Away from Her

eldest daughter was again and again (my mother died fifteen years ago)— passed away this summer, days before we completed the film.
    And somewhere in the years between reading the story for the first time, and optioning it to adapt into a screenplay, my love for my best friend, David, hit me like a Mack truck. I’d like to think this would have happened without my entering into the world of this story, but I’m not sure it would have happened as clearly or as fast, and I’m not sure he would have waited that much longer. As it happened, this story helped me move my idea of what love was, and specifically, unconditional love, into something much less melodramatic and typically cinematic, yet unfathomably deep and complicated in its own right. As Fiona does in the story, I proposed to him on a windy day, and he wondered if I was joking.
    It was an incredible process to sit beside David,after three years of marriage, and edit the final film together. Of course, as we sat in that dark room in front of the Avid, we fought and betrayed and loved each other in ways that have added considerably to our capacity for
endurance.
    This story reshaped my idea of love, gave me a keener eye into the experience of my grandmother as she moved out of her home and into her final years, and gave me the opportunity to delve into all this with one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, Julie Christie. Those are the threads it gathered for me. I’m sure that anyone who reads it will find a unique design embroidered for them, and that it will be as diverse and unique as their lives are.
    I’ve read “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” dozens of times, and each time I am amazed at its precision, its lack of sentimentality, its searing clarity and its ability to reach so far into me with each reading. More than all that, I still marvel that one day, a while ago now, it held my hand and led me to a place that I am very, very grateful to be.
    Sarah Polley
February 2007

The Bear Came Over the Mountain

    Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to strange tirades with an absentminded smile. All kinds of people, rich or shabby-looking, delivered these tirades, and keptcoming and going and arguing and conferring, sometimes in foreign accents. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and this activity in her house was probably the reason.
    Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics, though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also she played the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired, gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his smalltown phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.
    “Do you think it would be fun—” Fiona shouted. “Do you think it would be fun if we got married?”
    He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
    Just before they left their house Fiona noticed a mark on the kitchen floor. It came from the cheapblack house shoes she had been wearing earlier in the day.
    “I thought they’d quit doing that,” she said in a tone of ordinary annoyance and perplexity, rubbing at the gray smear that looked as if it had been made by a greasy crayon.
    She remarked that she would never have to do this again, since she wasn’t taking those shoes with her.
    “I guess I’ll be dressed up all the time,” she said. “Or semi dressed up. It’ll be sort of like in a hotel.”
    She rinsed out the rag she’d been using and hung it on the rack inside the door under the sink. Then she put on her