“Don’t leave the backyard, Jodi!”
“Okay, Mommy, I won’t!”
That last conversation echoed in Sarah’s mind like a brave shout into a dark night. She closed her eyes, gave a small shake of the head, and opened them again, holding the steering wheel with vise-grips of concentration. The trees, lit only by the weak headlights of her car, seemed to loom and sway with an unearthly rhythm. There was no moon in the November sky.
They had never found her daughter’s body. Search parties had looked and looked, and yet somehow, a five-year-old little girl had eluded all of them. It was clear to the police from signs Sarah was unable to see that Jodi had wandered into the woods near the backyard, but after that the trail had vanished. They had searched for almost six weeks. She kept her first loose tooth longer than that, Sarah had said. We understand, they had answered her.
Four months later, they were still telling her how much they understood. She was so sick of being told that everyone understood what she was going through, that everyone somehow knew how hard this must be for her. If they had ever really felt even a shred of what Sarah had felt, they wouldn’t have given up on the search parties. It was clear the moment that everyone stopped caring, because they began bringing over meals and sending cards that might as well have read, “This is so we can check our little box and forget about you and your dead daughter.”
Sarah closed her eyes again, longer this time, and listened to the song of the crickets lining the road. She opened them too late to stop or swerve or do anything. All she saw was the flash of the deer’s eyes before the impact jolted her chest like a defibrillator. The world shook itself apart and slowly realigned.
She sat in the car for maybe ten minutes after it came to a halt, staring wide-eyed at nothing before she recollected herself. The airbag hadn’t gone off – she had bought the car used – but after a cursory self-examination she seemed to be relatively uninjured. She dug in the space between the seats, found her cellphone, called 9-1-1, and gave the operator her info and approximate location in a slightly dazed voice before hanging up. You’re not supposed to hang up, she thought belatedly, staring down at the phone in her hands. Then she tossed it into the passenger seat, resigned.
As the shock began to wear off, she relived the moment in her mind, saw again the slender silhouette of the deer, its eyes looking straight at her with that uncanny, almost knowing look – as if it had recognized her…
It can’t be, she thought. It can’t. She opened her door, stepped out, and walked around the front end of the car, noticing dimly that the front of the car was mostly totaled, though the headlights still cast a weak beam over the pavement. The impact had flung the deer almost ten feet down the road, where it lay still. Sarah approached it slowly, trying to discern if it was alive or dead and wondering which would be easier to bear. Her shoe brushed a loose rock, and the deer moved its head weakly to watch her with one large eye. It was that eye – the briefest flicker of blue – and Sarah knew.
“Jodi?” she whispered, breath frosting and writhing away in the beam of the headlights. She dropped to her knees on the asphalt beside the creature, trying not to look at its caved-in side and crazily-sprawled legs. “Can – can that really be you?” She took its head in her hands as she would an injured sparrow and laid it in her lap, thinking of nights when Jodi had awoken from a nightmare and come flying into Sarah’s room, crying softly. The deer made its own soft sound beneath her gentle touch, and Sarah hushed it soothingly, stroking its nose with one hand, heedless of the biting cold in her fingers. “Don’t worry, baby,” she said quietly. “Mommy’s here now.”
The policeman who arrived fifteen minutes later found her in that same position. “Ma’am, are you hurt?” he asked quickly after exiting his car. Sarah shook her head mutely. The officer’s eyes went from her face to the deer in her lap. “Well, ma’am, I’m not sure it’s safe to hold it like that. You might want to move away from it, in case it’s sick or something.” He did not say that the merciful thing to do would be to end the animal’s life quickly.
Sarah shook her head again. A long silence ensued as the officer stood assessing the situation. “Well,” he said at last, “It’s not a very big deer; I’d say…”
“Female,” Sarah said distantly. “Female. Five years. Five and a half.”
“Yeah, actually,” the officer said, surprised, appraising her with his eye. “Big on deer hunting, huh?”
Sarah shook her head a third time, rocking the deer’s head back and forth gently. “I just know,” she said.
# # #
Stephen Banks is nineteen years old and has been writing fiction, flash, and poetry for at least ten of those years. When he isn’t writing, he can probably be found playing piano, using long words, reading good books, or staring off into space. He lives in North Carolina.
Photo: Scott Carroll
