“Yes, are you?” She said and he nodded that he was fine. Looking to the street she saw a crumbled body of brown fur. Quickly she got out of the car and ran to the small deer. It was a baby, a fawn. Blood spotted the fur aside the white splotches of youth.
It was not dead. Breath filled the chest, bringing it up and down in a hard labor. She kneeled beside the fawn, and stroked its fur in a gentle caress. Trying to calm the deer, she whispered to it how everything will be ok.
“He’s still alive,” she said as he approached her. But it was not said in hope of a better life. They both knew it was too hurt to survive. They both knew that they had to end its suffering.
She watched as he took a jagged rock. Told her to look away. She brought her hand up to her face and covered her eyes. She heard the sound. The crunch. The death. She kept her face covered until she felt his hand reach to her chin and turned her to face him. “I’m going to move the body away from the road so no one hits him again.”
He wiped away the tears from her face; the deer’s blood smudged her cheeks as he did so. Then he moved back to the deer and she followed. One moment can define a lifetime. One moment can set all else in motion. One moment can be the last, she thought as he lifted and carried the deer’s body to the overgrown ferns on the side of the road. He picked one flower and gave it to her. Such beauty to signify such horror. Why did flowers become an offering to the dead? Such contrast to the rot that will come. The emptiness that the reaper’s hand takes away. Did they show that something with beauty can still spring from the ground, where below worms eat away at carcasses? That death in turn brings life and hardship sparks light.
As if reading her mind, her boyfriend circled his hand in her own, careful not to crush the flower that he had given her. “I wish I saw him.”
She had seen the deer though.
That was the weird part about it, the part that she could not separate fact from fiction. She remembered the sun hitting her eyes, so she had shaded them and looked toward the road. The deer was standing there, but not as one would expect. It was not startled, like a deer caught in literal headlights, but it looked as if rot and emptiness had already come even before the car hit it. Was it just a foretelling of what would be, she wondered, or was she mistaken.
Letting her hand fall from his, she placed the flower on the deer. She did not want to look up at the fawn’s head, for the image plastered in her mind, painted by the sounds of the rock crushing the skull was enough. Instead, she focused on the splotched pattern on brown and white of its body. It seemed frail, not just because it was young. Was the fawn’s mother close by, would it look for its baby all of her life without knowing what had happened?
Again they drove through the natural gateway of green but now quietly. No smile escaped her lips, no laughter filled the car. He felt terrible. He should have seen the deer and swerved around it. The fawn’s mangled body played second fiddle to the image of its skull. The sound it made as he brought the rock to the deer’s head. The feeling of it break under his hit. And the feel of how it weighed like nothing as he picked up its lifeless body to move it from the road. She must hate him.
But suddenly she broke the silence and broke his preconceptions.
“After I moved in with you,” she said, continuing the conversation they had before the accident, “I found out what a big heart you have. And how your love was without end, so much so, that I stopped looking for the horizon. I found out how much I loved you back.”
Her voice washed away the darkness that had shaded his thoughts and brought the beauty of the surrounding and of her back to him.
Hitting the deer was a defining moment. One that could bring tragedy, yet he wanted to change it into something else. He took the ring from his pocket.
“I have been waiting for a perfect moment for the last few months,” he said. “But I haven’t found one yet. I know, this is far from a perfect moment ... probably the opposite of one. But maybe it is in life’s imperfect moments that we grow the most, that causes the most change and the most clarity. For I know now that not only do I want you in my life, but you are my life.”
He hoped she would say yes. He hoped that their path would intertwine into eternity.
He looked over at his wife, concern marking his features as he swept away a stray hair from her face. So much had happened since he had proposed to her on the roads of New York. They had married. She had gotten pregnant. However, the past few months of her pregnancy had been difficult. Tremors had started. Odd behavior changes. At first the doctors blamed it on the hormones of pregnancy. Then on a virus or bacteria. Give it time, it will pass, they said. She took antibiotics and other drugs, however worried that they would affect their baby, but knowing that they had to stop this downward spiral.
When those did not work, the doctors began to think it was a mental disorder triggered by the pregnancy. And when she got worse, they had her committed to a mental health institute where she could get the care she needed. He just hoped that once they had the baby she would get better. But now he had started having the same tremors.
He hid them from her. He did not want to add to the stress she was going through. He had to be strong for her.
This isn’t going to be forever. He had to believe that, and the idea that one day he would be standing next to her again. The sun lighting up her hair as she looked at him, again like how she used to, again with the love they shared for each other. Yet every moment that future seemed more distant, as a new one became clear. She was slipping away from him and he was powerless to stop it. And now, with the tremors, he was following her decline. Following her footsteps away. Not even the hopes of the baby could bring peace. He stood, letting his hand fall from hers. He hated seeing her like this, chained to the bed. It was said to prevent any self-harm, but he knew it was not just ‘self-harm’ that it was there to stop. She was burning up, she screamed in pain and anguish.
“Someone help. Please we need a doctor. We need to go to the hospital,” he shouted, pleading to deaf ears.
Pain came in waves. These last months it felt as if she was lost at sea, further and further from the coasts she was pulled. She tried so hard to stop it. To grab any lines her husband threw her way, to pull herself back. But despite her efforts she drifted further. And now the child inside her was coming as she herself was caught in a final and deadly riptide.
“I love you,” she whispered to her husband, as tears came to her eyes. But not the sweet saltiness ran down her face, as the smell of iron taunted her demise. She screamed again, struggling against the padded straps that weighed her down. Hearing parts of conversations, her husband frantic. The doctor working.
She felt the straps being released from around her wrists. It must have been her husband, no longer wanting her to struggle against the chains that held her down. But release her it did, as the sea of her dreams turned dark and dragged her mind down into its unending abyss.
A baby cried. She felt blood stream down her legs. Too much. She felt her husband’s touch along her forehead. It made her momentarily remember when he had taken her face in his hands on the road in New York. Had wiped away her tears. Then even that moment was lost from her mind.
She had to get away. Had to run from this confinement. She tried. Tried to leave.
The doctor was in her way. She wanted to escape, to force herself pass him and away. She clawed at his face in attack. His hands came up in defense and wrapped around her throat choking her.
Gasping for air, struggling against him. But suddenly her struggle ended. The strangulation stopped. Air again. Her husband had hit the doctor over the head to protect her. The doctor lay motionless now, and now her husband’s arms came around her.
His touch was not like the doctors. He did not move in harm ... but still she acted. She felt his skin come to her mouth. The gush of his blood ran down her lips. No. Why? She could not stop. Life escaped her husband and came into her. Life escaped herself as the trauma grew into too much. Blood pour
ed from her wounds of childbirth and she fell on the floor in her love’s embrace, enclosed by red. Husband and wife now dead. Surrounded by the newborn’s cries.
As the flower was to the deer. Now the baby was to them.
Acknowledgments
I started writing this book in April 2007, though I put publishing it on pause due to life circumstance and having the story grow more within my mind every year. I would like to thank Linda Bertrand, Spencer Beaver, and Paul Beaver who contributed to this book in the editing process. Thank you to Cristina Tănase for the beautiful cover design. A special thanks to TGC, especially Jenny Jones, where I found my inspiration initially. Finally, I am profoundly grateful to Eric Walker, Nicholas Borgen, and Mauricio Borgen, who have helped me during all of the years of writing and revising.
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