A wounded deer leaps hig.., p.8
A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, page 8
I open the thick, inky cover and flip through the inside pages, blank and new.
“I chose this one because it doesn’t have any lines, so you can also use it to sketch, to draw. If you want. Do you like it?”
I keep moving my fingers across the thick, soft pages, look up at her and ask what I should write about first.
“My advice,” she tells me, leaning over to hold me by the shoulders so she can look right into my eyes, “is to write about the things you feel and notice and want.”
Feel and notice and want.
A clap of thunder sounds in the distance and rain starts coming down. The air turns colder, but sweeter, too, and the softened dirt beneath our feet starts to go slick. We scramble to fold up the chair and the easel, turn the painted side of the canvas down so the rain won’t mess up Mom’s work. I tuck my new journal into the back of my pants. She takes off her black coat and lays it over the painting. She doesn’t look like a crow anymore—now she’s just a regular person trying to not let this one thing be ruined.
We make it back to the house as the rain turns from a steady drizzle to heavy drops beating down. She helps me out of my wet clothes and wraps a towel around me, drying off my hair and warming me up.
“I wanted to tell you that I’ve met someone new,” she says.
The calm, easy feelings that have been building crumble out of me, littering the floor with dust, and my stomach teeth start grinding around—they’ve had time to rest and now are ready to finish the job—figuring out what to eat next.
“He’s different from the others, and you’ll like him. He wants to meet you, too. I told him all about you.”
Mom says she loves me and she’s going to make us some hot tea with honey, for me to sit by the heater and warm up. I pick up the canvas and lean it against the wall, sit down, and look at my reflection. There I am in my field, surrounded by the greens and browns, all alone—no Moonshadow and no Deer and no Old Oak. They’re not in the painting, but the shadows casting off Mom are almost reaching my headless body, alone forever, with my arms frozen at my sides, like I’ll never move again.
Under the fig tree, three slugs make their way across a muddy expanse. I’m outside in bare feet, letting the wet dirt push up between my toes, each step a sucking sound. I squat down low to watch them—brown bodies with ovals of dark—leaving their trails. I put my face next to theirs, hold my breath. They stop moving, but their antennas are working hard. Mr. Kohl read us a book chapter about how a slug’s antennas are actually its eyes. That they don’t see the same way we do, but they can see the light in ways we can’t.
I back up to let them go on their way, making sure I am not blocking their ability to see. I close my eyes and try to let my antennas come out, to try to understand the brightness as well as they do, but heavy clouds have come over us now, and everything is a shadow.
The rain comes down in sheets of silver, and the wind blows from the west. The trees lean toward us, listening in. Right when we woke up, all the lights went out in a poof, and the refrigerator stopped humming. Mom gets out candles in case we still need them later, puts on water for tea, and lights some incense. Mom loves a storm, especially on a Saturday morning when there’s nowhere to go.
I haven’t met her new boyfriend—I imagine him coming over with a gleaming belt buckle, demanding to be fed, pounding on the walls and yelling about his problems. Then I try to picture someone like Kaleb, someone quieter who pays attention to things and offers to set the table, fold napkins. Whoever he is, it is possible she already got rid of him, because she’s not saying anything—though she did go out last night after she thought I was asleep. I heard the door double-lock and the sound of the car roaring to life. We never got rid of our old Volkswagen but it hasn’t broken down lately—it understands there’s no one to fix it anymore. Falling back asleep is easier with Moonshadow for company. And unless something happens, Mom won’t stay away for too long. I asked her if she visits her new boyfriend at night and she said no, she can’t visit him at night, that it’s not allowed. I imagine her out driving alone in the dark, listening for the night herons. She doesn’t want to tell me where she goes but I know the most important part—she goes away from me.
This morning she’s wearing her wrinkled clothes from yesterday, her hair a bird’s nest in the back. She’s bitten down her nails and now they’re pink with dried blood around the edges. She sees me looking and sets her slender hands down in her lap to rest while the wind helps the trees scratch the roof.
“What’s the first thing you remember?” she asks.
I remember leather shoe laces and learning to tie them, I remember oranges poked with cloves simmering on the stove in water, I remember a stray cat, white but dirty, that Mom tried to nurse back to health, I remember the crows that sat on the branches of the dead tree all winter, I remember the smell of daphne blooming in February, I remember feeding the ducks in Mill Creek, I remember a yellow raincoat, I remember an ice storm and icicles like daggers, I remember blood on the yellow linoleum floor, I remember drinking from the hose, I remember Mom slamming cupboards and swearing, I remember her war cry: goddamnsonofamotherfuckingbitch. I remember the smell of the new books in the library, I remember how big the big kids were, I remember the ramp to the kindergarten classroom, I remember show-and-tell and not bringing anything, I remember pulling out a tooth too soon and the tearing feel of it, I remember baths with Mom back when she would still get in with me, warm, I remember being even smaller and how impossible that seems already.
But those aren’t the first things. I look at her pale lips and her pale eyes. I go back as far as I can.
“I remember nursing from your breast,” I say and look away, but Mom doesn’t get weird about body parts, “That’s the very first thing.”
She taught me to say breasts, not boobs, and the difference between labia and the vagina, too, and that dicks and cocks are nothing more than penises. Mom taught me these things after she picked me up from the YMCA and I told her I’d heard some boys talking about cunts in the hallway.
“If anyone uses the word cunt around you, get away from them as fast as you can,” she’d instructed me.
Those boys had red sores on their faces and wallet chains clanking against their hips, their lanky bodies cloaked in heavy mean-boy smells—motor oil and sweat and frustration.
Mom nods at my nursing memory and says I have a strong mind, like an elephant.
“And I also remember that bottle shaped like a bear and how you always warmed the milk up for me.”
I remember the bear’s smile and that he was wearing blue overalls, and how the milk always made my insides warm.
“I was upset when you got rid of that bottle,” I tell her, missing it now more than ever. Maybe if she had kept it, my stomach wouldn’t hurt so much. I could hide it at school to help me with my stomach knives.
“Yeah,” she says about the bottle. “I’m sorry for getting rid of it, but I thought it was time. And I have a problem with getting rid of things too soon.”
She smiles a sad smile, and she is not thinking of the bottle but of bigger things, men and others, maybe me, too. Maybe we will all be gotten rid of when the time is right.
“How about you?” I ask her. “What’s your first memory?”
“I remember being so young I couldn’t talk yet, and I was being taken care of by my Aunt Josephine—you never met her—my father’s younger sister. She had always made everyone in the family nervous but even more so after she found a Ouija board at an estate sale when she was around thirteen. She started doing seances with her friends in the tool shed when all the other kids from her school were at the Saturday night dances downtown. She wore old-timey dresses made of heavy black lace and let her hair grow wild and tangled. People stayed away from her for the most part—no one took the time to understand her. My father always said I reminded him of her, and I knew it wasn’t a compliment—knew he thought there was something wrong with me, too. But that was later.”
Mom rubs her hands, giving each of her palms a hard massage. Her hands are tired and cracked, her nails are still all jagged and bitten down. She stretches her fingers wide like they’re thick bird wings and she is going to use them to fly away, but then she sighs and continues.
“The night Josephine was taking care of me, she set me on the floor and something bad was happening because she was screaming No, No, Please no. I couldn’t see what was going on and couldn’t move either. Her scared voice rang in my ears and the carpet smelled of metal and something left out to rot.”
I can see Mom as a baby being held down by this fear, unable to say anything. It’s the same feeling I’ve gotten when I read in the Guinness Book about people being buried alive, where no one can hear you, with nothing at all to do but lie there in the dark hoping for it to end. There was a community college student in Medford who was kidnapped and buried in a box underground for three whole days. It was on a TV special Mom let me watch when she was getting ready for a date with one of her boyfriends. I can’t remember which one.
Sometimes in my closet now I have to leave the door open to make sure I’m not locked in and can get up and move around whenever I want. The knives in my stomach started to cut when Mom drove us downtown to where the bigger, nicer houses are, because one family had dug up their real grass and replaced it with plastic grass. All I could think of were the worms trapped underneath, not able to get back up to the air and sky and not understanding why. That’s the worst part—no one even thinks to explain to the worms what is happening to their whole world.
Mom tells me she was born in the 1950s, and those weren’t the best years for being a kid—how the pediatrician told her parents not to hug her too much or at all, that too much affection was unhealthy for children.
“All the parents of that time had survived the Great Depression and World War II,” she says, “They knew too much about scarcity and damage and wanted what they thought was a more practical approach.”
There is Mom at three, with her arms extended upwards but no arms reaching back down.
“Things weren’t explained to children back then,” she continues. “When I had you, I wanted to make sure I explained things—explained things carefully and well. And I wanted you to have a lot of information so things weren’t so scary, and to be able to feel a lot of feelings and for it to be okay. I wanted you to have that freedom. That’s why I tell you so many things. I want you to know yourself and the world and to make your own decisions…” She drifts off. “But it’s all been a lot harder than I thought.”
The rain comes down now in heavy sheets and she gets up to see what’s left for us to eat in the almost-empty fridge. I understand now that all the things she tells me are for a reason, that she is leading me somewhere on purpose.
“Gotta eat this before it goes to waste,” she says, unwrapping cheese with green spots on it and carefully slicing off the moldy parts. Her hands catch my attention again, looking ancient to me, cracking in the webbed parts just like bird claws, like she is the only one getting older and I’m staying the same.
“What was it like when you had me?” I ask her, ignoring the food. She’s gotten some bread and quince jam from the cupboard, too, and our unlit kitchen table sits before us—a haunted picnic.
“Well, before I had you, you kicked me in the stomach every morning at six a.m. You’ve always been a morning person, Smokes.” She gets up to put milk in a small pot, adds cinnamon, nutmeg, and honey, and turns it on low. She reaches up to the highest shelf to bring down a bag of cookies she’s been hiding.
“The day of your actual birth was another rainy day, and I was alone. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it right and something would happen to you. The nurse was mean or maybe tired from her shift, and the lights were way too bright. I kept having the strange feeling that I wished I was outside in the dirt to give birth. I felt so awful that you were about to be forced to come out of all the warmth and darkness into that room’s cold harshness. Luckily, the doctor was kinder and gentler than the nurse. He was older and told me you were going to be the one-thousandth baby he delivered. He said that was very lucky, an auspicious sign. But when he left me alone to go help his other patients the sheets smelled like loneliness. I was freezing in the thin robe and self-conscious about my genitals hanging out in the air. I was worried I was going to poop on the hospital table. It’s a thing that can happen sometimes.”
She smiles and wants me to smile, too, but this story is too sad and hard. Poor Mom doing this alone, and I wasn’t born enough to help her yet.
“The mean nurse gave me a form where I had to fill out who the father was and tsk-tsked me when I put a line through the blank space. She thought I was a sinner or a future welfare mom or something. It didn’t matter though, because there you were, coming out huge with your jet-black hair and thick rolls of fat—you even had rolls between your wrist and your elbow. I was glad you were so fat—made me believe you could make it through a natural disaster or something worse—that you could survive in this crazy world, easier than the less hefty babies.”
I try to picture myself, thick with life. My arms now are two skinny sticks, not hefty but still strong enough.
“You asked me if you could have a brother, and you almost did. He was one of the less hefty ones, and he decided not to stay. It’s called a miscarriage. You were too young to remember, but Angela brought you to the hospital when I was there saying goodbye to him.”
She has finished cutting the green spots off the cheese and puts a slice of what’s left in her mouth. She starts to say something else but then keeps chewing.
“I wanted you, Smokey,” she tells me after a pause, looking me straight in the eyes, making sure I’m listening. “Some people believe that before they’re born, babies choose their parents—that they come back to Earth from the universe when they find the right human person to make them alive again. But for us, it was different. I chose you. I always had the unsettling sense that I made you come back here too early. And I’m sorry for that. I bet it was beautiful up there.”
Outside someone’s garbage can tumbles over in the wind and skids down the road.
“It’s sometimes beautiful here, too—sometimes it’s the best place to be,” I tell her, and she looks down at her hands, then starts again.
“Others believe that humans come to Earth to suffer, to exist in bodies of bone and muscle and pain and desire, because up there it’s all light and gorgeousness, and eventually that gets boring. We come here to experience all this weight, this gravity, this pain, this sharp ache. It kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Mom drifts off, in her own world now, but it does make sense to me, that we choose this. At this moment I know that she is the animal I choose, this is the small pack I was meant for—even with my loneliness, even with my stomach knives.
The lights flicker on and the fridge reluctantly starts humming again. The trees take a break from clawing at the roof. A crow lands on the outside windowsill and cocks its head at its own reflection. Mom lights her last Lucky Strike, and the gray air it makes moves up toward the ceiling as it always does. We watch the smoke rise and I imagine all the happy babies up there, so much farther up than our breath could ever travel, bathed in light and ease, eyeing all the future moms from a vast distance, far above the din.
Two-Rivers is a boy in my class who lives five blocks away from school. He says he has a pet squirrel and asks if I want to come over and meet it—that we could go that afternoon.
At Two-Rivers’ house, there are lots of crooked steps to climb up to get to the front door. After we climb the steps, we are in a tree house that has thick, brown rental carpet like ours, and the heater cranked up. His mom pours us orange juice and says she doesn’t know where the squirrel is right now, that it hasn’t come out all afternoon.
Two-Rivers gets a can of nuts and shakes it, makes a tchhh-tchhh sound with his lips, and points to the top of the curtains, where on a wooden rod sits the squirrel, bushy tail twitching.
“See,” he says, “Told ya.’”
“What’s his name?” I ask, and Two-Rivers gives me a funny look.
“Just Squirrel,” he says.
Squirrel jumps from one curtain rod to another one, hungry for the nuts. It jumps on to the back of the couch where Two-Rivers has made a trail of treats leading to him. It likes walnuts best. He puts a nut on his shoulder and the squirrel walks up his arm to get there, sniffs in his ear.
“You don’t need to impress people with a pet squirrel to have friends,” his mom says, standing in the doorway and watching him.
Two-Rivers pretends he doesn’t hear her, and she sighs and goes back to the kitchen, rubbing her forehead like Mom does. When I say I have to go, he asks if he can come to my house the next day, that he can’t bring Squirrel, but we could have fun anyways. And if not the next day maybe the day after that, or on the weekend, or anytime really. He has no way of knowing that I don’t let anyone come to my house, don’t want anyone to get that close, whether or not there is a boyfriend around, but especially not then. Even Toby has to wait for me outside, even when it’s raining.
I climb back down his stairs without knowing how to explain this to Two-Rivers, this boy with so much hungry need on his face. At school, he starts looking sad around me, and then just stays away.
Mom slept somewhere else again last night, so I make my own cereal and cut in bananas, dump some brown sugar on top, and pour the milk carefully. I don’t want any spills. She left a note saying she loves me and will be back in time to make us lunch. She drew two sandwiches in the corner: grilled cheese with tomato. Saturday cartoons are there behind the On button, but they will make everything worse—I’m too tired for their impossible reality—getting shot by Elmer Fudd and not feeling the blood leak out. Or running on air next to a steep cliff and still making it back to safety. I miss when cartoons used to be the most fun thing.
