Mr Bear

The thing about fire is that it spreads so very quickly. One moment you’ve watched your mom light a candle on the windowsil, and you can smell the vanilla scent wafting through the air. You’re setting out the tea set for your dolls, the same way you do every day. Mr Bear sits front and centre, the most important guest of honour waiting for his drink.

The next moment, you’re flying through the streets in the back of an ambulance, soot stuck in the back of your throat, the awful smell of smoke covering every part of you.

What followed was the most awful few months of your so-far rather short life. In and out of different hospital rooms, surgeries all the time, strangers hovering at the window watching you like an animal at the zoo.

You remember the zoo, seeing the monkeys through their barred cages. That’s how you felt - trapped, all the choices taken away from you. Gone from the only home you’d ever known, never to see it again.

You overhear a lot of odd conversations, seeing as you are on a lot of pain medication and are in and out of sleep most of the time. The first few days it was a coma, induced by the doctors to keep you from suffering too much with the pain. After that, time has been altered for quite some time. Awake one moment in the middle of the day, you blink and suddenly it’s night time, all the lights are dulled to help you sleep.

After a few weeks you end up in a shared space. The burned skin has healed enough that there is little worry of infection, one of your doctors tells you, so you can have a roommate now. That doctor is your favourite; he wears a white coat with some elephants embroidered on the front, and when you have the energy, you trace your small fingers over the print. It’s been weeks, but you still can’t feel anything with your left hand. It’s still there, but was burned so badly that it hardly resembles a hand any more.

Your mom visits all the time. She asked to stay with you at first, and you didn’t understand when she cried over you and said, ‘see you tomorrow’. You’d never spent a night without her, not even with the grandparents or just with dad. She’d seen you through every nighttime since the day you were born. It was almost as hard for you as it was for her, heading to a hotel room with a few small bags and a husband, no child in tow. You didn’t understand, you still don’t, why you spent so many nights and nightmares alone, comforted only by the nurses working late. They didn’t sing your song, didn’t brush your hair, didn’t hold you close and whisper reassurances in your tiny ears. You were alone, for the first time. So, so alone.

You ask for Mr Bear all the time. Mom and dad have tried everything to keep you calm, but whenever you say those words, mom starts to cry and dad doesn't know what to do with himself. They tell you he got lost in the fire, and everyone has been looking for him for weeks. You're not sure you believe them.

When it's finally time to be discharged, you don't know what to do with yourself. So excited to go home, to see mom every day and night, to get away from these awful fluorescent lights and beeping machines and strangers at the zoo.

It isn’t until you drove past the street you used to live on, with the big house and the green garden and all the toys you could have ever needed, that you realise the world was really, truly wrong. You don’t understand - mom said you were going home. Home is the house with your artwork decorating the fridge door, where you had your first big birthday party with all your friends from nursery. The place where you had tea parties with all the barbies in your collection, where you accidentally drew all over your bedroom door with marker pens because dad left the wrong stationery out in your reach.

Home is home.

This place… not home.

The ‘new’ house is so much smaller. A single story, so all the rooms were within a few paces of each other. Much easier to get around in, especially with the wheelchair.

‘It’s only temporary,’ mom tells you. ‘We’ll be home soon enough.’

You truly hope she means it. Changes have been happening all around you for months, and all you want was your own bed in your own room, scribbles on the walls and a tea set still waiting for you to serve it.

‘A fresh start,’ dad says when he shows you your bedroom. A room no bigger than a shoebox, with a colourful blanket and a brand new bear on the bed.

‘That’s not Mr Bear!’ you cry, and do your best to move out of the room. Your arms are too small to manouver the wheelchair away, so you sit there helpless, waiting for mom to comfort you. Her hugs almost feel foreign, it’s been so long since you felt her warmth around you.

‘A new beginning,’ she says through her tears, looking around at this different house, different life, different child. ‘Together.’