Page 2 of Bears Not Included

I roll up two pairs of leggings and a thick hoodie and add them to the bag already stuffed with bunches of underwear and socks. I have no idea how long I’m going to be gone. This could go either way. I’ll either be back in a few hours or a few days.

Or maybe never if I were braver.

“Your father is going to be so thrilled when he finds out this is the reason he’s sending you to law school. And he will find out, you know. He always seems to know Livia. Might sever a vein, too; he’ll be so excited.”

He’s not technically sending me to law school. In other words, he isn’t paying for it. He didn’t pay for college either. I took a student loan for college, then worked my ass off, and got a part scholarship for law school.

I work two jobs as well, at two different restaurants. The waitressing job at The Elliott, four nights a week, earns me way more than the one at Jimmy’s BLT where I work Friday through to Sunday, but nothing would make me leave Jimmy’s.

I have a soft spot for the elderly Jimmy Keppler, and his wife, Babs, the owners of Jimmy’s BLT, and helping them out makes me feel good about myself, which I crave. It’s nice to feel wanted.

I pay for all the other costs my scholarship doesn’t cover, including my own food and rent. Yes, I pay my father for living at home, because it’s a ‘teachable moment,’ he calls it.

I also use my own money for food and make sure my father has a decent meal at the end of each day. Most nights he eats at the office and doesn’t bother to tell me and doesn’t bring anything back for me either.

I do all this so I can become a lawyer, like him, to please him. A lot of hard work for something I have zero interest in being––I don’t want to be a lawyer like my father––but I’m a sucker for his affections. Stupid me.

I also stay at home because I feel closer to my mom.

I refrain from telling Faith my father forced me out of law school even before I got a proper start for reasons that turn my stomach. I don’t want to get into that right now with Faith. I don’t want anything to mar this day. Not when I’m this close to proving fairytales were real. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps.

I need this to be true like I need my next breath.

For now, what my father doesn’t know won’t hurt me. I don’t care about the repercussions I’m going to face when he finds out, either, because this is about my mom first and foremost.

This is for you, mom.

After my mom died all I wanted to do was please my father and follow in his footsteps where really my passion is folklore and mythology, like my mom’s

My father called her interests whimsical, and he said it like an insult, blunt, and condescending. Pretty much the same tone he uses on me every day, probably there since the first moment he realized his first and only child was a girl.

Me.

I’m stupidly still plagued with the need to please my father; I don’t know why. Even when he yanked my world out from under me in less than a minute a few weeks ago, delivering a statement so appalling and unsettling, I thought I was going to pass out as I watched his lips move, forming words I never thought I would ever hear.

He doesn’t want me to be a lawyer anymore. He wants me to be something else entirely now.

Chapter Two

Livia

I always prided myself on being strong, stronger than my mom had been, but now I know it’s nothing but a myth.

If it were true, I wouldn’t still be here, in this same house, still trying to please my father; just like my mother had done all her life. The thing about a narcissist is that they remain unpleasable. It’s their whole modus operandi, I’ve learned, but I’m too entrenched in it now to do anything about it. They will always move the posts and do it right in front of your eyes too, while telling you, you’re the crazy one.

My mom was a victim of her own affection. She loved my father until the last breath she drew when I found her splattered on the stone edging of the garden right above the balcony of my parent’s bedroom on the second floor, her body like a pretzel broken in half, soaked in blood, and surrounded by her favorite hydrangeas under a soft summer sky.

I feel my skin start to pull tight as my blood rushes frantically through me to get to my heart to deliver its next beat. I managed to hide that image of finding her broken and dead from my mind for years, but now that it creeps into my head so suddenly, it feels foreign. Like it shouldn’t have happened. She shouldn’t have died.

My father immediately sent me away to boarding school following my mom’s death. The day after, to be precise. In the car on the way to the school, he told me that my mom was standing on the balcony, and because of structural issues, the balcony gave way, and she fell to her death.

But I knew that didn’t happen. I was the one who found her. Nothing had happened to the balcony. But as he drove me away that day to boarding school, while I soaked the front of my dress crying for my mom, my tear-flooded gaze noticed that the balcony of my parent’s bedroom was no longer there. It lay shattered on the ground, just like my mom had been the day before.

My father had isolated us from everything and everyone, but he did it in such a way that it wasn’t even something I questioned because he was trying to keep my mom’s mental illness secret from the rest of the world. The mammoth lengths my father went to hide the fact that my mom had committed suicide give me chills now.

All the brainwashing he had done to me into believing that saying anything other than my mom was fine would be opening her up to ridicule and unkindness worked since I started to believe that my mom didn’t throw herself off the balcony. She wouldn’t have left me alone in this world. It was an accident. The balcony gave way, and she fell.

My mom was the most beautiful person I knew. She was also the coolest. She let me play dress-up and eat ice cream for dinner. She let me sit in the bath until I pruned, just so I could giggle at my fingers. And when she came downstairs to breakfast once when I was six years old, with her head and eyebrows shaved… she thought her hair had turned to worms, and it made perfect sense to me.

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