The teddy bear had always been special to her. From the day she was born, quite precisely. That’s when it was given to Devon. A gift from her mother that was, at the time, about the same size as Devon herself. In the process of transforming from a baby to a toddler, however, she started to eclipse the bear in height. But that didn’t make her feel any less like Reg was her peer. Reg being short for Reginald, which was what the toy company, Regal Bears, had decided to name it. Reginald, Regal—it was correlative. That, and Reginald was a pompous sort of name befitting someone of noble blood. And, to that point, as far as Devon was concerned, Reg was very much the king of her realm. The king of her entire world, as it were.

The older she became, however, the less acceptable—the less “cute”—her attachment became. She was no longer encouraged to turn to Reg as a source of comfort and companionship, as her mother once had before (though never her father, who found emotional attachments to inanimate objects to be a glaring sign of weakness), but rather, advised that she was “spending too much time” with him. And that maybe she “ought to take a break” from Reg for a while. “Wean herself off” him, as it were. Though Devon never conceded to doing this, she was horrified to enter her room one day, at age five, and find that Reg had vanished. There was no sign of him anywhere in the house, even though she looked in every room, bursting into tears each time she realized he wasn’t in there either.

Though it pained Leslie to do it, she figured it was better to separate her daughter from Reg now, when she wouldn’t remember it later, than to let their bond solidify even more unhealthily by not doing the “hard thing” sooner. As for Richard, her husband, he wholly approved of the maneuver, saying it was good “character-building” for Devon. That she had been too spoiled and coddled up to now, and he had no intention of raising some kind of weakling.

“She’ll never make it in this world if you don’t toughen her up a bit,” Richard mused as he lit his pipe in the easy chair situated next to the fireplace. If Devon had been able to see this scene at a more sentient age, she would have laughed at the hypocrisy of a man who looked so comfortable as he declared something like this. Perhaps it was fortunate, then, that she didn’t. It delayed the sense of rage toward her parents that wouldn’t dawn on her until well after what should have been the rebellious teenage years. Instead, the rebellion activated when it was no longer “relevant.” That is to say, when she was in her mid-twenties, and she started to think a lot about some of the fucked-up shit her parents did to her that she had previously ignored—starting with the hiding of the bear. Or was it the full-tilt destruction of the bear? She had never known for sure, and had always been too afraid to ask. Perhaps holding out hope that, one day, her mother would simply come forward and present the bear to her, no explanation provided. But Devon wouldn’t need an explanation if Reg was given back to her. The only thing she would care about was having him in her arms again. Even to this day, she could still feel him like a phantom limb.

Over the years, she tried to ignore this feeling. And for a while, as Richard had predicted, she was young enough to “forget” about the trauma of losing her best friend. But like all “forgotten” traumas, what really happened was suppression. The coping mechanism of champions. Until it turns into the defense mechanism of losers—losing the game of lying to themselves, that is. And Devon could no longer lie to herself. For so long, she was aware that something had been taken from her at an early age. That something was missing. And she also knew it was entirely her parents’ fault. That they had been the ones to make her feel like this. Like there was an inexplicable void inside of her.

The day finally came when she could no longer keep her emotions bottled, choosing the most random and inopportune of moments to explode on both Leslie and Richard. Namely, she did so in Richard’s hospital room after he had just suffered a heart attack. The outburst was contained at first, with only some minor irritation expressed over Leslie making Devon park about a mile away from the building because of her increasingly irrational phobia about her car being dinged by some ruffian and/or general incompetent. But then it escalated with the rapidity of a dog picking up the scent of an intruder and subsequently barking its head off. She proceeded to tell them how she had resented the absence of Reg ever since the day it occurred. That she had never forgotten about it or him. This is when she took her opportunity to demand if Reg was still “alive” and, if so, could they please hand him over now that she was an adult and they had absolutely no say in who she could and couldn’t “hang out with.”

Leslie looked on at her daughter with what she hoped was an expression of neutrality. She was doing the best she could to appear “muted,” but honestly, Leslie found the drivel that Devon was spouting to be truly appalling. Not to mention very concerning to her. Almost as if to further prove she had been right in the first place to confiscate that damned bear, which she wished she had never bought for Devon at all. Maybe a stuffed unicorn would have been a source of less fixation to her, who knows? But it was too late. Besides, the teddy bear is a classic, an essential, a must-have for any baby and child. How could she have known that her daughter would develop such an unhealthy obsession with this…this thing? It was only meant to be of interest for a brief blip in childhood and then, poof, time to move on. How could Devon have such a bizarre form of arrested development? Were there other cases like hers, Leslie wondered. Apart from male pervert types like Prince Andrew, that is.

Realizing she had zoned out a bit with all these thoughts swirling around in her head, she snapped to attention when Devon screamed at her, “Mom! Mom! Are you even listening to me? I need to know if Reg is still in your care.”

Without hesitating, Leslie replied, “No. I got rid of him when I took him away from you.” It was a lie so natural she couldn’t even control it coming out of her mouth.

“What do you mean ‘got rid of’? You threw him in the trash? You donated him? What?”

“Yes. I put him in a bag with some clothes I was donating to Goodwill.”

The silence between them allowed for her father’s heart monitor to beep with an especial kind of loudness. One that was mitigated again upon Devon shouting, “I don’t fucking believe you!”

“Well, I’m sorry, but that’s the reality, and you’re just going to have to accept it. To accept that what we did was for your own good.”

“How? How was it for my own good if I’m not functioning as well as I could be because I still think about Reg? About wanting him around when I feel at my lowest—which is all the time because he’s not around.”

Leslie stared at her in horror. “Are you hearing yourself? You sound absolutely insane.”

“And you sound like a fucking bitch!” She turned on her heel before she could see the reaction to that, though she did take note of Richard’s heart monitor beeps increasing in the aftermath. She didn’t care; she had to get out of that room. Away from the lies. There was no doubt in her mind that Reg was still “kicking” somewhere in Leslie’s house. That she couldn’t possibly be that cruel. That some shred of humanity in her had prompted the conservation of Reg for “posterity.” Or for Devon to unearth among her parents’ possessions someday after they were both dead. So obviously, Leslie was a liar. Which meant that Devon would not talk to her again until she decided to become a truth teller instead. Surely some good old-fashioned silent treatment would rattle Leslie enough to make her talk.

But no, as it turned out, Leslie had a shockingly high threshold for being ignored by her own daughter. Just another stab in the heart that Devon didn’t see coming from her mother. How “okay” she was with not being spoken to for a full month. It was on the day of their “not speaking anniversary,” however, that Leslie was incited to break the silence. This after an unexplained and highly disturbing experience. It happened when she left her room to go into the laundry and throw some dirty clothes into the wash. No sooner had she returned than she noticed a hostile change in the room: the presence of Reg turned face down on her bed, the stuffing in his back partially spilling out. Almost as if he had snagged himself on something. Perhaps in the process of magically removing himself from the back of Leslie’s closet, where she had kept him hidden for so many years. “Magically” was, in fact, the only word Leslie could think of to describe what had just happened. Apart from “demonically.” And she really didn’t want to use that word choice in lieu of something less hair-raising. Such hair-raising already being further compounded by being alone in the house since Richard was at a physical therapy session.

It was then that Leslie decided Devon must have channeled her desire to see Reg again so earnestly and relentlessly that it somehow actually made Reg emerge from his hiding place. Or rather, Leslie’s hiding place for him. She couldn’t handle the idea of even trying to touch Reg again, let alone move him back to where he was. And that’s when she decided it was time to throw in the towel, raise the white flag—all those cliches. She could no longer keep up the pretense of having disposed of Reg. It had officially become more trouble than it was worth.

***

Devon was there within twenty minutes upon receiving the news. She was surprised that at no point on her pedal-to-the-metal journey did a cop end up stopping her for speeding. But she had to get to him. No matter the risk. When she saw the state of him—turned over and looking like the teddy bear equivalent of a rape victim on her mother’s bed—it was all she could do to keep from bursting into tears. Tears of both joy and pain. It was quickly the former that eclipsed the latter. Because she knew that she could mend Reg. That he could be fixed. Her relationship with her parents, though…that wasn’t as likely. And while she was grateful that Leslie had at last come clean to her, it didn’t make up for the decades’ worth of lying. She asked Leslie if it had truly been worth it to keep her and Reg apart like that, all for the sake of trying to ensure she was “normal,” only to fuck her up all the more. Leslie insisted that it had been, and that she wouldn’t do anything differently. But maybe if she had at least said (even if she didn’t really feel it) she would have wanted to do things differently, it would have altered Devon’s perspective of her. Instead, it only solidified it.

In this sense, maybe it was for the best that Leslie and Richard had “revoked” Reg from her all those moons ago. Because it made her see that her parents were never really “on her side.” Never actually wanted what was best for her. Only their rigid version of what “best” meant. Maybe she had conjured Reg out from hiding with the sheer power of her mind, constantly centering her thoughts on him—with particular passion during the last few months. Thoughts that were too formidable to be ignored by the universe. And so it opted to throw her a bone. Or bear. Allowing Devon to ride off into the proverbial sunset with him as the sun set on her already frayed bond with Leslie and Richard.