I merged onto the freeway, feeling, as I always did, the rush of it—the smooth tar of it under my wheels and the way the traffic parted and shifted to let me in.
I was an object among other objects. A particle in motion. I didn't need to think about driving, I was so accustomed to it—so I thought about him.
Bram Smith.
Had I ever, really, even seen him?
I wasn't sure.
I had been over and over that scrap of memory from—when? A year ago, two years ago? That man in the corner of my eye, in the olive T-shirt, with the chiseled features—could that really have been him? Was I really even remembering anyone at all?
It didn't matter.
I had already burned the image of that man into my brain within a few hours of Garrett's having mentioned him at dinner—an image built out of what I thought I recalled and what I had been told, until the fantasy had a smell (oak, engine) and hands, and a voice. And then I had gone over it and over it, that burned image, during the making of dinner, and the cleaning up afterward—the dishes wiped with a paper towel before stacking them in the washer, the crumbs wiped off the table with a sponge—and the shower, turned so hot I could feel it in my bones, and while Jon and I made love, and as I lay awake afterward—hearing the fantasy's voice in my head, speaking my name—and making the bed this morning, pulling the floral sheets up, and putting on my makeup, eating a bowl of oatmeal at the kitchen sink. And all the time I was thinking of him, I was also feeling sheepish for thinking of him. I scolded myself for thinking of him. You don't even know it's him.
Even if it is, you don't know who he is.
In truth, by the time I was traveling down the freeway this morning at eighty miles an hour in my silk dress, whoever Bram Smith really was didn't matter.
He was, already, a fully developed character in my imagination:
He would have a deep laugh, I thought. His hands would be large, but skillful, a little dirty because he worked with them. His knuckles would be battered, the palms calloused. Younger than I, but a grown man. His body would be solid. He would smell like earth, and soap. Making love with him would be exhilarating, terrifying. A man who left love notes for complete strangers was a man of passion, a womanizer. I would never be able to trust him.
But did I want to trust him?
No.
What did I want from him?
What I wanted, I thought, really, was to ask him if it was true.
Did he mean it when he'd written Be Mine?
Was I really the kind of woman who could inspire such interest?
From a younger man?
A man like you?
I was imagining asking him, and his answer (yes), and his hand tracing a path from my neck to my shoulder, and then from my shoulder to my breast, and then leaning into me, telling me yes, breathing my name (Cherie) into my ear with the smell of the dust of the car's heater, a hot breath of it entering me, whispering yes, when it happened—when it leaped out of the sky and into my path:
Shit.
I slammed on the brakes, but it was too late, as if I'd been struck by lightning, but the lightning was solid, had a body, with mass, with weight—a body that was tossed onto the hood of my car, where it erupted in a fountain of blood. Somehow I came to a stop at the side of the freeway, the radio still on, my windshield wipers rhythmically sloshing the blood off my window with them. And then I was standing in my silk dress at the side of the road with the wind cutting straight through to my skin, and a man in a white lab coat was running from his car to mine along the shoulder, shouting, "Ma'am, are you all right?"
I shook my head as if to let him know I had no idea. I asked him, "What happened?"
"You hit a deer," he said, and then turned to point to the median, where a tawny mangled thing, lying on its side, lifted its head, then let it drop.
Cars and trucks whirred by us with incredible speed. My dress snapped around me in the wind of them. Here and there I glimpsed the face of a driver—repulsed, or concerned, or surprised. The man in the white lab coat looked at me, and, seeing that I wasn't hurt, said, "You're lucky. Really lucky. You could have been killed."
"Honestly?" I asked him.
"Honestly," he said.
We looked at one another for a few seconds, but his features were a blur to me. He was no one I had ever seen before.
"Really," he said. "I saw the whole thing. I pulled over because I thought you might actually be dead."
"I'm not," I said. "I'm fine."
From the corner of my eye I saw it again in the median, raising its head, and lowering it, either to die, or to rest.
The man in the white lab coat stepped around the front of my car to inspect the damage, then called over the wind of the traffic to me to say he thought it was fine to drive, but that I'd want to have someone straighten out the bumper. It was a mess.
Neither of us said anything about the deer. Helping it. Or killing it. It wasn't until much later in the day that I thought about that—the inevitable sin of that, because what could we have done? Had either of us tried to cross the freeway to it, we would have suffered its fate.
"How can I thank you?" I asked him as we parted.
"Drive carefully," he said, and shook his head.
AT THE office there was much, much drama about my accident. Beth told me to sit down after I told her why I was late, and she brought me a cup of coffee with so much sugar and cream that it tasted like syrup, or medicine—thick and sickening, I couldn't drink it—and then she proceeded to inform everyone. "Sherry hit a deer on the freeway!"
Condolences, commiseration, and, all the time, I was in my silk dress, shivering—not from cold, it was warm enough in the office, but still from the surprise of it. The solidity of it, that animal, and then the blood cascading over my white Honda, a ghastly rain of it on the windshield. When I parked my car in the college parking lot, it was still bloody, the windshield, and I couldn't stand to go around to the front of it, to see if there were any remains of that deer on my bumper, on the hood.
So many people, it turned out, had hit a deer—so many stories swapped in the office—that it began to seem surprising there were any left for me to have killed. Robert Z hit two a year ago, a doe and her fawn. (They'd leaped out of nowhere in a snowstorm as he was driving home to visit his parents in Wisconsin for Christmas. Only the fawn had been killed. The doe had glanced off of him, and she'd kept going.) Beth's uncle had careened into a whole herd of them up north in a fog, totaled his car but been given permission by the state police to take one home for the meat.
And there were worse stories. Someone's neighbor had been killed, swerved to avoid a deer on a country road, hit a tree instead, and died instantly. Someone's cousin had been killed when the deer he hit crashed through his windshield, landing in the car with him, crushing him—landing, it had seemed to the paramedics on the scene, into the cousin's arms.
"Your commute is too long," Amanda Stefanski said. "Have you thought about moving into the city?"
Amanda is the newest teacher in the department—a short, plain woman in her twenties. She has a warm heart, is always ready with solutions to problems, considered advice. Every Christmas she puts in our mailboxes homemade cards signed with x's and o's, telling us to love Jesus, to celebrate His birthday. Once, Sue suggested we try to fix her up with Robert Z "if we can find out he's not gay." No, I said, she was too homely. She wouldn't be Robert Z's type, even if he wasn't gay. Amanda's hair was dishwater blond, the bangs trimmed raggedly and too short across her forehead. Her jaw was large, strong as a man's, although her eyes were large and blue and her shoulders were delicate.
Sue had narrowed her eyes at me when I said she was too homely, and I said, "I mean, she's lovely, truly lovely, but—"
"Okay," Sue said. "Not lovely enough for your Robert."
"He's not mine," I said. "This has nothing to do with me. I just wouldn't want to see Amanda get hurt. I mean, Robert's—"
"Maybe Robert's not as picky
as you are."
"Fine," I said. "I'm sure you're right. Set them up, Sue."
But eventually Sue must have begun to see the fact of this herself because she never brought the subject up again with me, and as far as I know she never tried to arrange anything between the two of them.
Amanda leaned down and embraced me. She smelled like Windsong, or Charlie, some kind of inexpensive but pleasant drugstore perfume. "Really, Sherry," she said, "you need to move. It was one thing to live out there when it was the country. There's too much traffic now."
"Thank you, Amanda," I said. "But, really, the deer had nothing to do with the traffic. It—" But Amanda had her eyes closed tightly, as if she were praying or trying to block out what I was saying. I said, "Well, maybe we will. I mean, Jon won't move, not yet, but I might rent a place for Monday and Wednesday nights. We'd already talked about it, before this."
Jon.
I hadn't thought, yet, to call him.
He would be hurt, I supposed, if he knew that he was the last to know—although it was over now, and what could he do? And I hadn't been injured. The car was drivable. When I got off the freeway I'd stopped at a gas station and called the police to report it. A deep-voiced woman had taken my statement—the location, my license plate number over the phone—and she said she was sorry but that these things happened all the time, as if she thought I had called to complain.
Anyway, there was nothing Jon could do, and I had to teach. I was already late. When I stood up to go, Robert Z said, "Now be careful in the hallway, sweetheart." He came over to me and squeezed my elbow. "Walk slowly."
***
I SAW it, again, on the drive home:
A tan twisted body, looking half human, half animal, in the median, sprawled.
The knees were bent as if it were running, still, in its sleep. In its death.
I slowed down. I felt I should. Out of respect, or to really see it.
I looked closely and saw that it was a doe, no antlers.
It was dusk, but I could see her clearly, even her face, and that the eyes were wide open—and the awfulness of it struck me then, that here was a thing I'd killed. Some escaped, transfigured daughter of a goddess—the ghost of a younger woman trying to escape from something or someone just behind her, giving chase.
Where had she thought she was going? Was she trying to get back to the dark of the woods on the other side of the freeway, wondering how she'd come to this wrong road, and where to go—but blindly, led by scent and a dull drumming in her ears?
Jesus, I said under my breath. Oh my god, forgive me.
But would the gods blame me for this? Or forgive me for this? Or would there be some special punishment in hell for the woman who'd killed this beautiful animal, this divine creature, whether it had been an accident or not?
Maybe an elliptical machine in hell.
An endless aerobic dance in bare feet on a burning floor.
I was holding the steering wheel so tightly that I couldn't feel my fingers anymore, and then I was home, in my own driveway, and Jon came to the door and said, "Hey, I hear through the grapevine that we're going to be having venison for dinner tonight."
***
I'D FORGOTTEN to call him long enough that it had begun to seem pointless to call him. I'd see him soon enough when I got home, I thought, and show him the mangled bumper, tell him I was getting it fixed tomorrow, that Garrett had set it up.
In the hallway after class, I'd run into Garrett and told him what had happened.
"Wow, Mrs. Seymour. That could've been bad. You're really lucky. What happened to your car?"
I told him about the bumper, and he looked concerned—an expert, calculating the trouble—and offered to take a look. So I got my coat and led him out to the car, which was, despite the snow falling steadily all day, still a gruesome sight. The blood on the windshield had gotten sticky, thickened, but it still looked like blood, and there were dark streaks of it down the white side of the car, down the hood.
Garrett hadn't worn his coat, and as he knelt at my bumper in his thin shirt I remembered watching him in his Cub Scout uniform outside in the winter during a pack meeting, shivering but refusing to come in, to put on his jacket.
Kneeling at my bumper, Garrett didn't shiver, although his shirt was rippled by the cold wind around his shoulders in a way that made me shiver.
"This can be straightened without much trouble," Garrett said, looking up at me. "We need some tools. Do you have time to bring it over to the garage?" He nodded in the direction of the auto-mechanics building.
"Not today," I said. "Tomorrow?"
"Sure," Garrett said. "It's not going to hurt to drive it. But you'll want to get a car wash."
We laughed together at that—the blood on the hood of my car, what would that look like to someone driving by me on the freeway?
While we stood outside, snowflakes accumulated in Garrett's short, dark hair. I remembered snowflakes like that in Chad's hair, bending over him, brushing them off his head with my glove—the starry hundreds of them, scattered, and that first winter of his life, zipping him into his insulated snowsuit. All one piece. How blunt he was in my arms as I carried him from the car to the house, the house to the car. A bundle. A package. Looking at Garrett's hair foil of snow, I felt a stab of such deep longing for Chad—a physical ache—that I had to look away. Where was Chad now?
Somewhere else.
Somewhere no snow fell.
Garrett went back to work on my bumper, and I watched him, and it felt to me, standing bereft and useless in the snow as he picked blond for out of my grille and tossed it to the curb, as if Chad had been erased from the earth. As if there was nothing left to him but the memories of him. Imagining him in Berkeley was no easier or less fanciful than imagining him in heaven. "Garrett," I finally said, snapping myself out of my imaginary grief. "You'll catch pneumonia. Let's go in, and I'll buy you a cup of cocoa."
"I'm not cold," Garrett said. (They always said that, these boys. I'm not cold, I'm not tired, my hands aren't dirty, I don't need a hat.) "But, well, okay."
The cafeteria seemed stiflingly hot when we came in from the cold and sat down at a table together. Garrett got a cup of coffee, not cocoa, and I got a bottle of water, because I was thirsty, sweating in my coat, even in my silk dress.
We chatted about the cold, about classes, about deer and freeways and traffic. I felt lighter than I had for days, maybe even weeks. Such pleasant company. Such a polite, easy young man. We conversed effortlessly—not like mother and son, or student and teacher, but like friends. Old friends. He seemed genuinely relieved and astonished by my good luck, hitting a deer on the freeway and only having a bent bumper to show for it. He leaned back in his chair and said, "That must have been something, hitting an animal that big, that fast, in all that traffic." He slammed his fists together. "Lord, Mrs. Seymour, that could've caused a chain reaction. You were lucky you didn't see it coming, or you might have hit the brakes, the guy behind you would have hit you. Wow."
"I did hit the brakes," I said. "I think."
"Maybe not," Garrett said. "I think you didn't."
In only half an hour, Garrett had become the expert, the arbiter, of my accident. He shook his head as if to clear it, then talked about Hondas, the newer models, the steel frames, that I was lucky there, too. He compared my car to other makes and models. He sipped his coffee (black) from the Styrofoam cup, and I couldn't help but think to myself that what he was doing was a perfect impression of a man. Garrett (hands full of LEGOs and Matchbox cars, or standing on the back porch waiting for me to unzip Chad's coat so I could unzip his, too) pretending, so convincingly, that he was a man.
"Okay, Mrs. Seymour," he said, looking at his watch. "You'll bring the car by tomorrow?"
"Yes," I said. "In the afternoon?"
"Great," he said. "Just over to the automotive entrance. I'll tell Bram."
"Oh," I said. "Bram."
I put the top back on my bottled water and look
ed at it. AQUA-PURA. On the label, a little stream poured whitely down the side of a lush green mountain.
"We can't do any work on anybody's cars without our instructor's permission."
"Will he be there?"
Garrett smiled and put his empty Styrofoam cup down too hard on the table. It tipped over, but nothing spilled. "He might be," Garrett said. "Maybe I'll get extra points for bringing you over. Have you gotten any more notes?" he asked.
"I did," I told him, "get another note."
I looked down at the table and saw a smudged reflection of myself in the Formica—a younger woman, a college girl, without lines or details, talking about love notes and crushes with a friend—and then I looked back up at Garrett, and saw that he'd lifted his eyebrows, and suddenly we were both laughing. He was teasing me, the way Sue would have teased me, or Jon, or Chad. "Garrett," I asked, "do you have any real reason to think that Bram Smith is writing these notes?"
"Well, yeah. He talked about you again the other day," Garrett said, nodding. "This English department babe, and on and on," he said and made a hand gesture that indicated wheels turning, rolling into infinity. "I don't want to embarrass you, Mrs. Seymour, by saying much more."
"Isn't this Bram Smith married? Is something wrong with him? Why is he so interested in old English teachers?" I looked again at the label on my Aqua-Pura, projecting myself into the mountain scene. I was meandering along the stream. I was stopping to dip my hand into the chill waters.
"Mrs. Seymour, you're not old!" Garrett said it with such sincerity that I looked up. And there it was in his blue eyes—the little boy I'd asked not to smash his toy trucks into the legs of my furniture. Wide-eyed. Worried. A newcomer to this world.
"Thank you, Garrett," I said. "But I'm a lot older than your automotive instructor."
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