Teddy bear

I keep telling myself, you loved her so much. You were ready to start a new life with her. A new home, a new family. Everything was beginning to fall into place for the first time, for both of you.

I don't know what to do anymore, other than distance myself from it. Look at it from another perspective. After the wedding, you took your honeymoon in Mérida; so enchanted by its white rustic architecture and rural, populous atmosphere was she that you neglected the hotel's luxuries for the city's dusty Mayan streets. You discovered a shabby antique store, and she was enamoured by a stiff, old teddy bear, with its angular snout and off-center button eyes. As she sang of its hunched posture and resigned personality, you carried it with tenderness to the cash desk, you handed the old man $630 in Mexican pesos, and you relished the surrogate of a first shared life between you and her.

When you returned home, you placed the bear on your bed, between your pillow and hers. Every day it kept its silent vigil and every night, she would kiss the bear's forehead and set it aside, and passion would lead you to the doldrums of a safe and unassuming rest.

One day, she calls you just after your lunch break. She's crying and you're afraid, until she tells you that it's happened, you're going to have a family, like she's always dreamed. You've never felt relief like that in your life. You go home and it's such a joyous moment, you crash into the bed and knock the bear aside with blind disregard.

For the first three months, you prepare voraciously, you tell your family and friends and they are delighted to unload gifts of all variety upon you. The following three months you begin to set a room aside for the newest member of your family. She insists on the colour green, she is so in love. The next two months are spent slowly filling the walls with bright toys, pictures, safety nets, reminders of how vulnerable and precious and adored your child will be. You place the bear on a dresser overlooking the crib. It feels like a pool of water slowly gathering around your feet as you anticipate your first swim.

But the last month is a tidal wave. One day, she calls you just after your lunch break. She's crying, and you feel like you've grown accustomed to her fluctuating moods, until she says that she's bleeding. And bleeding. And bleeding.

And then you've lost everything.

They break the news to you slowly, as if it'll soften the blow, but these words are poison and they'll cripple you no matter how you receive them. The child was a girl who you never had the chance to name. The rest is a fog.

When the fog clears, she's standing apart from you. You can't reach her anymore and she keeps moving further away, and it looks like she's clutching something to her chest, crying. She won't let you in. You grow tired of trying.

You've grown so distant there's no point in pretending anymore, it's as if she wants nothing to do with you, and you wonder why. You let her pack her belongings in peace and return home a week later, but it doesn't feel like home. It's just an empty house now. The teddy bear is gone.

For the first three months, you are forlorn and directionless, slogging through your daily motions like an automaton. Your body moves forward, but your brain does not, and you feel like you're frozen in that day you saw her leave for the first time. The following three months your friends and family reach out to you with encouraging smiles. You receive them gratefully and slowly you warm up, placing memories of her and what you've lost aside, and you realize it was them weighing you down. Your mind begins to catch up. The next two months, you feel like you are ready to live again.

But the last month is a tidal wave. You open the door to check your mail in the morning, and sitting there is the teddy bear, crooked and expectant. You are lost for what to do other than take the bear and bring it inside, it smells earthy and different, but still like her. You don't know why she's done it, or what message she was trying to convey, but she was always secretive in that way and a little difficult to connect with. In your despair you tuck the bear away where you cannot see it, and you forget.

Yet the next day, there she is, exposing everything to you. You see her for the first time, but its on the news and she's splayed in the mud and grass, and she's dead. It's in a graveyard. You can see that there's something dug up near her body, but you can't bear to watch any more of it, to see her twisted face, or the name on the headstone, or the dirt under her nails. You click the television off, sigh, rub your eyes, unable to believe that she's really truly gone now. But maybe you can believe just for a second she isn't. You can give yourself that one gentle reprieve, can't you?

I found the bear.

She laughs, smiles with her teeth like she often does, touches your arm and purrs over how good you were with her baby niece. Maybe it's a sign, but she looks completely enamoured, like you've just unlocked the secret to her heart. She makes a joke about stealing the child because she's so adorable, you laugh too.

The bear is leaning forward, crammed awkwardly into the closet as I carefully lift it free.

One day you've walked into her office and she was looking at photos, the memory is strange because you've only been dating for a few months, she was cooing quietly over the faces of infants each in their own delicate outfits. You ask her what she's looking at and she startles, closing the page, explaining that she was reading an article. You brush it aside as a charming quirk, but now you're wondering if there was something more to it.

The bear is old and stiff, and I remember the vintage feel of its brown velvety fur, but not the musty smell.

She's been spending money on clothes, not for herself. You find the receipt crumpled inside a plastic bag you intended to use for your lunch. Baby clothes. Almost a hundred dollars worth. And this isn't the first time, and you tell her, and she cries, and after a while it's you feeling guilty for pinning this on her. You ask her how much she's bought. She opens a drawer, its full. Different outfits, different sizes, green. It's a gender neutral colour.

I hold the bear in my arms and squeeze it, bury my face in it, I want to let myself cry but I can't shake the feeling of something being horribly wrong. The bear feels rigidly structured, and theres dirt on its arms.

Every day she's asking you about names, and you like them all, but you can't decide; she insists on waiting until its born to know the gender, you'll name it then. But you catch her repeating her favourite names. As she works at her desk, as she sits on the couch, watching a reality show about teenage mothers, and every now and then on the cusp of sleep you can hear it. Whispered names. She never said yours like that.

I noticed just now a few crooked seams I can't remember seeing before and I have to investigate. In my rough handling, I twisted the bear's arm an unnatural angle. It caught me off guard, dropped my stomach. The sound of a bone cracking.

She was obsessed. You were the only one who could make what she really wanted happen. And you failed.

She's only giving back what you gave her.