by Erin Wood

The highway curves around pink granite cliffs of Maine coastline, and around we go, my husband and I, me at the wheel. I am not thinking of the curve as blind, have never thought of it as blind in the hundreds of times I’ve driven it, every summer for three decades.

That morning, a couple selfie captured us at the Dorr Mountain summit—the view a reward for burning quads and daring to grapple with slippery iron rungs. It’s our thirteenth anniversary, but the accumulation of years doesn’t always stop me from thinking of our future as blind, a curve around which I cannot see. 

We’ve just eaten lobster lunch, where my husband chatted with the waitstaff as the gentle, charismatic version of himself, the Marine who has identified them as friendlies. He is settled, so I am settled.

We are full and ready for summer vacation naps, the afternoon sun shining through the car window making my shoulders and my torso grow warm enough that I could almost sleep, if only I weren’t driving. The rolling turns I make with the steering wheel are so smooth and big and soft they feel like gentle watercolor brush strokes, painting the steep pink ledges, painting the gray foam as the waves roll into the shore.

Over and over, I have been lulled back, have kept the words I am leaving you from tumbling from the cliff of my mouth. Yet another fight will come later that night–a threat to throw my phone in the ocean on our anniversary, our daughter on the other side of a reverberating wall, a 2 a.m. apology in the darkness. Then, I’ll wait once more for another incident, apology, refractory period. The “We’ll do better next time.”The “We have a daughter together.” Again, I’ll remind myself that our son’s death is a grief that no one else can share.  

For a third of my life, I have stood by him, again and again thinking, Next time I’ll stay calmer. Take more responsibility for my part. Stop making him feel cornered. Stop nagging, pushing. Stop. Again and again, I have missed the signs of rising danger as I shift in his crosshairs from friendly to enemy. Somehow, I’ve never learned to predict, never figured out how to make it stop. Until that New Year’s Eve not so far in the future when I will run quickly enough up the stairs to get the door locked between us. Until that March day when I’ll sit next to him on a couch with a couples therapist and hear my words tumble.

For now, in the car next to him, I am so nearly sleeping, so nearly anesthetized. The sun feels so good it is almost too good. Maybe the best thing I can remember feeling.

From the cloudy edge of my peripheral vision, reminding me that I’m driving, something moves on the dashboard—only it isn’t on the dashboard. A buck leaps from above and overtakes the entire frame before me, moving across the double yellow. I slam on the brakes, stopping just feet from his gangly legs, the seat belt locking hard against my clavicle. Woah! My husband shouts, both hands bracing against the glove box. I am panting. Though she is not in the car, I feel the presence of our daughter in the back seat, needing my protection.

Never flinching, the buck’s eyes fill mine, saying stop, wait for me. He turns away and steps forward and steps forward again, and as he slowly crosses, I can see the gray velveteen of his antlers, a few pieces of velvet scraped and hanging, a scar on his muscled shoulder. My eyes flash to the red car suddenly filling the rearview mirror. It has come too close and is now slamming on its brakes, and I think it might rear-end us but it doesn’t.

My eyes return to the buck, to his legs moving like sticks controlled by puppet strings, hardly believable they are so light and airy beneath the heft of his body. In no hurry whatsoever, his head bobs gently as he strides, as if he has just eaten lunch and is full and ready for his summer vacation nap, too.

As he disappears into the pines on the ocean side, perhaps headed toward someone’s cliffside garden to annihilate their carefully-tended hostas, I press the gas but go even slower now, everything turned precarious. Until the crunching of the gravel driveway, silence holds me still, thinking there are things we can’t stop and things we can. And in my neck there is a clop, clop, clop like hooves on pavement, my pulse wild with knowing that there is little but a beat between disaster and another beautiful afternoon.

Erin Wood’s work appears in The Sun, HuffPost Personal, River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things,” Brevity Blog, The Rumpus, Catapult, and elsewhere, and has been listed as notable in The Best American Essays. She is author of Women Make Arkansas: Conversations with 50 Creatives and editor of Scars: An Anthology. She is working on a memoir about surrogacy, friendship, and infant loss. Visit her at erinwood.com.