My daughter killed her first deer during the pandemic. She was far far away and we were unable to touch or travel to each other because all over the world we were dying, being mowed down by a virus that held us captive in our own separate times and places. Back at the time of the killing, we were only a month in and there was brave talk of it being beaten back by our tenacity, our brilliance and intelligence. But there was and still is a looming sense of doom, of a beast lurking, able to stop us in our tracks. 

 

The call came in and my daughter sounded distant. Far away in California, holed up at a friend’s house somewhere around Tahoe. Through the magic portal where she had traveled earlier to me, when she had first fled, I had caught glimpses of postcard images which might have been snapped in another time to cajole the traveler, or beckon a tourist to come experience the purity and the silence of Northern California. There were blankets of snow on alpine sloped rooftops, frighteningly majestic mountains in the distance, the sky endless and always busy conjuring the next weather pattern..  

 

But on that day there were no pictures, and the tone of her voice was flat and disconnected and horribly restrained. I remember trying to conjure her in a time and place. Of the time, I wasn’t sure. She had called me in the evening but it was afternoon where she was. So maybe the collision had taken place in the late morning, a time when the sun is near its zenith but still March so not very high and perhaps in her eyes as she drove.

 Because she was sheltering inside a picture postcard, I imagined the air she was breathing to be so clear that it had its own color, the shadows of the trees long and deep blue. There are lots of fir and spruce and pine in that part of the world, places so thickly forested that one can not see all that lives and moves about in its depths. The roads are two lanes and the unbroken yellow line down the middle may be worn away. There is probably a narrow shoulder where the asphalt breaks off and also erodes annually because this is still the wilderness despite the villages with french bistros and ski slopes and alpine homes with slanted roofs and smoke curling out of stone chimneys. I imagined my daughter had traveled a wild country road that day to some unnamed place where she could pull the borrowed car off onto the gravel shoulder and go for a run.  

 

This is the type of road that she must have been driving because, as she reported, she killed the deer with her friend’s Subaru. On her way back from a run. She might have used the phrase “back home” but I tend to doubt it because my daughter is very careful with language unless she is mad and now, on this day, she was not. She was scared. That I could hear. She was neither in our family home, nor in the one she had created in her new life out west and she has always been very proprietary about whom she calls friend, and what she calls home.

 

And so she was far away from any home and she had called me because she was on the side of the road staring at the wreckage of a life she had just ended. Suddenly and out of nowhere, it had bounded out of the darkness of those deep woods and she had slammed into it. She had just finished a run and was driving in a borrowed Subaru and had hit a deer. Killed it. Before she even saw it coming.

 

What my daughter runs from and to has been a matter of much speculation on the part of her mother anchored far away on flat concrete plains of the midwestern city where I raised her. She was born to run in all kinds of ways, up and down the block, into a chain link fence when she was six which left her with a permanent half moon scar under her right eye, onto a soccer pitch which she commanded as she so loves to command, but who can blame her because don't we all?   Don't we all love to command and control, at least our own lives, or the field, or the future, or whatever noun fits that particular phrase at any given time. I imagined her thinking she was in control of the car, which she was, I am sure, after a run, which is one of the ways she sets herself free. Before, a run had been liberation from classes or papers to write or boys who troubled her heart, but I knew without asking that nowadays it was a larger prison she was fleeing and runs could be magic like that. I know this because I used to be a runner and we have talked about the indescribable thing that happens to us as we pound through the miles and go one step, one turn, one lap further into our bodies until we leave our minds behind and there are only our legs and our lungs and the incredible feeling of power and richness and motion of one perfect machine moving through the universe.

 

So my daughter has always run. Trying to outrun what I am still not sure and that speculation itself may be an illusion. When she was eighteen, she ran west, as far as she could get. I don’t believe, even now, that she was running from me, or us, but perhaps from some chapter in her history that needed to end so she could begin the next one. And certainly she had, at least until she was stopped, been running towards as well, because as any runner knows, one runs away and then towards. We mark our starting place, and stretch our hamstrings and adjust our gear and set the play list and off we go. No more silence of the long distance runner. We quilt our thoughts now with all manner of noise and news coming from the pods which are miraculously attached to that tiny screen from which we now conduct almost the entirety of our exterior lives.

 

And since she is a controller and a planner as well as a runner, she had probably calibrated that morning’s run for her marathon training, the now receding race in some far off safer future, a herd event that was sure to be canceled in those early fear filled times of solitary confinement. It would not happen. We both knew this without audibly confirming it with each other, but still she had been training, practicing a kind of recuperative denial. Because a marathoner is what she was and is. A marathon becomes, by some sort of miracle, no matter how crowded or planned or televised or chipped, in the end, an intensively private encounter: one runner and 26.2 miles, each one of them a marker of a life, run to, run through and run away from. And when the marathon ends, as marathons do, praise be, for the rest of our lives we say proudly and sometimes even out loud: “I did that. I beat that sucker. I mowed down those miles, every one of them with my legs and my lungs and my heart. I am a beast.” I know my daughter. She would go on to run this race come July, by herself on a route she would map out on her phone. Pandemic be damned.  

 

My mind then moved back to her country road just before the killing time. I placed her behind the wheel of the Subaru, driving towards a shower, a beer and the crossword puzzle. I imagined that what might have been on her mind was her future rerouted by the pandemic, but really we never know what runs through the minds of our daughters, we mothers. We can put them in a place and a time of day, maybe even conjure the curve of the road, the slant of light, the song on the radio, what’s been tossed in the passenger seat. But the contours of her mind remain in shadow, hidden from us. 

 

For my own narrative cohesiveness, I kept her on the road. She was in the car, endorphins still pumping and music filling the interior. Even a mediocre song is good on endorphins. Inside the Subaru she would have been sweating but cooling fast because she was in the North country after all and she has never liked car heat; I know this from the car trips of her youth. Damp and chilled. Heading back to a shower and a crossword. 

 

My daughter is a good driver. But fast. She likes to drive fast. She likes to barrel into the future, especially when the present threatens to close doors and windows. So she lives and drives fast and she can no longer countenance being a passenger when I drive. I don’t notice enough, she says. And now, because she is a daughter, who, as Tillie Olsen might say as she stands ironing, keeps so much to herself, I had to imagine the rest of her first killing day. Besides, that distant restrained tone that seeped from the phone that cold afternoon had warned me off: do not ask. I will tell you what I think you need to know and then the questioning is over. A press conference stiffness to it all.

 

So I imagined she rounded a curve and THUMP.  Or maybe she was on a straightaway with some visibility, with the late winter sun in her eyes. I zeroed in on a moment: she had done that miraculously human thing of looking up, storing the road condition data in her short term memory so she could glance away briefly to switch a station button on the radio or grab her water bottle out of the beverage holder where the fit might have been just a bit tight, requiring a tug. Even after her run she would have been in a hurry. Or angry? Frustrated by a persistent cramp which had slowed her pace?

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Yes, this conjuring takes the mother down all kinds of possible exits off the highway of the story, because this is terrain we mothers have never and will never be able to clearly navigate. These daughters dole out only brief missives dashed off on the backs of picture postcards sent from places they have run to. Although she is my daughter, flesh of my flesh, I will never unravel that mind. She remains a mystery, her psychic DNA indecipherable.

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And so, thousands of miles away, moments after she rings off,  I had to construct the end of the story myself, surrender her story to mine. I decided to take this exit: she had looked down to open her water bottle and THUD. And then I found myself on my own dry road. I took over the narrative because when we are lost and scared and powerless we make stories to make sense. I convinced myself that I knew this part: it was a buck. It had bounded out of the dark woods and slammed into her right front fender at just the right angle and died. When I had asked her, because I could really give a goddamn about the deer, if she was OK, she had replied yes, fine, and had gone on to talk about the damage to the borrowed car, and insurance. She didn’t mention shame although I heard it. She had already spoken to an agent, some poorly paid soul always answering a call, even in this pandemic, probably working from their bedroom, who soothed with talk of low deductibles. All would be well. And since I knew that she was well, that all would be well, I stopped listening to her words and listened to her voice.

 

I remember hearing a hardness there, like dried shellac. A mother must listen very carefully through the face of that tiny screen. She must press the phone to her ear waiting for a crack, a quiver, a pause, the moment where a mother might gain a toehold into the heart of her daughter so far away.

 

Was that it? An opening?  Before I could ask or say anything, she sighed impatiently, and her faraway voice reported dryly that the deer appeared to have broken its neck. It was dead. She left it on the side of the road. As we were ending the call, exchanging remote “love you's, I heard a car door slam. And then she was gone.