Page 9 of Bears Not Included

But no one was more wrong than my father because he was the one who sent her away to get better when I was seven years old, while he told anyone who would ask that my mom was at the spa or visiting relatives. He was the one who crushed her pills and mixed them into her soup, making her a ghost in a human body.

He was the one who locked her away in the attic when he thought she needed a time-out. A time-out from being crazy since she had a dirty laundry list of mental illnesses diagnosed by as many doctors over the years, but always in a different state across the continent.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, major depression, attention-deficit disorder... feeling alone in a room full of people.

But this changes everything for me. I want to prove my mom was just misunderstood and not mentally ill. That her love for fairytales, her journals, notes, and drawings were not the rantings of a woman dispossessed of her faculties but someone with a passion for believing in the unbelievable.

The more my father told her she was mentally unstable, the harder she fought to be heard. The more medications she was given.

Is it really such a bad thing to believe that something actually happened? She wasn’t hurting anyone. But she was also fragile, and my father could have just allowed her to be herself and indulged her a little. It would have made her so happy. She loved him so much and asked nothing else of him.

And while I’m doing this for my mom, I’m doing this for my father as well. Not to get a chance to say I told you so, but I think I want him to love her again.

I understand only too well the level of puerility of my thoughts, but if my father could see she wasn’t as mentally unstable as he believed, that she hadn’t lost her mind, that he had only misunderstood her, he could love her again.

The way he loved her in the pictures I had seen of them that graced the fireplace mantle when they were still young and before I was born. The same Polaroid images he had removed the day after her death and refused to give them to me when I begged and cried for them. There is not a single reminder of my mom in the house, except for me.

The day she died, not even hours afterward, my father gathered up her journals and notes, put them into their boxes, and told our housekeeper, Mrs. Rosely, to burn them immediately.

But Mrs. Rosely, who tried her best to look after me and my mom, didn’t burn them. She stored them in the attic of our house, deep inside a wooden chest my father would never think about opening.

What my father called my mom’s embarrassing rantings stayed in our attic for ten years until Mrs. Rosely wrote me a letter, telling me she had kept my mom’s things and maybe I was ready to revisit that side of her.

To this day, my father doesn’t know I have everything of my mom’s that he wanted burned after her death.

And here I am now.

I spent a year pouring over those journals and notes, and my memory was triggered as I remembered things my mom would tell me. I used to be in awe of how she described the garden and the mountains, and the sketches she would whip up so easily made me admire her more. She kept calling the mountains the bear’s beard.

I took everything she said as a clue, and together with the girls at Fairytale Femme Fatales, we scoured through hundreds of images of mountain peaks. I also remember my mom saying over and over that it was a secret, and then she’d place her fingers on her lips as if to shush me.

She would grab me by my skinny arms and whisper that it’s a secret, then shush me, and when I told her I knew, I knew it was our secret, she would get so frustrated, and she’d hit her head so hard against the wall that my father would tie her hands up.

It’s a secret. Shh…

My breakthrough came when Skyler asked me who my mom really was. As in her heritage. And that’s when I cracked the code that lay hidden in my mom’s madness.

Armed with nothing but my mom’s maiden name, Winston, and because I couldn’t risk asking my father anything about her, I did a deep dive into her genealogy. I took DNA tests and I almost lived in the library researching my mom’s heritage when I should have been studying. I went through archive after archive and discovered my mom had European ancestry in her blood.

And suddenly, everything fell into place. When my mom said bear’s beard mountains, she meant if you tilted your head a little, you would see a mountain range that looked like a bear with a beard.

When she said,” It’s a secret, shh,” she meant Secret Hush Valley, a little village at the foot of the mountain that had almost been wiped out during a battle that was never documented, so their enemy remained unknown.

As the village tried to rebuild itself, an Englishman and his family arrived, ready to help rebuild. Alfred and his wife became the owners of a goods store in Secret Hush Valley, and when I saw a black-and-white picture of Alfred’s wife, it was as if I were staring at my own mom.

My mom, Corinne Ann Winston, was a descendant of Alfred Winston—the servant who had worked for the three bears and Goldenia, who later became three gentleman brothers, Bernard, Barrett, and Bruin Ursid, and their golden-haired bride.

It had been Alfred Winston who had tried to sell their story to a publisher out of desperation to help his sick child.

My mom wasn’t crazy. She was right.

Chapter Six

Livia

Secret Hush Valley, the town at the foot of the mountain, no longer exists. It was wiped out after a devastating flood, which also killed Alfred Winston, his wife, and two of his sons. There’s no account of his other four children, and obviously at least one of them survived, or my mom wouldn’t have existed.

According to the timeline I put together, Alfred and his family had possibly only lived in the town for around three years before the flood.

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