Deanna woke with her heart pounding and raised her head until it levitated an inch above her pillow. As her breathing calmed, she listened carefully, squinted to better focus on what she might hear.
There wasn’t much to see with the blackout curtains and the bedroom door closed.
She lifted her arm high and let it descend slowly like a parking lot gate until it lay on his side of the bed. Empty. He was probably asleep on the couch again.
The red letters of the clock were the only source of light in the room. 3:23.
Then there was a sound. She didn’t hear it clearly because the covers rustled a bit as she sat up. She remained still again. “Travis?” she called.
Because she was wearing only underpants, she reached for the robe on the floor then pulled it on as she stood. Her bare feet padded across the cold, wood floor and into the arched doorway to the small living room. She leaned against the doorframe with one hand. His chair was empty, the couch too—but for a wadded fleece blanket on one side. The light in the room was thin and blue. She looked out to the county road, where she could see a halo of mist glittering around the solitary streetlamp at the corner where two backroads met alongside the border of their property.
Deanna felt a warm, queasy anger rising. She could feel her heartbeat in her stomach. The bathroom door stood open. Dark. She tiptoed to the kitchen to look out another front window toward the garage—also dark. Mist was collecting in droplets on the smooth steel roof of the garage except where the droplets had converged and left crooked lines like veins as gravity tugged some drops toward the rain gutters. The truck was not in the driveway.
“Goddamnit,” she said. “This is it. This is really it.”
She stood breathing audibly, her arms crossed against her chest, her eyes darting around the dark lawn, along the road beyond, then up to the black silhouettes of tall trees that made up the forest beyond the yard.
Yellow headlamps of a passing car illuminated the wooded road long before she could see the car itself. The noise the passing car made lessened, then increased again. And the lights, after slowing, moved quickly away and up the hill, disappearing through the trees.
She could feel the skin on her forehead stretching tight as her brows lowered and pulled toward each other. She could hear her own breath, feel the churn of anger, jealousy, and disgust in her stomach. She was moving toward the bedroom to look for her phone when she heard a rustling outside, then a distinct thump followed by a loud guttural shriek from the backyard.
She looked out the kitchen window to see a deer bounding across the yard. It didn’t slow, didn’t look back. It flew across the yard and out through the driveway gate, which Travis had left open. The wooden fence was supposed to keep the deer from her rosebushes and his apple and cherry saplings. But occasionally they leapt over, leaving clipped rose stems where buds had been and piles of shit like spilled packets of Raisinets.
The shrieking sound came again, and her breathing quickened with it. Her hands patted her sides, found the ends of the belt of her robe by touch, cinched it around her waist and threw one end over the other to make a quick knot. The shrieking sound kept on now, starting, stopping, then starting again. She padded to the back bedroom to look between a gap she poked between the blinds with one finger. She could hear her own quick breath in the pauses.
The sound was animalistic, a kind of screaming. What did they call it when sheep screamed? Bleating? That was it. A kind of frantic bleating. She was afraid she might find an elk being eaten alive by a mountain lion.
Another bleating scream.
She saw something near the back fence—movement—and she tugged at the string, raising the window blind.
There was a deer, but what was it doing? It was near the base of a madrone tree only a few feet from the back fence, and it was thrashing, kicking wildly.
“Oh, God,” she said.
It thrashed and screamed, then paused for two or three seconds and thrashed and screamed again, snapping its head back and forth on its whip-like neck.
Deanna grimaced and pressed her palms to her ears. She looked at the floor, but then she made herself look up again. “Oh no,” she said. “Oh, no, no, no.”
She ran to the bedroom, flipped on the light and saw her phone on the bed spread. Shaking, she touched the phone screen, found his name, and called her husband.
The phone rang. She was on the other side of the house, but she could hear the distinct bleating still. She pressed the phone to her ear with one hand, clamped her opposite palm to the other ear hard until she could feel her ear trying to pop. “Come on, come on,” she said. The sounds of the bleating and the phone ringing layered, laid on top of each other in stereo—each with its own contrasting pattern of mechanical noise and dead silence.
No answer. Deanna looked at the glowing screen of the phone in her hand. She stared at it, then pressed the red button to end the call.
She kept staring while the bleating came in fits and starts from somewhere behind her. She kept her back to that side of the house and her head down. Then seeing and remembering how she was dressed, she dropped the phone and her robe and rummaged in the closet for a top and a pair of jeans. Stumbling, she stepped into the jeans and pulled on a sweater before plucking up the phone again. This time she dialed 911.
Deanna closed her eyes hard, then went back to try again to understand what was happening with the deer.
“Nine one one,” said the dispatcher. “How can I direct your call?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s a deer… and it’s screaming in my yard.”
“Did you say, screaming?”
“Bleating? Screaming? I don’t know what to call it, but it’s screaming in my backyard.”
“Do you mean it’s injured?”
“I don’t know, injured or stuck in some wire or something. Just screaming and thrashing, and it sounds so terrible.”
“Mam, it’s going to be okay. I can get a sheriff’s deputy out there, but there’s a serious accident out on Robinson Road. Most everyone is way out there. It might take them a little while to get to you. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t understand,” she said, a touch of tremolo in her voice. “I’m looking out there now, and it’s just thrashing its legs and screaming and screaming.”
“I don’t know what’s happening, but it sounds like it’s injured and the deputy might need to put it out of its misery.”
She shivered, then imagined an officer walking into her backyard and shooting the screaming deer between the eyes at close range as she watched from the window. “Is that something they can do?”
“Yes, mam.”
Deanna paused, looked down, then held her forehead with her empty hand. She forced herself to look again. Deanna said, “Oh!” The syllable burst out of her mouth like a cough. “Oh, no. It’s the tree.” She stared hard at the deer. “It must’ve…”
“Mam. Please stay on the line. I’ll contact the deputy and see if I can get an ETA for you.”
Deanna saw now that the deer was, indeed, thrashing all four legs, but finding no traction. It was stuck, and now she remembered the branch and where it was broken off the madrone some distance from the ground. “Oh, God,” she said again.
“Mam?”
“I think it jumped over the fence and impaled itself on a broken branch. There was a car on the road, then another deer running. The car must’ve spooked them.”
“I’m sorry mam, but the deputy is at least twenty minutes from your location.”
“What? But this poor deer, can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear it through the phone?”
She listened. The deer was quiet then for a few seconds—just when she wanted so desperately to show the woman on the other end of the line. Then another bleat came, but it was softer. “Did you hear that?” she said.
“I don’t think so, mam,” the dispatcher answered.
“It’s still screaming.”
“Mam, the deputy told me to ask if you have a hunting rifle, or a neighbor close by who has one?”
Deanna’s eyes went wide. “My husband has a rifle, but I don’t know how to use it,” she said. “It’s very upsetting. Do you know how upsetting this is?”
An even softer scream came from the deer, and she clearly saw its mouth open this time. Its thrashing movements slowed.
“Okay. It’s alright, mam. The other thing you might do… you might want to leave the property temporarily so you don’t have to hear it.”
“Yeah, okay. Maybe I can…” she said, then paused. “But…”
“Mam?”
“My husband has the truck.”
“Okay,” the dispatcher answered. “I’m sorry, but I’ve done everything I can at the moment. The deputy will be out there as soon as he can.”
“God. Are you kidding me?”
“If your husband is nearby with the truck, maybe he can make it there faster? Try giving him a call,” she said.
“Thanks for nothing,” Deanna said, and she hung up the phone.
She looked away, though she was still facing the direction of the deer. But it screamed again, louder than last time, and she stuffed the phone into her back pocket. In the kitchen, Deanna tugged on her rain boots and a parka. Then she rushed away from the house and toward the street, away from the deer. She didn’t look back. It let out a long bleat as she hurried along the gravel drive and through the gate. But this time the sound was much softer.
By the time she got a hundred yards down the road, she guessed the deer was probably dead. She stopped walking, zipped up her parka against the cold, and pulled on the hood. She thought of all the things she might say to Travis when he tried to come home.
It was overcast, the moon barely showing through the clouds. The streetlamp at the intersection was the only light nearby. She didn’t know what else to do, and suddenly had to urinate. She stepped into the roadside ditch through the damp grass and behind three stubby fir trees to squat and relieve herself. Deanna took her time crouched there, dripped dry, shivering. She looked up at the moon. The grey steam from her breath was visible against the dark sky. In a minute she realized that she hadn’t heard the screaming in some time. She listened intently.
From the patch of small trees, she watched a vehicle approaching, then the headlamps flick off some distance away. With only the running lights glowing in the mist, she saw it creep toward the house. It was a truck—their truck. When it finally turned into their driveway, she felt her teeth clench. Stumbling through the brush and weeds in the roadside ditch, she made her way back to the road. From a distance she saw the light inside the truck come on and go off again with the click of the drivers’ side door latching.
She arrived at the gate just as he was slowly easing open the front door thirty or forty feet from where she stood. He had taken off his boots and held them pinched by their tops in one hand. Normally, he took them off in the kitchen. He was about to enter in his stocking feet.
She could see now, in the far corner of the backyard, the deer—its split feet still dangling, its long neck a thing given over to gravity. Its mouth was open as if it were still screaming even now that it had bled out or given itself a heart attack or whatever it had finally succumbed to. Its head low, pendulous now, hung toward the ground, unmoving.
It was cold out, but she didn’t feel it now. She planted her feet, made fists with both hands. “Travis!” she screamed, then with increasing volume, “Traaavis!”
The man jumped and spun on his heels, nearly falling off the narrow porch. She screamed his name one last time, loud and long—knowing, hearing just how much her own quivering voice unleashed, sounded like that of a desperate animal.
