Florence

Daniel knew he had to make amends in recovery, but he had no idea how to make amends with a deer.

It wasn’t exactly something that was addressed in a 12-step group.

Deer didn’t have cell phones to call to offer to replace their rug that was in a landfill somewhere covered in his vomit, or doorways to stand in while he avoided eye contact and apologized for showing up to their wedding ceremony drunk.

Deer did have mouths and stomachs, though, and he knew at the very least that those mouths and stomachs liked birdseed.

His neighbor Florence had taught him that.

Florence was old, and retired, and the type of person one might expect to have an array of bird feeders in her backyard that she kept meticulously filled. She was also the type of person to invite Daniel over for pie, or cake, or any occasion that would be an excuse to chat.

Sometimes the occasion was a call on a Saturday afternoon to tell him that the sink was clogged again–and didn’t he used to be a handyman?

Other times, it was that her computer screen had gone dark, and yes, she knew Daniel had already left instructions for her on how to get it back on again, but they didn’t seem to be helping, so could he just come over and look at it already?

Inevitably, he’d drag himself over there only for her to practically shove him down into a kitchen chair with a plate of whatever dessert she’d made already sitting out on the table.

He could have gotten up and left then, but he never did.

More than anything else, Florence was the type of person to be lonely.

Lonely is not a good thing for a person to be when there is an alcoholic living next door.

It’s not a good thing to be in the same way that it’s not a good thing to be a deer standing in the middle of the road several hours past midnight when an alcoholic is driving back from a party.

Daniel knew that she was lonely.

She ended up loving him like a son.

Daniel did things that would break her heart like smashing into a deer, because he was not her son, but he liked to think sometimes that maybe if he had been, he never would have become an alcoholic.

There was a hiking trail near the road where the accident had happened and he figured that was as good a place as any for what he had planned.

He drove there, sober this time, and parked his car and started walking.

Florence once told him that she’d liked hiking, back in her days when she had been able to walk farther than the end of the driveway without needing to sit down.

Daniel had never been one for hiking, especially not with a 10-pound bag of birdseed on his back, but he couldn’t think of any other way to make amends with a deer.

After about half a mile, he took the backpack off and set it on a rock.

The sun came down through the trees, illuminating the green of the whole place. Birds flickered in and out of his frame of vision as quick little bursts of color.

It would have been more appropriate for what he had to do if it had been raining or at the very least, overcast, but it seemed to him that Mother Nature did not care about what he had to do.

When he took the first handful of birdseed from the bag, he stared down at it for a long time as if it would tell him something, or as if he needed to tell it something.

It never spoke, and he didn’t either.

Instead, it just sat there like little rocks in his hand until he turned his palm over and let it fall onto the soil below.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He didn’t know who he was speaking to or what exactly he was apologizing for.

The list of things he had done that warranted an apology stretched well beyond the deer he had hit.

It was long, unbearably long, and if he thought about it too much, it would crush him into the dirt like a stray boulder off a mountain.

He used to drink to deal with it.

Then drinking only led to more things he had to apologize for, and the list grew longer, and the boulder sank deeper into his bones until there was nothing left of them but a pile of dust.

Florence would have tried to sweep the dust up–she never did like a dirty kitchen floor, but she of all people should have left him there.

Daniel owed most of his apologies to her.

He’d first noticed the picture of the deer hanging over the table one afternoon while they were eating cherry pie.

It was a new recipe. She had found it online and raised her chin proudly with a smile when she said it, like she wanted to bait him into complimenting her for being maybe the only 81-year-old in the world who even knew the word ‘online.’

He did compliment her, and then she pretended like she hadn’t been expecting it, which made him laugh and start to choke.

He deserved to choke.

She rushed up to grab him a glass of water and when she came back, he pointed to the photo of the deer in its frame and said, “That’s a nice picture.”

He was starting to feel guilty for being there, for what he was going to do after he finished the slice of pie, and wanted to distract himself.

Her eyes lit up–it amazed him that 81-year-old eyes could still do that behind a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. She told him she had taken it in her backyard and had that proud look again when she said it.

He wanted to bottle it up and take it home with him.

He had the thought that maybe if he could, he wouldn’t need to ask her for money, that this time he could leave without it, and the leftover pie she packed him in a tupperware would be enough.

She went on to describe the first morning she had seen the deer there, standing at the bird feeder, and how she had nearly fallen rushing to grab her camera. She had seen many there throughout the years, bucks, does, and young fawns–and every morning she did, it felt like the first all over again.

He said, “I’d like to see that,” and that was a mistake because the next morning he got a phone call a little past 5 a.m. telling him to come to the window because the deer were out in her yard, and this was his chance to see them.

His head hurt, and he was hungover from all the beer bottles still lying around his living room, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.

Instead, he stayed in bed and told just one of his many lies to her in their too-short friendship.

He told her he saw them.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” she said, whispering back as if even inside her house, her voice, her soft, overly kind voice, might scare them away.

“They are,” he said.

Part of Daniel wanted to experience whatever that natural awe was that she had for the world. For cherry pie. For nature. For sunshine. For old TV shows. For deer.

For him.

He knew he couldn’t.

He didn’t have it in him, whatever it was she thought she saw.

So he kept drinking.

He received several more calls like that on several more mornings.

He stayed in bed every time.

Then the phone calls stopped.

The birdseed was piling up around Daniel’s shoes now. His hand was poised to launch another heap at the ground when a voice spoke.

“Hi, excuse me.”

He froze there, unable to move. Whatever it was he had been doing was supposed to be private. He didn’t want to face anyone else. He didn’t know if he could.

The person who had spoken came around the tree where she had appeared anyway. She was younger and dressed far better for hiking than he had been.

“Can I maybe ask you not to do that?” she said. She glanced down at the birdseed he still held in his hand.

He blinked, barely able to register her words. “Do what?”

“Dump that on the ground,” she said, “it’s fine in a bird feeder, but out here it’s not good for the ecosystem.” She smiled and her ponytail swayed as she cocked her head. “'Leave no trace' and all that, you know?”

“Oh,” he said. Then it hit him, and he said, “Oh shit.”

He let the birdseed slide from his hand into the backpack. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t know.” His face started to flush.

He had the thought that he always did, even at almost eight months of sobriety, that he could go home and drink to recover from every awful thing he was feeling at that moment.

She said, “That’s okay, I’m not a ranger or anything like that. I just thought you should know. I figured you were setting up a trail cam or something.” She pointed in the direction from where she had come. “I have one over there. I use molasses and a salt block for bait. It might give you better luck if you try that.”

He said, “I don’t have a trail cam.”

“Oh.” Her eyebrows raised in surprise.

“I’m making amends,” he said.

She looked at him as though she wasn’t entirely convinced he was sane.

“With the woods?” She asked.

“No,” he said. He could have stopped there, but he knew he needed to remind himself why he had come there in the first place if he wanted to make it home without a case of beer in his trunk.

And he did.

“With a deer. I hit a deer.”

He pushed his backpack aside and sat down on the rock. His eyes surveyed the mess of birdseed he’d left in the dirt in front of him.

“I’m in one of those 12-step groups for alcoholics. It’s part of that.”

“Oh,” she said.

She was quiet for a moment, and he tried not to imagine all the things she was judging him for and all the reasons she had to do it.

Then she said, “Well, I don’t know how you can make amends with a deer, but I’m sure it would appreciate it. If it knew.”

“Its not really–” he paused. “It’s not really about the deer.”

He had never admitted it to himself before.

Even when he was staring out the window where her bird feeders used to be, and walking through the aisles of the grocery store scanning the shelves for the brand of pie crust she’d used, and noticing the quiet, the painful stillness at 5 a.m. on a spring morning when his phone used to ring.

They were both gone now, Florence and the deer.

The deer on the road had died when he drunkenly plowed into it. Then the deer in the backyard had stopped showing up when the new family moved into Florence’s house and took the bird feeders down.

The day he found out she died, he had been trying to call her from rehab to apologize for the deer, for the money, for all of it.

She had always given him her money when he asked, of course she had–as freely as she gave everything else. She didn’t ask questions even when his stories about his sick relative, or his wallet being stolen in a gas station parking lot didn’t quite add up.

He gave her a hundred reasons to ask–the haze in his eyes and the stains on his clothes, and the slurred voice he used to pick up the phone–but she never did.

He’d sit there and pretend he couldn’t possibly take her money like that wasn’t the whole reason he had come over in the first place, like he truly cared about the computer she wanted him to fix, or the jelly preserves she wanted him to try.

She’d insist and fold it into his hand with her trembling wrinkled one, and he’d wonder if she knew that no one had ever touched him so gently in his life.

No, it was not about a deer.

It was about an old woman who had loved deer almost as much as she had loved him.

His face was wet. He wiped it quickly with the sleeve of his flannel shirt as he sat on the rock.

He could feel the young woman still looking at him and pretending not to.

She poked the pile of birdseed with her foot. “This might seem like a weird question,” she started, “but have you ever watched trail cam footage?”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he told the truth. He had been trying to make a new habit of that.

“No.”

She nodded as if she had been expecting that answer. “I could give you the link to mine. I upload it online for other people to see. It gets a fair amount of views, especially if something cool like a bear shows up.”

She paused and raised her eyes from the pile of birdseed to his.

“Sometimes people even leave comments on it, saying they showed it to their grand kids or whatever. Or that watching it helped them with a crappy day. Made them feel a bit better, you know?”

He considered this, what she was offering.

Then he asked in a small voice, “Do you ever see deer on it?”

“Yeah, loads of them,” she said. “All the time.”

He nodded slowly.

He had no idea if watching it would do anything for him except make him feel more guilty. He wasn’t the type of person who just had a crappy day. He had had a crappy life.

A lot of that had been his own doing. He could see that now.

Even so, it would be something for him to share at the next group meeting that wasn’t about how he had cried in the middle of the woods over a pile of birdseed.

He said, “I think I’d like that.”

At home, Daniel watched a highlight reel of old footage from the young woman’s trail cam using the address she had written for him. There were raccoons, and coyotes, and even a bear like she’d said–but mostly, there were deer.

He didn’t know if Florence ever knew that online trail cam footage existed. If she had, he was certain she would have sat there watching it for hours and then complained that her back hurt, so it was probably better that she hadn’t.

He wasn’t going to sit there for hours, but he did find the black and white images and the occasional wet noses sniffing the camera more interesting than he thought he would.

Maybe Florence had known he was sick, and the phone calls and the deer had all been her way of trying to fill him up with something that she knew would make him better.

He didn’t know, and he never would know.

He had learned one new thing about deer, though.

The young woman had casually thrown it over her shoulder as she was walking back towards the trail.

“Oh, and just so you know,” she’d said, “deer really shouldn’t have birdseed.”

She paused.

“They can’t digest it.”

Florence, wherever she was, would have liked to see the way he burst out laughing at that.