Desmond at Home

Desmond had no enemies except for the deer. Even the plants he bought to dissuade them couldn’t; the deer always found their way to the garden. Then he built the fence, but the best apples grew on the wrong side of it, as if the branches were stretching toward the deer or the deer were willing them closer. Desmond, if he caught them eating in the yard, would come out gun in hand. He never fired it, but I always thought he could. 
Me? I’d let them. I’d watch the deer step timidly through the shadows, slim limbs moving toward the sunshine. The way they cock their ears back when their snouts close around a pink cosmos, chewing clumsily, patting at the food with loose lips. I watched them through the blinds when Desmond wasn’t around. I’d pause between dishes or walking the broom back to the closet, just to watch them for a moment from the window. Out of habit, I conceal my curiosity even now—even with Desmond gone—and watch as a deer limps in from the street, moving unevenly from the shade of one tree to the next and trailing blood.


The day Desmond died, the first of his tomatoes ripened. I spotted it from the window when I came in: a flush of red among the kale and chard and carrot tops. We’d been waiting for it for days. The tomato was small, but there were bigger ones coming, and it went into the pan with three eggs and some spinach. I counted his pills into a small dish on the side. I carried the plate down the hall and opened the door just to drop it right there at the threshold. I knew as soon as I saw him lying there, hands limp over his quilt, folded.
I waited in the hallway as the paramedics came in, watched as their boots pressed the fallen omelet into the carpet, the way the egg tracked in the treads, the corner of a tomato peel lifting with a heel, thin and transparent and roe-orange. They asked me who to notify. I told them I’d need to go out to the kitchen; I’d need to look for Lydia’s number.
I remember the last time she came to the house. Desmond wasn’t home, and I was in the kitchen making lunch, just inside the screen door. She got out of the car and after she put the boxes from the garage into the trunk, she opened up the side door and called out for the dogs to jump in, too. I would have gone out to say something, but she put her cigarette out on the gravel with her heel and looked right at me through the screen before slipping back into the car. When she left she did it quickly and she didn’t stop at all turning onto the street. When Desmond got home that day, he unlaced his shoes slowly, lining them up where otherwise he would toss them. All the while, he looked out through the glass door to the backyard, and when he was done he said that it was better this way.
Give it enough time, and that’s where Desmond landed on most things. He’d say it with a shrug when he misplaced the remote or let the coffee get cold, or with a cheeky smile when I couldn’t get a stain out from his shirt. Once, when an old friend called asking about his wife, he said it coldly, just before hanging up. “It’s fine,” he said. “Trust me, it’s better this way.”
Her new number wasn’t in Desmond’s address book. I told the paramedics that as far as I could tell, they weren’t in touch. But I was here, I reminded them—I could come instead. They just handed me a card with an address and asked me to pass it on to the family. I know it’s hard when a job ends like this, one of them told me. He shook his head, shook my hand, and took back the pen and the clipboard when I was done signing. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said again. “Please, just keep looking for that number.”
I emptied the three drawers under the landline onto the kitchen island. Under the dead pens and dull scissors, most of the papers had yellowed and thinned to brittle onion skins. I ripped a few while sorting: a Marty and a Gene I didn’t know—how long had it been since they’d called anyway? He’d spent a lifetime collecting and forgetting these paled connections, and now that Desmond was gone, I wondered if anybody would be sad for even a moment if this whole pile of numbers just vanished.
Like that, I could knock the whole pile into the trash. And if I lined the can up at the curb on Tuesday, who would notice? Empty the cabinets, smash the plates; the house was too still, like it didn’t know how to be without him. I could rip the stuffing from the couches, grind up the wine glasses under my heel. I wondered what stained glass looks like when it shatters. This house he had taken a lifetime to build—how long would it take to disassemble a quilt square by square?


Once, on an afternoon not long after Lydia took the dogs, Desmond sat at the counter while I made lunch and told me that it wasn’t good for things to come too easily to people. He thought comfort kept a person from seeing the truth. I washed the cabbage in the sink, picking off the bug-bitten leaves while he went on: a person who didn’t know where something came from didn’t deserve to have it. And the worst thing a person could do was forget what it took to keep a thing going.
That’s what I thought about looking at all the loose phone numbers he’d let fall away and fade. She didn’t stick around for it. And it meant something that I was still here, still standing in his kitchen gathering the loose papers into a short stack and placing them neatly in the corner of the top drawer and closing it shut.
And if I left the refrigerator door open before I walked out? Let the guts of the home spill out, let the pumpkin curry I’d made last Thursday spoil, let the milk sour and the chicken breast turn and the ice cream seep from its cardboard carton and dribble down to the floor? Who would find it first—Lydia? Or would the ants be drawn in through the gaps in the floorboards, tracing the lip of the counter and crossing the peeling laminate to sip from the sweet, pale lake? Would the flies and roaches join them, drawn to the sausage on the bottom shelf, covering the links like a string of jewels?
Maybe Desmond would like for things to end like that. Even when the flies that clung to the cool shade of the porch in late summer landed on his shirt, he’d leave them there to shake with his shallow laughter at my disgust, let them cling to the folds of his tee even as they crawled up closer to his neck. His grin, by then, was puckered and hollow. His hair freshly sheared to a close spiky crop. I’d cut his hair myself, right there on the porch, the coarse gray sticking to the static of the lawn chair as it fell. The next spring, the birds had used it to nest in the deck covering, and I wondered how many more broods this house would raise.
I wondered what Lydia would do with the house, now that it was going to her. The house should be important to someone. He’d built it himself, and though the wood cladding was weather-worn, the old redwood still lent their grandeur to the place. After the dogs left, we pulled out the weeds in the yard and tossed out seeds, and when the wildflowers came up in the summer that made it look complete. Kind and wild. They’d bloomed orange and violet all spring, and now the yarrow frothed white, and the green was greeting its autumn rust.
The wind today knocks the blooms into turmoil, and I stare out at the roiling sea, holding the slip of paper with Lydia’s number in one hand and the phone in the other. I’m standing there at the counter, dialing and hanging up and dialing again—again—when I see that deer out by the far fence.
The swelling is just above the ankle. The worst place it could be, really. Deer heal from injuries like this all the time, but one so low to the ground? It could get caught, infected, fester, leave him vulnerable to coyotes. This is just a young buck, and he’s all alone. Maybe this is why Desmond’s gun came to mind. In an instant, it could be over, and painlessly—and I’d always felt sure Desmond could pull the trigger, if it really came down to it.
I saw it the first time I met him: one of the dogs had caught the neighbor’s cat that day. I was walking up from the street to introduce myself when I saw Desmond, knee deep in the weeds, looking down at a small, mottled lump on the ground, standing with his hands clasped behind the small of his back. He looked over at me, nodded, then reached down to take up the limp body. He held it in the nook of one arm, though the flies had already begun to collect around the scent. They crawled up under the hem of his sleeve, and he walked by me steadily. He told me I could sit down on the porch bench and that he’d be right back, and then he called the dog over to him and walked with it down the road toward the neighbor’s, leaving the rest of the pack behind the fence howling. I sat and put my contract papers down beside me and listened to the wind rush through the pines and the crows cawing and to the rest of the dogs whining and then the silence that followed. Desmond returned empty-handed and reached out to introduce himself. Just one more thing we never talked about.
How strange the places we find our sense of safety. I feel less alone with the deer here, even as the night comes and the house gets still and watchful. The deer settles beneath the oak outside the window and together we listen to the pine needles scraping the siding, and finally I dial Lydia’s number.
She answers.
“Who’s this?”
“Sara,” I say, and she knows who I am.
I tell her what I know and give her the address on the card they handed me and the words feel like nothing as I say them.
“The beets will need to go in, in a few weeks,” I tell her.
I imagine the smoke stumbling from her lips when she pauses. “Sorry,” she says. “What’s that?”
“I thought I could help. It’d be nice for winter.”
She thanks me but says that won’t be necessary.
I start to tell her about the broccoli, too, and the chard that’s ready for harvest, but instead, she said things like “Thank you, I remember where Des kept the key,” and “Thank you, I’ll take care of things from here.” And when I ask when she’ll be by, she says she’s in the middle of things right now and that she’ll send an invitation when the service is planned. The lettuce is ready now, though, I say, but—
“Thanks again,” she says to me. “I’m sure you did what you could.” And I don’t know how to respond to that, but it doesn’t matter because she hangs up to shout at the dog barking in the background without any kind of goodbye to me at all.
So I do what I can: wipe down the counters, put the dishes in the washer, take a damp cloth down the hall to clean what’s left of the eggs. They’re cold and pressed deep into the high-pile carpet so I have to get low on my hands and knees to blot the mess. I undress Desmond’s bed and gather the sheets and dirtied towels in my arms, walking them down the hall to the laundry room. The cycle starts and I continue on, waiting to flip this last load. His last dish sits on the drying rack. The house smells like lemon verbena.
The deer, looking in, would see a light turning on in one room, then off, and then the next light over coming on. Me, snaking through a skin shed by the animal who’d outgrown it. Me, running the garbage disposal one last time, then looking out at him.
The buck hasn’t moved this whole time: still chewing, still panting. He doesn’t move when I slide open the glass door, nor when I step onto the gravel to look at him. His eyes are dark and wide and glassy. The nubs of his antlers still wrapped in velvet. It’s chilly and calm, and the wind rustles the fallen leaves that haven’t yet been pressed into the earth by time and weather. I lower myself to the step, and we stare at each other calmly, his dished ears giving me his full attention and I give him mine.
How strange where we find our sense of safety. The apples could go out in the yard for him, I think. Pulled from the crisper, rinsed, and flung out into the field to supplement his browse while he heals. The bowls could be brought out from the cabinets, filled with fresh water, and spread throughout the property so he’d never have to walk far. Then, maybe I’d open the fence around the vegetable garden. Release the pear trees from their wire cages. Pop the snow peas from their casings and serve them piled up by the trunk of the tree. Before I leave, I could dig up the carrots from the ground and arrange them along the edge of the patio, the greens dripping over the edge of the pavement and mixing with the dirt.