boyfriend, why doesn’t she have more friends? Should I be worried?’ I always defend you. I say, ‘Hannah marches to the beat of her own drummer.’ But it’s not that. It’s that you’re completely stubborn and bitter. You think you have everyone figured out, all of us with our stupid little lives, and you might be right, but you’re a miserable person. You make yourself miserable, and you make the people around you miserable, too.” Allison hesitates.

Just say it,
Hannah thinks.
Whatever it is.

“The irony is,” Allison says, “you remind me of Dad.”

IT IS THEIR
last night in the backcountry. They’re on another island tonight, the third and final one (the trip is almost finished, it’s almost finished, it’s almost finished). Hannah has no idea what time it is but senses only that she has been deeply asleep, probably for several hours, when she awakens to Elliot’s weight on top of her, his hand clamped over her mouth.

“You need to stay calm,” Elliot says. He is whispering directly into her ear, more quietly than she’s ever heard anyone whisper; it’s like he’s thinking the thoughts into her. “Something’s trying to get at our food. You can’t scream. Do you understand? I’ll take my hand away, but if you make noise, I’m putting it back.”

Though he does not use the word, she understands—once she understands that he is not raping her—that he’s talking about the bear. Finally, as she knew it would, the bear has come.

She nods, and he lifts his hand. The sound from outside the tent is a scratching, as against bark, and an unself-conscious huffing. The scratching stops, then begins again. Are Sam and Allison awake as well? Elliot remains on top of her. She is lying on her side in her sleeping bag, and he is out of his, propped on his arms, the center of his torso pressed to her shoulder, his abdomen against her hip, his legs straddling her. Is he staying in this posture because he doesn’t want to risk even the slippery noise of climbing off? Because, in the event of the bear’s approach to the tent, he is protecting her? Or because it feels nice, and surprisingly normal, for them to be entwined like this? The pressure of his body is not unpleasant at all.

Elliot’s breath carries onions from dinner and would probably strike her as disgusting if she were confronted by it at a party. In this moment, it is not disgusting. She wonders if they will die. She thinks of the exhibit in the Anchorage airport:
The bear shows its anger by growling and snapping its teeth, and the fur on its neck stands up as its ears flatten. When threatened, a bear may charge.
And yet she is almost glad that the bear came; it means she wasn’t paranoid.

Then the bear crosses between the moon and the tent’s triangular screen, and she sees it incompletely but definitively—its dark, silver-tipped fur and the hump of muscle on its shoulder. It’s a grizzly; a grizzly is outside the tent. It is on all fours (she’d been picturing it standing), less than ten feet away. How can they
not
die, so close to a grizzly bear? Maybe the reason Elliot has remained in this posture is that it doesn’t matter what he does right now—he could grab her breast or spit in her eye, and no one will ever find out. Her heart thuds against her chest. A wave of unhappiness sweeps over her, and she feels her features contort; she starts to cry. A stopped-up sniffle escapes, and Elliot immediately collapses his arms so his face, too, is pressed to hers, his nose under her chin, his forehead at her ear. He shakes his head. He wraps his arms around the top of her head, pinning and suppressing her. Against his face, Hannah breathes the word
Allison.
He shakes his head again. If he were anyone else, anyone whose own sibling was not in the other tent, she wouldn’t trust him. Somewhere deep in her backpack is a key ring—how abruptly your keys become irrelevant out of your home city—and attached to the key ring is a whistle, which perhaps would scare off the bear if she blew it. It would be something to try, if she didn’t trust Elliot about staying still.

And then the bear leaves. Like a person—she can feel this—it is glancing vaguely around, checking that there’s nothing to attend to before it departs. But its focus is already gone from here, directed at the next thing. It is leaving, and then it has left. Neither she nor Elliot moves at all. How long do they not move? Maybe six minutes. It is Sam who breaks the silence. He calls out, “Holy fucking shit!”

“Are you okay, Hannah?” Allison says. “You guys are fine, right? We saw it near your tent.”

“I’m okay,” Hannah calls back. “Elliot made me stay quiet.”

“I want to come give you a hug,” Allison says. “But I think I’ll wait until morning.”

“Did we not hang the food high enough?” Elliot calls to Sam. He says this in an ordinary voice while still on top of Hannah. His breath has started to bother her.

“I did it the same as the other nights,” Sam says. “I don’t think it got anything. I think it was just curious.”

“Or trying to be friendly,” Elliot says dryly. Underneath him, Hannah laughs—not because the comment is particularly funny, but because of her bottled-up energy. They all are willing the moment to turn, and it
is
turning, it’s starting to contain the mood it will contain later, as a story they tell to other people.

“It didn’t want to disappoint Hannah,” Sam says. “It knew she’d feel gypped if we didn’t get at least one sighting.”

“It wasn’t even a real bear,” Allison says. “It was that guy from the store in Anchorage, dressed up in a bear suit. Otherwise, he was afraid you’d demand a refund for your pepper spray.”

Now they all are laughing. Also, Elliot has an erection. If she were a different person, not a virgin, this is when Hannah would—what? Unzip her sleeping bag, pull off her sports bra? To get things rolling, she’d probably need to do very little. Plus, there would be the giddy aspect of trying to keep Sam and Allison from hearing. On the plane home, she’ll kick herself for not going with the moment. Elliot was hot, they were in Alaska, and for Christ’s sake, they’d just escaped being mauled by a grizzly. The fact that things don’t shake out for her with guys—who, really, does she have to blame but herself? At critical moments, she can’t seem to summon the appropriate energy. But if she keeps thinking of this particular episode, thinks of it in any depth rather than breezing by it as part of a larger list, she must admit that if she had the situation to relive, she would make the same decision. She was tired. He had bad breath. There was a rock beneath her right thigh, poking into her through the bottom of the tent, her sleeping pad, and her sleeping bag. It would have been awkward the next day, or maybe for years to come; she’d wonder obsessively if he had been able to tell she was inexperienced, if he’d thought she was a horrible kisser. And besides, her sister was the one he really wanted. Just because he’d settle for her, just because the proximity of the bear had made him horny—it didn’t seem like enough of a reason.