Issue/Publication: Winner of the Boston Fiction Festival, 2006

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The girls are asleep on Friday night when Maxwell injures himself, a deep accidental cut to the base of his left thumb with an Exacto knife. He grabs the skin together with a washcloth, feeling himself go white. He walks into the living room where Paula reads on the couch. "I'll be back in a few minutes," he says, holding his injury behind his back, and steps outside. He almost falls, bites his teeth against nausea. Unsafe to drive. He waits only a few minutes at the bus stop three doors down. The TRAN bus descends the canyon road. Maxwell presses his wound against his chest to hold the washcloth on as he digs for his wallet, leaving a bloody stain on his t-shirt the shape and size of his heart.

The bus jolts down the hill through the dark, Maxwell holds on to the silver bar in front of him with his good hand and grits his teeth. In the house, Paula finishes her chapter, gets up to make a cup of Puri-Tea, and realizes he's still gone.

~

Maxwell, Paula, and their daughters Saraby and Marina, 11 and 7, live in a partially-renovated carriage house on a long, flat double lot. The deer eat anything tender in the garden so they live with bare land and grasses and a few trees near the back, a sandbox visited only by the neighborhood cats, a rusting wheelbarrow where Paula and Marina have planted marigolds. Inside the house, books and handmade wooden dolls and organic cookbooks clash with computer screens and stereo equipment. The girls share a room, but Saraby has a private walk-in closet with a shag rug, a desk with a lava lamp, a small window, and posters of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and Lindsay Lohan on the walls.

~

As the bus lurches down to the emergency room at S.A. General, splotches of black impede Maxwell's view. He leans his head against the window, breathes oxygen into his lungs and his vision returns. He pictures Paula, lost in her book. The girls' round tummies beneath cotton pajamas rising and falling with sleep breath. Too much trouble to rouse them all. He steps off the bus in front of the ER entrance, pushes himself into the harsh light of the triage unit, crowded with Friday night disaster cases. Because of the blood stain on his chest, they think, for a while, that he's been shot.

~

When Maxwell isn't back for three hours, Paula gathers the girls from their beds. Saraby is too heavy for lifting and partially wakes, "What, Mom?" at her mother's gentle shake.
"Shh. Come sleep with me."

Saraby nods and stumbles across the hall and flops on her father's side of the queen-sized bed, instantly asleep. Paula carries Marina to her own side; the seven-year-old murmurs but doesn't wake. Paula slides between them. By matching her breathing with her daughters', she finally sleeps, tears pooled in both ears where they've slid soundlessly, leaving painted southwest canyons on her cheeks.

At two a.m. the taxi drops Maxwell off. His hand a throbbing mitt of gauze, he finds the three of them curled like nestled commas.

~

Three evenings a week, Maxwell drives the girls down the canyon to the waterfront where they walk along the bay and watch the people in the restaurants eating and laughing behind glass. They chew red whips and stroll. Often, once he's put the girls to bed, Max walks the two miles back down the canyon and watches the street scene at the old fish market, now an outdoor mall. He stops for a pistachio ice cream cone at Mentor's and walks uphill home to his wife and children late, filled with the city night. But that night, the night of the injury, they'd all stayed home. Paula took a bubble bath and he and the girls played "Sorry!" until bedtime. The Exacto knife accident was just a stupid slip, cutting open the plastic packaging of his new Zip drive.

~

Paula talks to him about it over Saturday morning breakfast. Saraby and Marina have bolted the table, plates and silverware and dirty napkins left behind.

"I worried. I thought you'd walked out on me. Why didn't you let me help you?"

He shakes his head, shrugs, wrinkles his nose.

"Forget it," she says. "Forget it, forget it, forget it. Pass the comics."

When Maxwell looks at his family he feels his own melancholy seeping through the house.

"I'll take the girls to the park," he says.

"I don't think you should drive with that hand."

He pauses. "Probably not."

~

The day before the night Maxwell cuts himself, Paula, alone at the kitchen table, is distracted by a parallelogram of sunlight on the floor. Parallelogram. The word tastes of roast pork and aged port--sweet but deep. She says the middle syllables slowly, concentrating on the synesthesia to make it stronger. "Pair. Allelo. Allelo." The way her tongue taps the palate twice, and then goes wide and soft for the "gram," a lizard blinking in the sun. She stops between thoughts to feel the smooth shelf of her hipbones, runs her thumb down the jagged piano keys of her ribs. She knows what she has done to herself, what she continues to do to herself, honing and filing her body down to angles. When Maxwell is not around, she doesn't eat. Only eat with people, it's her rule.

On schedule, her hair is thinning. The weak roots slip from their follicles with small reluctant sighs. They sense the air of autumn, the snap of nights. Like golden and red leaves they sift to her shoulders, catch themselves in the hairbrush, depart, denude, exfoliate.

Marina has not noticed her mother losing weight but nothing escapes the dark quick eyes of Saraby.

Paula sips her water: "liquid," the word so close to "languid." Cleared of food now, she will taste the words, hear the tang of clear water.

~

Marina rouses them from their melancholy, she wears them all out. The afternoon after he cuts himself, Paula and Maxwell sit on the couch in the living room not looking at each other as Marina spins and contorts in her new dance. Maxwell's hand throbs, a blurt of pain with every heartbeat. Paula's face is tight and far away and Maxwell watches as she slowly draws her thumb down her ribcage. She's so thin now, a brittle twig.

Marina spins. "And now, the grand finale!"

Marina knows her mother tastes the wind, enjoys the bright tang of high C on the piano. She spins and babbles, blows pink into the thick dull brown sadness that fills the house like smog, thicker and blacker in the corners where it settles. Down the street, the strawberry music of the ice cream cart, late this year. October. She makes loud silly noises, flinging Tusky, her oldest and best stuffed animal, into the air until Paula rouses herself on the couch and gently says, "Marina, Dear."

She ignores her mother.

"Enough now. Pipe down," Maxwell says, and because he so rarely scolds, Marina does.

~

Saraby stands behind the couch and takes it all in. She's noticed her mother's ingestion of words not food, her long baths; her father's walks and silence. In his drawer, she found a magazine with pictures of naked ladies and a bunch of candy: Snickers bars and Bit O' Honey, stuff her mother doesn't allow in the house. She notices families that giggle: Alanna Prather's family has five kids and the house is loud and fun and they're always late; at dinner they sometimes have food fights. But we're a quiet family, Saraby thinks, conveniently disregarding her little sister's usual antics. Yet none of them are particularly quiet outside the house.

After she finishes her homework and practices her piano, she practices her tears in the mirror. She wants to become an actress--she can cry on cue, she can look dramatic. She is beautiful. She knows this because she hears it often--"what a beautiful child!" She also knows she's very sensitive--she hears this, too, in hushed voices from the living room when she hides behind the couch. "Saraby is very sensitive." Saraby hears this, and works hard to fulfill her destiny. Lost in her own facial expressions, she does not see the deer in the yard, a Saturday afternoon visitation.

~

Marina sees the deer. A rustle in the underbrush. The deer scratches his neck with a hind hoof. He's thin, his fur brown gray, a dusting of white on his face. His underbelly is white, too, between his meager haunches. His black tail wags, his tongue slurps his black nose. He scratches again for fleas. Marina stands at the kitchen window and watches him browse and graze the tall grasses next to the back fence, pulling, his mouth working sideways. Big black eyes. His mouth looks soft. She holds up Tusky so she can see, too.

Her mother calls her "Deer." Sometimes that "Deer" has an edge. "Deer, close your mouth when you chew." "Deer, make sure all your clothes are in the hamper. No, Deer, don't be silly, your dirty ones." "Deer, please take that noise to the backyard." The deer they see in the canyon run from the cars, are lean and wild. She wants to pet one. "Nobody pets deer," her mother tells her. "They won't let you touch them." Perhaps it's like butterflies, you cannot touch their wings without bruising them. But at night she's looked out the window and seen her mother feeding the deer apples that sound like summer garden birdsong. Their mouths, so soft, delicately take the apples from her mother's hand.

~

Paula has resisted pets, though the girls beg. Her own childhood house was full of them, casually. Over the years, the pets died, one by one and sometimes in groups. The chickens roosted in the trees at night and were picked off by the raccoons. The guinea pigs and rabbits, in their back yard pen, shrieked as dogs got into the yard, into the pen, and ripped them to shreds--tossing them like rope toys as Paula and her sisters screamed from the window. Besides. It's the mother who cleans after the pets, walks the dog, takes the mangled cat to the vet to pay 600 bucks for heroic measures--and then euthanasia.

Saraby begs. "I'll walk it, I promise! I'll clean up after it!" But Saraby's private closet room is hardly an advertisement for her ability to clean up after herself. Underpants and socks lie in drifts. Books (open, pages wrinkled) litter the floor. Candy wrappers, forbidden but exposed boldly. Saraby knows of her parents' lack of ability to follow through, she buys candy anyway, eats it in forbidden places, forgets to hide her crimes. Saraby will forget to care for an animal. And Marina truly is, still, too young.

~

On Sunday, they all go to the library to return their old books, to get new ones. Paula drives. "We're all going?" Saraby asks. At Paula's nod; "Get ready, Marina. We're all going." The girls race to the car. Maxwell browses in the music section, borrows a double-album Robert Johnson delta blues CD. The Vicodin for his hand makes his head fuzz out. Paula reads to Marina in the kids section; Saraby scans titles in the still slightly illicit Young Adult section then stocks up on Judy Blume books. In the hills, a lit cigarette butt sparks a small grass fire, under control but not out by nightfall. Firefighters will work through the night to extinguish it. They see the dark plume, they hear about it on the radio as they drive home from the library.

"Santa Ana winds," Paula says.

Maxwell nods. Marina stares out the window and Saraby reads, getting a little carsick.

~

And then Tusky is lost. Marina realizes it once she's taken her new books upstairs and can't find the scruffy gray animal. Her mother sees her panicked look and immediately stops reading. They check the house, the driveway and car, all four of them; they call the library. Paula drives back to the library to check the street in front of it, comes home defeated.

"We'll keep looking, Dear. Could she be in your bed?" Paula says.

"I looked."

"Let's look again."

"No, she was with me."

"Let's keep looking, Dear. And we'll call again tomorrow."

Maxwell puts Robert Johnson on the stereo. Turns it loud to drown the silence between them all. In the bathroom, he unwraps his bandage, stares, horrified and fascinated, at the thick black stitches strained by the swollen red edge of the incision.

~

Saraby has gone to her closet room filled with guilt that she hasn't found Tusky, that she isn't looking hard enough, that she isn't a good sister, a good person.

Marina opens the front door and walks down the short driveway alone. She stands on the canyon road, the hot fire wind blowing dust and leaves and dirt in her face. Maybe she's down near the water, lost. She starts walking down the hill. It's late now, almost dark. The steep sidewalk is narrow, the cars pass so close to her. Scared, alone, there are bad men who will steal you, she stops walking. The world has swallowed her--there is no bottom. Yelling out into the world, "Tusky! Tusky! Come back, Tusky! " She falls to the ground. "Tusky!" But there is nobody to pick her up, nobody has realized she is gone.

~

Marina is inconsolable, won't eat dinner. They put her to bed early. "We'll get her another one," Paula says in bed that night.

"No." Maxwell says, hand hurting. "Don't cheat her of her experience. Don't diminish her loss. That's teaching her that loved ones can be replaced. Let her mourn."

Paula nods. She cedes to Maxwell; he's good at this. When the city mandated that their tall eucalyptus tree was a fire hazard and had to be removed, they mourned. They paid through the teeth--five thousand dollars--and then they mourned the sounds of the wind in the tree, even the silvery detritus of shredded bark, leafs, and caps that Saraby used as whistles, forming an inverted triangle with both thumbs and blowing hard for a shrill shriek. Maxwell took a small branch and cut it into disks, polished them, and put them on chains for the girls to wear around their necks.

Paula reaches for Maxwell. "You're a good dad," she says. Careful not to touch his bandaged hand, she straddles him. He sighs, releasing against her. His inner thighs a silky blue vanilla as he slides inside her. He runs the fingers of his right hand down the side of her jagged ribs, "Don't disappear," he whispers.

~

Saraby lies quiet in her own bed. Tusky is Marina's sleep companion, her daughter, her friend, cuddled, dressed, talked to, loved. How can she live now? "Sleep with me?" Saraby whispers across the room. But Marina is a small silent ball. If they do not find Tusky, they will have a ceremony, Saraby decides. They will fill a shoebox with letters and drawings--"For Tusky, beloved companion. We love you"--and bury it in the garden near the eucalyptus stump. They will erect a headstone: "Tusky--more than an animal, more than a friend. Rest now."

~

In the morning, the air is bad from the fire and Paula struggles for breath, a touch of her old asthma. She wakes, groggy, and packs lunches, carefully washing a small clump of tuna fish off her finger rather than putting it in her mouth to taste. Food words don't always taste like the food they represent. "Anchovy" does, fishy and salty. But the word "Tuna" tastes like chalk and smells like coffee.

Maxwell drives the girls down to school on his way to an early class. "You girls meet me in front of Peet's Coffee this afternoon," he tells them in the car.

"Can I get a hot chocolate?" Saraby asks.

"We'll see." This year they're old enough to walk, together, the two blocks. It's Maxwell's way of encouraging their independence in a world where children are never alone.

All day at school, Marina cannot breathe well from the air, and her heart hurts. She struggles in math class, distracted by the colors of the numbers. Two is blue, three is green, five and seven are yellow, eight is orange. Every time she remembers Tusky is lost she stops, pencil in midair. Last year, a lioness in the zoo freed herself and wandered around roaring and trying to find her way back to her enclosure, and all the kids and families had to leave the zoo. The lioness found her own way home. Marina crosses her fingers and wishes the same for Tusky; but how much harder--small and gray and unable to move unless she helps her, how can she do it? She wants to fall to the ground again, under her desk. The kids would laugh. Her dad had a quick meeting with Ms. Lopez before school started so she knows, but Marina won't tell any of the other kids. She doesn't know if, in second grade, any other kids still sleep with stuffies.

~

Paula sits in the kitchen. Hunger is a distant gnaw, part of her growing anxiety. The loss of the stuffed animal, Maxwell's wound and distance, and even the sky is wrong, the sun red even at ten a.m., the sky dull. In this shadowless daylight the early fall leaves, back lit, glow almost neon yellow and green. Sound is muted. Time has stopped--inanimate objects seem even more still--the occasional car on the road cuts across the scene in stop motion. The driveway, like an illustration in art class, two vectors coming to a distant point.

Around two p.m., Paula hears a faint clatter of hooves, watches a young male deer appear at the right side of the window and run off to the left. He's young. His antlers bear two large prongs, the back ones slightly branched at the tip. She takes a sip of water. The animals are fleeing the distant grass fire. The canyon holds mountain lions, skunks, squirrels, opossums, raccoons, red foxes, feral cats. Will they follow the deer, break from the oaks and the Monterey Pines, race down the road into the city?

Paula loves the wild word "feral"--loves the "forest" and the "fecal" in it. She chooses another word, "elongate," and pronounces it. It's yellow, striped with royal blue. But it does not hold her, and now the water she sips is thin and flat and runs through her without nourishing.

~

The young deer runs down the long winding Chert Canyon road. He's not majestic, he doesn't have the grand stature or presence of a caribou or moose, he's just a lost, slim animal fleeing a forest choked with smell and yellow black danger. The wide flat surface clatters under his hooves, the bad wind hot on his neck; down through the trees, away from the trees, the roar of the occasional car pushes him on until he cannot stop and runs into the center of the crowded midday city, galloping panicked through the hard treeless streets where the roaring doesn't stop and doesn't stop. Traffic on Ulysses S. Grant Avenue thickens, cars honk, swerve aside. The road snarls. People stare at the single deer running through traffic, running across asphalt, on and on.

Maxwell, still five blocks from Peet's, is stuck behind a bus. "Come on!" he mutters, using his good hand to maneuver the car around it. He brakes again, immediately, to avoid rear-ending a motorcycle at a stop sign.

Saraby and Marina, hot and weary, trudge away from school down Grant Avenue, Saraby ahead, Marina a few steps behind. "Look!" Marina says, and Saraby turns her head. They stop as the deer races towards them down the center of the street, then stalls and stands still, his wide eyes flat and unfocused in terror.

The girls stare. Horns blare. "He's lost," Marina says.

Saraby takes her backpack off her back and stands it next to her where it promptly thumps over. "Come on," she calls to the deer quietly, holding out her hand. Cars continue to swerve. The deer stands frozen.

"Come on, little deer," Marina echoes. Their voices are high and tender.

"Come on, little one, come to me," Saraby says.

The deer begins to shake, his thin legs too thin to support his body, brown and gray, gaunt from the long dry season. He steps slowly between two parked cars onto the sidewalk and walks right past Saraby.

Saraby doesn't breathe.

The deer stops at Marina. Haunches trembling, he stretches his neck toward her and briefly touches his soft black nose to her forehead.

Then he turns and dashes on, running haphazardly down the avenue into the treeless bayside streets.

But Saraby says to Marina, "He's going to the zoo. He's going to find a new land to live in."

But Marina says, "That deer touched me." And the air tastes like a juicy peach; it shimmers pink.